Wow

Shipped with the backside up.

She said it felt so good, like it was designed for her hands.  

This is by far the biggest L for Xbox! This bundle could be selling out for the next year and instead.......they limit it to a giveaway......

LMAO! "Deadpool and Marvel teamed up with Xbox to make a custom wireless controller that everyone will want to get their hands on" Oh the irony!

I mean its kind of a meme at this point. This is the 4th official delay. After what happened to their offices they should have just stopped committing release dates that were not realistic.

Some are still in Ukraine IIRC.

I think they should just say it's ready when it's ready and give us a date like 1 month before release, everyone understands why it's taking a while, nobody is mad at that, but I wish they would stop putting pressure on themselves to meet a specific date when they're clearly struggling, I'm expecting it will be delayed once again into Q1 2025 but as far as I'm concerned they can take as long as they need.

Also kind of don't want it launching near Avowed anyway...I'll buy it day one still but I won't be playing it until I'm done with Avowed.

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. 

DAO is the only great entry in the series. DAI is better than DA2 by far but it has a lot of problems. Dumbed down combat. Sidequests that go nowhere. Awkward writing. Enemies don't respawn in worlds so you can kill everything and then have an empty region. I killed everything lol. Giants in a forest respawned but little else. At times it has a nice atmosphere in some regions...at first. The keep is a nice hub area. It was visually nice for the time but it is aging. Dragons start off imposing but at some point they become easy to cheese. The steeds are useless a little bump they can't jump over. Searching for items is tedious. Click the stick and a small area pings. Now the Trespasser DLC was decent.

Not saying avoid DAI. It's fine. Just not amazing either. Has some highs but mostly flat.

Yeah, when I played DAI on release almost 10 years ago I was a bit disappointed. Felt MMO-like, lots of fetch quests, gathering of crafting materials, and mob killing. It just felt overly long and bloated. But I want to replay it ahead of Veilguard's release for story reasons, after 10 years I don't remember much of what happened in Inquisition, and I didn't play it's DLC packs the first time around, so I will be playing them for the first time now.

I've already found some good mods which will improve upon some of DAI's weak points and cut down on the grind, so I'm hoping for a faster and more enjoyable playthrough than my original 112 hour one this time around. Looking at How Long to Beat my original 112 hour playthrough was actually faster than the average player, the average completionist run for base game DAI is apparently 129 hours, the fact that I managed a completionist run in 112 hours on Nightmare difficulty is pretty cool. I don't know if I will even bother with Nightmare difficulty this time around, I only did it the first time for the Xbox achievement, and since I'm playing the Epic Store version this time and don't really care about Epic Store achievements, I'm not sure if it's worth adding to my playtime by going with Nightmare again.