Well, go the chance to play Dragon Age 2 over the weekend. Its left me feeling like someone has had a few choice swings of a spike club at my face. What a dreadful sequel. The original was pretty good, been through a couple of times once party, 3 times solo. So was quite looking forward to it, though steam tie was already a let down. So anyways, I started it up and got to the, what they term, character builder screen, male/female of each mage, fighter, thief. Yep, absolutely zero difference between playing female or male, nor in fact any real difference between fighter or thief. So pointless in terms of RPG. Then we get into the game, story line - zero. Dumped into a continuous stream of weak enemies and one troll, yawn. Camera all over the place, right click weird to say the least, doesn't seem to lock on half the time. Some more pointless story interlude, then down a path fighting some small beasties until you find, dun dun dah, Alaistair with different color hair and a new name, so the characters - you meet or in party are basically the same ones from the first game with no personality or inventiveness. Cue another torridly boring battle, exactly the same as the first one. At this point I stopped. Truly another total turd for the pile, I though at first it was just one or two, but apparently not using steam I have managed to miss most of them. Graphics poor, RPG non existant, story - none, combat ridiculous. The funny thing is that Metacritic scored it 82/100 from critics and 4.4/10 from users. Just goes to show how corrupt or totally blind games sites are nowadays. Ruined my whole weekend that did.

What.. I haven't played any Dragon Age game, but I still know that DA2 is quite infamous.. didn't you really find any reviews about it?

The masses of low user ratings was what kept me away from DA2. Well, that and Origin, but I think it also had a PS3/360 release. Shame. First DA was pretty solid, I thought.

You should play the first, its quite good. Nothing which will blow your socks off, but pretty solid. Disc version is DRM free too.

As for reviews, I pay no heed to anything any of them say, as I mentioned above, I saw Metacrtic gave it 82/100, and its that type of nonsense which puts me off reviews, games sites and such like totally. I mean they obviously didn't see the game at all past the big wedges of cash in the way.

Thanks, but I would, if it were on Gog.
No more physical media for me.

. My point is that I saw many reviews strongly criticizing it, at least by users, so I would have never played it.
Metacritic and the other usual sites are unreliable since the IGN joke ages ago.
How did you decide to try it, exactly?

Yeah, the first game is quite a treat. I could not bring myself to play the second for long :(

I kind of lost faith in game site integrity once I saw the modern Call of Duty(s) reviews... among others.

Buy the game, then copy the contents onto your hard drive. If I remember rightly this was the recommended way of installing the original as the installer didn't work on some setups. So you can have a digital version.

I played the first, so knew the series, but wasn't in any hurry to play it. Was round a friends, so played it then, wouldn't infect my system with any DRM.