I think Loghain's motivations are weak as well. art and sound is a matter of taste I guess... but specifically the sound is very similar to BG and I know for a fact Inon Tzur was involved with the music of both games.
about the structure of solving problems for everyone - by that time it was pretty much the Bioware formula. you could take it or leave it, but most of Bioware did it. I don't think it's fair to put it all on DAO. But of course, nothing wrong with thinking this game is overrated and not so good and such...
Yeah, people are of course welcome to enjoy or dislike games as they will. This is just my own red-hot take.
I actually think the music was quite good for DAO. The problems I had were more to do with mixing, ambient sounds, and sound effects. A great example of this is the discrepancy between the city of Baldur’s Gate and whatever the capital city of DAO was (its been a while). If you turn off the music in Baldur’s Gate you will hear plenty of background noise. It sounds like a bustling city, so even though visually it is quite static, the sound keeps it from feeling completely inert and dead. In DAO this is completely absent. Turn off the audio track and you will hear almost nothing. This, alongside the clunky way characters move gives the game a peculiar feeling for me. Everything seems smothered and lifeless.
As for art direction, DAO is all over the place. For example, while the character models are somehow both simultaneously idealized and poorly rendered, they are still mostly representational. That is to say, they don’t have cartoonish proportions (except for the boobs 😂). The weapons, however, are outrageously oversized, as are one of the shoulder pads on all of the suits of plate armor. This doesn’t look good to me. It’s inconsistent. I think one of the few things DA2 did well was that it tried to give the series a coherent sense of visual identity (though this included way too many unnecessary spikes in Kirkwall, because they were literally trying to make their game edgy), because the first game really doesn’t have any. I can’t even remember what a DAO darkspawn look like, but I can remember how they looked in the sequel despite them appearing in far fewer numbers and me having played far fewer hours in that game.
