Dragon Age II (PC) review "There have been complaints, and will be many more, that Dragon Age II is appealing for a more mainstream audience by removing all the fiddling of its predecessor, but I don’t think this is a fair accusation. There is very little that you could do before which is no longer possible. The difference is that the extraneous elements have been stripped away, giving the action space to breathe."

For me, two things defined Dragon Age: Origins, one of the most ambitious and fictionally rich RPGs in recent years. The first was the depth to its world, the cavernous reach of its narrative, which included a history spanning many thousands of years. The land of Ferelden was too often steeped in fantasy cliche, but it wasn’t just the setting of a video game; it was a place with a back-story and politics, inhabited by different races, all vying for their own means thanks to their own prejudices. Dragon Age, ultimately, wasn’t a game about mythical creatures living in a faraway land; it was about us, and our world, and how we might reflect upon that if prompted in the right way.

The game’s second defining feature was, of course, the way it began. Depending on your choices during the character creation screen, you experienced a completely different opening hour-or-so of the game. These origin stories created a narrative that was distinctly yours. In Dragon Age, a single playthrough could never even begin to tell you the whole story.

In Origins, you discovered things, rather than being told them. As a human noble, I had no idea how badly some of my people had treated the elves until later on. I assumed hostilities were because of the paranoia of others, not because of the horrible oppression these people faced day after day, hidden away from the higher-class humans. Seeing this all clunk into place, and watching various other strands of the story begin to make sense as a result, was a rare experience in a game.

BioWare’s approach to Dragon Age II is an interesting one. There are a great many changes. Combat is the most immediately apparent, but there are more. The dialogue options. The skill tree. The world.

If Origins was the epic, the company’s tour-de-force of fantasy, then this sequel is the microcosm of all its lofty ideas. That’s true both of the game’s systems and the world contained within them. Rather than whisking you off on an enormous journey across a huge nation, Dragon Age II restricts you primarily to a small part of its world, and the story you experience is the only one available.

Your choices along the way - both moral and pragmatic - do alter the course of your lengthy adventure. But this is a more focused tale. Instead of creating your own character entirely from scratch, this time you step into the boots of Hawke, a refugee from the hellish Ferelden, hoping to start a new life in the city of Kirkwall. This is no courageous quest to save the world. There’s no arch-villain in Dragon Age II. There is simply the harsh reality of existing in these times - and the painful truth of what you must do to survive.

In many ways, this is an impressive departure from the norm for BioWare. Gone is the developer’s established structure, where a largely linear opening and conclusion bookend a several-stranded bulk of questing in between. There’s no necessity to hop around various regions, with a list of people whom you must convince to join you. The main quest, in fact, is one that only slowly falls into place. At the start you have no overriding objective other than to gain access to the city. Once you’re in, for a good while, it’s not always entirely clear what you’re supposed to be doing at all.

It’s decisions like this which might help Origins loyalists to deal with changes that have been made elsewhere. Conversations, for example, have received an overhaul. Instead of simply picking from a list of dialogue options, you’re asked to select your attitude on a directional wheel. Its similarities to Mass Effect have sparked drearily predictable accusations of dumbing down, but that isn’t really the effect it has. The game’s being explicit about its emotions and attitudes doesn’t make things easier, as such. It just allows you to tailor your character in a more specific and manageable way.

Combat, too, has been streamlined enormously - especially if you consider the PC version of the original game. There’s less focus on tactical micromanagement, and more focus on getting stuck in. There’s a radial menu, through which you can fine-tune the combat style of you and your troupe. But fighting, this time around, is primarily a spectacle. For my money, it’s a change done right.

There is an almost unparalleled physical weight to Dragon Age II’s combat. Your character automatically locks onto the nearest enemy, circle-strafing around them, and each blow lands with a cacophonous thump. To be wholly successful in combat you also need to adopt a fine-tuned rhythm reserved usually for dedicated brawlers. There have been complaints, and will be many more, that Dragon Age II is appealing for a more mainstream audience by removing all the fiddling of its predecessor, but I don’t think this is a fair accusation. There is very little that you could do before which is no longer possible. The difference is that the extraneous elements have been stripped away, giving the action space to breathe.

Like Origins, Dragon Age II makes the mistake of stretching out these sequences for too long. There will be times throughout the lengthy campaign where you wish for nothing more than a little respite, the chance to explore a new place, or meet some new characters who aren’t hell-bent on your destruction. Even your passage through the main storyline is far too sluggish, with unnecessary padding at several points. When there’s little sense of forward momentum, with relatively few changes in scenery as the game plods on hour after hour, it’s a problem. Things become unfortunately repetitious, and you get the sense that you could have progressed much further by now if only the game had let you.

The disappointing early quests see you following waypoints between battles and conversations, and there are few which really thrive upon character quirks or clever social nuance. Ten hours in, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were being bundled from one generic NPC to another, with none of them giving you any interesting information or unique jobs to do, until the game arbitrarily decides you’re allowed to get on with something resembling a main story.

If Kirkwall were as fascinating a place as - say - Orzammar, the dwarven city in Dragon Age: Origins, this feeling would be mitigated substantially. While Dragon Age II’s tweaked art style is more appealing (and certainly less generic) than that of the original, the world it paints offers fewer intellectual rewards. Orzammar’s culture was fascinating. A strict caste system kept civilians segregated, spread out on separate vertical layers of the towering, volcanic cavern in which the place sat. Its council’s politics ran astonishingly deep, perhaps more so than any game to have tried something similar. Kirkwall is a melting pot of different cultures, different peoples, different outlooks on life, but there’s never anything to rival the extraordinary sociological complexities upon which Origins thrived.

Once again, though, this is a personal tale, and you can see what the talented chaps at BioWare have tried to do. Dragon Age II attempts not to slowly unravel a grand ecosystem of politics and culture (although the game does head in that direction eventually), but instead to paint the picture of one person trying to find their calling in a large and confusing world. We imagine sequels to be bigger and better than what came before. Dragon Age II isn’t. It’s noticeably more modest in its ambitions, substantially lower-key in its delivery. And that’s perhaps the bravest route BioWare could have taken.

Is it successful? Not entirely. It’s too slow in places, and the game never does anything as overtly impressive as the title that preceded it. But measuring up against the gargantuan scope of Origins was probably always going to be an impossible task. What Dragon Age II does, with the conviction you’d expect from a team with the talent of BioWare, is understand this, and play to new strengths.

Dragon Age II is a long way away from perfection. But it is its own game, undeterred by the enormous shadow left by several previous BioWare releases. I can’t condemn it too heavily when it is, essentially, the game I’ve been asking of the developer for years.

Freelance review by Lewis Denby (October 31, 2011) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.