Sarathiour
Cipher
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2020
- Messages
- 3,264
I can't DA elves seriously, all of their story arc are teenager fanfiction tier, and the lowest point of DAO broadly speaking.
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Dragon Age How to Enjoy Dragon Age: Origins
- Thread starter Butter
- Start date
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2022
- Messages
- 897
Can you just use DAupdater to install mods as long as they're not graphics mods?
Cael
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2017
- Messages
- 20,588
You should try the City Elf origin story sometime. It is "Muh Oppression" taken up to 11. It is why the only elf I play is the Mage Origin. The other two is shit tier burnlootmurder fanfic.
Lemming42
Arcane
I fundamentally can't get through the Dwarven caves segment in this game. It's too boring. I've tried to play DA:O like five times and I quit there almost every time. The entire game feels like being kicked in the nuts over and over, but up until that point, there's some padding protecting your balls from the full force of the kick - oh, this plot sucks, but at least the combat is decently fun. Oh, I have to listen to Alastair talk, but at least I'm unlocking cool spells. Oh, the maps are stupidly big and empty and are absolutely fucking tedious as fucking shit to navigate like in every other miserable fucking BioWare game, but at least - and at this point, you're desperately seeking reasons to keep playing - at least, um, uhh.. I've just found a +3 Necklace of Wanking or whatever.
Then the Dwarf area hits and it's like the final nut kick, where the padding has finally worn away and there's no longer anything protecting you from the full force of the game's dreary mediocrity. With no reasons left to continue, the Dwarven caves hit you with full testicle-shattering force, and you can't keep playing, it's become too much, it's too boring and it feels like you've already been playing forever and you're barely awake anymore.
Just make the maps smaller and hire a writer who isn't a fat bald retard. That's all they had to do. But no, every map has to be the size of the fucking Sahara desert with nothing in it, and every interaction with an NPC has to be excruciating to the point where the combat - which is reasonably fun on its own - just isn't anywhere near enough to carry the game.
Then the Dwarf area hits and it's like the final nut kick, where the padding has finally worn away and there's no longer anything protecting you from the full force of the game's dreary mediocrity. With no reasons left to continue, the Dwarven caves hit you with full testicle-shattering force, and you can't keep playing, it's become too much, it's too boring and it feels like you've already been playing forever and you're barely awake anymore.
Just make the maps smaller and hire a writer who isn't a fat bald retard. That's all they had to do. But no, every map has to be the size of the fucking Sahara desert with nothing in it, and every interaction with an NPC has to be excruciating to the point where the combat - which is reasonably fun on its own - just isn't anywhere near enough to carry the game.
Lemming42
Arcane
Gave the game another go just now after thinking about this thread, and I finished the bulk of it but yet again I just can't finish it. It's just not good enough to actually see to completion.
In case anyone's interested in discussing a mediocre 13-year-old game, here's some thoughts before it leaves my memory:
I've done the Mage Tower (boring) and the Dalish Elves quest (boring but with a vaguely interesting choice at the end that pleasingly forces you to do something "bad" either way), plus the first bit of the Redcliffe quest where you free the demon boy. Now I'm tasked with getting the Urn of Sacred Piss and the boredom's hit me. Just like it did the last five fucking times. I can't go on, there's a limit to this game and this is it. It's too boring to proceed with. The game is too long and the gameplay is too empty and the plot and setting are too dull and there's just no convincing reason to carry on.
I'm going to skip the rest and play the critically-acclaimed, widely-beloved Dragon Age 2, which I've played before but I quit after literally about an hour.
In case anyone's interested in discussing a mediocre 13-year-old game, here's some thoughts before it leaves my memory:
- Comparing it with Bioware's other late-2000s epic, Mass Erect, the writing in Dragon Age is way better. There's some stuff that's genuinely quite complex - the stuff with Tim Russ and the werewolves gave me pause (and I liked that when I thought about it and decided to side with Tim Russ, the game didn't have a go at me for being "evil" or whatever, even though it did feel like I was being gently nudged towards making the opposite decision). It's great that companions will get really pissed off with you for doing what you think is right, but it's a shame they often give you an easy way out via a (Persuade) option. It's also nice that the dialogue options usually, though not always, offer a good range of opinions for you to voice and allow you to challenge or mock most people you meet in the game. The only real weak point in the writing is Morrigan, who often seems to get inserted into the Chaotic Evil role even when it doesn't make any fucking sense, to the point where she complains about us doing shit that's actually mandatory to our quest.
The problem though is that the setting is just so fucking boilerplate and boring. Dave Gaider had an opportunity that many of us will likely never have - he was given the budget and the team to write the game of his dreams. The ball was entirely in his court, and he came up with... Ferelden. A foresty land with castles, elves, and dwarves, where everyone says shit like "hail sir knight, what news of the battle" and "this witch will turn us into toads, she will". What a fucking bore! The interesting scenarios the game comes up with are suffocated under the totally unappealing setting - the inverse of Mass Effect, in which the writing was fuckbrained infantile horseshit which you could just about tolerate because the setting was visually and thematically cool.
- The combat is alright but it's just a pain in the ass after a while - it is nice to have some C&C in terms of having to build your party with surprisingly scarce skill/attribute points, but as soon as you come up with something that works, the game is just a series of irritating trashmobs. Managing the whole party is just annoying, the tactics menu sucks, and playing it as a single-character thing doesn't work because your teammates are all retarded and will wander face-first into traps and let themselves get surrounded. So you're always forced to micromanage the party to some extent which is fun for five seconds and then not fun when you use the same exact strategy to clear the next six hundred identical battles the game throws at you.
- A couple of big moments aside, reactivity is terrible. It's really bad in most conversations where NPCs will often just not react to what you've just said and say something else instead. A lot of the time, if you try to mock or insult an NPC, they will literally not acknowledge it and just say the generic line attached to the more neutral options instead. It's not even like a Telltale game where they try to hide the fact that all dialogue options lead to the exact same response; in Dragon Age an NPC's response will often not match what you've just said to them at all.
- THE MAPS ARE TOO BIG. This is one of my big complaints; so much of the playtime is just deadweight. You're so small and everything else is so big and so echoingly fucking empty, it feels like playing an MMO that everyone else has long since abandoned. You should not be spending most of a game moving through dull nothingness. Nothing's well designed either - towns look like fucking shit and are a slog to walk around, dungeons are all crap and turn into trudging death-marches as you round another copypasted corner to find, ooh yay, another trash mob of "Enraged Corpses"! Woohoo!
- Sidequests are so boring as to be pointless. This is the case in almost every RPG ever made, to be fair.
The problem though is that the setting is just so fucking boilerplate and boring. Dave Gaider had an opportunity that many of us will likely never have - he was given the budget and the team to write the game of his dreams. The ball was entirely in his court, and he came up with... Ferelden. A foresty land with castles, elves, and dwarves, where everyone says shit like "hail sir knight, what news of the battle" and "this witch will turn us into toads, she will". What a fucking bore! The interesting scenarios the game comes up with are suffocated under the totally unappealing setting - the inverse of Mass Effect, in which the writing was fuckbrained infantile horseshit which you could just about tolerate because the setting was visually and thematically cool.
- The combat is alright but it's just a pain in the ass after a while - it is nice to have some C&C in terms of having to build your party with surprisingly scarce skill/attribute points, but as soon as you come up with something that works, the game is just a series of irritating trashmobs. Managing the whole party is just annoying, the tactics menu sucks, and playing it as a single-character thing doesn't work because your teammates are all retarded and will wander face-first into traps and let themselves get surrounded. So you're always forced to micromanage the party to some extent which is fun for five seconds and then not fun when you use the same exact strategy to clear the next six hundred identical battles the game throws at you.
- A couple of big moments aside, reactivity is terrible. It's really bad in most conversations where NPCs will often just not react to what you've just said and say something else instead. A lot of the time, if you try to mock or insult an NPC, they will literally not acknowledge it and just say the generic line attached to the more neutral options instead. It's not even like a Telltale game where they try to hide the fact that all dialogue options lead to the exact same response; in Dragon Age an NPC's response will often not match what you've just said to them at all.
- THE MAPS ARE TOO BIG. This is one of my big complaints; so much of the playtime is just deadweight. You're so small and everything else is so big and so echoingly fucking empty, it feels like playing an MMO that everyone else has long since abandoned. You should not be spending most of a game moving through dull nothingness. Nothing's well designed either - towns look like fucking shit and are a slog to walk around, dungeons are all crap and turn into trudging death-marches as you round another copypasted corner to find, ooh yay, another trash mob of "Enraged Corpses"! Woohoo!
- Sidequests are so boring as to be pointless. This is the case in almost every RPG ever made, to be fair.
I'm going to skip the rest and play the critically-acclaimed, widely-beloved Dragon Age 2, which I've played before but I quit after literally about an hour.
If you're playing as a mage the deep roads will finally offer you enough space to really use those destructive spell combinations and other spells with huge areas of effect, and there will be lots of things to kill also if you're playing with the nightmare difficulty like you should. It's something to look forward to in fact, there will be few opportunities for such carnage before the endgame.
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Lemming42
Arcane
Honestly I wasn't enjoying the combat enough to play on Nightmare or be excited over the prospect of any more of it - there's a bit of fun early on in figuring out how to cycle through party members to activate and combine abilities as efficiently as possible with minimal waiting for cooldowns, but when you've figured out a winning strategy then every battle just becomes the same (especially since mana/stamina regen means there's never a reason to hold back).
Playing DA2 right now and it's pretty bad but honestly I don't mind the more action-y combat, it's got a lot less to it than DAO combat but it also flows far better and preserves the same basic gameplay model of sitting around waiting for cooldowns to expire. I'm sure I'll change my opinion in about an hour after fifty more trash mob encounters.
Maps are still too BIG. "The Wounded Coast" is fucking terrible, essentially a disguised network of tunnels that all have nothing in them, with mission objectives pointlessly placed at the opposite end of the map to your entry point. Why??? The devs must have actually been insane and/or hated the player.
Playing DA2 right now and it's pretty bad but honestly I don't mind the more action-y combat, it's got a lot less to it than DAO combat but it also flows far better and preserves the same basic gameplay model of sitting around waiting for cooldowns to expire. I'm sure I'll change my opinion in about an hour after fifty more trash mob encounters.
Maps are still too BIG. "The Wounded Coast" is fucking terrible, essentially a disguised network of tunnels that all have nothing in them, with mission objectives pointlessly placed at the opposite end of the map to your entry point. Why??? The devs must have actually been insane and/or hated the player.
Lemming42
Arcane
Pretty deep into Generic Age 2. It's probably objectively worse than Origins but I'm finding it to be much less of a boring pain in the ass to play, though I couldn't tell you why. The Templar-Mage stuff was literally the only interesting aspect of the setting in Origins, I'm glad that it seems to be the crux of the plot in 2, even if it's handled badly. I'm also finding the party members less annoying - only Anders, Carver, Isabela and the Dwarf guy are actively annoying, the rest are basically fine. Nobody as good as Shale from Origins, but nobody as fucking dull or irritating as the entire rest of the Origins cast either. I wanted to kill myself whenever Alistair, Morrigan, or that Elf assassin guy started talking, and Leliana and Wynne are so fucking boring that I couldn't focus on or retain any information from even the very short conversations they had to offer. Meanwhile, Aveline, Merril, and that Elf twink who's clearly Gaider's dream boyfriend (nothing wrong with that, just wish he'd kept it private rather than putting it in a game to be sold to the public) - all basically fine, a serviceable party who don't get in the way too much or comment unless it makes sense for them to do so.
What is amazing is how everything about the game feels like it's designed to repel the player. It feels like I'm being mocked for daring to play it. You can actually hear the developers laughing at you when you stride out into the street only to be met by YET ANOTHER fucking mob of thirty generic assassins. Origins felt like an RPG made by a team of idiots who didn't understand how to make games, but DA2 feels like it's made by people to actually hate games and are deliberately trying to aggravate you for playing their product. Nobody finds trash mobs fun. Nobody on the planet. Nobody likes these big maps that you have to run through again and again. Nobody likes the reused areas. Nobody on the planet likes this stuff, why is it in the game? It's like if I made a movie but I made 90% of it just be the camera pointing at a brick wall, nobody enjoys it so why have they made the game like this? Aren't games meant to be fun? It's not even like, challenging, it's just time-wasting.
It's a shame because the story structure (if not the actual content) is a million times better than Origins, the party members have more potential than Origins (I mean, who the fuck was Alistair?), the combat is less of a chore than Origins, and a few of the quests have interesting premises and genuinely difficult choices to make, but it feels like the game was undermined on purpose by half of the dev team.
What is amazing is how everything about the game feels like it's designed to repel the player. It feels like I'm being mocked for daring to play it. You can actually hear the developers laughing at you when you stride out into the street only to be met by YET ANOTHER fucking mob of thirty generic assassins. Origins felt like an RPG made by a team of idiots who didn't understand how to make games, but DA2 feels like it's made by people to actually hate games and are deliberately trying to aggravate you for playing their product. Nobody finds trash mobs fun. Nobody on the planet. Nobody likes these big maps that you have to run through again and again. Nobody likes the reused areas. Nobody on the planet likes this stuff, why is it in the game? It's like if I made a movie but I made 90% of it just be the camera pointing at a brick wall, nobody enjoys it so why have they made the game like this? Aren't games meant to be fun? It's not even like, challenging, it's just time-wasting.
It's a shame because the story structure (if not the actual content) is a million times better than Origins, the party members have more potential than Origins (I mean, who the fuck was Alistair?), the combat is less of a chore than Origins, and a few of the quests have interesting premises and genuinely difficult choices to make, but it feels like the game was undermined on purpose by half of the dev team.
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rusty_shackleford
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2018
- Messages
- 50,754
Did anyone ever make a mod for da2 to remove wave-based combat?
Completely destroys any semblance of encounter design, ruins positioning because new enemies just spawn right on top of you, etc.,
Completely destroys any semblance of encounter design, ruins positioning because new enemies just spawn right on top of you, etc.,
P4anc4ke
Barely Literate
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2022
- Messages
- 3
Not sure if you care at this point but I solved it and completed a new playthrough without any problems and thought I would share it since it might help other's that aim to play the game with Slinks Ravage and a few other mods.
I deleted my Dains Fixes folder from my override folder, then I downloaded Combat Tweaks and a few of the optional files and I can confirm all my problems are gone now, even when having all other mods except Dains Fixes on. The mods used as well are:
Creatures scaling (from combat tweaks)
No weapon trail
VFX Weapons
Unofficial remaster
Full respec mod
Qwinns Fixpack
Character respec
In conclusion, don't use Dains Fixes with Slinks Ravage, use Combat Tweaks instead. Combat Tweaks seem to do similar things, although not entirely as Dains Fixes is more about actual combat coding bug fixes and CT actually tries to rebalance and change combat. Thankfully CT includes the personal annoyance remover which for me is essential to get rid of ugly graphical effects and obnoxious sound effects. Download CT with DAUpdater.
I would recommend adding the followingi n your ini file as well:
[RAVAge]
Difficulty=<0>
ExtraDifficulty=<3>
NoAutoLoot=1
ItemsPerHolder=<2>
DropRate=<1>
PropRate=<1>
NoFloaty=1
NoVFX=1
EliteOnly=1
NoExtraMobs=0
Also add one of the files from CT (the creature scaling ones) to complement the fact that both CT and Slinks Ravage makes your characters much more powerful, this mod also makes enemies more powerful overall.
I can understand if Baldurs Gate was your first rpg or something similar that Origins might not be amazing, but for me it is my favorite game of all time. It has a great gritty and dark/mature setting with, although a bit simplified compared to the older ones, real time with pause strategic combat, great characters and writing with good humor imo. Some sections in the game can be tedious for sure, but any game that is + 50 hours long will have that I would say, impossible to keep the player constantly engaged with new things for that long, especially when it comes to combat. The mods I use above really adds to the combat and looting, making it much more satisfying and unpredictable so anyone thinking the game is a bit stale I really recommend a playthrough with those mods.
I also have to mention how incredibly good the cutscenes are in this game, I don't think I have played a game with better cutscenes tbh, modern games usually fill their games with slow, unintersting and boring cutscenes that I can't wait to end but in this one i'm on the edge of my seat in most cutscenes. A large factor to this is the fantastic sound design imo, I recommend playing this game with headphones, it really picks up the high impact sounds and general ambience.
Interesting.
As I was playing an archer, I relied pretty heavily on Dain's Fixes for attack speed stuff.
ScepticCat
Novice
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2022
- Messages
- 24
I endured this game to the end and it was like a strangling yourself while masturbation - not's for everyone's taste I mean. And it was all in vain: class that I chose - was a shitty garbage, a chick I was trying to make my wifu - kicked me out because I had done the only one bad deed before, the final cutscene was missed because steam version of the game - is a buggy mess. Yes, I wasn't good at this game, but at least they should have let me see the consequences of my bad decisions.
luj1
You're all shills
Dragon Age is the beginning of decline along with Mass Effect and Witcher
The decline started more around 2000. Going single character with Neverwinter Nights was an early sign. So was Morrowind, Gothic 2, Dungeon Siege, and Arx Fatalis. I could probably include Divine Divinity too although I liked that one.
Sir, this is the RPG Codex. I think you might be lost. Do you even like RPGs?
RPG Codex 101 All Time Greatest
Gothic II: #9
Morrowind: #10
Arx Fatalis: #56
Neverwinter Nights: #70
Divine Divinity: #90
I still think the biggest division in opinion about NWN is whether people played it online or not. The OC sucked. We all agree. The expansions were good, but not incredible. Playing on a persistent world online though? Having a DM run a custom (even premium) module? Absolutely outstanding. Easily some of the best gaming experiences of my life. That's what the game had been made for. If you didn't do that, you were doing it wrong.
I know I know. I actually like NWN I completed it twice and the expansions and I played it online and various single player campaigns. It's maybe not top 5 for me but close. But it's still a first step towards decline. Those others I don't like though. And all of this is effected by playing EQ which as a PC only game was far more advanced and better than all those console games that came years later.
One of the biggest parts of the decline to me is not so much those games I didn't like, but the few good RPGs from that time were not progressing like they needed to. Might & Magic 9 and IWD2 came out at that time but they were aging even on release. MMOs started looking like they were going to take over which I would have loved if it didn't go off a cliff within a few years.
One of the biggest parts of the decline to me is not so much those games I didn't like, but the few good RPGs from that time were not progressing like they needed to. Might & Magic 9 and IWD2 came out at that time but they were aging even on release. MMOs started looking like they were going to take over which I would have loved if it didn't go off a cliff within a few years.
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Correct_Carlo
Arcane
How to enjoy Dragon Age: Origins:
Play it on release in 2009, then never play it again.
Play it on release in 2009, then never play it again.
Zeriel
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2012
- Messages
- 13,463
Nah his opinions are actually pretty solid for old school Codex opinion. Hell, VD made his bones talking about how shit BG 1 & 2 were. The "top 100" list is just a popularity contest with lots of newfags voting. And besides, it's more of a menu of fun games to try. Just because a game is fun doesn't mean it can't also be decline for its time.
"Good for what it is" is indeed a thing. I never quite agreed with VD on his BG hate boner, but I could see his point if I compared it to the best games of the 90s. Or judged it on, say, C&C next to Fallout.
PorkyThePaladin
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2013
- Messages
- 5,182
The key to enjoying Dragon Ass: Origins is to ... not play it. It was released during a bad period in RPG gaming (tbh it wasn't as bad as today, but people back then being closer to the golden age, weren't used to such shit yet as we now are), so the desperate RPGers flocked to it, hoping it would be the Messiah. It wasn't. It was utter shite, and tbh, today there is almost no excuse to play it unless you are just a completionist.
Lemming42
Arcane
Forgot to mention that I played Dragon Age Inquisition, but didn't finish it. It was made as a joke I think. I believe the game actually sprang into existence after I complained in this thread that the maps in DAO and DA2 were too big and empty.
How dare they make a game about running across the same four maps over and over doing shitty busywork. What a waste of time. It's the same fucking thing as DA2 but somehow even more grating.
It's a shame because I found the writing and characters to be, on the whole, a lot easier to stomach than the previous two entries in the series. I think Vivienne was the first DA companion (other than Shale) who I actually liked, she seemed to talk a lot of sense about the mage bullshit that everyone else was losing their minds over. But I didn't like her enough to spend six hours running through the Swamp of Shit just to see what she'd say next. Oh also that Elf thief was fucking annoying to the point where I sacrificed like 25 minutes of gameplay just to load an earlier save and not recruit her.
How dare they make a game about running across the same four maps over and over doing shitty busywork. What a waste of time. It's the same fucking thing as DA2 but somehow even more grating.
It's a shame because I found the writing and characters to be, on the whole, a lot easier to stomach than the previous two entries in the series. I think Vivienne was the first DA companion (other than Shale) who I actually liked, she seemed to talk a lot of sense about the mage bullshit that everyone else was losing their minds over. But I didn't like her enough to spend six hours running through the Swamp of Shit just to see what she'd say next. Oh also that Elf thief was fucking annoying to the point where I sacrificed like 25 minutes of gameplay just to load an earlier save and not recruit her.
It's a step down from BG in complexity, is the point. Why do you need everything spelled out for you? Is it a girl thing? Can't read properly with all those tears in your eyes?
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