Dragon Age 2

As if the original Dragon Age wasn't enough of a letdown to anyone looking for a decent RPG experience, they released Dragon Age 2 less than a year-and-a-half later.  Which is right out of the Electronic Arts playbook - shovel crap out as quickly and voluminously as possible and pay your hack game journo buddies to hype it up as the Best Thing Ever so your fanboys never have the time or inclination to try anything else; if that ever happens, they might learn just how shoddy your products really are!  And boy is DA2 shoddy.  Its combat moves slightly faster but is just as shallow and monotonous as the first game's, throwing hordes of the same one enemy at you over and over again for 30+ minutes at a time.  The writing still carries the same air of disinterested arrogance as everything Bioware's made since 2001, like the team thinks they perfected the art of storytelling long ago and they can now crank out flawless masterworks in their sleep; nevermind half their dialog is smug speechifying and the other half is just shoveling out exposition with the same dead cadence and repetition as an instructional video.  Character interactions are still the same trite "be stoic/make stupid jokes/be an asshole" choices that never change a damn thing outside of throwaway lines in cutscenes, and the world design is lazier than ever, copy-pasting assets wholesale from the previous game and even reusing the same exact rooms multiple times in a row just to pad out the dungeons.  And of course they shoehorn in awfully-written character romances and almost-naughty scenes with every combination of gay, bi and trans characters, conspicuously draping their brand in a rainbow flag and declaring themselves an "ally" like every big corporation with a terrible reputation does, and for the same reason (I'll give you a hint: it ultimately has nothing to do with LGBTQ+ people).  Basically DA2 is just a cut-rate Diablo 1 in terms of gameplay design and premise, with a toe-curlingly trite story set in and around a single locale so they can make as few new assets and characters as possible.  But what truly pushes it into being irredeemable is BioWare and EA's attitude toward their audience.  After two of the game's developers got caught posting glowing reviews for their own game on Metacritic, EA's official response was a flippant "who cares just buy it anyway lol", which just proves they don't have the slightest care about ethical behavior from their employees, the quality of their products, their own reputation or even the medium of gaming in general.  As long as they make a quick buck off you and yours, anything is fair play.  If selling heroin was legal I'm sure they'd happily quit the video game business entirely and do that instead; it isn't, though, so they'll just have to settle for producing subpar crap at premium prices and letting their cult of employees, journo shills and dumbass corporation-worshipping fanboys foist pro-EA propaganda all over the internet instead. Fucking shysters.  

While this is technically a half-Star game for making at least a few improvements to the dragging combat of the original, there's no way I'm rewarding Electronic Arts or BioWare for showing such flagrant contempt for their audience. Dragon Age 2's final score is a whopping zero Stars, and BioWare, EA and every one of their enablers, shills and apologists get two raised middle fingers apiece.  Now please, go support a developer that has some scruples, pushes genuine quality in their products and still values their customers and the medium of gaming beyond how many pennies they can shake out of them this week; I promise there's plenty to be found.

Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: 2011
Platforms: XBox 360, PC, PlayStation 3

Dragon Age: Origins

Mass Effect was just awful - an utterly boring slog that cribs elements of other, better science fiction works while adding no unique twists of its own.  But I had at least a little hope for Dragon Age.  While BioWare was never very good at world building or making a "role-playing experience", surely they could at least recapture the challenging tactical gameplay, interesting characters and captivating narratives of the old Infinity Engine games, right?  Well, it was an RPG on a console in 2009 - a time period when people valued pretty cutscenes and online functionality gimmicks over gameplay or requiring any thought to complete - so you can guess how well it went.  Rather than having 60+ classes, numerous pieces of equipment, a vast array of potions, scrolls and spells and countless potential character builds to experiment with, you get... 3.  Yep, it's the old Fighter/Thief/Mage trifecta with boring, linear skill trees to determine what slightly different tactics you can employ, in theory at least. In practice combat mostly consists of slow boring rounds of Rockem Sockem Robots, with everyone trading blows until one side falls and getting healed to full immediately after if you win.  No stakes, no tension, hardly any tactics and no fun.  Christ, even Diablo II, released nearly a decade prior, had far deeper combat and character building than this, and even Diablo 1 had more character choices if you factor in the Hellfire expansion pack. The plot is utterly predictable dark fantasy fare, pitting the humanoid races against the "Darkspawn", a blanket term for zombies/orcs/ogres/goblins/every other stock fantasy jobber ever ripped from the pages of Tolkien.  The elves are smarmy magical tree huggers, the dwarves are smarmy nonspiritual architects, humans are short-lived, combative and naive and looked down on by the other two.  You've seen it all hundreds of times, and it's given no new twist here to keep it firmly under the umbrella of laziness painted up as homage.  Even D&D had long since moved away from these tiresome, restrictive tropes well before Dragon Age was a thing, so there's no excuse for it here.

The writing continues to suck major ass in the same way Mass Effect's did, just aping plot points from better stories, winking at its own lame clichés (not caring that simply calling attention to a cliché doesn't make it less of one), and cramming in everything you need to know via huge stretches of exposition that read more like a car manual than conversation.  Every character with more than eight lines of dialog talks in the same haughty tone and spouts off constant labored witticisms, as though being condescending and having an arsenal of platitudes on deck at all times in order to appear smart is going to carry them through life in lieu of practical knowledge and personal connections they don't ever care to develop.  I'm sure people who write like this are just as fun to interact with in real life, too.  Don't expect any decent world building either because, of course, it's all relegated to boring encyclopedia entries you get to exit out of the gameplay completely if you want to peruse; after all, we wouldn't want to risk losing that lucrative audience of thirteen-year-old boys who have the attention span of hamsters and only care about chasing the arrow to get to more monster bashing and titties and cheevos to prove they're real manly men!  The game also just screams "desperate moneymaking scam" because as you play there's constant popups about its dozens of DLC releases - nearly all of them being short, unsatisfying hour-long quests they're trying to milk $5 or more apiece out of.  Yeah... all the fanboys still whingeing on about Oblivion's horse armor can officially piss right off, because at least Bethesda had the courtesy to not pester me about buying it every three minutes.

Dragon Age: Origins is shallow, derivative, ruthlessly boring and completely full of itself, but that's the entire point of it existing.  There was never a thought spared by anyone involved for making a decent game, just for milking a few dollars out of nostalgia for the D&D-clone RPGs that came before it while investing as little time and mental energy as they could get away with.  Alongside other overhyped '00s/early '10s stinkers like Bioshock, Dishonored, Dead Space, Witcher, Mass Effect, Dark Souls and especially Halo, it's just another example of a company cashing in on platform bias - shamelessly copycatting things computer games had already done brilliantly years earlier, stripping out any trace of intelligence or depth they had to make them 'broadly accessible', painting them up with soulless HD graphics and selling it as the next big cultural revolution to early teenagers too young to know they're being served a lame knockoff and fanboys too in love with their corporate gods to care.  It only becomes worse when you consider BioWare once worked on a few of those great games they're now making soulless clones of.  They used to have genuine passion and talent for telling stories and writing great nuanced characters and coming up with clever challenges to overcome, and now they're needy sellouts who can't function without constant reassurance of how talented and sacrosanct they are through the glowing press and awards EA buys for them.  A hard fall from grace for a once-prestigious name, Dragon Age marked the end of any hope I had for BioWare ever being good again.

Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: 2009
Platforms: XBox 360, PC, PlayStation 3