@KulliK357 Said
Oh lord no.
If this game is a rough diamond then how Bioware even found it from all the layers of crap that's caked on.
Really, the writing is great, the story starts really well and the general ideas behind the game are amazing, I'll even go as far as to say the combat is fun, because it actually kinda is.
now to the problems, and boy are there a lot, let's start with the most obvious and glaring one, this game was rushed out, the entire thing has some elements that are beautiful and touching as well as dark and disturbing, so why is my immersion not piqued? because they all happen in one of 5 locations, the number of dungeons is extremely limited, and after the third time you've been to "reddish orange underground dwaven cave" you will start to see patterns emerge, "walk through room with holes in the floor fenced off, loot skeleton in corner, go down stairs, cutscene, bossfight which will almost certainly include wraiths."
The idea of family is something which exited a lot of RP'ers, but it's done really weirdly, i don't wanna spoil anything but by the end of the game it feels less like family, more like a series of regrets.
One of the things i expected them to do but didn't expect them to go overboard with was the camios of DA:O characters, the early on addition of a certain apostate mage with a sense of humor was nice, and i thought perhaps they'd leave it at that, until i came across the second mage to join my party, and that one was clever enough to slip by (i loved the dalish beginning story to DA:O :P ) but by the time you've met the king, an elven assassin and a certain ginger bard then things are getting silly and a nice touch is getting a little bit overdone.
What gets me the most about this game is how much time it spends faffing about, all the separate main questlines are sorted out very very separately and it just feels wrong, they should blend together, it's like "in this chaptyer we shall deal with this problem then introduce the next problem which shall be dealt with next chapter" and it feels much much less smooth, the game happens over the course of about 6 years or something with cutscenes announcing "3 years later" or whatever, and when you get back in game, you find all your characters looking exactly the same and even stranger, wearing the exact same clothes/armor, so you mean to say, in twenty minutes game time i can find what my character couldn't find in three years?
ok game... ok...
One thing that usually doesn't bother me in these games is frequent random encounters, but in this it feels weird, the entire game takes place inside a city, but in this city there is the near constant threat of being attacked by groups of 20+slavers or mercenaries at any time, and as soon as you come around the corner, all their buddies are there waiting for you, it just feels odd, i must of wiped out well over 1000 people in my time playing, but yet the town feels just as populous as it did when i first arrived, where are all these slavers bandits and mercs coming from? this is just immersion breaking and annoying, in DA:O s***loads of random encounters made sense, the darkspawn live underground and there are millions and millions of them they can jump up in large groups at any time and ambush you without risking any strategicly valuable numbers of units, in DA2 it gives me the impression this mercenary band could populate a small country by themselves, and they are sqeezed into this little city?
OK now i've said all that i just wanna say that despite all that, if you were the least bit interested in this game, try it, if you liked DA:O, definitely try it, the combat is fun and very intuitive, the squad tactics elements are just as well done and controlling your squad properly is still the good kind of challenge (you need to do it a lot more than in DA:O though, the AI got a bit dopier between games) and teh storyline is still very well written and the universe they created is still very much intact and there's a lot to learn about it and it's inhabitants which will interest any fans of the first game.
(edit: wall of text is wall of text... christ, don't blame you if you just wanna read the last paragraph)
I just beat it. Did you not like the ending? I thought it was good how they left you guessing what the hell happened to the Champion. And who's that woman questioning Varric?