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There is a lot of things in Dragon Age II that are awesome. There are also many things that suck. But during my recent play session (involving the end of Act 2, so there are spoilers, I suppose) I was overwhelmed with stupidity.

The end of Act 2 involves a long run through town towards the keep, where the Arishok has held up with his army. There are many battles along the way there, and you meet up with many important people as you go along. You have to talk to the Knight-Commander, and the Enchanter, and all these people, making decisions, and so on and so forth. A lot of tense moments, and cool decision-making. Finally, when you get to the Arishok, you have what is probably the first battle in the game that is actually challenging. It’s the only battle I’ve died on on casual difficulty. It’s really hard! My party was wiped almost immediately.

Every previous boss battle, going into the last cutscene before the battle triggered an autosave, so if I lost the battle, I could try it again. When I went into this battle, designed to be very difficult, there was no such autosave. I died, and the game picked back up with me entering High Town. This was about 15 minutes of cutscenes and dialog ago that I had to play back through.

What the fuck.

I just can’t believe that the designers didn’t think that battle was hard. As I said, it was the first tough battle on Casual difficulty. I can’t even imagine how hard it must be on actual difficulty settings. Why would they not autosave there? This is 40th Day level bullshit, and I thought Bioware was above that.

Again, there is plenty of good stuff in the game. Earlier in my play session, the game really impressed me in it’s attention to detail! But still, this was a really, really stupid oversight that made me waste a bunch of time getting back to the fight, which I almost lost again. Stupid.