Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General What games to play other than BG3 only?

I wouldn’t say so. If you don’t import a DA:O save to DA2 there’s stuff you won’t see in DA2 as it will just use a bunch of default assumptions about what happened, but with the exception of a few guest appearances the story largely diverges from DA:O after Ostagar/Lothering and you’ll have already got past those.

DA:I uses the web-based Dragon Age Keep to set up your world state rather than imported savegames so in a way it matters even less if you’ve not played DA:O to the end, though if you try to use the Keep to specify what happened at the end of DA:O without having played it some of the options might not make a lot of sense. Or you can just take the default world state and run with it. The character you play won’t have known the Warden from DA:O, so it makes perfect sense to play them without knowing what exactly happened in the earlier game. There will just be some references and perhaps characters which don’t mean as much to you as a player as they otherwise would have, or stuff that you’ll find out in DA:I that you might already have known if you’d played DA:O to the end.

All that said, DA:O is probably my favourite of the three, so if you’re not sure about finishing that then I don’t know how much you’ll enjoy the next two. Though they do have different virtues, as well as different flaws, so still possibly worth a try.

EDIT: DA:O also had a fairly large expansion called Awakening that I think is quite good if not fantastic. I think it’s also possible to play Awakening without finishing DA:O (though you’ll need DA:O installed) and it will just assume your DA:O warden died resolving the events of that game and a new Grey Warden from Orlais has been dispatched to be the hero of the expansion. I confess I only ever played Awakening as a long epilogue to the main DA:O story though.