8. No More Gibbing!

One of the best elements of the Dragon Age series is its staunch refusal to portray a gritty, mature plot and world in a sterilized way. By that I mean there is quite a lot of blood in Dragon Age 2, and for the most part it fits the theme. That is until you start to become the Hawke of legend, not just the street kid with a knife and a sense for glory. Once your characters are powerful enough to complete several late game challenges, many regular enemies just don't stand up to your ferocious attacks…and by stand up I mean remain as a whole entity. As soon as the tip of your blade hits just one of your enemy's arms, he explodes in a shower of bloody giblets, staining your outift for the foreseeable future.

Obviously, that gets to be a bit gratuitous, even for 2011. So several fine members of the Dragon Age modding community decided to end some of this nonsense, and made the No More Gibbing mod for Dragon Age 2. This mod takes away the exploding internal organs of vanilla DA2, and replaces them with a simple one or two large piece dismemberment with an appropriately small red shower. The improvement has to be experienced to be appreciated, but it does add a sense of depth to an otherwise ridiculously dark world.

Click on Next Page to find out the rest of the best Dragon Age 2 mods!

7. Character Generator Revamp

One of the largest differences between Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age 2 is that in 2 you are forced into the protaganist role of Hawke, a legendary hero(ine) whose conquests against the Dark spawn are well known. However, the character generator used at the beginning of Dragon Age 2 allows you to customize your Hawke how you so wish. While the game provides you with a dashing and scarred starting face, what you end up with is ultimately under your control.

Unfortunately, the starting Hawke options are almost always the best options, as the current character generator is more of a character uglifier if anything. Of course, this is completely modifiable, and the Character Generator Revamp does exactly that. Gone are the days of butt ugly 'ünique' characters. The generator revamp sharpens the edges of most unique character features, allowing even the most terrible facial artists to create a heroic figure that is sure to be the envy of all. For its gift of player character beauty, the Character Generator Revamp mod is one of the best Dragon Age 2 mods available today.

6. Archery Critical

Dragon Age Origins had one pretty large knock against its stellar gameplay; Mages were unbelievably overpowered. Thankfully, a slew of early mods fixed this problem in a variety of ways. It seems as though Dragon Age 2 has swing the pendulum in the opposite direction for protagonist Hawke, as instead of being horribly overpowered, the one balance problem is that an Archery based Hawke is incredibly useless.

One of the reasons a rogue style Hawke is so pitiful is his lack of critical skills that are on par with Warriors or Mages at a higher level. Of course, this balance issue really sucks, as it takes players a full 30 hours of gametime to finally realize their Hawke is completely gimped. Thankfully, modders have recognized this problem once again and have produced a backwards-save compatible mod that gives Hawke a reliably powerful Archery Critical Build Up Skill. This makes a rogue Hawke a great character to play, and fixes one of Bioware's largest balance issues.

5. Dragon Age Save Generator

One of Bioware's touted selling points for Dragon Age 2 was its backwards compatibility for previous save games from Dragon Age Origins and the Dragon Age Downloadable Content. Depending on the stage of your saved games and the plot choices you enacted, the plot for Dragon Age 2 is slightly changed to reflect your previous games. Of course, this is useless for those who played DA:O on different machines, lost their save games, or didn't enjoy the game and never finished.

If you fall into one of the aforementioned groups who didn't complete DA:O or buy the DLC, you may miss out on several interesting pieces of DA2 content. Thankfully, modders have rectified this horrible situation and produced the Dragon Age Save Generator, which lets you create a save game from the previous Dragon Age content, and select different choices to build up to your Dragon Age 2 game. This mod basically lets all players see all of the hidden content in DA2 without forcing them to replay DA:O several different times. For its ease of use and functionality, the Dragon Age Save Generator has earned the number 5 spot on the list of the top 10 best Dragon Age 2 mods out today.

Mod

Click Next Page to find out what the top 4 best Dragon Age 2 mods are!

4. Nightmare Difficulty Tweak

Bioware created Dragon Age 2 by listening to the feedback coming from a large number of vocal gamers and critics, and then attempting to mix their own preferences with the criticisms received from their audience. While wonderful in theory, oftentimes only the loudest minority are able to be heard as they drown out the relatively content majority. This is exactly what happened with Dragon Age 2, as the sometimes brain-tweaking strategy required in Dragon Age Origins was completely ripped out of DA2. Bioware instead opted for a much faster paced action-rpg hybrid mix that went well with critics, but not holdovers from Origins.

One of the tactical decision players often had to make in Origins was to nuke or not to nuke. See, mages in Origins had very powerful area-of-effect spells that would also damage the rest of the friendly party, not just the enemies. Thus, players had to be judicious in their use of nukes. In DA2 that strategic gameplay element only exists in one mode: Nightmare. Unfortunately, Nightmare mode also increased the number of enemies, how hard they hit, and how much health they have. Basically, it is not much fun to play.

This leaves regular old gamers out in the cold, yearning for the tactical based combat of Origins but too casual to take on Nightmare mode in DA2. Of course, there is a mod for that, as the Nightmare Difficulty Tweak allows casual gamers to get their strategery on in Dragon Age 2. It takes the friendly-fire aspect of AoE attacks and puts it into regular game modes. Casual RPG gamers, you can now breathe a sigh of relief.

3. Facial Tweaks

One of the most recognizable features of Dragon Age 2 is its incredibly high resolution character model graphics. Especially noticable is the quality and care taken in rendering each notable character's face. Bioware isn't quite as bad as Bethesda is at rendering facial beauty, but some of their design choices still manage to stump gamers regularly.

Luckily, the Facial Tweaks mod gives the control to the customers in this situation. It allows players to select from a set number of options for each major character's face, such as giving Anders a greasy ponytail, or Meredith many more wrinkles than she already has. Silliness aside, facial tweaks has default options that make most characters fit their personalities much more. Meredith goes from a girly blonde to a harrowing grey warrior, Aveline gets rid of her Arnold Schwarenegger-like jawline in favor of a more realistic face, and Anders appears to be much more rogueish than before. While small touches, Facial Tweaks is an incredibly immersive mod, and one of the best Dragon Age 2 mods out now.

2. TrufflesDuval HighRed Texture Pack

Ah, the Bentley of mods in most gamer's minds is the graphical enhancement mod. Made extremely popular by the Natural Landscapes mods for Oblivion and Morrowind, graphical mods usually give a game's graphics a next-gen bump by increasing the screen resolution and texture size of the existing files. TrufflesDuval's High Resolution Texture Pack mod for Dragon Age 2 is more of the same, in a very good way.

The mod takes almost every texture from DA2 and reworks it. Cobblestone roads now appear uneven and positively medieval, while Dark spawn revenants are now every bit as frightening from far away as they are up close. This mod even changes the armor textures, giving more detail to the moving pieces of Hawke's armor, and ultimately delivers a much sharper Dragon Age 2 grahpical experience. However, the best part of this mod is how little processing power it takes to run. Talk about turning a molehill into a mountain, in the very best sense.

1. Sunnie’s Evolving Weapons Pack

And the absolute best Dragon Age 2 mod out right now is….Sunnie's Evolving Weapons Pack! Let me explain; in my opinion there is nothing more frustrating in an RPG than getting fantastic new loot every other battle. It sounds crazy, but many gamers like myself like to familiarize themselves with their awesome new loot before they wear it out. Unfortunately, vanilla Dragon Age 2 loot drops like candy, and you are simply another dungeon away from a completely new set of armor.

Sunnie's Evolving Weapons Pack changes all of that, allowing players to literally bond with their weapons and armor. In Sunnie's world, weapons grow in power as you do, and as you kill more enemies your swords gain different abilities depending on severla factors. Also, it allows you to continue to use great looking armor and weapons with relatively crappy stats, as those items will grow alongside you. Say goodbye to an ugly looking Hawke. For all of these tremendous gameplay improvements Sunnie's earn the top spot on the best Dragon Age 2 mods list.

This post is part of the series: Dragon Age 2 Mods & Addons

Read this article series for an outline of the various Dragon Age 2 modifications and expansions.
How to enable Cheats/Mods on the Origin Version of Dragon Age: Origins
Introduction
In this tutorial we will be enabling the developer console and mods in Dragon Age: Origins. If you own the disc copy or a steam copy, there are hundreds of guides online but as there are none for the Origin version, this tutorial will cover that.
Step 1
Go to your Origin Client and right click on Dragon Age: Origins. Select 'Game Properties'

Step 2
Type in '-enabledeveloperconsole' in the space provided and click 'apply'

Step 3
Navigate to the folder where your keybinding settings are at. It should be in your documents following this path: D:Users(Name)DocumentsBioWareDragon AgeSettings. Once you locate the file open it with notepad.

Step 4
Find where is says 'OpenConsole_0=Keyboard::Button_' and then after the Button_ type in 'Tilde' so it looks like this: This will mean that in order to open the developer console in game you must press ~

Step 5
Now the developer console is installed but when you press ~ you will not see any text but it will be active. We can fix this with a mod that enables developer console text. Head on over to this link and download this file.
Step 6
Navigate to D:Users(User)DocumentsBioWareDragon Agepackagescore and place the file we just downloaded in the folder named 'data' (make sure you extract the file we just downloaded).

Also, If you install any other mods you will place them in either the 'data' or 'overdrive' folder. Further instructions can be found when you download the mod as every mod is different!
Step 7
Now you should run the game from Origin and press ~ and it will work! Here is a list of all the commands you can put in!
Recap
Dragon Age: Origins is already an amazing game but it just gets better with mods! Please note that it is possible to get banned for modding but I have never heard of anyone banned for modding single player dragon age games.
Thanks for Reading

The Age of Mods

Dragon Age Origins is an outstanding game. But when you’ve beat it, it doesn’t have to be over. One of Bioware’s goals with Dragon Age Origins was to create a game which could be easily modified using a powerful toolset provided by Bioware. The mod community has become quick to start projects. These projects cover a variety of topics, from changing the rules of combat to changing the way NPCs work. There are many available, and a surprisingly large number of them are good. The three listed here, however, are my the ones I suggest trying first.

Innodils Pocket Plane

The party camp in Dragon Age is pretty useful, but there are many ways it could be better. There is limited inventory space, for one. The lack of variety in the provided store is also limiting, particularly if you’re into crafting. And then there is just getting to the camp – at times, it can be hassle.

No more. The Innodils Pocket Plane mod puts an item in the inventory of the main character which instantly teleports him or her to their own magical camp with a huge number of features. There is nearly unlimited storage available, a merchant who has unlimited numbers of every crafting item in the game, and an area where you can change your party while in the plane. There are even some customization options.

Annoyingly, the Innodils Pocket Plane mod is a little unbalanced. There is a Tomb of Secrets which can unlock any specialization, and some versions of the mod give access to unbalanced weapons. If you can restrain yourself from abuse, however, the Pocket Plane is an essential download.

Combat Tweaks

Combat in Dragon Age is extremely engaging and a hell of a lot of fun, but it isn’t perfect. So in comes the Dragon Age Combat Tweaks mod, ready to try and set things right and make the combat that much closer to perfection. Like the Advanced Tactics mod, the Combat Tweaks mod is a must-have do to some minor but important changes it makes to Dragon Age.

Dragon Age Origins Hd Mod

The changes in Combat Tweaks help make combat more intuitive by clearing up a few gray areas in how combat works. For example, feedback about special melee attacks is strangely absent in the stock game. If you hit an enemy with Shield Bash and it does nothing, you don’t know why. Combat Tweaks changes this by showing that the attack was blocked or resisted. Also, the effects of things like runes and poisons don’t seem to work with some attacks in the stock game, and Combat Tweaks changes this.

This is really only the tip of the iceberg, however. There are a lot of little changes made, and for the most part they are for the better. Most of the potentially unbalancing content is optional, as well, so Combat Tweaks probably won’t make the game feel too easy.

Advanced Tactics

Dragon Age Origins Mods Xbox

The tactics which are available in Dragon Age: Origins aren’t for everyone, but they can be extremely handy for those who don’t want to look over absolutely every single detail of combat. However, the tactics don’t go far enough for some people. There are certain conditional effects which would be handy but aren’t in the standard game, and some AI behaviors which don’t make sense.

Dragon Age Origins Mods Steam

The Advanced Tactics mod tries to alleviate this by adding new conditions and changing the way pre-existing conditions work. For example, there are new conditions which check to see if debuffs are active on a target and conditions concerning the number of opponents which are dead or alive. A particularly ingenious planner could create some very elaborate battle plans using this system.

The Advanced Tactics mod is not just for condition settings, however. It also modifies the AI in ways everyone can appreciate. One of the most important is the modifications it makes to auto-attack behavior. Character in Dragon Age have an annoying tendency to 'forget' their attack orders against enemy targets from time to time, and the Advanced Tactics mod changes that behavior for the better. It is worth downloading for that alone.

This post is part of the series: Dragon Age Origins Mods & Addons

Your guide to additional modifications, addons and downloadable content for Dragon Age Origins.