The Mass Effect Controversy

Okay, spoiler warning. If you haven't finished Mass Effect 3, you will probably want to stop reading. I'm going to discuss the ending, the controversy and give my own opinions on a whole bunch of stuff. Every second person on the Internet is doing it, so I may as well join in the chorus. This is a long way, so strap yourselves in.

I'll start by saying that the discussion and debate over the ending has reached a surprising level of hype and debate. Not since the Star Wars prequels have we seen such an outpouring of fan rage and Internet anger. $80,000 has been raised for Child's Play in the "Retake Mass Effect 3" movement. Gaming sites have been filled with backlash over the ending, and then others telling those people that they are "entitled whingers" and then the usual barrage of EA hatred. This thrust Mass Effect 3 and BioWare/EA into the limelight, and not necessarily in a good light.

Unfortunately for them, they're in a bit of a damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't situation. If BioWare changes the endings, then according to many, they will have surrendered their artistic integrity by "giving in", but if they don't, then they risk alienating tens of thousands of fans who found the ending to be disappointing. Just to clarify my own position, I thought the ending was awful. 1/10 awful. That said, right up until the ending, I was loving the game and would have been verging on a 10/10 score (notwithstanding my hatred for common interpretations and definitions of review scores).

So final spoiler warning now. If you keep reading, don't say I didn't warn you.

No, this is your last warning.

One of the more ridiculous elements of this controversy is the lengths that both sides are going to in order to make their point. Someone filing a lawsuit for false advertising is ridiculous. On the flip side, journalists who go "I haven't played it but, BioWare shouldn't change a thing because of artistic integrity" is equally fallacious. Sites dismissing all complainers as "entitled whingers" is just as unhelpful as those issuing threats against BioWare staff. Debate needs to be reasonable and informed, on both sides.

I'll pull a specific example here, an article from GamesRadar. It starts off with the disclaimer: "I don't know what the ending of Mass Effect 3 entails, and I don't care.". This is right before launching into two pages of discussion as to why the ending shouldn't be changed. This writer forgot rule number one: write about what you know. Later it pulls out the line: "The Matrix sequels were crap, but their crapness wasn’t the biggest tragedy. The biggest tragedy was that a concept so huge and open to almost infinite interpretations was tied to a single linear trilogy following a single narrative path." Of course, since this argument is made without any knowledge of the ending, the writer doesn't realise that this is precisely the issue with Mass Effect 3's ending. Way to shoot yourself in the foot.

Your real choice

Anyone who is going to comment on the ending of the game, please, play and finish the damn game first before you start speaking. Artistic integrity argument or not, you have to know what you are talking about. I respect the concept of artistic integrity, but at the same time, an ending must maintain the integrity of the artistry. Mass Effect 3's ending doesn't do that, because it's filled with so many gaping holes in its presentation that it falls to pieces under even the most cursory examination. The player gets blasted by a giant Reaper laser, which apparently vaporises everyone, except Shepard and Anderson. Yet the rest of the allies believe that everyone is dead and no one survived, so they retreat. Yet Shepard gets up and makes his/her way to a teleportation beam that takes him/her to the centre of the Citadel, where they have a showdown with The Illusive Man and then some Machine God or Reaper deity where they make an ultimate decision to destroy all synthetic life, attempt to control the Reapers, or achieve "synthesis" where man and machine are fused in a final evolution.

Now, if we assume that Indoctrination Theory is incorrect, then we end up with some bizarre and incomprehensible inconsistencies within the final ten minutes. Firstly, it's reported that everyone dies in the laser blast on Earth, which is why they break off their attack. Yet when Giant-Deus-Ex-Machina-Plot-Device (aka the Crucible) docks with the Citadel and locks into place, the military command communicates directly with Shepard. If they knew Shepard wasn't dead, why did they report that everyone had died? We've also got the issue of the Normandy crash landing on some mysterious planet at the end of the game's final cutscene with several members of Shepard's crew - all of whom except for Joker were present on Earth before the final push, and some of whom can potentially be with Shepard in the final attack where they also supposedly got hit (and vaporised) by the Reaper laser.

If only Shepard had magical plot armor earlier on

This is even ignoring the issue of the Mass Relays exploding, which from The Arrival DLC, we're told will obliterate the entire system with a supernova-like explosion. BioWare staff have supposedly issued statements saying "That relay was special" or "this explosion is special", but there's no indication as such given by the game (and I've not seen these reassurances). If anything, we're led to believe those explosions will destroy everything - because Joker is desperately trying to escape from the coloured explosion shockwave, but gets hit by it and it forced to crashland on a jungle planet. That hardly indicates that the explosion is harmless, but instead explicitly demonstrates to the player that it is. I could go into many more details, but how about I just leave a link to this article and be done with it?

I'd hate to think that BioWare's writers were so short-sighted as to not realise how awful and inconsistent the ending is. If they didn't, then I'm afraid I have little faith left in their writing abilities, nor the ability of any of the playtesters or design team to not see these problems. I was concerned enough by the inability to import faces from previous Mass Effect games into Mass Effect 3. How did the designers possibly think it was acceptable to have import a Shepard and have that face appear entirely different in the third game? Players who have played through the first two games are going to be attached to their Shepard - and the developers have the greatest responsibility to allow continuity for those players, as the whole point of the series was to chart the journey of Commander Shepard. Needless to say, if Indoctrination Theory isn't correct, then BioWare have their work cut out for them to explain all these inconsistencies. If it is correct, then they've pulled one hell of a stunt... and all I can say is that the DLC that provides the real ending had better be provided to players for free. Else they can kiss lots and lots of fans goodbye right now.

I hope the end is Shepard fighting against becoming another Saren

In order to understand why is Mass Effect 3's ending such a failure, it is important not simply to analyze at a superficial level. Let's analyze it as part of the series. More importantly, and this is where so many writers and reviewers and others are missing the point, let's analyze it as a game. To analyze Mass Effect 3's ending purely as a narrative structure is to undermine the entire medium through which it is conveyed. We cannot analyze story-telling in video games in the same way that we do books or film media, because the gameplay should inform the narrative and vice versa.

Mass Effect is an adventure in the classic sense: it's a journey of discovery and exploration, where you come to know your true enemy as a result of the twists and turns of the plot. You get to know the universe, the characters, who gets along with who, and who doesn't. What are the burning historical issues that inform the backdrop of the setting and individual conflicts. As part of this, in a gaming context you're given two decisions that have a real impact on the game and the series: Does Wrex die and does Ashley or Kaidan die? Now, while these may feel like trivial points, and some people hate Kaidan/Ashley, it's a significant because as part of the same game, it can have a direct impact on your ability to play the game. You're romancing Kaidan, but you've traveled with Ashley all the time for the firepower? The player is forced to pick between Kaidan or Ashley, and they potentially lose Wrex as well. There are potential real gameplay ramifications from player choice.

 Who died on Virmire?

Mass Effect 2 brought a few changes. One, for the sake of gameplay, the infinite ammo guns of the first game were taken away and replaced by a standard ammo system. Many fans were up in arms about this "rewrite" and "lore breaking rubbish", but it was included for the sake of gameplay. Personally, I had no issue with this; the change helped improve the gameplay significantly over the firtst game which started off with you having to meticulously watch your heat meter, but you could ignore it entirely by the end of the game and hold down the trigger indefinitely. Here the established writing and lore was "re-written"/"reworked" so as to improve the gameplay. From a pure writing perspective, it's a cheap and poor device, but the writing changed to suit the gameplay. You won't see this in other media, which is why games can't be treated the same as other media.

Plot-wise, the game also forced the player to work with Cerberus (whom most probably didn't like), and had them gather a number of allies to their cause. The player did missions to ensure their loyalty (or at least attempted to) and as a result of player choices, there was a definite possibility that characters could die during the end game. If the player did badly enough, even their character could die. Again, this kind of story-telling is exclusive to video games. The player is responsible for what happens to individual characters, and thanks to their emotional involvement, that resulted in some players being distraught when their favourite squad member(s) died. (Of course, some deliberately attempted to get certain individuals killed) Again, this can potentially have an impact on the player's ability to succeed in the end-game - a favoured squad member with complementary abilities to the player's can die (or be needed elsewhere), forcing them to adopt new strategies and tactics in order to succeed in gameplay.

 Maybe you lost Miranda's loyalty in an argument. She might be dead.

Mass Effect 3 sees the conclusion of the hero's journey in the final trial, the attack against the ultimate enemy. By gathering all allies together (though potentially losing some along the way), the player is getting together all the military might possible in order to assist for the final battle. Throughout the game, the player has a bar that builds showing them the potential chance of success of this final onslaught. Yet ultimately this doesn't appear to have any real effect, and there is virtually no appreciable game difference from not having built up anything, nor from your decisions during the game, or the past three games. At best, it's possible to lose/gain one single party member as a result of choices made in Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, but this party member only appears in the final third of the game. The only other difference is the ending to destroy synthetic life will indiscriminately target everyone on Earth should the player have insufficient war assets.

This is where Mass Effect 3 fails so terribly as a game in terms of its narrative. The previous two games have set the stage of a game where choices have real and concrete effects on the way that the game plays out. The player will suffer as a result of bad decisions or be forced to sacrifice others and potentially make their own gameplay more difficult. The narrative affected the gameplay. However, Mass Effect 3's ending (not to mention game as a whole), summarily dispenses with this concept and expectation. The travesty is that it is a mess not only in terms of the details of its execution in a narrative sense, but in it entirely forgets the responsibilities of the trilogy as a game.

 Give me back my game. Now.

Now, the odd thing personally, is that while I've seen many people argue that BioWare shouldn't change the ending because of reasons of artistic integrity, and plenty of articles on why it's a terrible ending, I've seen very little from arguments of those who liked the ending as to why it was a good ending. I have a friend who is a writer and budding game designer who gave his thoughts on the ending. I have to give him credit, because he's done better than "professional critics/reviewers" who have failed to develop a single coherent argument as to why the ending is good except for "the writers made it that way." I'm sorry, but from people who get paid to write articles, that's simply not damn good enough. If you're going to declare the ending is great and deride everyone picking (serious and significant) holes in the delivery and details, then you'd damn well better be able to back it up with something better than "that's what we got given."

The funny thing is that thematically, I can see the argument that the ending is well written. The argument that the entire series has always been about order versus chaos does strike a little bit of a chord. However, the problem is that it is a retcon (retroactive continuity) of a theme. i.e. The writers decided to change the ending of the game, from the originally intended one, and forced people to reinterpret existing material in a new way. This change is why the first and second game don't entirely gel in a thematically consistent fashion with the third. Mac Walters took over as the lead writer during the development of Mass Effect 2, and in hindsight you can see that divergence and some of the dropped plot ideas from the first two games... just as you can retroactively see the theme of order versus chaos come through. The problem is that it takes until you talk to the dying Reaper on Rannoch before the concept of order versus chaos is finally presented to the player in any sort of coherent manner.

Tali doesn't think it's about order and chaos

For two entire games, the Reapers are insistent that they "are beyond our understanding", but when we reach the conclusion they say "actually, you're all going to be killed off by synthetics, so we kill all advanced races so that doesn't happen." Hate to point this out, but that's an idea that has been floating around in human culture, and specifically sci-fi, for decades. Given you've studied us (and all other races), you'd know that. Heck, when the dying reaper said that on Rannoch, my thought was "Really? You're just recycling the idea from Battlestar Galactica? That's your idea of 'beyond understanding?' Please tell me you're just trying to get inside my head." It's just such a ham-fisted and simple explanation that it doesn't do justice to the catch cry of the Reapers thus far, nor their vast power and arrogance.

The problem is that Mass Effect has explored some interesting themes, put players in some difficult moral quandaries, and likely put them through the emotional wringer with character deaths. There are so many good points to the series that the inconsistencies and retroactive application of thematic ideas throughout decisions and events in the series doesn't do justice to universe that has been created for players, nor the experiences they have had within it.

 So we explored for what purpose exactly?

This isn't simply an issue of the ending failing to live up to player expectations, it's an issue of the ending failing to live up to the rest of the narrative experience provided by the Mass Effect games. It is a failure to live up to the gameplay experience delivered by the rest of series. True enough, a story should be about the journey, and not the destination, but the issue is that every single destination is exactly the same. For the ending we have, it turns out that Harbinger and the Reapers were right. You can struggle all you want, but nothing you do will make any difference in the end. Kind of makes you wonder why you were fighting throughout all three games.

Character arcs and The Shattered War

One of the things I wanted to do in The Shattered War was to give both the player and NPCs character arcs. The player must experience a story that goes through several twists and turns, but a good story should result in people being changed by that experience. Today I'm going to discuss techniques that I've employed to give players an experience that will help provide an impetus for change in both NPCs and potentially the player themselves. They're common techniques, but I think it's important to analyse them and how they benefit a game.

Allow the player to change others
This is a concept that has been around for a while, so it's an obvious one to include. The first time I remember it was in Knights of the Old Republic. Where your influence could change the way your party members reacted to the world at large by changing their opinion. This is a valuable technique because it really makes the player feel like a powerful influence and leader within the game.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've decided not to include companion specific abilities. This is a gameplay affecting/extending consequence of allowing the player to change companions, but in The Shattered War the required amount of work means that I won't be implementing it. However, there are simpler methods to allowing the player to affect an NPC. By having an NPC deal with a difficult issue or choice, the player can push their thinking in one direction or another, causing them to change their viewpoint on a moral "grey area", or even push them over the edge should they be close to breaking point. I've provided the ability for the player to cause NPCs to pursue their cause with deadly intent should the player push them in that direction.

 Do you forgive Bastila, or does she deserve retribution for her crimes?

Allow the story to change others
The events of a story should cause characters to change. Whether they lose their humanity, or perhaps find it, without character change, a story can feel stagnant and stale. Events have an impact on people, and if that doesn't occur, then are those events really having much of an emotional or physical impact on its participants? NPCs are easy to to change throughout a story, as they are under the writer's control. They can react to events that must happen as part of the game, which can cause them to undergo minor or major change. This could even form a significant part of the story.

It is important here to make sure that NPC change does not overshadow the player.  No one wants a repeat of Neverwinter Nights, where the story was more about Aribeth than it was the player. The player is the most important person in the story, and if they're not, then they can (somewhat rightfully) feel a little annoyed. If they can't prevent the obvious "bad thing" from happening no matter what they do, then it can be a source of frustration and annoyance.

Remember: the player is always more important than the writer's favourite NPC

Allow the player to change themselves
Essentially, this concept is allowing the player to "grow" during the telling of the adventure. Many players come in with a set personality, or the idea of a personality, but a good adventure will either force them to test that personality or cause them to define areas that they had not considered before. The simplest tool here is moral dilemma and "grey" decisions. Does the player save one "good" person or save five "evil" people? Do they side with an ineffectual but personable leader, or join forces with the merciless brute who could save others?

This is often one of the most difficult things to do, largely because of the tendency of many games to offer "the happy ending" scenario where everyone wins. The true test of character is when the player is forced to decide between the lesser of two evils or the greater of two goods. Testing the player with decisions like this is one of the best ways to make them decide whether their character is the person they thought, or whether sometimes they're forced to make hard decisions.

 The best debate from DA2 - who is more evil: mages or templars?

Allowing character arcs is a valuable means to deepen the gaming experience for a player, as it adds a personal depth to the story in addition to simply the events that occur. I believe that I've created a nice balance of these aspects in The Shattered War, allowing the player to not only affect the story, but the reactions and development of characters within that story.

Shattered War exclusions

I'm taking a bit of a different approach for today's blog about The Shattered War. Recently I've been covering things that I've included and the decisions I've made. Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, today's post is going to cover things that didn't make the cut.  That's right, I'm going to be talking about things I decided not to include and why.

Companion Abilities
The plan here was to make some custom abilities for each companion that would set them apart from the regular warriors, rogues and mages. Not only that, but these abilities would vary in their effectiveness and strength based upon the player's interaction with them. Take Fialeth, the elven rogue, who prefers to fight with a dual-wield style. If the player encouraged her to pursue an aggressive or angry method to resolve her issue, then the ability would cause her to inflict more damage. Alternatively, a player pursuing a path of reconciliation would provide Fialeth with the ability to avoid damage.


Gifts
I was never a huge fan of the gift system in Dragon Age: Origins. It felt a little clunky most of the time, and felt like a means to smooth over relations with characters whom you fundamentally disagreed with. On the whole I felt the rivalry system introduced in Dragon Age 2 was a lot better, another design choice led by Alpha Protocol.

The friendship/rivalry system was one of the improvements of DA2

In sort of a combination of the above two issues, I am looking to implement small bonuses to attributes (just like DA:O did) but to give different bonuses based on whether the companions like or dislike you. Of course, the bonuses provided will be to different attributes based on the companion and how they feel about you.

Custom Models
Basically, I don't have the necessary modelling skills, and I don't know the process for including new models. In addition, it would be vital the new models follow the same sort of artistic style present in the original game, as I wouldn't want something that feels out of place with existing content.

No Area Reuse
There will be some areas that will be reused from Origins within the game. In virtually all cases I'll make some modifications so that they're not immediately recognisable from the original game, and there will only be a few areas that I'll appropriate as part of the adventure. I'm also limiting this exclusively to interior areas; my ability to create interiors is not as high working with exterior/landscape levels, so I've focused more on my strengths. This helps reduce my workload and enable me to get the mod released earlier.

When you're outside, expect completely new terrain

Minor Characters & Ambient Consequences
One initial plan for The Shattered War was to have a large number of "ambient consequences". This involved having a significant cast of "ambient" characters in the adventure - NPCs that either only speak in barkstrings (ie one-line conversations that do not go into letterbox format) upon the player interacting with them, or simply holding background banter as the player passes.

The concept was that the player would make many minor decisions throughout the adventure or perform with varying degrees of success in battle, and these would be reflected in these "background" conversations.  For example, one sidequest may see the player placing poison to kill off dangerous and aggressive wildlife. This would subsequently result in the player overhearing a conversation between people where a Mabari had died. Alternatively, if the player didn't carry out, the people would comment on how the region was unsafe. Another example is where the player fights alongside allies - their survival (or not) would be reflected in conversation later on.

 The people around this campfire won't be as talkative as I originally planned

Unfortunately the overhead of managing and recording the necessary amount dialogue means that this idea would take a great deal of time. A lot of the necessary background work is present to enable this to happen, but I simply haven't written the associated dialogue.

So there you have it, some things that didn't make the cut within The Shattered War. I'm hopeful that the things that have remained as part of the adventure will keep players engaged and entertained.

NPCs, interaction and dialogue

In between my testing sessions for The Shattered War, I've been focusing on getting a lot more dialogue written. While the dialogue has basically been planned in general content terms for quite some time, I'm getting down into the details of the interactions with a few of the significant characters.

In terms of NPC interaction, I've taken the Mass Effect approach. Between core story missions, you return to your home base of Fort Velen. This helps drive some key events and discussions vital to the plot, and helps with the pacing and overall flow of the game. The player does get a choice of tasks they wish to pursue, so having them return to Fort Velen allows me as the designer to bring certain essential items to the player's attention should they not have discovered them on their own.

You'll become familiar with the surroundings of Fort Velen

This design means that most of the major interaction between party members will occur in Fort Velen. Outside of Fort Velen, they will generally only provide 1-line responses to any attempt to talk to them. I understand that many players dislike this model, but given the number of potential choices and scenarios they player can be in, I simply can't justify the overhead of the dialogue (particularly VO work) that the alternative would require.

However, in addition to party members, there will also be a number of key NPCs who are part of the campaign against the darkspawn who are based in Fort Velen. Your interactions with them will occur here as well - though in all these situations, you will be given choice. These NPCs may come to you with issues or opinions and ask for your support, and your decisions here will affect how they react to you, and may result in them providing or withdrawing their help to you. You may even choose to ignore them, which could bring its own consequences.

Allies or adversaries? That's up to you...

One thing I am not doing is making the ramifications of those choices blatantly obvious. One of the design decisions I disliked from The Witcher was the way the game informed the player very clearly about a consequence related to an earlier decision. While some players appreciated being told exactly what result their decisions had, I found it an immersion breaking technique. Every choice the player makes should lead to a story that feels unique and accurate - not one of a series of alternate realities that are made blatantly clear. While the illusion can be broken somewhat by multiple playthroughs of a game, I believe that each should feel like it was the "true" story. To do otherwise is to partially rob the player of the power of telling their own story.

So there's an insight into the design aspects of interactions with major NPCs in The Shattered War. If you have any specific questions or things you'd like to know, please comment and I'll provide a response!

Testing issues

As I've mentioned previously, I wanted to create a beta version of the introductory part of The Shattered War for testing by some players while I continue to work on the mod.  While for the most part this has gone smoothly, there have been a few issues that keep cropping up and causing me trouble.

One of the most frustrating is the audio for a particular dialogue not working properly - the character simply does not speak. Oddly enough, the lines work perfectly in the toolset, and I can export the dialogue without hassle. I can then even extract the sounds from the exported .fsb file and listen to them. Unfortunately, for some reason, they refuse to play in the game itself. This occurs with a couple of characters, but I can't identify any consistent issue across the various dialogues or sound files. If anyone has experienced this and/or has a solution, please let me know.

Of course, the other problem is that some characters aren't yet voiced, but that's a problem that I understand and will hopefully get the right people to solve before the final release. I've still have to produce properly annotated scripts for some of the dialogue that still needs to be recorded, which is a significant undertaking in its own right.

Taraz looking concerned (maybe about voicing issues?)

Another hassle appears to be within character creation. Specifically, the game doesn't seem to give the player enough attribute points if the player happens to click "Quick Play". If they do, then a whole lot of attribute points simply disappear into the ether, and I can't find a means to fix this.  If the player decides to create their character by going through the entire customisation process, there's no issue, but it's a potential problem.

Another problem that has come about a number of times is objects not interacting correctly.  There have been several cases where objects to do not react correctly to player manipulation. In some cases this is due to me attempting to use pre-existing mechanisms for interaction in a way that isn't supported. This generally has to be discovered by trial and error, as documentation of many of these mechanism is minimal to non-existent.  The other alternative is to simply code all my own scripts, an option I have been resorting to more frequently, albeit at the expensive of additional time.

At least we can interact with this corpse...

All that being said, testing is coming along quite well, and everything is fitting together reasonably well.  So if you're keen to check out the beta version of the introduction of the mod (and haven't already contacted me) please shoot me an email (I have a gmail address for AmstradHero) and I'll be in touch.

I do work in a bit of a vacuum at times, completing individual segments separately before doing the work that brings them together.  There are a lot of individual parts (particularly dialogue) that are complete, and I can see the end in sight for writing of dialogue.  The Shattered War may be a long time in the making, but a beta version of the introduction shouldn't be far off for those interested. With any luck, people won't have to wait a really long time for the full product!

The Shattered War: Combat Design

Since I've been doing a bit of playtesting of The Shattered War, I'd like to talk about some of the design aspects of the mod.  While I often talk about things like dialogue, choice and character design, in this post I'm going to deal with the crucial gameplay aspect of combat.

The first important decision was to decide which level to start the player. Most players who play mods, particularly a stand-alone mod not part of the main campaign, will be familiar with the Dragon Age mechanics, and know how to conduct combat. Thus I don't need to hand hold people with basic fighting tutorials (as happens within the start of DAO), or how to create a character. For most players, it's also more interesting to not start at the lowest level. As such, The Shattered War starts players around level 9, and gives them some basic supplies suitable for this level.

Of course, there will be enemies to match your level...

As the player starts as a more powerful character, their companions must also start at a higher level. Because of this, there is the possibility that the player will decide a particular playstyle is not working, or that they don't like it. As a result, I'm also going to include the possibility of re-creating a character - by adopting the re-spec mod. This has been on my to-do list for a quite a while and I've only recently begun to look at it. This is a crucial part of having an adventure starting at a higher level, as it allows the player to redesign their character and their companions to create a balanced party. This is also essential because of the limitation in the mod of there only being four companions, meaning there is not necessarily the ability for the player to simply "take a different character" if the existing character build does not suit them.

The next point is to attempt to introduce new mechanics or combat scenarios to enhance the gameplay. Due to technical and balance considerations, I am trying to avoid creating new abilities or spells for players to use. Despite this, I trying to introduce new mechanics through usable items and placeables, as well as enemies with slightly different behaviour to the default game. It is important to understand that increased difficulty does not come simply from adding more monsters, but at the same time, I do not want to introduce effects or situation that seem far fetched compared to the original campaign.

So there's a short discussion of the combat of The Shattered War, if you have any questions about the combat (or maybe even some suggestions), please feel free to comment!

Level reuse guidelines

I thought I'd go into a bit more detail on the subject of level reuse and cover some rough guidelines on things that work and things that don't. I'll use some examples to compare and contrast different examples where possible - as level reuse has been present in games for quite some time.

Don't reuse plot critical areas
This is Dragon Age 2's main failing. Areas that are home to crucial areas of the plot are locations the player has visited potentially dozens of times before as meaningless and nondescript places  used for sidequests. It ruins any sense of exploration and the sense that something new is occurring, because it's simply reminding the player of the sidequest they did 30 minutes ago... and 30 minutes before that... and 30 minutes before that...  Alternatively, if you consider Mass Effect 1, you'll see that while it potentially featured just as much level reuse as Dragon Age 2, all of the generic levels (with slightly different arrangements of crates) were for side-quests. Optional content that while interesting, wasn't part of the main plot and climatic events of the game. This is why I found the original Halo dull after the halfway point, because the second half of the game was mostly just traveling in reverse of what you'd already done.

Use it as background
Like Sundermount in Dragon Age 2, try to use larger (outdoor) areas as different components. Dragon Age Origins did this with a number of its random encounter areas - several were part of the one "map", but the player could only see a small part of the map at any given section. The additional areas were merely background - area that the player could see and made their current surroundings real, but not accessible to walk. By doing this, none of the effort of level design is wasted (because all of the walkable area is used), but because the different component areas form the vista (partially) visible from the others, each area will feel unique rather than feeling like the same cookie cutter areas. Of course, if it's combined with the above point, then you're even more off the hook.

You saw that wall and mountain in the background from a few different areas

Limit reuse
This might seem like a no-brainer, but it warrants saying. Don't re-use levels too much. If player keep seeing exactly the same terrain over and over again, they're going to get bored. It doesn't matter how pretty it is, they're going to find it tedious. When we're talking a single player experience, especially a narrative based experience, you have to present the player with something new, because otherwise it doesn't feel to them like the surroundings are progressing with the story. Even if the setting is set in the same location over a long period of time, it should undergo cosmetic changes to demonstrate the effect of previous events within the story.

Reuse segments, not everything
Wherever possible, try to avoid reusing an entire level wholesale. If you can fragment a level and potentially present the player with those segments in a different order (or even leaving out bits entirely), then the player will likely see the deception, but is more likely to accept it as a reasonable effort to keep things interesting. Missions within sandbox games (e.g. GTA series) do this brilliant, as do many driving games. They have the player travel through part of a level they've already seen, then introduce new segments that they haven't seen. Designers can also get the player to come through the area from a different angle; have them go backwards through the level instead of fowards. Dragon Age 2 attempted to do this to a degree, but due to failiings in the above areas, it's reuse still grated on players.

This outdoor setting was used in its entirety every time

So there's a few simple pointers in terms of how to manage level reuse in games. Reuse isn't always bad, but if you're reusing levels, make sure that it is a conscious choice and reasoned decision to reuse an area rather than simply "we didn't have the time/budget to do a new level." If you're doing that, then you're game already contains one design flaw that could have been avoided.