Dragon Age 2: Mechanics (1 of 2)

Dragon Age 2 is an enjoyable, if deeply flawed, successor to Dragon Age: Origins. To paraphrase Ron Case (my brother-in-law) "Even if it's one of Bioware's weakest offerings, it's still much better than many other games out there." I whole-heartedly agree. I am personally torn between rating on its own merits and comparing it to its predecessor. As the game is part of a franchise, one most examine both aspects to give the game a balanced review.

As I have a lot of ground to cover, I'll review the mechanics and plot separately. I played DA:O and DA2 on Nightmare difficulty on the PC, so my review will be coming from that perspective. And when I say "review", I mean "list of things I found notable".

Platform: PC
Difficulty: Nightmare


Combat is faster paced--I'm not entirely sure how to quantify pacing in combat, but it certainly feels like things happen quickly. This is a good thing, although it barely affected my experience as I adhere to the pause-then-issue-orders play style. If I had to guess, the change in feel has to do with several factors:

• Movement is faster. In addiction to covering ground faster, melee characters have "dash" moves to close gaps. Less waiting on positioning.
• "Critter" tier enemies. They have 4 tiers of enemies in DA2--Critter, Normal, Lieutenant, and Boss. The critters are the bulk of most encounters and they have very little health. Even though they're essentially cannon-fodder, mowing through those poor bastards makes you feel like you're accomplishing a lot. 
• No Friendly Fire. This is true for every difficulty except Nightmare. This allows you to toss Area-of-Effect powers like there's no tomorrow, which in turn allows you to mow through enemies with alacrity.

Combat is less tactical--There is some debate whether DA2 is more or less tactical. I use the merriam-webster definition of tactics: "The science and art of disposing and maneuvering forces in combat." The game is "streamlined" to put it nicely. Dumbed-down would be the other way of saying it. 

• No Friendly Fire. This means the most effective method of play is to get your tank, round up as many enemies as possible, and drop fireballs (and other AoEs on his feet) until everything is dead. Friendly fire makes using your most powerful abilities a choice. Proper timing and placement of said abilities can make or break a battle. In this case, combat is reduced to rounding the mobs up and using AoEs on cooldown.
• Cross-class combos replaced combo spells. On one hand, it's great they broadened combos to include classes other than mages. On the other hand, combo spells offered countless tactical options, as they often created entirely new effects. Cross-class combos simply add more damage. While getting 10k damage on a target is giggle-worthy every time, it's not really an additional option--it's something you automatically do whenever you can. 
• Enemies come in waves. By far one of the most annoying features added to DA2. Enemies jump off rooftops, pour out of alleyways, climb out of the ground, or simply materialize out of thin air. This happens every single fight. Any advantage gained from skillful positioning or making use of terrain quickly evaporates as enemies materialize behind your front line and proceed to sodomize your mage. 

Classes are more balanced--I won't say they're balanced now, they aren't. But mages are no longer the powerhouses they were in the first game. I applaud Bioware for accomplishing this by increasing the power of other classes rather than nerfing mages, but in terms of raw damage output, mages can easily get left in the dust. The balance comes at the cost of flexibility. 

• Warriors: They cleave with every swing. Every single one of their attacks does splash or AoE damage, making them the undisputed AoE damage kings in DA2. There is an ability which doubles his damage for 10-15 secs with 20sec cooldown--when it comes to massive burst (independent of combo), it's pretty hard to top the warrior. 
• Rogues: Whether they dual wield or use archery, they're hands down the highest single target damage, especially when you take cross-class combos into account. They're no longer useful as scouts as they cannot stealth indefinitely, and their AoE is fairly poor on the whole. However, my highest crit was over 10k damage by a rogue--no one else ever came near that. 
• Mages: What mages bring to the table are healing, superior crowd control, and wide-range AoE. Unfortunately, they're fairly poor at single target damage, and the required specialization means that no mage will really excel at more than one of these aspects--they might get pretty good at two of them by the end of the game. 

Non-combat elements removed--I assume this is to simplify things. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it removes layers of customization and flavor from the game.

• Stealth is solely a combat mechanic. You can no longer prowl around perma-stealthed while scouting for the group. Stealth lasts seconds at most.
• Crafting is relegated to NPCs only. Effectively it's pretty similar--you order from NPCs the items you may have crafted from previous games. But reagents aren't used up, you don't really save money, and you don't customize characters by which crafts they know.
• Traps were completely removed. Admittedly a minor part of DA:O, stealthing around setting up traps with my rogue was a source of joy for me, especially as I alerted enemies to my presence and watched them stumble into my well-prepared gauntlet of doom.
• Most abilities cannot be used outside of combat at all. Generally not a big deal, most of them have no use outside of combat. But like the aforementioned stealth, it's rather sad to see it go.

Nightmare mode is an afterthought--The changes in nightmare mode, outside of a general increase in health, armor, and damage of enemies, are as follows: Friendly fire turned on, enemies gain elemental immunities.

• Abilities are not designed with friendly fire in mind. I mentioned earlier that all warrior abilities cleave. This means if I wanted my DPS warrior to use an ability, I had to pause the game, run my tank out of melee, and then allow him to use an ability. On top of that, warrior abilities have no targeting reticle so the area of effect is difficult to determine. I've 1 shot various party members more times than I care to count, simply because the area of effect was larger than the weapon arc drawn on the screen.
• Elemental immunities punish mages for no apparent reason. Mages are not a high damage class--they're surpassed by warriors and rogues for single target and AoE. When you consider a mage will have 1-2 elements available to them for much of the game, giving every single enemy invulnerability to an element means your mage's effectiveness will plummet on many encounters. This is especially bizarre when one considers there are no monsters immune to physical damage.
• Assassins steal your healing potions. On nightmare mode, you take enough damage that you MUST have a healer in group at all times. The healer alone is insufficient, and you MUST carry healing potions at all times. Considering Assassins can easily 1-shot or nearly 1-shot any character, allowing them to steal your limited healing potions (effective max 4 on nightmare) is adding insult to injury.

Camera is console-ified

• Camera is attached to the characters.  You can no longer slide the camera across the battlefield, panning around to get a good view of the terrain. You are anchored to a specific character, which can be a problem if you're trying to drop an AoE on the back of an enemy line. I've spent more time than I like wiggling the camera back and forth trying to get an angle to drop a fireball. 
• Camera lacks a top-down option. This is fairly annoying as a PC gamer, as the top-down view is ideal for a strategic view of the battlefield. The camera as it is is more of a 3rd person over the shoulder view, which isn't bad in and of itself, but I spent a lot of time staring at little red dots on the mini map to gain the knowledge I could have easily gained from a free-floating top-down camera.
• Targetting is console-ified. If you bring your cursor within an inch of a target, the target reticle immediately snaps to the center of that target. This is extremely annoying. I cannot stress this enough. While I'm sure it's very useful for console gamers, part of the PC experience is the ability to precisely place our cursors where ever we damn well please. When friendly fire is turned on, I need to be able to precisely place the center behind enemy lines so I don't flambee my meleers. Unfortunately, this "snapping" of the reticle prevents such precision, and I often couldn't use mage aoe due to the combination of camera drawbacks and friendly fire. 

Combat mechanics are largely unchanged--For the most part, the underlying mechanics of DA2 are fairly similar to DAO, and it's a pretty easy transition from one to the other. 

Talent Trees are simplified, sort of--Instead of making a linear series of talents you need to buy in a row, they broke down the talent trees into sort of circles, where you eventually want to buy everything in that tree--but you have flexibility as to the order you choose them. The simplification comes from the fact that each "half" of a tree would have been an independent tree in its own right in DAO--so every DA2 tree has a bit of a split personality. When you first buy abilities, you get a stripped down version of that ability--you have to spend further talent points to unlock the full potential of the ability. On one hand, that level of tweaking can be fun, but you end up having to spend 2-3 talents to buy the "true" version of a power, which ends up being sort of annoying.

Companions cannot use armor--They have their own armor, which never changes. You can get up to 4 upgrades throughout the course of the game, but this is by and large the extent you'll be able to customize them. This means you get piles and piles of interesting armor / weapons that go to waste because they can only be used by Hawke. 

Items are generic--Most of the items you find are generated diablo style, and only have a couple randomly generated properties on them. However, they don't do you the courtesy of labeling them according to their properties. Oh no. A "Ring" might be +4% fire damage or +6 health. And you find a LOT of "ring"s. 

Runes make the game stupidly easy--Customization via runes instead of armor seems like a good idea, if INCREDIBLY FUCKING BORING, but it may actually be a bit too much customization in the end. You don't need to craft a set of dragonscale armor to fight the high dragon--just load everyone up with runes of fire resistance and they're 90-95% fire resistant. Challenge for DA2 high dragon? Non existent.

Overall, Bioware went to a lot of trouble to streamline (dumb down) DA2 to appeal to the console market. They tried to make it more active, like Fable 3 or Oblivion and remove some of the more "clunky" non-combat elements. While they did preserve the core tactical play, it's deeply buried under a pile of changes which seem to say "Tactical RPers need not apply". 

DAO was called the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate by the CEO of Bioware. We didn't want another Fable 3 or Oblivion. Those games already fill the active hack and slash niche of video game roleplaying. We wanted another Baldurs Gate 2, or heck, another Dragon Age: Origins--there are no other games like them at the present. We liked the deep levels of customization, we liked being able to explore, and craft. DA2 is a good game, complaints aside. It's better than many games on the market. It just alienates the original DA audience to try to appeal to those who didn't care for the genre to begin with.