Dragon Age II Is A Horrible Game, And You Are A Horrible Person For Liking It

The late, great Roger Ebert, reviewing the legendarily-bad film Battlefield Earth, remarked "I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies." Well my friends, Dragon Age II, along with its partner in crime Mass Effect 3, is the Battlefield Earth of RPGs.

Now I am aware that, like Fallout 3, this game possesses a legion of apologists who will argue until they are blue in the face that "Dragon Age II wasn't that bad" or even that it's a "damn fine game in its own right." And while I might, were I reviewing any other game, declare that whether one likes a game or not is a purely subjective affair, that is most definitely not the case with Dragon Age II. The apologists are wrong; this game is objectively terrible. I hate, hate, hated this game. Hated every stupid, Awesome Button moment of it. Hated its pathetic attempts at being "dark" and "edgy. Hated it's vacuous, soap opera dialogue and insufferable protagonist. Hated the implied insult that anyone might actually be entertained by this shallow, dumbed-down drivel. This game is rancid. I realise that we internet critics have a reputation for hyperbole and exaggeration when we talk about how bad something is, but I am not exaggerating when I say that Dragon Age II is one of the worst releases for a major developer that I've ever played. At no point during the game was I entertained, amused, or even mildly interested by what was happening. The only way BioWare could possibly redeem themselves after releasing this travesty would be to declare unambiguously that Dragon Age II sucked, that it was the result of a completely wrong-headed design philosophy, and that any future Dragon Age titles will not resemble it in any way, shape, form, or fashion. Of course, the likelihood of that occurring is about the same as that of the earth's gravitational pull suddenly reversing.

Dragon Age II isn't just a failure. There are plenty of bad games out there that are released and quickly forgotten, but Dragon Age II isn't one of them. No, it's a spectacular, epic failure. Not since the likes of Daikatana or Battlecruiser 3000 A.D. have I seen a game aim as high as this one and crash quite as hard. Dragon Age II desperately wants to be taken seriously, and yet it is such a thoroughly wretched experience that you'd almost feel sorry for it were the game itself not so aggressively obnoxious. It's a perfect example of what happens when developers' egos get out of control, and when they start seeing themselves as "artists" instead of game-makers.

Dragon Age II is a clear case of that contemptible game design philosophy that states that a game's primary purpose is to tell a story, that deep, involving gameplay gets in the way of telling that story, and that games ought to be like movies as much as possible. Thus, Dragon Age II isn't just lacking in player agency, it's openly contemptuous of the concept, giving the player no control of the story and constantly railroading him down a fixed path regardless of the choices he makes or the character he creates. Unlike Dragon Age: Origins, where the player character was an unvoiced blank slate that the player could shape in any way he wished, Dragon Age II saddles us with Hawke, who begins the game fleeing the town of Lothering, which has been overrun by the Darkspawn. In a clear example of how not to make a first impression, the opening area features some of the worst-looking environments I've ever seen in a game. There's a reason it's been called "Shit Mountain," because the whole landscape is so completely...brown:

The rest of the game isn't much better

And despite the seemingly wide-open landscape, the only area the player can actually travel is a linear pathway. But you won't notice that until you pick your jaw up off the floor after seeing the insanely-idiotic combat animations. See, apparently BioWare felt that that the pace of combat in Dragon Age: Origins was just too slow for the drooling, ADHD-afflicted morons who are this game's target audience, so they sped everything up and added in TOTALLY AWESOME NINJA FLIPS AND SPINS OMG!!!! Just try to watch Hawke and Co. spinning, flipping, twirling, and leaping about like monkeys on speed and not crack a laugh, I dare you! As if that weren't ludicrous enough, enemies will explode into blossoms of gore and body parts if you so much as breathe on them:

Don't worry, there's no nudity in the game, because that would be OBSCENE

And this is just the opening prologue. I haven't even gotten into the rotten, maggot-infested meat of the game.

One of the reasons I hated Dragon Age II was how Hawke's character and personality were largely fixed by the writers, and the player is given very little choice in how he or she defines Hawke. One immediately gets the impression that the developers just wanted to tell this deep and meaningful story, full of intrigue, drama, mystery, tragedy, triumph, and, oh yes, there might be an actual game somewhere in there if you look hard enough. I have to ask BioWare...why not simply make a movie or write a book? If telling a story is all you want to do, then video games aren't the medium to do it with. If there's a lesson I want drilled into the heads of every game designer out there, it would be this: You are making a game, NOT A MOVIE! You are game developer, not a filmmaker, so START ACTING LIKE ONE, GODDAMN IT! It seems to me that all the praise for BioWare's "brilliant" writing has gone completely to their heads, and now they believe that their games can succeed on their writing along, and not their gameplay. But they are wrong. So very, very wrong.

Being forced to play as Hawke means three significant changes from Dragon Age: Origins. First, there's only one opening this time, instead of six. Second, Hawke is always human, with no race options available. Thirdly, Hawke is fully voiced, unlike the Warden, with dialogue options chosen via a Mass Effect-style dialogue wheel. These three changes have the not-insignificant effect of utterly obliterating any sort of character customisation (which I regard as the foundation of any good RPG).

Apologists for this game are likely to point out that a fully-voiced protagonist is "Evolution!" and that silent protagonists are "Outdated!" or "Only there because there wasn't technology!" Not only is this opinion naive, it is simply wrong. An unvoiced protagonist allows for far greater flexibility in dialogue options, case in point, Fallout. In Fallout, a character with an extremely low Intelligence score would be unable to communicate in anything but uuhhhs, aaaahhs, and duhhhhs, and because of this he wouldn't be able to speak with people, potentially locking him out of many potential quests. On the other end of a scale, a character with a high Intelligence score would get dialogue options that reveal his superior intelligence, and there were numerous dialogue options that were linked to specific skills. Or take Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, for instance. The Malkavian clan is cursed with insanity, so nearly every dialogue option offered to a Malkavian PC is completely batshit.

Now, while developers could have all these kinds of dialogue options fully-voiced, the cost of it all would be rather prohibitive. To use the example of Intelligence-based dialogue in Fallout, essentially the developers have to duplicate (or triplicate) the PC's dialogue options (and the NPCs responses) depending on how intelligent or unintelligent the PC is. No developer is going to spend the money to voice all those possible responses, so a fully-voiced protagonist is going to have far fewer dialogue options than an unvoiced one.

So what dialogue options does Hawke have? Well, if Commander Shepard's responses in Mass Effect were Paragon/Neutral/Renegade, then Hawke's responses are Nice Guy/Smug, Unfunny Twat/Jerkass. That's it, those are the only possible dialogue options. And since the game uses a Mass Effect-style dialogue wheel, you can't even see the full line of the response; instead, you're simply presented with a paraphrase that bears no resemblance to what Hawke will actually say. Many times I'd be left shaking my head, thinking "What? That wasn't what I wanted to say at all!" Of course, I was still operating under the assumption that I had any control of my character at all. It soon becomes obvious that Hawke is entirely BioWare's creation, and his story is going go the way the writers want it, whether the player likes it or not.

Why can't people see that Dragon Age II is EVOLUTIONARY?

The combination of a voiced protagonist and the dialogue wheel means that each Hawke you play has the exact same dialogue options as any other, regardless of how he's defined. Part of the "streamlining" of Dragon Age II was the removal of all non-combat skills, such as Persuade/Intimidate, and none of Hawke's basic attributes affect dialogue, either. A Hawke with a high Cunning stat isn't any more persuasive, nor is a Hawke with a high Strength any more intimidating. And since Hawke is voiced, he even sounds the exact same on every play-through. Essentially what you're left with is not the ability to play whatever character you want, but rather just choosing between three "Flavours of Hawke."

The end result is that there is virtually no flexibility in how you play Hawke, or how he progresses through the game. You cannot play as a Hawke that prefers diplomatic solutions to violent ones. You cannot play as a Hawke that solves problem via subterfuge and guile. No, violence is the only option for Hawke, and one quickly gets the impression he's little more than a hired thug whose only real purpose is to kill people in order to advance to the next cutscene. One of the game's writers, Jennifer Hepler, stirred up some controversy when she declared that she didn't enjoy playing games at all (and yet for some bizarre reason decided to work at a major game developer), and that she wanted games to have a "skip combat" option for people who just want to experience the story. The thing is, in games like Fallout or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, the player could skip combat by using his skills of persuasion or subterfuge; Fallout is unique in that can be completed without firing a shot, if that's the sort of character you wanted to play as. You didn't need a "Skip Combat" button because the choice of a non-violent quest resolution was available the player.

The whole plot of Dragon Age II is that, like Tony Montana in Scarface, he arrives as a penniless immigrant to the city Kirkwall, only to work his way to the top over a period of years, eventually becoming the Champion of Kirkwall. The problem is, the way he becomes the Champion is the same in every play-through: by killing a bunch of Qunari. Just think how much better the game would have been had Hawke possessed viable non-combat skills. He might have become the Champion through his superior diplomatic skills, negotiating a peaceful solution to the Qunari conundrum, and forging a truce between the Mages and the Templars. Or perhaps his skills lie in stealth and guile, allowing him to thwart the Qunari uprising by sneaking into their compound and assassinating the Arishok. It would have allowed the player to decide what the game's slogan "Rise To Power, By Any Means Necessary" actually meant. Instead, what we got was "Hawke kills things, and he is AWESOME ZOMG!!1!1!"

There is only one way through this game, and only one character you can play as. Hawke's skills and attributes only affect how you kill things, and even there they're largely irrelevant, because all enemies scale to your level. You could probably strip out nearly all of the RPG mechanics and just reduce the game to a button-mashing hack-and-slash without losing any of the game's depth (whatever little it possessed in the first place).

Now, an RPG focused entirely on combat isn't necessarily a bad thing (consider Icewind Dale or Diablo), but in both of those games, the combat required tactics and strategy, whereas Dragon Age II's combat requires neither of those things. I actually started longing for Hepler's "Skip Combat" button, not because the combat was too difficult, but because it was so bloody tedious! The game basically just takes the combat from Dragon Age: Origins and speeds it up while simultaneously dumbing it down. One of the issues I had with Dragon Age: Origins was how often the combat felt like filler, but Dragon Age II takes this to a new level by making all combat filler!

Every single encounter (and I *do* mean every one) involves the dreaded "enemy waves." Your party will walk into an area, enemies will spawn and attack, and as soon as they're dead a new wave of enemies will appear quite literally out of thin air. Sometimes they'll leap down from the rooftops, or sometimes they'll teleport down from the ceiling. It has to be seen to be believed:

Maybe their combat instructor was Ceiling Cat?

Not only is this annoying as hell, it also eliminates any possibility of any sort of tactical planning, because you know nothing about what sort of enemies you're going to face, or where they're going to appear. There's no point in carefully positioning your party members, such as placing weaker classes like mages or archers in the back, because there's a good chance that a magically-teleporting wave will appear right beside them and kill them.

Nor is there any sort of variety to enemies or the encounters in general. In a game like Baldur's Gate 2, one might face diverse opponents such as Beholders, Mind Flayers, or Umber Hulks, all of which required certain strategies to defeat. Dragon Age II, on the other hand, offers you nothing but wave after wave of generic enemies that differ from each other only in how many hit points they have. Occasionally, the game will decide that it needs to offer some sort of challenge and offer up a more difficult foe, such as a mage. And like all bad games, these encounters are difficult for no reason but that the enemy cheats. Enemy mages can teleport (which you cannot do, and is even supposed to be impossible according to the game's lore), can make themselves temporarily impervious to weapons (which you cannot do), and have access to incredibly devastating area-of-effect spells (which you cannot cast).

But it's the boss battles of Dragon Age II that are truly execrable. All of them test your patience more than your skill, and involve little else but whittling down their kilotons of hit points. The worst has to be the battle with the High Dragon, which takes bloody ages for you to get down to even a third of its total hit points, at which point it flies away to an unreachable spot (presumably going "U MAD, HAWKE?" all the while) and summons a horde of smaller dragons to attack. Oh, and did I mention it's spitting fireballs at you the entire time? The whole thing is such a blatant example of hair-pulling frustration and tedium that I'm amazed anyone at BioWare thought it would be enjoyable in the slightest. Compare this to Baldur's Gate 2, where you could kill a dragon in less than ten seconds with a little luck and the right application of tactics.

Really, combat in Dragon Age II boils down to waiting for your cooldowns to expire, then hitting a button to reactivate them, or do some stupid-looking special move that will make all the enemies around you explode. As I sat there watching my character leap and twirl about like a jackrabbit on crack and as enemies burst into blossoms of blood and gore around him, I thought to myself, "Just what sort of demographic was BioWare aiming for, anyway?" The only answer I could think of was children. Very, very small children.

So the character customisation is rubbish, the combat is rubbish, but what about the quests? Well, those too are rubbish, consisting almost entirely of "Go here and kill everyone" or "Go here and fetch me this object." The entire first act of the game is little more than Hawke trying to raise enough money to go on another quest; some people might point out that this very similar to the first act of Baldur's Gate 2, where the player had to raise enough coin to go after Imoen. But this is where the similarities end, because while Baldur's Gate 2 provided numerous examples of well-written, involving sidequests, Dragon Age II gives you a glut of dull, unmemorable fetch- and kill-quests. It quickly reached the point where I simply walked about Kirkwall and right-clicked on NPCs with the floating quest arrow over their heads, which would either complete some quest I had already done, or give me a whole new quest. As a particularly egregious example, Hawke will occasionally come across various items, and somehow he will know exactly what random NPC it belongs to. Upon returning it, he'll loudly proclaim something like "I think you lost this!"

That's you, the Champion of Kirkwall. Part time hired thug, part time FedEx guy, part time Kirkwall Lost and Found.

There's no need to even glance at your journal. You can get through the entire game just right-clicking on NPCs with an arrow over their heads

Nor is there any worthwhile rewards for these quests beyond XP (and even that is rendered largely meaningless due to the level scaling). Most loot you get is completely generic, and has no description or flavour text at all, and is instead just named things like "Ring" or "Belt." Worse, it all scales with your level, meaning that that sweet sword you just grabbed will probably be obsolete once you gain a few levels, thus negating any sense of reward. As if that weren't bad enough, you cannot equipment your companions' armour! Playing as a mage and found a great piece of armour? Too bad, it's useless. This is just inexcusable; I'm sure BioWare has offered some pathetic justification for it ("We wanted each companion's appearance to be unique!"), but the fact that Dragon Age II fails to implement one of the most basic elements of a party-based RPG just goes to show how utterly inept this game is.

So what does that leave us with? Well, there's the writing, and it's awful. This is BioWare at their most self-indulgent. Dragon Age II is so desperate to spin to some deep, meaningful tale, full of allegory and symbolism about hatred, bigotry, religious fanaticism, and so on, that it collapses under the weight of its own pretentiousness. As I mentioned in the opening paragraphs, there's no sense whatsoever that the writers wanted to involve the player in the story in any meaningful fashion, and cared only about satisfying their own artistic impulses. Everything important in Dragon Age II plays out in non-interactive cutscenes, with no options for the player to decide or affect anything. No matter what Hawke does, he will always lose one of his siblings, the Qunari will always end up going on a rampage, he will always lose his mother, Anders will always blow up the Chantry, and the Mage/Templar conflict with always come to violence, and the player will always fight Knight Commander Meredith regardless of whether he sides with the Mages of the Templars. You affect nothing, decide nothing, and change nothing. BioWare might as well have offered you three check boxes at the start of the game for which personality Hawke should have, and then just shown you cutscenes for the rest of the game.

Dragon Age II is told via a framing story - Cassandra, a "Seeker" of the Chantry, is interrogating the dwarf Varric. She wants to know how Hawke became the Champion, and so Varric relates to her the events of Hawke's life across several years. Unfortunately, this framing device is little more than a gimmick, and worse, the game never seems to show any actual passage of time. The one bloke complaining about having to wait to see the viscount will still be there complaining several years later, even after the viscount has been murdered! Fenris will never clean up those corpses in his mansion, even after many years pass. Like so much, it's all one big wasted opportunity.

Then there's your fellow party members, which leave no cliche unused, and like the story, show clearly just how far BioWare has descended into self-parody. The only really interesting party member is Varric, as he has the game's few genuine moments of wit. He's also one of the few party members who isn't a love interest, and this is important, because BioWare has now fully embraced their reputation as "the guys who put asinine romances into their games." The rest of the party members aren't written as characters, they're written as love interests specifically designed to appeal to that pathetic breed of BioWare fan who makes lengthy dissertations on forums about what Tali's sweat might taste like and who has a forum signature proudly declaring his support of a particular love interest. Just look at the sorts of characters BioWare has inflicted upon us in Dragon Age II:

MERRILL is clearly supposed to be the kawaii-uguu moeblob waifu for anime fanboys. I take it BioWare wanted her to come off as sweet and adorable, but instead she comes across as being so stupid as to be borderline retarded. Apparently, she sees a mugging and thinks it's some form of greeting in the Kirkwall alienage. I'll bet she died after the end of the game because she forgot to breathe.

AHHHHHH GET IT AWAY FROM ME!!!!

ANDERS is the oh-so-tortured, anguished pretty-boy with a dark and tragic past who lives with a Fade spirit inside him, which causes him to see himself as an abomination and fills him with self-loathing. Oh hell, he's basically the game's equivalent of Edward Cullen, with his whole character feeling like a bad bit of Twilight fanfiction. At least you get the option of killing him.

FENRIS: Before I say anything, just take a look at this wanker:

One glance at him and I bet you're all full of sarcastic remarks, like "Oh, I bet he's the angst-ridden bishonen with a dark and tragic past who wields a comically-oversized two-handed sword and he's just waiting for the right love interest to come along and soothe his anguished soul." "Surely," you think to yourself, "BioWare wouldn't sink so low as to make a character who looks and acts like the worst example of a stereotypical JRPG protagonist, would they?"

Well they would, and they did. That description above exactly describes Fenris' character, and it's all done without even a hint of irony or self-awareness. And like Anders, he too speaks in overwrought prose that would make Stephanie Meyer blush. "I escaped a land of dark magic only to have it haunt me at every turn. It is a plague burned into my flesh and my soul." What? No comments about how "These wounds, they will not heal?" At least you get the option of killing him.

ISABELA is a ludicrously whorish pirate (because everyone loves pirates, right?) who's laid up in Kirkwall after her ship sinks. Her only two defining attributes are that she has a huge rack, and she talks about sex a lot.

Play now, my Lord!

Her "romance" is all about how she's interested in nothing but sex, sex, sex, because oh, she was hurt in the past and can't let herself get close to anyone...at least until the right person comes along, that is. This plot, you should know, was rejected by nine out of ten romantic comedy writers for being too cliche.

And when she's not talking about sex, the rest of her dialogue consists of the lowest form of humour imaginable - pop culture references. "I like big boats, I cannot lie," she says, at which point I take the game disc and throw it against the wall as hard as I can.

So the character customisation in Dragon Age II is rubbish, the combat is rubbish, the quests are rubbish, the writing is rubbish, and the companions are rubbish...what does that leave us with? Well, the graphics, and they're rubbish, too! Dragon Age II might be the first example of a game where the sequel looks worse than its predecessor.

The entire world of Dragon Age II (which is largely confined to the city of Kirkwall, because exploration and varied environments are OUTDATED and ARCHAIC) is drawn in a palette consisting entirely of browns and greys. The city of Kirkwall does not look or feel like any sort of city that real people might inhabit, being constructed of narrow, boxy hallways that connect large, square rooms, with very few stand-alone buildings existing anywhere. As for the rest of the environments, well, there a very, very few, because Dragon Age II reuses the same handful of locations for every quests. You'll see the same cave, the same warehouse, and the same mansion over and over again, only some times certain hallways or doors will be blocked off, creating the illusion that it's a different place. Really, BioWare?

Yet when it comes to all-out, balls-to-the-wall hideousness, you can't beat Dragon Age II's character models. Behold, skin that looks like melted plastic! Behold, hair that looks like it's made out of a solid lump! Behold, bodies that move in no way bodies should ever move! And I'd be remiss in my duty as a reviewer if I didn't point out the "new and improved" elves who resemble the bastard children of donkeys and the Na'vi from Avatar, and have been given a right sound thrashing with the ugly stick:

Kirkwall's residents' habit of dumping nuclear waste into the water had some adverse effects

Upon release, the game's performance was simply atrocious. During my very first play-through, I set the game to run in DirectX 11 mode, which resulted in the opening interrogation scene (which consists only of two characters) running at an abysmal FPS (Compare this to the opening interrogation scene in The Witcher 2, which ran at 60 FPS with the graphical settings set near maximum). When the game actually began, it was so riddled with graphical glitches and artefacts that it was utterly unplayable, forcing me to bump the settings back down to DirectX9 mode. Later nVidia driver updates and patches improved matters somewhat, but for a game with such mediocre graphics, Dragon Age II performs wretchedly.

I'm sure I could go on forever, pointing out all the ways this game is terrible. Dragon Age II is an example of fractal badness - when you find something that's bad about it, it leads to you finding yet more things that are bad about it, and it never ends. It's seldom that a major release is so utterly lacking in any redeeming qualities, if anyone wants proof that EA has thoroughly trashed a once-great developer, just point out Dragon Age II to them.

This is more fun than playing Dragon Age II

And the worst part was BioWare's reaction to the Dragon Age II backlash. Again and again it was the same old song and dance: "Our game is fine, it's just a vocal minority that doesn't like it!" Lead writer David Gaider blamed the low Metacritic score on a raid by 4chan or RPGCodex (as if the Codex would waste time trying to down-rate this rubbish). Gameplay designer Mike Laidlaw dismissed criticism as coming from RPG fans who just wouldn't accept that RPGs have changed for no other reason than because he said so. It's the typical PR response to any game that's negatively received - state that you did everything right, it's better than anything else, and shift the blame to what is assumed to be a very small group of customers. At no point in the process did BioWare once take responsibility for turning out this piece of garbage, instead insisting that the direction of Dragon Age II was the "right direction." How clueless can you get? I should point out that Laidlaw's only other work for BioWare is the largely-forgotten Jade Empire, which until Dragon Age II was regarded as BioWare's weakest effort. Funny how Laidlaw and new lows for BioWare go hand in hand, isn't it?

To anyone who repeats the notion that this game is "evolution!" and that "RPGs aren't like Baldur's Gate anymore, you stupid old people!" I ask you this: how can removing RPG mechanics, causing the gameplay to approach that of countless other games, be considered "evolution?" "Evolution" would imply adding features that weren't there before, such as how the Ultima series brought us in-depth story and dialogue, how Fallout brought us choice and consequence, or how Baldur's Gate brought us party members with their own personalities. But changing the gameplay to that of another genre isn't evolution, it's simple money-grubbing; an attempt at selling an RPG to people who hate RPGs.

After this and the steaming pile that was Mass Effect 3, I can say with near-absolute certainty that I will not be buying another BioWare/EA title ever again. They misrepresent their games, trying to pretend that Mass Effect 2 is an RPG and not a TPS, they have no care for quality, they lie and condescend to their fanbase, and they insist on chopping up their games piecemeal to sell Day 1 DLC. They've gone from one of the most respected RPG developers to being an absolute joke.

Do not buy this game. Do not harbour even a suspicion that you might one day might consider entertaining the thought of buying it. Do not buy it from someone even if they need the money for a life-saving operation for their child. Do not take it for free. If you see a copy of Dragon Age II lying on the street, do not pick it up. The only way you should ever take a copy of this game is if someone pays you for it, and even then, it had better be a substantial amount of coin. And should you by some misfortune have this game installed on your PC, you should seek out and push the Awesome Button post haste. Here's a hint, it's the one labelled "Uninstall."