The company was forced to rush DA2 by EA because SWTOR was delayed and there’s a metric called “Group Responsibility Profit” each EA group had to commit to (BioWare group - Austin, Edmonton, Montreal, Mythic) and that meant shipping something to buy enough profit in times for earnings.

Good lord. I didn't think there was anything stupider than per team stack ranking, and now I learn someone found a way to stack rank game release schedules?

Weirdly, 2 is the only DA I've ever played all the way through. DA:O and Inquisition both just kind of dragged on and on for me, where 2 had much more even pacing.

I got on with 2 the worst of all of them. Well like most people didn't play Veilguard but of 1-3, 2 was hard work.

I just remember dragon age 2 to feel rushed and underdeveloped. The scale also felt a lot smaller than the original.

I thought the smaller scale helped make the stakes feel more believable. The very rare case in scifi/fantasy of seeing any sort of stakes deflation.

(DA2 I completed thrice to really explore the wild variety of the story tapestry coming out of DAO, which also lent a lot of interesting feeling to how well developed DA2 was but it wasn't always obvious in a single playthrough. and I don't expect to have that many finished playthroughs of any of the others. I think that's why it ended up my favorite.)

I just found the encounters were very repetetive as I remember. I had just finished the first one two weeks before the second one came out.

I suppose one of the things that influences my opinion is that I mostly don't play RPGs for combat encounters. They are all somewhat equally repetitive filler to me.

yes, you remember correctly. it was also mostly disconnected from DAO, feeling like an offshoot rather than a sequel. iirc, almost not a single character from DAI had appeared in DA2, except for a cameo from Flemeth in the intro.

it had many issues, but the writing was still great, the story compelling, and the characters human. so people were disappointed that it didn't match or exceed DA1, but it was still a good game because of the writing, and people grew to appreciate it.

To be honest I have the third one on my ever growing list of games to play. I have been told it's pretty decent and kind of the last game Bioware actually delivered on.

Dragon Age 2 is my favorite of the Dragon Age games in spite of its problems. I liked the characters and the tone of the game, and I really enjoyed the more focused personal scope of the game -- just zeroing in on one person and following them through the different chapters of their life. I do remember chuckling at how baffled the questgivers were whenever they needed to find the SECRET HIDEOUT of smugglers/cultists/runaway mages or whatever the quest was about. The maps were so small and you keep going back to the same ones over and over again, so it's not this big mystery.