What did you hate about Dragon Age: Origins?

[Cael]

You do realise that in any decent RPG there is some diversity in combat encounters that require you to pick up different tactics...?

You do realise that you just described DA:O's set piece combats?

You've never played the game, have you?

 

[Piotrovitz]

I dropped off after second faction quest, and up to this moment, 90% of all encounters were trash fights that boiled down to getting aggro by your tank and healing him repeatedly while your DPS attacks from behind. I had absolutely no motivation to go further because of this bullshit.

Does it change late game, beside boss battles?

 

[Beastro]

They merely used other ancient evils instead, like the monsters spawned from the mating of various gods with various things, not all of them sentient.


Who? Alistair? I couldn't stand the guy. He was likeable, up until the Landsmeet when he goes completely batshit psycho. For all of his worshipping of Duncan and the Grey Wardens, the most basic tenet of the Grey never made it through a single brain cell in his head: They would do ANYTHING to take out the darkspawn, and that includes recruiting murderers, traitors and worse. There are labels for people like that, who love the prestige that a title brings but care little for the duties that comes with the title. None of them have good connotations.

Not long buried shit like we have. Monsters seemed to be birthed and lived until slain, not hidden until they reemerged.

No, Loghain. I have a soft spot for hard nosed realists.

 

[Erikolaz]

Alistair had poor self confidence and tried too hard to compensate for it, through his childish humor and through white knight virtue signaling. My party found it best to ignore his desperate cries for attention.

 

[Taurist]

that dwarf that tried to sell me DLC

 

[Cael]

I dropped off after second faction quest, and up to this moment, 90% of all encounters were trash fights that boiled down to getting aggro by your tank and healing him repeatedly while your DPS attacks from behind. I had absolutely no motivation to go further because of this bullshit.

Does it change late game, beside boss battles?

Late in the game? You were barely 25% of the way in.

And you don't even realise there is no order in which you had to do the factions, right? Which means your "second faction quest" has absolutely ZERO meaning?

 

[Cael]

Not long buried shit like we have. Monsters seemed to be birthed and lived until slain, not hidden until they reemerged.

No, Loghain. I have a soft spot for hard nosed realists.

He had his ulterior motives. He is not as hard nosed a realist as he would like people to think. But his motivations (papa bear) were understandable. I quite like the guy and always swap Alistair in for him. I think I only made Alistair king once, which was a mistake because the bastard promptly beheaded Loghain. After that, it is to the pub with him.

 

[Lhynn]

90% of combat in DA:O are trash fights and are repetitive as fuck.
There are a few fights that stray from the norm, the fights against dark knights, against dragons and against bosses. But outside of those, yeah, you are basically doing the same every fucking time.

 

[vota DC]

There were too many mob battles and few bosses, so the game was just about crowd control magic.

But then Alistair loses his shit. He hates Loghain and believes completely in the nobility of the wardens. At that point in the game I totally saw Alistair as my bro. He had stuck by me through all the crap and been a faithful and loyal companion, suffering endless abuse and tanking through all the toughest mobs. I felt like I owed him a debt and respected his opinion. So when he declared, "Being a Gray Warden is an honor, not a punishment! I will not call this man my brother!" I realized, shit, he was right. I was really moved by this. I hadn't looked at it that way before but I realized Alistair was completely correct. The game persuaded me to change my mind. Loghain fucked Alistair hard and put him through a ton of shit. Maybe it wasn't the pragmatic thing to do, but a bro is a bro, so I cut that fucker's head off.

I don't know. I still remember when Duncan killed a member of my party. Duncan wasn't a bro at all, but he was surely a Gray Warden. Wardens are just a weapon.

 

[Teut Busnet]

Yeah, that was really fucked up. I guess no one would join the Wardens if they just told candidates: to become a member you have to drink some demon-blood that will quite possibly kill you, if you don't want to drink it, we will kill you and should you survive drinking it you'll go mad in a couple of years.

Never wanted to be a Warden after that and it spoiled the whole game a bit. They should have handled the Wardens like the Night's Watch or the French Foreign Legion.

 

[Kabas]

I didn't like how most of the character's armor/robes looked like, especially the rogue's armor. Frigging Roman cosplayers.

 

[Morality Games]

Not long buried shit like we have. Monsters seemed to be birthed and lived until slain, not hidden until they reemerged.

No, Loghain. I have a soft spot for hard nosed realists.

He had his ulterior motives. He is not as hard nosed a realist as he would like people to think. But his motivations (papa bear) were understandable. I quite like the guy and always swap Alistair in for him. I think I only made Alistair king once, which was a mistake because the bastard promptly beheaded Loghain. After that, it is to the pub with him.

Trick there is to harden Alistair's personality (after doing his personal quest, chose the evil options about humans being out for themselves), arrange the marriage, and then recruit Loghain. As with the pub route, Alistair gets angry and leaves your party, but instead of the pub asserts himself as the king (but doesn't challenge your decision). He sits in a room angry while Anora leads the army, but later becomes a much more effective king than he was without being hardened.

You sort of make peace with him in the epilogue where he says he isn't angry anymore but says he wishes things could have turned out differently. In his king cameos in later games he seems back to his old self, but Loghain is still alive as a Grey Warden.

 

[Piotrovitz]

And you don't even realise there is no order in which you had to do the factions, right? Which means your "second faction quest" has absolutely ZERO meaning?

I know that you can do them in any order you want, that's why I didn't bother to even write which one they were, you dingus. I did the elves part and the humans with the posessed boy or something.

Be it only 25% or whatever of the game, it was still one trash fight after another. There's zero resource management with health/mana/stamina regeneration after each combat. There's zero variety of character builds, you just end up taking same tanking traits for tank, DPS boosting traits for rogue etc. Beside few encounters, you are doing same stuff repeatedly. To continue this single player action MMORPG steaming pile of dog shit would be serious case of masochism.

Reading your posts where you analyze the plot and characters motivations in amusingly autistic manner, I guess you're some kind of psycho-fan of the franchise and will defend this turd by any means.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

DA:O is such a turd. It's not completely obvious how much of a turd it is at first glance. It has a nice shiny exterior and some of the initial impressions can be quite positive. Oooh, interesting lore. Ahh, a spell combo system. A large world to explore.

But it's all shit. The writing is arguably some of the worst in any video game ever simply because of how pretentious it is in relation to its quality. You can have games with small amounts of shitty writing, or walls of text written well, but DA:O has WALLS of TEXT FULLY VOICED OVER ABOUT THE MOST BORING SHIT EVER. Every fucking dwarf you click to buy some shit launches himself into a Hamlet-like monologue about his whole fucking family tree and history and retarded children until you just want to join the Darkspawn and kill everything that talks. Never did I sit through such boring shit as DA:O dialogues and cut-scenes. At the time, I even thought that I might be getting too old for games, but then I played some of the Witcher games, and realized that no, it was the shit Bioware writing, and not gaming in general.

Then there is the shitty exploration. You have a giant game map, which turns out to be just a few point-of-interest towns, which are fairly barren, and some tiny wilderness maps in between. The wilderness maps are so small and filled with invisible obstacles, that essentially they function as outdoor corridors.

The combat is shitty because mages are overpowered as all hell, and most other things are underpowered. Stuff like Entropic Death and Mana Clash can one-shot boss level monsters, while my 2h-warrior was a gimp.

Oh, and another reason that writing is so crap, is that the main story is so telegraphed. Think about any DECENT rpg, say a PS:T or a Witcher game, or PoE. The story is complex and has many twists, and at the begining, you have no idea how it's gonna play out. But in DA:O, by the 2nd hour of gameplay, you can pretty much know exactly how everything is gonna turn out.

 

[Cael]

And you don't even realise there is no order in which you had to do the factions, right? Which means your "second faction quest" has absolutely ZERO meaning?

I know that you can do them in any order you want, that's why I didn't bother to even write which one they were, you dingus.

Actually, it does because you were asking for examples of different gameplay, you dingbat! How the hell am I suppose to give you examples when you won't tell me what you HAVE seen, retard?

 

[Sykar]

I have not much to add here anymore. It is a shame since I could see some potential in the game but it is marred by shitty writing, repetitive combat, clunky camera, disappointingly small locations, irrelevant choices and above all the utterly retarded gift system which rendered any character interaction moot. On top of that nothing really happens between party members. Remember BG series where party members would leave the party or kill each other? Can't have that in this mess of mediocrity.
I managed to finish about 50% the first time I tried it then got fed up with all the shit. I tried the game two more times but could barely get past the Origin story.

Edit: I forgot the biggest disappointment for me was that there are no repercussions whatsoever if you chose the Blood Mage class. Multiple times in the game you are shown and told that "its bad mkay" yet you can happily use it without any drawbacks not even social drawbacks whatsoever.

It is a shame since I liked the idea of combining spell to get some unique effects.

 

[Lhynn]

you just end up taking same tanking traits for tank, DPS boosting traits for ...

Holy fucking shit, give this guy a medal, he just figured out character building 101 in almost every fucking crpg we have been getting in the past 12 years.

 

[Commissar Draco]

I do wonder at times how much Ancient Evil is a modern plot/thematic concept from our perception of time and history, since I can't recall it really being in old literature/religious stories. A modern mind would find the Titans buried in Tartarus an odd hint of their eventually release at some point, but to the Greeks they were over and done with.

They merely used other ancient evils instead, like the monsters spawned from the mating of various gods with various things, not all of them sentient.

Loghain was a good character. What he does makes sense from his point of view, and I find it hard to fault him in many ways. Alistair is also a good character. What he does makes sense from his point of view. However, I hate immature, selfish brats, regardless of their sense of humour, so I can't stand the twerp. That is the value of Dragon Age IF you are one of those people who can see things from multiple points of view.

He was the only likable person in the game.

Who? Alistair? I couldn't stand the guy. He was likeable, up until the Landsmeet when he goes completely batshit psycho. For all of his worshipping of Duncan and the Grey Wardens, the most basic tenet of the Grey never made it through a single brain cell in his head: They would do ANYTHING to take out the darkspawn, and that includes recruiting murderers, traitors and worse. There are labels for people like that, who love the prestige that a title brings but care little for the duties that comes with the title. None of them have good connotations.

You need to harden him a bit to make him into palpable character Comrade; you can also chop his head of and marry Loghain daughter to become the King if playing as human male noble; both methods help a lot. He ends up as decent King if you beat the millennial emo man child out of him too.

 

[Cael]

I do wonder at times how much Ancient Evil is a modern plot/thematic concept from our perception of time and history, since I can't recall it really being in old literature/religious stories. A modern mind would find the Titans buried in Tartarus an odd hint of their eventually release at some point, but to the Greeks they were over and done with.

They merely used other ancient evils instead, like the monsters spawned from the mating of various gods with various things, not all of them sentient.

Loghain was a good character. What he does makes sense from his point of view, and I find it hard to fault him in many ways. Alistair is also a good character. What he does makes sense from his point of view. However, I hate immature, selfish brats, regardless of their sense of humour, so I can't stand the twerp. That is the value of Dragon Age IF you are one of those people who can see things from multiple points of view.

He was the only likable person in the game.

Who? Alistair? I couldn't stand the guy. He was likeable, up until the Landsmeet when he goes completely batshit psycho. For all of his worshipping of Duncan and the Grey Wardens, the most basic tenet of the Grey never made it through a single brain cell in his head: They would do ANYTHING to take out the darkspawn, and that includes recruiting murderers, traitors and worse. There are labels for people like that, who love the prestige that a title brings but care little for the duties that comes with the title. None of them have good connotations.

You need to harden him a bit to make him into palpable character Comrade; you can also chop his head of and marry Loghain daughter to become the King if playing as human male noble; both methods help a lot. He ends up as decent King if you beat the millennial emo man child out of him too.

I know. I just find it more satisfying to send him to the pub for being a millennial emo manchild.

 

[wyes gull]

"Young man! I know you are of noble birth, son of a man of great wealth and standing and sure, your life for the next few years will likely consist mostly of chasing high-born lady tail, bedding the occasional tavern wench, going on boar hunts, humiliating peasants and at the very worst shaking down poor farmers for protection money... but I pray thee, consider the following. Join the Knights of Ni Night's Watch Watchmen uh, "gang" and see the world! Bring great honour to your family! Adventure in... well... mostly war-torn, shitty desolate places. Fight... uh.. unspeakable monstrosities... over and over and over again. Rally comrades who will... uh... yeah, probably bore you to death with their interminable drama. What else.... Right! You get to meet a gay elf!!! So, what say you? Will you join us??"

"No."

"But we're considering a great dental plan starting next semester!"

"Still no."

"Well get fuckt because you're going anyway, lmao."

Yay for choice.

So, basically everything. Except the gay elf, oddly enough.

 

[DemonKing]

Gee everyone trashing the Codex's RPG of the year 2009...imagine what a dumpster fire we'd have if we threw the sequels into the mix.

If you want a good laugh:

https://culturedvultures.com/best-dragon-age-characters/

The only character I would have picked out of their entire list is Morigan (although admittedly I didn't play enough DAI to meet Iron Bull). I don't even recognize/remember most of the characters on this list. Say what you like about DA2 but at least some of the NPCs were well developed (eg Aveline).

 

[Mikeal]

Interestingly almost all of this characters are from Gimbquistion. Interestingly author of the text looks like dyke whale. Coincidence? Me think nay.

 

[Cael]

Interestingly almost all of this characters are from Gimbquistion. Interestingly author of the text looks like dyke whale. Coincidence? Me think nay.

Gimbquisition? I thought it was LGBTInquisition?

 

[Neanderthal]

The game raised no strong emotions in me whatsoever, cookie cutter bioware design and just another stepping stone on path of decline.

 

[Mikeal]

Gimbquisition? I thought it was LGBTInquisition?

Gimb is shorten version of word gimbus which in polish slang means "retarded teenager". So I should rather write Twatquistion.