Venture into a forgotten Grey Warden prison to unearth secrets behind the bloodline of Hawke.
BioWare’s Dragon Age II was released back in March, and while some loved it – our own Greg Tito among them – others saw it as making more compromises than it perhaps ought to have. With Dragon Age 2: Legacy, the game’s first major DLC expansion, BioWare seems to be trying to make it up to the game’s critics.
One of the most oft-repeated criticisms of the game was its reuse of environments, and one of the first points on the official site is that players will be leaving the all-too-familiar city of Kirkwall for entirely new sites and locales. The setting this time around includes an “ancient Grey Warden prison” that the player and party must investigate after coming under attack by a criminal group hunting protagonist Hawke’s bloodline.
Legacy focuses on Hawke’s father (who was not in the original game) – and the way that the BioWare site mentions the “harsh truth about the Hawke lineage,” it’s a safe bet that Hawke won’t like what s/he finds in the prison.
Other critics of the game claimed that it wasn’t nearly tactical enough (as they believed a “true” PC RPG should be), and BioWare has promised new Darkspawn enemies that will require tactical use of the player’s entire party to vanquish. According to Game Informer, the Legacy demo showed a fight against a Guardian enemy that would constantly spawn clones of itself to join the fight in order to distract the player and hamper their progress.
BioWare has also said that there will be more character customization this time around – defeating the Guardian enables a player to tweak out Hawke’s class-specific weapon with upgrades like “speed reduction” or “increased critical damage.”
Legacy is due on July 26th for PS3, PC and Xbox 360, at the price of $9.99, 800 BioWare Points, and 800 Microsoft Points, respectively. Will it win you over?
