Quote:
Originally Posted by Dale Baldwin
My biggest issue with the game is that it has Oblivion-dungeon syndrome. You feel like you're treading the same areas over and over again; even all the mansion areas have the same layout (including fallen painting in front of the stairs). It comes across as very lazy on Bioware's part.
I don't remember that being as much of an issue in DA:O. You had far more variety in environments you were visiting.
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I found that only to be a mild annoyance, and for buildings (the layout at least) it makes a kind of sense, it's not uncommon for buildings in the same city to have the same design. most of the caves and mines being identical on the other hand... but I can understand why they've done it to save time. I'd have preferred they spent longer on the game and improved it but we all know there was no rEAl chance of them being allowed to do that... so it comes down to prioritising where the time and resources should be spent
having completed the game a few times now though I have a new big complaint. replayability
don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things you can do differently on different playthroughs, but most of them are only minor things and have little or no actual effect on the rest of the game. Origins had three different main endings and hundreds of variables that would effect the epilogue, plus several parts of the game played out somewhat differently depending on your origin and/or earlier decisions. DA2 seems to be sadly lacking this and I worry this will badly hurt its appeal as time goes on. I know some people are happy to buy a game, play it once and proclaim it the greatest game ever but never play it again, or happily play the same game twice in the exact same way, but personally I love a game I can play again and again and have it be different each time. it's one of the reasons Blade Runner is one of my favourite adventure games
it also doesn't help that we still don't have a toolkit. mods played a large part in keeping Origins alive with new content, and much like the Awakening expansion (which sadly never got a toolset update either) DA2 badly needs new content to keep it fresh, and having to pay for DLC is far from a perfect solution
