15 years later, Dragon Age 2 is still BioWare at its best

"Hawke this, Hawke that,' Why does everything fall to me?" There are many staples that make up a BioWare game. You have your legendary hero, one that you can shape to your liking with different background options. Next is your singular big bad, a gigantic, evil dragon or maybe an advanced machine race destined to wipe out all life in the galaxy. But the most important part of all: the chance at a happy ended earned through trial and tribulation. For Dragon Age 2, the 2011 sequel to Dragon Age: Origins (which follows that formula to a T, by the way), BioWare saw those staples and effectively went, “lol fuck that.” No longer would players get the choice to pick whether they were a human, elf, or dwarf. Instead, they take on the role of the human protagonist Hawke, a refugee who, with their family, plans to escape the darkspawn invasion introduced in Origins by fleeing to the city of Kirkwall in the Free Marches. One big bad? How about several across the span of seven years? Oh, you want a happy ending? Yeah, well, recalibrate your way of thinking because that’s not happening. Initially called Dragon Age: Exodus in production, it was changed to Dragon Age 2 (presumably to highlight th