Thank You So Much For Making Me Aware Of The DA2 Full Dialogue Mod!! I've Always Hated Not Knowing What's

Thank you so much for making me aware of the DA2 full dialogue mod!! I've always hated not knowing what's going to come out of Hawke's mouth lmao. Are there any other mods you'd recommend for any of the DA games?

Hi anon sorry for taking so long to answer this!! I don't really play DAI on PC because my poor baby computer can't take it but listing the mods I use for the other games below the cut:

Origins mods:

ZevranASAP – Most important mod in all of Dragon Age. Get Zevran right out of leaving Lothering instead of having to complete one of the treaty quests first 

Lady Aeducan the Non-Warden – Second most important mod in all of Dragon Age. For my GirlAeducan havers. If you’re playing other origins, references to Endrin’s middle child/Bhelen’s sibling will be female or gender-neutral. Also replaces the corpse implied to be Brosca’s in Jarvia’s hideout with a skeleton

Morrigan Restoration Patch – Restores cut Morrigan content

Extra Dog Slot – Important!! Take your dog with you without using up a companion slot

Skip the Fade – Loved the Fade the first two times I played, was over it by the third. Skip the maze stuff and go straight to your companions’ nightmares (you still get the increased skill points)

Grey Wardens of Ferelden – Replaces Wardens’ armor with the Grey Warden armor we see in the other games (and allows you to purchase Grey Warden armor and weapons at Soldier’s Peak and Vigil’s Keep)

Isabela by Fialka – Isabela appearance more consistent with DA2. Frankly she still looks pretty pasty in my game but I think it might be the lighting I have. Either way she’s closer to the Izzy we know and love :) 

Dwarves are Not Mages – Replaces the mage robes some of the dwarven nobles wear for SOME REASON with noble clothing

Bug fixes:

(A bit less sexy but this game is so janky I'm morally obligated to list these)

ZevRing – Fixes glitches with Zevran romance and gives you a ring you can actually equip

ZDF – Fixes various dialogue glitches

Jowan’s Intention Fix – Fixes glitch that prevents an encounter with Jowan from triggering. Haven’t played with this one yet bc I just found out about this glitch in my last playthrough, I never told him to leave before (sorry king)

Silverite Mines – Fixes glitch that prevents you from reentering the Silverite Mines in Awakening

Sigrun’s Roguish Past and Law and Order Fix – Fixes infamous (and much accursed by me) glitch that stops Sigrun’s personal quest from triggering if you’ve started Law and Order

Joining Ritual Fix – Fixes glitch where the final Awakening companions’ Joining won’t trigger  

DA2 mods:

Full Dialogue Interface – As you know, replaces the infamous dialogue wheel with a more Origins-esque dialogue interface

Female Hawke Movement Animation Tweak – F!Hawke’s walk is replaced with M!Hawke’s instead of that cartoon sexy lady shit. Can also give M!Hawke F!Hawke’s walk for shits and giggles.

Kidnappalooza – Makes it so your love interest (if not in the party) will be kidnapped in Best Served Cold instead of your sibling. Absolutely critical mod for girls who love drama and romantic rescue missions (me). If Kidnappalooza has 100 users then I am one of those users. If Kidnappalooza has one user then I am that user. If Kidnappalooza has no users then I have finally stopped playing DA2. 

Anders Awakening Gold Earring – Gives that poor man his earring back after Bioware stole it from him. As if he hasn’t gone through enough 

Isabela Curly Hair – Gives Isabela curly hair and optional piercings 

Repeatable Romance Scenes – Replay romance cutscenes/animations between Hawke and their LI. Will also play romance animations from other romances with your current LI (meaning you could get an animation from the Hawke/Merrill romance between your Hawke and Anders and visa versa with all the LIs)

DLC away – Puts the DLC items into storage for you because. It’s annoying to do it yourself

Anders Romance Dialogue Overhaul – A few tweaks to the Anders romance. Notably a Friendmance kiss before the final battle and a scene where Anders tells F!Hawke about Karl

Anders Automatic Romance Armors – Gives Anders romance armor as well as a house robe when he’s in your house :) 

Ellise Herald MOTA replacers – Replaces that godawful MOTA party outfit with this sexy little black number

Sleeping Cat for Anders – Anders gets a cat. Very important

The Covert Mage – Gives apostates staffs that masquerade as other weapons and puts them in plain clothes instead of being out and about on the streets of Kirkwall in mage robes

KS Hairs for DA2 – More hair options for Hawke :) 

Zevran Restoration Project – New face for DA2 Zevran’s ugly ass

Dialogue mini-mods – Various dialogue tweaks to choose from

Bug fixes:

Import Vault fixes – Fixes various bugs from importing DAO saves to DA2, notably ignoring romances and thinking poor Nathaniel died if you left him at the Keep 

Epilogue fixes – Fixes some bugs with the Varric and Cassandra cutscene at the end of the game

Zevran Romance Dialogue Fixes – Zevran will remember he’s in a relationship with you and not fuck Isabela as you helplessly watch

Planning to use:

Some mods I haven’t fully used yet but have been meaning to! Started playing with the first one on my current run but thought it was crashing the game so I removed it (then turned out that it wasn’t the problem RIP). These are bigger changes so you should use them on a new game. 

Kirkwall Expanded – Adds new quests, shops, crafting opportunties, and more! Also dwarf lady NPCs for my fellow dwarf fans (Note: Since DA2 doesn’t have a force load option, this one’s kind of a bitch to uninstall part way through a playthrough)

Playable Elfs Beta – Haven’t played this one yet but am excited to! Exactly what it says, make Hawke an elf with new elfy meshes for their family

Dragon age magic head-canons nobody asked for:

Most of the magic taught in the Circles is woefully inefficient if not blatantly inaccurate. Students are trained to use big, wasteful movements, loud chanting, and casting techniques that glow and use as much mana as possible. Artificial limitations are everywhere like ‘spirit bolts have a 20-yard range limit,’ ‘Ice is inefficient against armoured opponents,’ and ‘lightning can’t be cast indoors’ which is all bullshit, but since magic is tied to belief, in the hands of a Mage who believes spirit bolts fizzle out after 20 yards, they will do exactly that.

Even discounting the magic, the Circles are very strange places. Insular communities populated by people under constant observation who never see the sun. None of them has any family, the only children are strangers brought in from other circles and treated like tiny adults. The population is always small and will shrink at random and they all pretend not to know why. Every Circle develops its own, utterly incomprehensible-to-strangers culture just to cope. Telling magical ritual apart from bizarre personal activities is harder than you’d think and new transfer Templars tend to be jumpy until they learn what’s deemed normal here and what’s not.

The Chantries attached to the circles are also weird as the void. They’re disconnected from the rest of Thedas and attended solely by Templars and mages, and tend to develop splinter theologies just to deal with the internal pressures bubbling in the congregation. Half of then would get excommunicated if any Chantry higher-ups ever bothered to check on them. Getting sent to serve a Circle Chantry is a death sentence for an ambitious Chantry Sister’s career. 

The magic of hedge mages tends to be significantly stranger than circle trained mages, simply due to the freedom to experiment and develop their own techniques and limitations. As magic is impossibly vast and framed by point of view, the self-taught are often capable of feats that the learned old masters will swear are impossible. There are multiple ways to cast almost everything, but only one method is ever chantry approved.

Given the nature of the fade and the sheer amount of pain and fear pervading the Circles, they are, without exception, haunted as fuck. The Kirkwall Gallows is by far the worst. The old harrowing room is now used a storage room where only tranquil go because the disembodied whispers are so loud. The tranquil don’t seem to mind. There’s another room where anyone who enters will immediately walk back out again with no idea why they wanted to enter in the first place. Getting sent to go in and retrieve a long lost bottle of whiskey is a hazing ritual among the younger Templars. If you press your ear to the walls in the cellar you will always hear muffled screaming in the next room. There is no next room.

Vivienne is absurdly powerful for a Circle mage. Her knight commander has been trying to trip her up for years, convinced she was too strong, she couldn’t possibly be using the correct techniques, only to repeatedly be confronted with the fact that she’s following every rule to the letter. She’s just Like That. She was wily enough that none of his accusations stuck before she could gain the protection of more important people, and she walked out of the Circle to go live in a noble’s manor with scowling Templars trying to burn holes in the back of her head. It was the proudest day of her life.

Solas’ techniques are so utterly removed from everything the modern mages do that they can’t recognise what he’s casting until they see the result. Even the simplest things are incomprehensible to them, and, unusually for a hedge mage, incredibly wasteful of mana. His skill progression in Inquisition is learning how to do things he could already do without using the entirety of his now meagre reserves and knocking himself out. The first time he met Cassandra he miscast a low-level shield and passed out from the blowback. It convinced her that he was well-learned in theory but of little actual ability which is why she trusted him so readily. 

But anyway. These are mostly pre canon.

Marty and Jeff lived together from the late 50s until Marty got married, first in a small first floor place over a shop; when rent got steep they moved later to a top floor one-bed flat (I haven’t decided whereabouts yet). The second place was a bit of a shithole and was full of mice and draughts and mould and Jeannie always found it funny that for ages Marty wouldn’t invite her over or even tell her where he lived.

Jeff and Marty met through an ad in a paper where they were both looking for a flatmate. Marty was new to London and didn’t know anyone there; Jeff has lots of friends but wasn’t close enough to anyone/everyone he knew already had settled living arrangements.

Randall & Hopkirk: Private Investigators is the result of many long late night talks from the times they lived out of one room. It started as a running joke between the two of them, where they would pretend to deduce things about strangers and ‘investigate’ the weird comings and goings of their neighbours and occasionally each other, but it’s something Jeff used to want to do as a detective story obsessed kid and it was Jeff who first became serious about the joke.

The joke kind of died, sadly, as there’s nothing like the gruelling hard work of starting a small business and the constant threat of bankruptcy to dampen the humour in it. However, Jeff has done investigations into who is drinking all the tea and making them run out (It’s Marty) (It’s always Marty), and who is stealing cigarettes from him when he had them counted (it’s also Marty).

Their collective financial situation has never been great, but in the early days of the business it was positively dire. Often they couldn’t afford to keep the electricity on and when 1963 rolled on with the coldest winter for 200 years, things were pretty miserable for them.

Jeannie and Jenny are from the rural Lake District.

Jean is the elder by a little over a year.

Their family were upper middle class but the Second World War made things very different financially and growing up, Jeannie and Jenny never experienced the security their parents and grandparents had.

Jeannie has always struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia* but she still did better academically than Jenny did although Jenny was very successful in other ways - she has a good head for business and quickly made herself indispensable at a local business near where she grew up.

Jeannie moved to London for university. I haven’t decided if she completed her degree or what she was studying but I’ll ponder it.

Jeannie and Jenny were close as children but grew apart when they were sent to separate schools when they reached secondary school age. They don’t see each other very often since they live so far away but are trying to reconnect and regain their closeness.

Marty has anxiety (shocker) and OCD. He’s always been like this although it goes through cycles where sometimes it is better, sometimes worse. It was particularly bad he was a preteen, when he and Jeff first started the business, and about a year after he and Jeannie were married. It’s also pretty bad after his death lol but it does still fluctuate. Essentially it gets worse every time he has a lot to process and think about.

Jeff and Jean have both witnessed Marty having panic attacks, Jeannie much less than Jeff. This is mostly because Marty makes more of an effort to remove himself so that he won’t upset Jeannie. It’s silly that it’s this way around because Jeff is better at calming Marty down before panic has a chance to set in and Jeannie is better at calming him down during and afterwards so it’s silly that he should avoid her. But hey. Marty IS silly.

Sometimes Jeff and Jeannie tease Marty about his anxieties. Marty doesn’t mind this; even if they are making a little fun of him it reminds him to step back and check if he is being rational.

When he has it, Jeff is the most frivolous spender (of his own money, not the company’s. He’s not an asshole. And also he needs to pay Jeannie). It stresses Marty out to watch but Jeff is pretty certain it’s none of Marty’s business!

Marty and Jeannie met a long time ago but never stayed in touch. Years later, they ran into each other by chance at a party that Jeff was also at, which is when Jeff met Jeannie.

There was a bit of light competition between Marty and Jeff over Jeannie, but nothing serious and nothing like as devastating or threatening as Marty thinks.

Marty’s aunt Clara has been unofficially estranged from the family. Marty gets on with her fine, and has no idea. They briefly exchanged correspondence when he was in his teens. Her invitation to his wedding, however, went mysteriously missing, and neither Jeff nor Jeannie remembered her after Marty’s death.

Marty and Jeannie got married in September 1966 and it rained all day and everyone got soaked and they all had so much fun <3 Marty cried because he was so happy and Jenny gave him her handkerchief. He forgot he had it and gave it to Jeannie later to give to Jenny; Jeannie also forgot, and found it in a drawer some time after Marty died. She kept it for a bit longer but eventually sent it to Jenny.

Marty is from Liverpool (so it’s a cheap shot. I don’t care). Jeff is from London (……see above)

Marty does like the Beatles, a lot, although he keeps it p quiet. His favourite song of theirs is Any Time At All but it’s up against stiff competition. Jeff is less of a fan, partly because Jeff’s favourite song was Roll Over Beethoven and he heard the Beatles cover, didn’t enjoy it, and kind of wrote them off a bit because of it. He does eventually come around to their later work (Marty is smug about this) and he likes George Harrison’s solo stuff. He wishes he had the time and money to learn to play the sitar.

Jeff’s guitar was from his grandfather as a present

Marty’s family can be very intense and as a child Marty was often called on to mediate arguments between his parents. I think he has siblings but I need to consider this further.

I don’t know where I’m at with Jeff’s life before meeting Marty. We know that he was in the army, but in what capacity? I also think Jeff has a sister and she’s quite a bit older than him.

Jeff, Jeannie and Marty are All bisexual. Real bi trio

Jeff smokes weed, although less so than he used to. Sometimes he and Marty would smoke together but unfortunately weed makes Marty insane and terrible to be around so he stopped joining in. Jeff has also tripped on LSD a couple of times (it’s the 1960s, it’s London, Jeff hangs out in the right places for it. All the cool kids are doing it. Marty is NOT a cool kid, but he lives with Jeff so it’s by association. Jeff is also not really a cool kid but he can pass it off).

Marty is forbidden from LSD after the Incident. (It was fine. He locked himself in a bathroom for 6 hours. Jeff was worried. Marty had a fine time. The bathroom has never been so enthusiastically, yet haphazardly, cleaned, and also never so fascinating to look at.)

Marty and Jeannie are both stress-smokers. Marty is trying to cut down, but unfortunately he is always stressed.

Marty is the better fighter. When they got into scrapes while he was alive, Marty did most of any fighting that was required. He’s not amazing at it but he’s better than Jeff. He has a lot of pent up energy. On occasions where they’re both required to fight, Marty would occasionally have to come to Jeff’s aid. They both have very selective memories about this; Jeff thinks it was Marty who needed rescuing more, and Marty is under the impression that he’s a lot better at fighting than he really is.

Marty got his drivers license on the third go, and the mini Austin is his first car.

The Chipi and the Chapa

The steam library really is the gamers refrigerator. I keep checking to see if there's anything I want to play. I have games. I have plenty of games. There's nothing i want to play

My hot take right now is that Ace Combat isn’t and has never been a representation of real-world politics or history (except for Assault Horizon, but it was bad so who cares,) but instead is an exploration of politics and philosophical questions on the nature of war mixed with a deep fascination on machines that often verge on and act in a way that is completely fantastical. It tries to convey its lessons and its themes not through the events of the greater war, but through the interplay of characters swept up in the greater conflict, who are inevitably characters surrounding the principle protagonists and antagonists, all ace pilots.

What I’m saying is, Ace Combat is and always has been deeply political- and antiwar- but also loves the Really Cool Machines that do the war. Ace Combat is a mecha anime.

Ace Combat is Jet Plane Gundam, and is subject to the same misrepresentations as the latter.