While I think Dragon Age II has some interesting ideas, I also think it kind of reeks of low budget. Sometimes a low budget can help a creative work, make it so the mechanics need to be distilled down, the ideas focused, and just can help make the game more charming. DA2 feels like a different beast though, like a game that wasn't just designed within a small budget but designed to wear that budget as a business success. So, it all takes place in a handful of maps in one location, the city of Kirkwall. There's a new art style too, one with a bit of a comic book feel to it, which just happens to come along with (at least what appear to be) simpler looking models. Maybe that's all that necessarily feels cheap here, but the implementation of Kirkwall, the Only Setting of the Game, leaves some to be desired I think.

Now the whole one city thing was something I was actually pretty excited for. I LOVE a good, large RPG hub, and Kirkwall oft gets compared to Sigil in Planescape Torment (most of the setting of that game) which is one of the greatest RPG hubs. Kirkwall even has a lot of the hallmarks of a good hub, like quests that have you crossing knottily through the city, different districts, characters that change with the city as the game goes along.

My thing is it feels like the city was built off a checklist. It's got different class divided districts, just like Taris, but there's no progression through them. There's recurring characters that grow with the city, but they never make much of an impression, as if they're all from the same mold just tinkered with a tiny bit so they fit their quest. But those quests are my main issue. I think they were going for a kind of "the city is the main character" thing, because there doesn't really seem to be a main plot, or at least there wasn't one when I stopped playing at the end of Act 2. Instead, there's a main plotline for each act, which runs simultaneously with a bunch of sidequests. Each of these quests feels about equally complex, and by and large these are the only type of quests in the game. There's one fetch quest, and it's pretty involved for a fetch quest, but the rest of the game is just going back and forth between characters, talking and progressing quests with that mass effect dialogue system, and writing that's middling, if well delivered. It's a fine way to do quests, it just feels so... static. There's no variety. I don't think the fact that this is a quest-marker driven game helps thing either.

Moving on to the one part of the game that doesn't feel low budget, the combat is... well it's not great. It's kind of a combination of a Jade Empire-like action system with a RTWP system. Or at least that's what it seems like it wanted to be? In reality it's just RTWP but the default settings make it so you need to press a button to attack every time and hold a button to pause. Thank god you can change that! The bigger issues are 1. Because the game thinks it's an action game, every move has a cooldown and a resource drain. It seems to be influenced by MMO design I think? But without interesting ways to replenish your resource, it's not so much a resource management thing as two very long cooldown timers on every ability. It takes what's supposed to feel fast, fluid, and interesting and just needlessly slows it down. You can easily just end up without anything to do after a couple seconds besides autoattack until your abilities ready up. Even health potions have cooldowns on them. I get it's supposed to get you to focus on the tactics, but I was playing on easy because I know I'm not tactically minded, yet the game still felt always either slightly too easy or way too hard.

It doesn't feel properly balanced, and the game just feels willingly constricted under it's budget. I didn't really love DAO, and I was hoping the black sheep of the series would win me over (as often happens), but even I've gotta say this just feels rushed out the door.