Okay, a question: I played DA:O for quite a while. I stopped a little after getting the dwarf character. I got very bored with all the companion-related quests. What percentage of quests deal with your companions? I would really enjoy Dragon Age more if I could "roll" all the characters and if they were mute units
You didn´t have to do companion quests in DA:O and if you found talking with companions boring you could cut a lot of it by not being active in that regard (and in such case you´d likely not get most of personal quests even started).
DA2 has less talking with companions and most of pc/companion chats are engineered via quest prompts, which you can ignore in some cases, though given the "engineer-y" implementation that basically means not talking to them at all.
If you talk to them, you get the quest even if you decline to do it, at least that happened in few cases I tried to do that out of curiosity. You can ignore them afterwards I think, though it may not stop their plots in later acts.
If ignoring is not an option for you, then companion quests are a lot more prominent in DA2. Pretty much every companion has own quest line consisting of 3 subquests (one for each act), some are tied to the "main plot" and most of dialogues you can have with companions revolve around these quests.
I think I may have spent overall more time on companion quests than on the main quest.
Personally I think few of these contained some of the better material the game has to offer and companions are also where most of the game´s C&C take place (tied to the friendship/rivalry meter, not strictly to how or if at all you´ve done their quests, though these can influence the meter quite significantly).
The thing however is that unlike in DA:O, DA2´s "main quest" sucks balls for most of the time.
It´s basically a disjointed set of miniquests which should somehow come to fruition later which does happen, but often in a loose manner and it mostly plays out the same anyway.
Motivation for your character to do them is often more than dubious - for example, most quests listed under main plot in act 1 are there only because they´ll lead to some events in later acts, otherwise they´re pretty much indiscernible from some other side quests. However, your char´s sole "main plot" goal in act 1 is to gather 50 gold somehow. So you may as well ignore these main subquests altogether and get the money via side quests (which suck too, certainly nothing like BG2´s second chapter, for example).
So what happens when you gather 50 gold without touching some of the main plot parts? You have to finish all of them anyway.
The main quest gets only somewhat interesting in the second half of act 2, but that´s quickly rectified in retarded act 3.
Thus my point is, ignoring companion quests so that you could get to the "good stuff" in my opinion isn´t an option in DA2, because there´s very little of other "good stuff" present.
Personally I´d summarize game´s solid points as companions (not all of them), focus on family (unusual element, but somewhat misused/underused in the end), qunari (not enough to save the whole story "arc") and combat skills (not well supported by other aspects of combat, like camera, targeting and encounter design).
The game is mediocre at best anyway (say, 5/10), but you take companions out of it and you´re in a plain bad games territory (say, 3/10).
All in all, given what I think about the game in general, plus your preferences in regards to companions, I don´t recommend Dragon Age 2.
This post was a lot longer than it needed to be, sorry
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