14 DAY TRIAL // Kirkwall is a twisted city (for the best conspiracy details watch out for the Enigma of Kirkwall diary entrances in Dragon Age 2) and there are several design choices made by the developers at BioWare that make the city more strange than it should be while limiting a player's ability to actually enjoy it as the backdrop for Hawke's adventure.
Kirkwall is a former slave city and Tevinter outpost, which justifies the very different architecture to what players were used from Origins, with impossibly high walls and very twisting alleyways, but the weirdest thing about the city is that nothing ever changes about it.
It's no secret that Dragon Age 2 covers about seven years of Hawke's life and that's enough for a city, especially one that witnesses such important events as Kirkwall, to change significantly.
But the BioWare development team chose to make it easy for players, by keeping all taverns and all merchants and all important landmarks in the same place for the entire duration of the game rather than make us re-explore the city after each time lapse sequence.
It's lazy in terms of spatial design (as is their tendency to reuse dungeons with very little modifications) and it does not make sense in the context of the story.
I've seen shops open and close in less than six month in my neighborhood and considering that Kirkwall is one of the main cities of the Free Marshes similar things should happen.
I understand that the Hanged Man is important because it's the base of two party characters but it would make sense to see the drunken patrons change over the years.
The lack of change is also seen in the characters, which do not seem to age and also fail to at least change their appearance.
I understand that such modifications over time consume resources, but if change is such a problem, then BioWare should have chosen a different framing device for the story of Dragon Age 2.