Games like Dragon Age 2: one city, ten years, three acts

Dragon Age II closes its first act and jumps three years. Kirkwall is still the same handful of districts — Lowtown, Hightown, the Hanged Man, the clinic down in Darktown — but the people in them have moved on without you, and your standing with each one has been quietly scored the whole time. Then the game does it again. A decade passes in a city you could cross in a minute. That is the thing games like Dragon Age 2 almost never offer: not scale, but a place that changes while you stand still in it. Our Dragon Age II: Ultimate Edition page tracks the bundle that holds the whole decade plus its three expansions.

The lowest price we logged for each game between 26 September and 30 October 2026, read on 6 November 2026. Offers before 26 September are left out because the feeds then still carried Steam accounts, console keys and region-locked keys, so the low shown on a game page can be lower than the figure here. Live prices sit on each game page.

Game	Party	Low	Date	Store
Mass Effect Legendary Edition	Yes	$14.99	1 Oct 2026	Steam
KOTOR II: The Sith Lords	Yes	$1.77	23 Oct 2026	Gameseal
Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire	7 companions	$2.79	6 Oct 2026	Driffle INC
GreedFall	Yes	$2.27	7 Oct 2026	Eneba
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings	Geralt alone	$1.97	29 Oct 2026	Driffle INC
Divinity: Original Sin 2	Yes	$11.24	2 Oct 2026	Steam
Dragon Age: Origins	Yes	$7.39	26 Sep 2026	GOG

Electronic Arts' own announce trailer for the game these seven are measured against.

Friendship and rivalry, kept on someone else's ledger

Mass Effect Legendary Edition

Shepard's crew works the way Hawke's does, because the same studio built both. Dragon Age II quietly moves a number every time you agree or snap at someone, and by act three that number decides who stands with you; Mass Effect 2 takes the same idea and makes it the structure of its entire back half, where a squadmate whose loyalty you never settled can simply not come home. The dialogue wheel, the interrupts, the save you carry forward — all of it is the machinery Kirkwall runs on, pointed at a galaxy instead of one port.

The real departure is scope. This is three games in one launcher with more than forty add-ons folded in, so the consequences you set up in the first hour resolve two installments later rather than two acts later, and the connective tissue is travel rather than a decade of waiting. If the appeal of Hawke was watching people react to a version of you built up over years, the trilogy is the longest run at that idea anyone has shipped. Its readings also move more than any other row above — the window runs from the table figure to more than twice it — so this is one to catch on a sale day rather than a random Tuesday.

The squad screen is where loyalty stops being flavour and starts deciding who survives the last mission. (Official Steam screenshot)

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II

Obsidian's sequel puts the scoring in plain sight: its store listing promises that the choices you make will affect your character, those in your party, and those who may yet join you. Where Dragon Age II leaves friendship and rivalry as a slider you feel rather than read, this one also hangs a light-and-dark axis over everything, so the party reacts to a morality you can watch moving. There is no equivalent bar in Kreia's version of events, which is the point of her.

Twenty-one years on, the conversation system still does something few RPGs attempt: argue back. (Official Steam screenshot)

Games like Dragon Age 2 that build their own Kirkwall

Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

Neketaka is the closest thing in RPGs to a second Kirkwall. It is one city of stacked tiers and rival quarters, you come back to it between every expedition, and the four factions circling it want incompatible things from you — which is exactly the trap Hawke walks into with the templars, the Circle and the Qunari. Obsidian gives you seven companions to choose from and lets them argue with each other about the choices you make, so the standing you build is social rather than numerical.

What a Dragon Age II player has to accept is the camera and the pace. This is an isometric party game with a ship to captain between islands, so the fights are planned from above rather than swung at from over a shoulder, and the writing load is heavier — long reactive conversations instead of Kirkwall's clipped ones. Treat Deadfire as the version of the premise built for people who want the city and the factions without the action combat, and it is the strongest fit here.

Neketaka is built in tiers, and which tier you are welcome on shifts with the faction you last helped. (Official Steam screenshot)

GreedFall

Spiders built a colonial island and then handed every quest on it to three or four factions at once, so the merchant congregation, the natives and the religious order all have a reading on what you just did. Its listing is unusually blunt about the method: objectives can be finished through combat, diplomacy, deception or stealth. That last option is the genuine break from Kirkwall, where a conversation can change who fights you but almost never stops the fight happening. GreedFall will let a high enough reputation walk you straight past an encounter.

Act three, paid for back in act one

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

Four different beginnings and sixteen endings, by CD Projekt's own count, with a second chapter that splits so hard you see a different half of the game depending on one decision. That is Dragon Age II's act structure with the branches made visible. The cost is that Geralt travels alone — there is no party to keep happy and no ledger running underneath the conversations.

Divinity: Original Sin 2

Larian's pitch is to gather a party and develop relationships with its companions, and the world reacts differently depending on who — or what — you chose to be, down to playing an undead or a lizard and watching doors close. Fort Joy sets up obligations that come due hours later in ways Kirkwall would recognise. The combat is the hard switch: deep, tactical and turn-based, where Dragon Age II wants you pausing a real-time brawl. Rivellon also runs four-player co-op, which no other row here offers, and its readings in the window spread wide enough that the figure above was a good day rather than a normal one.

Larian Studios' launch trailer, for the turn-based alternative on this list.

Ferelden, ten years before Hawke got out

Dragon Age: Origins

Before Kirkwall there was the Blight, and the Ultimate Edition is the whole of it: the base game, the Awakening expansion and nine content packs that add party members and areas. The appeal for someone coming backwards off Hawke is seeing the same world written at a different temperature — complex moral choices spread across a kingdom at war rather than compressed into one harbour town, with a tactical camera and a party you pause constantly. It is last on this list only because it is the one a Dragon Age II player is most likely to own already. Its readings across the window spread by more than half, so the price on the Ultimate Edition is worth checking twice.

Ferelden's fights reward the pause button far more than Kirkwall's do. (Official Steam screenshot)

Hawke's shortlist, narrowed to one

Mass Effect Legendary Edition. It is the same studio's idea of a cast that keeps score on you, given three games to pay it off instead of three acts, and nothing else here gets as close to the feeling of a crew that has opinions about the decade you have had. Deadfire is the better answer if what you actually missed was Kirkwall itself rather than the people in it. One note on the numbers above: GreedFall barely moved across those five weeks — its highest reading sat about six per cent over its lowest — so its row is roughly what the game has been asking all along.

If you are shopping the wider genre first, our discounted RPG round-up and story-rich picks cover the ground above, the Baldur's Gate 3 verdict handles the obvious modern comparison, and the Clair Obscur list is the turn-based cousin of this one. Before trusting any cheap row, read what a historical low actually means.

We wrote this from store pages, published reviews and our own price record, not from playing each game for this piece. Some store links on our game pages are affiliate links, so playze may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.