I loved a lot of aspects to this. The way it's being told through Varric's story rather than exactly what happened. I liked a lot of the cast and the idea of it based around the city but yeah it's last minute push out the door is sadly painfully obvious.

@FallenGrace DA2 was my introduction to the series and only my second "real" video game ever, so I am fond of it for nostalgia purposes. but I know as a fan I tend to rely on Varric's narration to excuse a lot of the jank (Varric doesn't want to describe each cave individually, Varric says "And then more enemies appeared!" so they jump down from rooftops, etc). when I squint I can see the mistakes as charming, but I regret we won't see what a fuller, more fleshed out DA2 could've been. still amazing they finished it at all considering their dev time.

Ha ha, I can totally see that. I did the same for different reasons as I was a huge Bioware fan back then so intentionally looked past the obvious warts. It's sad seeing what happened to them and a lot of the behind the scenes of Bioware pulling entire games together in a short time. It should have been more obvious from DAII and I hope they can rebuild themselves with Dragon Age Dreadwolf.

I dunno man I still cope pretty hard on this. It's like when I was playing Nier:Automata for the first time recently and I kept thinking "man these environments are so plain and un-detailed" but as I got further in I realized oh granular detail just isn't what this game is interested in; it's focused on Big Ideas and stuff. I feel the same way about DA2; all the stuff that it actually cares about is pretty well fleshed-out and super fun. The parts that are half-baked are on the periphery of the game's attention (even if it's stuff that was really strong in DA1).

@cowboyjosh they definitely prioritized the writing/story, which i'm glad for, and i personally don't care as much as others do about the reused environments/assets—when i first played it i didn't even realize that was a bad thing. i think some people criticize it to a ridiculous degree, but these days i see the holes-covered-with-toothpaste not as laziness and more as "oh, bioware was forced to make this game within eighteen months, no wonder they had to cut corners."