Editing Bioware (section)

====Dragon Age II====
The most tragic game on the list. A perfect storm of wrongheaded design and corporate mismanagement, Dragon Age II was dead on arrival, and is easily not just the least beloved entry in the trilogy, but the least beloved thing Bioware did prior to its decline period (more on that later). The story had some interesting ideas and angles (the main character's family being rags-to-riches immigrants, Templar/Mage conflicts, etc.), but too often veered from one plot thread to the next without any rhyme or reason while being completely disconnected to the previous game. It clearly put trying to be "different" and "unconventional" on a pedestal over being good. [[Star Trek#Films|'Cause it worked sooo well in ''Generations'', right?]] 

Some characters, mostly Isabella, Varrick, and the player's hot/cute sister Bethany went over well, but overall, DA II's story, characters, and world are generally seen as a step down from the first game even if you ''aren't'' a hater. If you ''are'' a hater, then many of the characters were either idiots, one-dimensional, or just plain unlikable.

Gameplay fared worse, being the worst kind of busywork, consisting of [[Dawn of War 2|running through the same not-even-reskinned maps over and over again]], pressing the same buttons to do the same things to the same generic enemies as they teleport in out of nowhere. All these problems might've been ironed out as development went on, if not for the fact that their [[EA|corporate overlords]] had them rushing the game out in '''less than a year''', in their endless quest to have ''all'' their properties work like the Madden and FIFA games they're used to bankrolling. And when, thanks to ''their'' interference, the game under-performed, EA promptly scrapped the expansion they were building to wrap up the dangling, jangling plot threads.

The game can be skipped entirely without missing much of anything; the narrator (the aforementioned Varrick), appears again in the third game and summarizes all of the important parts in one conversation. It's actually sort of the point of the story that [[Grimdark|despite Hawke and company winning every battle they were subsumed by greater forces, everything in their lives falls apart anyway, and nothing they did had any lasting effects.]]