Dragon Age II has made important changes over the original is obvious from the beginning. You might feel a slight twinge of disappointment when first creating your character. You no longer select a race; the game's story insists you play as a human and lets you choose only a gender and one of three classes (mage, rogue, warrior). You are also assigned a surname--Hawke--though you can select a first name. Hawke is fully voiced; in this way, Dragon Age II resembles developer BioWare's own Mass Effect--one of many changes to the series clearly inspired by that spacefaring RPG. If you enjoyed how the original Dragon Age looked toBaldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights for inspiration, playing a voiced protagonist may initially disappoint you. However, even RPG purists will likely embrace the change once the game is in full swing. Gone are your own character's blank looks during cutscenes, replaced by communicative facial animations and expressive voice acting that properly correspond with the dialogue options you choose.
The story has you escaping Lothering with your family during the early events of Dragon Age: Origins and arriving in the city of Kirkwall. From here, your vague primary goal is to make a name for yourself in the region over the ensuing years, rising from freeloading refugee to local champion. There's an odd lack of direction here. There is no overall sense of purpose, no main villain, and no opportunity to save the world from marauding darkspawn. While you do get a few chances to square off against such beasts, the stakes are never clear because there's no central plot to pull you through. As a result, the story is scattered--a series of missions and events without a center. The most heartfelt moments come from peripheral tangents and side quests focused on individual party members, where you explore loss, love, and betrayal. Nevertheless, there's a discouraging lack of epic-ness and focus, and no final prize to set your eyes on.
MINIMUM
Windows 98/2000/ME/XP
Pentium III or AMD Athlon 800MHz Processor
256MB RAM
2GB Hard Disk Space
Nvidia TNT2, GeForce 1, 2 or 3, ATI Radeon 7000, 7200, 7500 or 8500, or Matrox G450 Video Card
DirectX Compatible Sound Card
DirectX 9
MAXIMUM
Windows 7/Vista (32 or 64 bit)
Intel i7 Quad Core 2.8Ghz or AMD equivalent
3GB System RAM (High)
30 GB Hard dDisk Space
nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX / ATI Radeon HD4850 Video Card
Direct X 9.0 compatible supporting Dolby Digital Live
DirectX 9.0 - DirectX 11
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