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Geoff Speare
United States
Bedford
Massachusetts
tee hee, that tickles!!!
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Played a bit more of Dragon Age 2 -- still liking it! I have to say that the combat plays out very well. My rogue has enough options that I need to pay attention to what abilities get used in what order. Also, the death animations (which generally involve bad guys turning into small chunks) is very satisfying.
Quests
One thing they did a good job with are quests that reward you for following a certain direction in the game. A simple example is loot-based quests -- every now and then, a piece of loot you find will start a "return this loot to its owner" quest. These are invariably simple (go to spot X), but the idea is a good one.
Better implementations include quests for attacking street gangs (there are actually different gangs across the main city), and (hopefully) one based on a series of notes found all over the place. It's nice to discover unexpected rewards for taking actions in the game.
Also nice, the quest page has a "rumors" section; these are "pre-quests" that can become quests if you follow up (look in the right part of town, etc.).
BioWare Time and Player expectations
Pacing is a crucial part of any story. In many BioWare games, where you are responsbile for saving the world (or a big part of it), there are a lot of plot points where "you need to act, NOW!" This is great for adding a sense of urgency to the game.
The problem is that most of the time, this urgency does not exist. In Dragon Age: Origins, you can leave a given area and everything there will happily wait for you to come back. The biggest example of this in my playthrough was saving a possessed wizard from a demon. The NPCs in the quest said I had no time, he was killing everyone in the house, I had to act NOW! In fact, I was able to leave, complete a totally different side quest, and use the result of that side quest to help the mage. By ignoring the implied urgency, I gained options I did not appear to have.
Dragon Age 2 has not done a lot of this yet, but the same assumptions appear to be operative.
This has the potential to become dangerous if this treatment of time is changed without warning the player. In Mass Effect 2, travel time and such do not really matter -- until one key point in the game, where suddenly how long you take to get to a certain quest has a big impact on how that quest plays out. This makes sense from a realism standpoint -- but is the exact opposite of how the game has taught you to play up to that point. (Fortunately for me I did not dawdle; if I had, I would have been unhappy, and probably would have restored from a prior save and proceeded with the proper understanding.)
It's a tough problem to solve -- if you just put the player on a clock, you take away a lot of choices. The current BioWare standard solution works great until you look behind the curtain and see how it really works.
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