What (Non-PS4) game are you playing?? - Retro & Other Gaming Forum - Page 85

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I've started my replay of Dragon Age 2. Just finished Act 1, roughly 15ish hours in. Feels like I have so much to say and almost nothing to say at the same time.

Much like with my first playthrough, the most striking and defining aspect to Dragon Age 2 is probably how unfinished it all feels. How most quests involve you just clicking on an icon, loading into somewhere, killing one of the same half a dozen or so enemy types in the same half a dozen or so location tile sets, before its quest complete with almost zero narrative dressing at all, as you're fast forwarded through a vague skeleton of a wider story in a completely lifeless world.

In this story you're stuck with just one human preset character where your class choice has almost zero bearing on the story (unless you pick mage) and it feels like an especial shame here, as the opportunities to tell unique stories as a dwarf, or elf or Qunari all seem so perfectly set up here, in the boiling pot of Kirkwall, arguably better set up than any other game and its the one you can't pick a race in.

And yet there are clearly things lost in Inquisition, which I think is a shame. Having a proper tactics screen again to properly shape my companions is great. Companions having unique specialisations to give them clear roles is wonderful, as it makes almost every companion viable to use, whereas in Inquisition I basically felt like I didn't need 90 percent of the companions, using them for unique narrative flavour to quests and then throwing them back in the cupboard the moment it was over. Having an approval system you can see that unlocks unique passives for your companions is great. Being able to bring companions into conversations, to either close them off completely or alter the direction is great. I guess also because the companion pool is smaller, you're more likely to see them having things to say on missions, whereas I feel like so often my companions in Inquisition just stood silently in the background while I did