So Dragon Age: Origins is rather fun so far

[Erebus]

The camera of DA:O is really beginning to annoy me. There are many fights in which you can barely see the more distant enemies, even though they're perfectly able to attack you. It's a real problem when some of them are mages or archers who can stun your whole group with special attacks.

On the plus side, the fights you can face while travelling on the World Map tend to be more interesting than average. Some of them are fairly well designed and original, and use a variety of enemies who manage to be a challenge without having a bloated amount of HP.

EDIT : Okay, fuck you, Dragon Age 1. I've reached the fight against Cauthrien and it's massively retarded. First, I'm not allowed to use the dungeons to get to the back door and leave the way I entered the castle, for no good reason. Second, I'm not allowed to attack immediately, I have to enter the large room full of archers and give them an easy target. Third, the stupid queen betrays me if I mention she was held captive here, because the game might as well be titled Dragon Age : Traitors Everywhere. And finally, Cauthrien is so ridiculously overpowered that she's perfectly able to slaughter my whole party all by herself.

I was going to say that the fights in Denerim were rather decent on the whole, but screw that.

EDIT : The game won't allow me to hang the queen with her own guts, but on the plus side, I can have her marry Alistair. It's almost too cruel, but she deserves it.

EDIT : After the nobles voted against him, I attacked Loghain, killed most of his guards and was about to slaughter him... when a random lady exclaimed that this all wasn't very proper and that the issue should be settled with a duel. For some reason, I wasn't allowed to pretend I hadn't heard her and bash in Loghain's empty head.

I decided to betray the queen, because why the hell should I be the only honest person around ? Alistair was too much of a pussy to execute her, but at least he sent her to a dungeon. The idea of becoming king inspired him to new heights of whining.

The game tried to make me watch Alistair and Morrigan having sex. I don't think so, game !

 

[Jarpie]

The camera of DA:O is really beginning to annoy me. There are many fights in which you can barely see the more distant enemies, even though they're perfectly able to attack you. It's a real problem when some of them are mages or archers who can stun your whole group with special attacks.

On the plus side, the fights you can face while travelling on the World Map tend to be more interesting than average. Some of them are fairly well designed and original, and use a variety of enemies who manage to be a challenge without having a bloated amount of HP.

EDIT : Okay, fuck you, Dragon Age 1. I've reached the fight against Cauthrien and it's massively retarded. First, I'm not allowed to use the dungeons to get to the back door and leave the way I entered the castle, for no good reason. Second, I'm not allowed to attack immediately, I have to enter the large room full of archers and give them an easy target. Third, the stupid queen betrays me if I mention she was held captive here, because the game might as well be titled Dragon Age : Traitors Everywhere. And finally, Cauthrien is so ridiculously overpowered that she's perfectly able to slaughter my whole party all by herself.

I was going to say that the fights in Denerim were rather decent on the whole, but screw that.

EDIT : The game won't allow me to hang the queen with her own guts, but on the plus side, I can have her marry Alistair. It's almost too cruel, but she deserves it.

EDIT : After the nobles voted against him, I attacked Loghain, killed most of his guards and was about to slaughter him... when a random lady exclaimed that this all wasn't very proper and that the issue should be settled with a duel. For some reason, I wasn't allowed to pretend I hadn't heard her and bash in Loghain's empty head.

I decided to betray the queen, because why the hell should I be the only honest person around ? Alistair was too much of a pussy to execute her, but at least he sent her to a dungeon. The idea of becoming king inspired him to new heights of whining.

The game tried to make me watch Alistair and Morrigan having sex. I don't think so, game !

Bioware game in the nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Sorry, I want believable game mechanics: women starting out with -3 STR, -2 END, an extra point to Charisma modifiers against characters of the opposite sex with an INT rating of <5, and they can never raise their INT score past 7 (due to men having higher variability in IQ).

Which gender would have higher Wisdom ?

The one responsible for most ancient and modern philosophy, of course.

Ideally, wisdom would be the same for the average character, but the maximum value (10, for example) should only be attainable by men. I would be inclined to argue that if the game would have a morality system, the highest value attainable should be limited by a person's INT score, since smarter people appear to have a stronger grasp on the matter of ethics.

You mean WIS score... Plenty of intelligent assholes and Librul College professors around to make dent into your theory. Morality without the deeper understanding of Absolute TM and Natural Order is relativist wankery anyway.

 

[SCO]

don't say you weren't warned

 

[Commissar Draco]

Cauthrien fight is duable when playing as anything but elven faggot mage and you can actually surrender and receive pretty Hilarius escape/be rescued from prison quest. All other points DAO is Classic Bioware game what you expected Erebus? Played two you played them all.

 

[Roguey]

Cauthrien fight is duable when playing as anything but elven faggot mage

Um what, I beat that fight as a literal elven faggot mage. Cast sleep on the guards first thing, backed out out of the room and into the library where Cauthrien followed, kept Cauthrien unable to do anything with paralyze, mass paralyze, horror, and misdirection hex till she was dead, sent an Indomitable'd Sten into the room to draw out the two melee guys, then sent him in again to draw all the archer aggro while I cast sleep again, took out the mage and then the archers with aoe spells.

I'm not sure if the fight would be worse or better if the archers and mage weren't intentionally rooted in their spots.

 

[circ]

Firkraan is one of the easier boss fights in the game because it doesn't cheese summong trash mobs, and sticks to melee and easily avoidable or resistable breath attack. Flemeth is surprisingly harder.

Anyway Cauthrien - you're supposed to lose I seem to remember. It's not THAT hard to kill her though. I used some kind of bee attack or some nature magic thing that essentially confuses a shitload of mobs in a room, vs the archers. Healer was a maxed out Wynne at that point probably.

 

[Erebus]

One thing I don't like about combat is how easy it is to move around. For instance, there's no point using your fighters to block a stranglehold while your mages/archers target the enemies from behind them : the enemies will slip through almost instantly. When enemies are moving, it can also be pretty hard to hit them with hand-to-hand attacks. During the fight at the gates of Denerim, it happened several times that I had a darkspawn running at my PC, I charged it, they got right next to each other... and then the darkspawn continued running in the same direction and my PC didn't even get the time to hit it once.

Cauthrien clearly didn't have the same problem : when she swings down her sword, her target is going to take 100 points of damage even if he or she is now five meters away.

 

[sea]

The Ser Cauthrien fight is easy, though I admit the scattershot the archers use is annoying. Paralysis Explosion and any spell combo (Storm of the Century etc.) will eliminate 95% of the archers. Cast it before the fight if possible for true lulz.

 

[abnaxus]

Erebus have you played Drakensang: River of Time?

 

[Erebus]

Erebus have you played Drakensang: River of Time?

No. I didn't care for the "Dark Eye" pen-and-paper RPG and didn't feel like trying a CRPG using its setting and rules. If I ever get the chance to borrow it (like DA:O), maybe I'll give it a try, but I don't intend to buy it.

 

[Roguey]

Cauthrien clearly didn't have the same problem : when she swings down her sword, her target is going to take 100 points of damage even if he or she is now five meters away.

It does work both ways but the person actually has to be within attacking range when the attacker starts the animation. For DA2, they changed it so the damage doesn't get dealt until the end of the animation, though this puts an end to animation canceling and encourages manually moving away from melee attacks and aoe spells.

 

[Erebus]

The end of the game is drawing near and my spirit of fair play is ending even faster. Until now, I hadn't taken advantage of the fact that enemies will moronically keep attacking a character protected by a Force Field, even though they're doing no damage at all. But this kind of cheap tactics suits overpowered boss perfectly.


EDIT : Done ! The final battle was surprisingly easy : none of my four character (warrior PC, Oghren, Morrigan and Wynne) was even KOed. I called the elves to the rescue, though I'm not sure it made a big difference. It was nice to see some named NPCs (such as the First Enchanter, Eamon or the leader of the Legion of the Dead) join the fight. Still, the fight in itself simply wasn't very fun : tactics weren't really required, the only important thing was regularly healing my characters.

I rather liked the conclusion. Even though few of the subplots of the story really grabbed my interest (to say nothing of the main plot itself), it's always nice to see the consequences of your actions and have an idea of what your companions will do in the future.

And wow ! WTF happened to Alistair ? I found him almost likable during that conclusion. I can't tell if it's because becoming king had matured him a lot or because I knew he would no longer follow me around.

I chose to go back to Orzammar. Rumors that I had a hand in Harrowmont's untimely death are completely unfounded. It's just the kind of accident that happens when you take a crown that doesn't rightfully belong to you.


All in all, DA:O was an uneven game. Some of its elements were good, but many more were mediocre and forgettable, and some were really bad. I don't see myself ever playing the game again.

 

[cvv]

And this thread has risen again!

Ok, just finished DAO and need to get some things out of my chest. I swear I started this game twice before and never got any further than ?Lothrien? (ya know, the starting village). I hated the combat, the typical Beware focus on cheap cinematic trinkets, the galactically boring story and even more cliched setting, the disgusting corridorness of the whole thing and so on.

But seeing this game was RPGCodex GOTY some years back, I endured this time and finished it. And - it was still bad but less bad than expected. In the end I had to admit there were few things I really liked about this game. The roleplaying element is fairly good, some characters are well written (most are boring though), the setting and lore revealed some surprisingly interesting details and the combat, in the end, was acceptable - or, to be more precise, I liked how the magic worked here far better than in previous Beware games like BG or IWD.

Some fights on harder difficulty were pretty brutal too, no casual-player trivial stuff as one would expect in a mass market game like this one. The most insane fight for me was against Branka, probably because I did it very early in the game. Although...I blame the difficulty design too, since I waltzed through the whole Deep Roads quite easily and then was skewered by the crazy difficulty spike. I'd say the whole Orzammar line is a single digit level stuff but the last fight is at least level 15 stuff. The fight against the knight chick in the palace, after you free the bitch queen, was pretty brutal too. In the end I did it by bolting back to the hall, luring the chick there, and then placing my elf mage by the door and keeping it shut. The chick with the big sword hit like a truck but finally she fell and mopping up the rest was easy.

And special recognition should be given to the final battle which was, I simply have to admit, very emotionally engaging...in that I sweared and sweated and was pretty fucking emotional. The dragon itself was easy but then all those Alphas started to pour in, my useless dwarves were slaughtered in seconds and I couldn't hold the line with just one crappy healer. When I finally beat the fucker it was cathartic.

Despite the positive feeling about some details, especially the final battle though, it's still a bad decline era game. In the end what I hated most, from the bottom of my guts, was the ubiquitous corridors. My god why in the holy fuck? Why the open areas like forests have to be always structured like fucking corridors in those console RPGs? I hated this shit in Witcher 2 too. Is it some technical limitations? Because Skyrim is a console RPG too and it didn't have any problems with free, open movement.

Ok so that's that, now I'm gonna wait till DA2 is under 5 bucks to see for myself if it's really so much shittier than DAO.

 

[Kaldurenik]

Not sure if DA2 is worth 5$

 

[Shadenuat]

DA:O is a game balancing on the edge of Decline, DA2 is game which fell into Abyss of Decline and sank in it.
You probably should play the add-on now, it's okay for a snack.

 

[Rake]

Just pirate DA2. It's not worth 5$, and i doubt you will finish it if you had trouble finishing DA:O. Buy the DA:O expansion if you want more DA.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Don't. It's just more corridors and more shitty combat, now even more stupid because your character is so high-level and you still kill thugs and robbers and highway bandits and random Darkspawn - all of which have just got their stats bumped.

 

[cvv]

Hmm, started up Awakening, got bored after two hours, uninstalled. No idea why. I guess I'm not as big a fan od DAO as to crave more of the same thing.

I don't suspect I'm gonna give it another shot though, as I did with DAO, because we have W2 and D:OS and TToN incoming, and I'm probably gonna be checking even some console shit like Witcher 3, DA:I or Watch Dogs.

I watched some DA2 gameplay footage and I'm DEFINITELY not gonna play that ugly, consolitis ridden, rushed, cheap, anime-ized puta.

 

[Volourn]

"True, but it's still the best D&D ruleset and will continue to remain so when Next is released."

W.T.F.

"Third, the stupid queen betrays me if I mention she was held captive here, because the game might as well be titled Dragon Age : Traitors Everywhere. And finally, Cauthrien is so ridiculously overpowered that she's perfectly able to slaughter my whole party all by herself."

You betrayed her. She specifically asks you NOT to rat her out. Yet, you do. Why do you lie and betray?

 

[sea]

Ok so that's that, now I'm gonna wait till DA2 is under 5 bucks to see for myself if it's really so much shittier than DAO.

Protip: don't. Dragon Age 2 does some things okay, namely telling a fairly complex and rich character study that has a lot of reactivity (even though the characters themselves suck). Despite the dumbed down dialogue system, there is a lot more C&C than meets the eye in the game and more so than in the original Dragon Age, if you discount the main plot events which are all forced on you. A ton of side-quests have pretty big changes as you go through the game and many plot threads are resolved or dropped and open up new ones, it's actually pretty cool to see.

It might be worth pirating in order to see what it does well, from an academic standpoint. If you are just looking for a game that is actually fun to play, stay the hell away from it. It's like someone took the worst elements from Dragon Age and cranked them up to eleven, while removing all of the good stuff (i.e. occasionally excellent tactical combat, art direction).

The worst part is that BioWare actually do pretty good writing these days when they have the opportunity to do characters that are not sex kittens and fan bait. Dragon Age 2 might be the most disappointing game for me in a long time just because there is so much promise in the setup and structure of the game that is completely fucking wasted, but at least there are a few okay bits (mostly in the second act when the qunari get involved in the story more). I literally laughed my ass off at what was meant to be a big emotional moment about halfway through the story, and immediately uninstalled the game, it was so awful.

Ultimately I still had to really drive myself to play halfway through and was bored out of my mind for most of it. Dragon Age 2 gets the honorable distinction of being the only BioWare game that I haven't even been able to force myself to finish, even for those academic reasons.

 

[Erebus]

"Third, the stupid queen betrays me if I mention she was held captive here, because the game might as well be titled Dragon Age : Traitors Everywhere. And finally, Cauthrien is so ridiculously overpowered that she's perfectly able to slaughter my whole party all by herself."

You betrayed her. She specifically asks you NOT to rat her out. Yet, you do. Why do you lie and betray?

That's what she says afterwards, but it doesn't make any kind of sense. When the party faces Cauthrien, it's either going to be attacked or sent to a cell for later execution. Since the queen is with us, she's either going to share the same fate or see her identity revealed. Given that, the sensible choice was to reveal her identity right from the start and try to bluff our way through : it literally couldn't have worse consequences than not doing so.

 

[Volourn]

No, she tells you before hand not to reveal her to anyone. Perhaps, she had a plan to escape the jail if you didn't open your big betraying mouth, air breather. Geez.

 

[Delterius]

If I'm not mistaken, there are two reasons why Anora doesn't want to be revealed so soon. First of all, she wants to save her father in the end. Meaning that her kidnapping must be pinned on Howe's shoulders rather than Loghain's.

Secondly, as long as she's in control of the information of her rescue, she's in control of how it is revealed. She's the one who'll reveal the Loghain's Administration latest big fuckup on the Landsmeet. Thus she can become Eamon and the Protagonist's partner, rather than just a glory they can use - if no one saw her being rescued, she can always come up and definitely betray you. After all, she can't really trust you not to exact revenge upon Loghain.

 

[Erebus]

No, she tells you before hand not to reveal her to anyone. Perhaps, she had a plan to escape the jail if you didn't open your big betraying mouth, air breather. Geez.

(Note to self : Volourn doesn't breathe air.)

If she was so good at escaping from a cell, the party wouldn't have had to rescue her. Besides, if the party'd been arrested, odds are Cauthrien would have recognized her (she's not disguised or anything). And if it had ended with a fight, she might very well have been accidentally killed.

If I'm not mistaken, there are two reasons why Anora doesn't want to be revealed so soon. First of all, she wants to save her father in the end. Meaning that her kidnapping must be pinned on Howe's shoulders rather than Loghain's.

She didn't have to tell the whole truth, just that What's-his-face was detaining her and we rescued her.

Secondly, as long as she's in control of the information of her rescue, she's in control of how it is revealed. She's the one who'll reveal the Loghain's Administration latest big fuckup on the Landsmeet. Thus she can become Eamon and the Protagonist's partner, rather than just a glory they can use - if no one saw her being rescued, she can always come up and definitely betray you. After all, she can't really trust you not to exact revenge upon Loghain.

Indeed. And isn't it ironical that, by stabbing me in the back, she made sure I would never willingly do her any favor again ?