Finally finished my first ever playthrough of Dragon Age 2, nearly a month after I finished my replay of Dragon Age Origins. Final playtime on DA2 was 63 hours. My thoughts on the game:
Graphics and Art Design
Underwhelming on both counts. DA2 looks roughly the same in terms of graphics as Dragon Age Origins, and looks quite dated even with some high rest texture mods I installed. The art design was also somewhat underwhelming, I found the look of Kirkwall and the surrounding areas to be lackluster in terms of art design. Meanwhile many areas reuse the exact same map, without even any art changes. Kirkwall is stated in Codex descriptions to be made out of carved obsidian, so the city should be black, and yet in-game the city is made with white stone, presumably due to an error of communication with the art department, so you need a mod if you want Kirkwall to be a black city as originally intended by the devs.
Story
Not quite on par with Origins, mostly due to the fact that the Origin system was removed, meaning a single pre-set starting story, but the main storyline was quite good overall, with some good twists along the way.
Companions
Overall weaker than the Origins companions imo. The friendship vs rivalry mechanic for companions that they added was a cool idea, but doesn't really do much in practice, no matter what you do you can't dissuade certain companions from making certain poor choices along the way. I did find a few of the companions to be quite well written and likeable, but a few others were not quite so good, and I found Anders in particular to be even more dislikeable than he was in Origins' Awakening expansion. Out of all the Awakening companions they could have brought back, why Anders? He was annoying in Awakening, and is annoying for entirely different reasons in DA2.
Gameplay
On the plus side, combat animations are sped up considerably compared to the rather slow and dull combat animations in Origins. On the downside, alot of the RPG mechanics were dumbed down, forcing mod downloads to make the game into a proper RPG. For instance, in the base game, companions have preset equipment and preset level-up upgrades, if you want to customize your party and choose where to assign their attribute and ability points, you must download mods to do that. DA2 was the also the first Dragon Age game to add Bioware's controversial dialogue wheel, where dialogue listed on the wheel is not actually what the character says when you select that option. Skill trees aren't particularly deep in the base game, requiring yet another mod if you want deeper skill trees.
World Design
Dragon Age 2 feels rushed out (which it was, releasing just 16 months after Origins and 12 months after Origins' Awakening expansion), and one of the areas where it feels most rushed is the world design. The game has a grand total of 8 main maps, most of which aren't big at all, and various smaller sub maps coming off those 8 main maps. Most of the dungeons reuse the exact same cave map, just with certain sections blocked off on each reused version, and the same goes for the dungeons that use the Dwarven deep roads map instead of the cave map. Multiple instances also take place in the same Sundermount ambush site map.
Bugs/Quality of the PC port
Even with some fan made patch mods that I downloaded, I ran into a fair few bugs. Most notably, the save transfer system from Origins to 2 is quite buggy, and I had to use console commands to get several quests I should have had from my save transfer that weren't given to me, including the Finding Nathaniel quest with Nathaniel from Origins Awakening.
Modding
The game uses the same simple override folder system as Origins, with most of the mods you can find going into the override folder instead of the add-ons folder, so modding is pretty easy. However, I found that load order seemed to matter more than in Origins. Dragon Age 2 modding was far less popular than modding for Origins and Inquisition, so the game has just 1500~ mods compared to 3000~ for Inquisition and 3700~ for Origins. Most noteworthy is that body type customization mods feel quite lacking compared to Origins, there are very few of them and the few that do exist seem to mainly change your nude model and don't affect your body proportions while wearing armor, unlike in Origins.
Overall Score: 8.4/10 with mods, 7.7/10 without mods
My review of Dragon Age Origins
Next I will be replaying Dragon Age Inquisition in preparation for the release of Dragon Age Veilguard later this year.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 26 July 2024
