Posted May 10, 2011
StingingVelvet: There are people who hate my favorite game and people who hate yours. I do think however there are certain objective measures of quality for certain aspects of games. For instance, no matter what your opinion is of the rest of the game you have to admit the repeated content and locations of DA2 are an objective flaw.
I agree, but the edge was taken off that particular flaw since Bioware always repeat content. Mass Effect featured roughly 6 distinct locations (themselves being pretty repetitive apart from the Citadel), lots of planets that were featureless and may as well have been randomly generated (or palette swaps) and then upon said planets there were one of two endlessly repeated buildings or the same endlessly repeated cave. They didn't even disguise the fact, at least in DA2 you entered from different points as some weak attempt to disguise the repetition. I know you could argue that Kirkwall was more relevant to DA2 than Denerim was to DA:O, but Denerim was one marketplace surrounded by only 3 or 4 enterable buildings and then 4 repeated, identical and unpopulated back alleys. What really stopped me liking DA:O as much as I may have was the fact that the facial and body animations were distracitingly poor to the point of actually be funny. The voice acting was generally weak - sometimes embarrassingly so (the stereotypically gay blacksmith "artiste", for example) and even when it was good (Alistair) it sounded out of place (he sounded like a modern day student from the south of England). DA2 improved in those regards while also making the experience more suitable for console - and that's obviously annoying if you were playing it on PC. It's just that if you read most of the negative reviews on Amazon, you'll see people naming all these terrible things that DA2 did that also apply to DA:O equally ("unrealistic because you don't need to eat" being a particularly odd one).
The population of the US had risen by 100 million in that time and much had changed economically since then. No such change happened between DA:O and DA2 - plus people had played the demo and the same people who hate DA2 now hated it before it was released. There were obviously more than enough people who liked it to mean it did better.
Post edited May 10, 2011 by Export