You have isabela, and the elf keeper for guys.
Who do women get ? Varric I assume and that elf dude.

No idea who the bi options are. How many companions are there btw ?

Isabella's bisixual, she'll gladly have an orgy involving any combination of the Warden, Leliana, Zevran, and Alistair.

As for who the male gay option is...my money's on two possibilities: either Fenris (everything about him screams for the yaoi fangirls to have their way with him), or no one (knowing what appears to be Bioware's penchant for dropping what the majority doesn't go for, wouldn't surprise me).

I liked the faster two handed weapon combat that I saw. That needed to be changed.

I started following this game when it was the "un-named original bioware game" on the old forums. They intended to do an old-time, traditional rpg, intended for pc only, since they were also working on a 360 exclusive game at the same time, called Mass Effect. There was a long development time for the original Bioware game that was finally called Dragon Age. When it was finally released, it was the old-time traditional game that a lot of the people from the old Bioware forums had been waiting for. It had its flaws and problems, like the slow clunky two handed weapon combat. Despite that, it was a hit, unexpectedly so, apparently. So instead of making a sequel, they go back and change everything that made it an old time traditional rpg. Voiced character; if you don't like the two possibilities, you're out of luck, or playing with the sound off. You don't know what your pc will say, since they decided on the wheel o'hints from ME/ME2, and threw in "intent" icons that are supposed to make it better, and the "personality" stuff; answer consistently sarcastic and snarky, and your choices will shift more towards sarcastic and snarky. They haven't said anything about what happens when you want to change your "personality" or the dialogue options. PCs are restricted as to which weapons you can use, for the sake of "making the classes more unique". Instead of standard fighting for your rogue, you're some combination of a ME2 vanguard, infiltrator, and Jade Empire martial arts rabid squirrel. Your rogue apparently has discovered the machine gun crossbow; fire dozens of arrows to rain down on both your party and your enemy from the safety of your infiltrator cloak. Now your warrior will deal aoe damage. This was the reasoning for taking away the ability to use bows. I'm not really sure, but when you swing a sword or mace and cut someone's head in half down to their collarbone, you're only damaging one enemy. How does that hurt the guy next to him? When a mage is completely out of magic, instead of pulling out a bow/crossbow and dealing damage from a distance, they can take their super duper staff-sword and go all jumpy ninja SPARTAN!!!!! on an enemy. Squishy mages without a lot of hit points or stamina. Yeah. Same for your warrior; no damage farther away than his weapon can reach, since you can't use a bow. I'm sorry, but I don't see unique. I see restrictions that would keep me from creating the character I want to use, without actually giving me a reason for changing it. I won't go into the zombie skeletor clones. Darkspawn in the original game looked blighted and scary. The new ones, my personal opinion only, would scare the heck out of dentists, since all the perfect teeth would put them out of a job, but as far as fighting them as opponents? No, they look like generic undead instead of darkspawn. I also find myself wondering how fast you are going to have to be to hit pause, since you can only cue up one action for each party member at a time. So you set up what you want everyone to do, unpause the game, and hopefully manage to hit pause again, before your party starts doing their own thing again.

You are right. I don't like the changes. They took what I thought was a unique game, threw it in a mixer with JE, ME/ME2, and anime style fighting. It isn't unique to me anymore. I was hoping to find out who the voice actor was for femHawke, but after this last information, that doesn't even matter to me. And all of it makes it very unlikely I'll bother with DA3: Return of the Awesome SPARTAN General Button Samurai Empire. Other people may be very happy with the game. I wish them luck and happiness, but it isn't a game I'm interested in anymore.

Surprise, Aveline is not a LI option. Expect an outrage in her thread on the Bioforums. :celebration:

They took what I thought was a unique game, threw it in a mixer with JE, ME/ME2, and anime style fighting. It isn't unique to me anymore.

Thank Olympus for that. With standard Ladyhawke already resembling me love, I wouldn't want the weirdness of the red-headed, broad and patriotic fighter and family person only being able to follow a straight love story.

I still would like to know what was so unique about Dragon Age. Art style, combat system, the typical Bioware story way... All seen before. Sure, it was a 3D old school party dungeon crawler, but is that something so desirable and "unique"?

I know there are people who love the changes.

I saw the live feed they had today on Dragon Age 2 and I gotta say I can't wait for this game to come out. Fem Hawke sounded great

I saw the live feed they had today on Dragon Age 2 and I gotta say I can't wait for this game to come out. Fem Hawke sounded great

I know there are people who love the changes. I do hope they enjoy the game. I don't see how those changes and restrictions are good things, and I'll pass on the game.

While it's a vast improvement over the butch and angry Jennifer Hale,

Jennifer Hale is hands down my favorite voice actor out of any game I've played. Her performance was much more nuanced and believable than male Shep.

Jennifer Hale is hands down my favorite voice actor out of any game I've played. Her performance was much more nuanced and believable than male Shep.

Her voice annoys me, I can only play as a male shep, her voice there is just something... Off.

Apparently, there are quite a few - it has been reported that DA2 has already gone gold on all platforms as of today, including OSX, which is surprising considering the Mac announcement was only made very recently.
http://twitter.com/dragonage/status/36170067884384256

"Going gold" for a video/computer game means that the game is now finished and every detail is locked down, and has been sent to the printer/publisher/duplicator/whatever you want to call it for mass production for release. That is why so many people will keep trying to get things changed or tweaked in a game right up until the "gone gold" announcement. Once the "gone gold" announcement is made, the game is due out in a short time.

I'm looking forward to the "gone gold" announcement for Skyrim; its usually about two weeks from "gone gold" to "on your shelf/in your mailbox".

What exactly is unique about DA2? Mixing things from several different games and changing the art style drastically from the first game isn't "unique". Allegedly, in the name of making the classes more unique, they restricted weapons. So now your "unique" warrior can use swords, shields, maces, and hammers. Your "unique" rogue can use a bow, or daggers. Both are stereotypes. Stereotypes aren't unique. Leaping ninja/samurai MageHawke with the bladed staff might be. Just how that will work, I don't know. Arcane warrior was the compromise for how a low health, low strength, low stamina mage could wear armor and fight. Arcane warrior isn't in the game anymore, apparently.

One of my rogues dual-wielded an axe and a mace. Hook your opponent with the axe, bludgeon with the mace. Another dual-wielded axes and managed to do quite a bit of damage. Neither was the stereotype two daggers rogue. In DA2, you can be....a dual dagger using rogue. I had a dual wielding warrior that used sword and dagger, and could provide back-up for the rogue with a bow. In DA2 you can be...a sword and shield, mace and shield, axe and shield, or two-handed weapon warrior. Not two weapons, or a bow. The restrictions for DA2 enforce the stereotypes, and prevent you from making a unique character, imo.

Well it looks like they got rid of the skill Coersion. That is gonna be trouble, I'll wait and play it for I give a final judgement but that's not good in my opinion.

Link ?

Really, damn it, that better not mean lless options to talk around things, or a ME style karma meter.

It's on Bioware's Dragon Age forum pages. It was out of a german magazine and it talked about them getting rid of coersion and other things that I won't mention because of spoilers. I have some concerns about it too. I hope it's just extra options in conversation that aren't incredibly important but I do agree I would be disappointed if they went with a Mass Effect Paragon/Renegade type system.

"Awakening" arrived in the mail a couple of days ago and I'm playing the Warden Commander as a human mage for my first character. Currently he's gone to Amaranthine for the first time. The main thing that struck me, and maybe it's my imagination, but this expansion doesn't seem as fresh as DA:Origins. Were a lot of developers let go before "Awakening" was created?

After being away from the game for almost a year, I was rusty when the first combat of the game began, but it's coming back to me. Oghren isn't a bad character to have around again (and his drunken raving about the pants monster was hilarious), but it seems like a foolish thing for him to join the Grey Wardens, with all the consequences that always result. Anders' wisecracks don't work as well as Alistair's jests had in the first DA.

Anyway, I'll get "Awakening" out of the way before DA 2 is released in March. Maybe it will be better than some of the DA veterans think. If I had been one of the gamers turned off by the first DA trailer, I would have missed out on a great game. Hopefully this won't be a "Dragon Effect" game (though I enjoyed Mass Effect myself).

When you go into a new area, hold your tab key down and look around.

You can't really talk to your companions in the hall now. If you hold the tab key, you'll see random items highlight, like a couple of trees in Amaranthine, a tree in the area before you find Velanna, a rowboat in the sky in the Fade, stuff like that. *IF* you have the correct party member with you, and you click on the tree or whatever, you'll get dialogue with your companion. The items aren't interchangeable though. Ander's tree in Amaranthine won't trigger Sigrun's dialogue, Sigrun's tree won't work for Anders. I still haven't been able to get all of Oghren's dialogue to trigger. I loathe the conversation system in Awakening. Gaider said they didn't have the word budget for Awakening to use the same conversation system as Origins. I was hoping they wouldn't use the Awakening version for DA2. I guess the "watch what you wish for" applies, because they didn't use it for DA2. Instead they went with the wheel o'hints that I dislike intensely in ME/ME2.