I finished Dragon Age 2 recently. Yes, for the first time. Yes, I’m late to the party. I know. Where have I been all this time, etc. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let me explain to you a thing.
I liked Dragon Age 2.
If this article gets any kind of wide readership, there will be a large number of people who stopped reading at that sentence and went straight to the comments to tell me I’m wrong. Keep reading.
Dragon Age 2 is hated by a lot of fans and they won’t shut up about how much they dislike it.
For the record, I still don’t understand why and no, explaining it to me again will not make me care more.
I’m an outsider to all this. I’m a huge fan of BioWare games in general, as we’ve established repeatedly. But Dragon Age was an unknown to me. A lot of fans are very passionate about it, and understandably so. Many of these fans loved Dragon Age Origins. Many of these fans loved Origins so much that they feel an uncontrollable urge to inform you of this fact and of how much “better” Origins is than DA2 any time you so much as mention the fact that you’re playing DA2.
There’s this phenomenon I’ve noticed where if you tell a certain group of gamers that you like a thing they’ll take this as an invitation to shit all over that thing. It’s almost like the part of our brains that handle empathy just shuts the hell off right then and goes SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET I MUST INVALIDATE THEIR SUBJECTIVE JUDGEMENT DURHURHURHURMURMURFURDUR and then the next thing you know BLAAAAAAAAAAGH I AM A GIANT SQUID OF ANGEEEEERRRRRRRRR because look I’m busy liking this thing, I don’t need you to tell me how you liked a different thing more.
This is especially true of sequels and differing editions of favorite RPGs.
In fact, if nobody has coined it yet, I’m going to go ahead and call this Baldwin’s First Law: “if you tell a geek what you like, you are wrong.”
It doesn’t matter to them that you’ve already said, repeatedly, that you never finished Origins because it stopped being fun for you. It doesn’t matter that you began your conversation with the sentence “I liked Dragon Age 2 and think it’s fun, surprisingly deep, and highly underrated,” your feelings are WRONG and you should feel THIS INSTEAD. They’ll make excuses, like, “oh yeah, mages were terrible in Origins, you should play a warrior,” and ignore that maybe you don’t want to be a warrior, maybe you like casting spells and expect a game that gives you the option of casting spells to, you know, make that a fun thing to do.
It doesn’t matter that you were too busy struggling with the clunky mechanics when you played Origins to notice the fantastic story, you’re just wrong.
I’d love to say it’s just this game, but no, this isn’t isolated. It’s universal. It applies when you tell people you like Pathfinder and someone chimes in “4th Edition/2nd Edition/GURPS is better!” It happens when I tell people that Saints Row the Third is one of my favorite games and they try to convince me that I should like Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row II more. Heck, I’ve done it myself when people told me they liked the Star Wars prequels and now I feel terrible about it.
So I promised I’d explain to you a thing. Now I’m actually going to do that. Hopefully without splitting any infinitives.
Whether you like a thing is based on feelings.
Feelings cannot be wrong.
Now some of you are about to argue with me that what you like is based on sound logical reasons and to you I have only to say listen here you little #!?&@, I’m not finished.
You THINK that what you like is based on sound logical reasoning but that’s not actually how the brain works. You like stuff because you like it. Wait. That’s tautology. You like stuff because of how it makes you feel. Better. Your brain just rationalizes it afterward. All the sound logical reasons are your brain looking to justify what you already feel.
I can give you my sound and logical reasons for liking Dragon Age 2, but they aren’t nearly as important as the fact that I liked it because I felt things when I was playing it and I enjoyed having those emotions. Even the sad ones. And feelings cannot be wrong. Reasons, sure, reasons can be nonsensical or points of argument but my feelings are mine, I own them, nobody else does.
My liking something is not an invitation for you to tell me I’m wrong and should like something else.
If a kid likes the color blue, you don’t get to tell her that she should like pink instead. If a kid likes chocolate, you don’t get to tell him he should like carob instead, you idiot. Note: Apologies to our vegan readers. —Ed.
So if it’s not okay to tell someone what color they should like, why is this kind of unsolicited negativity something I should expect or put up with?
Expect an article containing my actual Dragon Age 2 thoughts in the future. For now, I leave you with what may well be the most important question of our generation (assuming that wasn’t a thing I just made up for emphasis instead of a literal truth):
Fellow gamers,
What the heck is WRONG with us?
Jonathan Baldwin
Jonathan is a firm believer that the best way to make friends is to game with them, and that nearly any problem can be surmounted with a well rolled d20 and a sense of humor. Regrettably, his professors do not agree with him, which leaves him with the challenge of balancing his gaming habits with his studies. Profile Page / Article Portfolio
Imma let you finish but Back to the Future 2 is the best movie of all time.
I actually loved both of the Back to the Future sequels and I think I’m the only one in my family who does. But they’re so much fun. D:
I was joking about Nerd-dom but I honestly do think Back to the Future 2 is the best movie ever made. It is a time travel movie (awesome) where in they go back to the events of the first movie and interact with it. The only thing that comes close to that level of awesome is the Deep Space 9 episode where they go back to the events of the original series tribble episode.
But, as you say, I understand I very well might be alone in that opinion.
I enjoyed playing DA2, i liked DAO more.
Now, it is truth that internet shows the worst of this sub culture where the keepers of purity, in any object, will punish anyone who praise a heretic version of they beloved game.
Now, do i think DA2 could be better? yes. But so do i about many books that i have enjoyed, not gonna mention any just in case torchs are ready and the omnipresent internet mob knock my house door.
And here I was hoping to read something about why DA2 is a good game and what we can learn from it for running our own games and how video games can be made better in the future.
But this doesn’t seem to be about DA2 at all…
I will get to the point of writing an article like that. I swear I will. This was a message I felt had to be sent, however. Basically my entire first play through, every time I so much as mentioned the game … eventually that builds up and you have to answer it. Probably while throwing objects and flailing.
I’m going to revisit Thedas again, trust me, and Hawke specifically. There IS a lot DA2 can tell us all about both good storytelling and the pitfalls of repetitive level design, it has a lot of good and a relatively minuscule amount of bad to be reflected on. Promise. No guarantees when, though, seeing as I’m presently obsessing over Skyrim for an entirely different set of reasons.
Sorry this wasn’t the article you were hoping for, but it was the one I needed to write when it was written.
I’m with you. I enjoyed Dragon Age 2. So much so that I did a playthrough as each of the three classes. I think one of the biggest reasons Origins fans go upset was because DA2 had one main character origin ( a human ) instead of several different ones each featuring a different race. This did not bother me at all, I still had a great time. Oh, and I also had more fun with Saints Row 3 than GTA4. Keyword: FUN.
Fun is the key. Now when I play a new game I find myself asking about ten minutes in “is this the most fun way I could be spending my time right now?” And if the answer is no, I’d better have a damn good reason not to shut it off and do something else.
I was pretty happy with the singular origin too, honestly, because it felt like they spent more time on it and it mattered more. Multiple choices and roleplaying hooks is all well and good, but if they don’t matter in the game you have to work harder to make them matter to the player. And the more versions they add the more disparity there is in the experience of the players. Sometimes that’s worth it, but when you’re telling a more character driven story like DA2, it probably makes more sense to go the way they did.
Probably. xD
I also enjoyed Dragon Age 2 and don’t understand the insane amount of hate it gets from the fans. While it had its flaws, I found it to be incredibly entertaining. Also, it has Varric. Any game that has Varric in it is a winner in my book.
I think the reason why so many people take their opinions about things so seriously is that people tend to identify with their opinions. So, when you say, “I didn’t like [blank]”, they read it as a judgment of their opinion and not your own personal tastes. At least, that’s my theory anyway.