Dragon Age - Discussion Thread

[Reverend]

^I'd say Awakening is certainly worth the time as it's pretty substantial as far as DLC goes. As to whether it's worth the money, that is of course up to you.

A bit late now, but it would have probably been better value for money if you'd gotten the 'Dragon Age Origins Ultimate Edition' as that comes bundled with Awakening, plus all the DLCs including: -
'Warden's Keep': Short, but solid with some nice loot, some extra shops and an item storage chest!
'Stone Prisoner': An absolute must! Shale is arguable the single best companion.
'Return to Ostagar': Feels very in-place when played late in the game and some good gear to boot.
'Witch Hunt': Essentially a short epilogue story that is important plotwise, but shallow in terms of gameplay. Entirely made up of recycled maps from the main game & other DLCs.
'Golems of Amgarak': A post-game small dungeon crawler expansion. Not a lot of plot. Mostly there for some extra challenge and some powerful loot.
'Leliana's Song': A separate module that gets a little into Leliana's backstory.

There's also a thing called 'The Darkspawn Chronicles' Another short stand-alone module that has you controlling the darkspawn in a "what if" scenario where none of the potential "Hero of Fereldan" characters made it out of their Origin segment alive. it sounds cooler than it is since all you do is replay the maps from the final battle of the main game controlling darkspawn. All the "story" is in the form of codex entries. Take it or leave it really.

Honestly, if I were you I'd see if I can't get a refund for DAO and buy the Ultimate Edition instead.

Either way, you can also get a little bonus free DLC for DAO & DA2 here. It's basically a bunch of items that were pre-order bonuses at launch.

 

[Evil Twin]

Yeah, Awakening is worth getting. Actually you should've just gotten the Ultimate Edition, since it includes Awakening! But anyway, it's not terribly long, but it has a decent story. Plus it introduces Anders, who plays a big role in DA2.

Don't really have any recommendations for the mage, since it's the one class I haven't played all the way through Origins with. Mage combat in Origins feels kind of slow and clunky compared to the other two games. Plus, being forced to play a Circle mage, even as an elf, was kind of a turn off for me.

 

[John Clark]

I'd go with getting Awakening too.

As for myself, I've been playing Trespasser today. I've generally enjoyed it (haven't finished it yet though)

Spoiler: Spoilers for Trespasser.

This run through is still with a fem/Mage/Lavellen but not one that romanced Solas.

Thoughts so far.
Teagan looks a lot different from DAO/DA2. Also, I'm not entirely sure my Warden would totally agree with his position on the inquisition.
Viv still doesn't seem to like my Herald, but everyone else does.
Varric is the Viscount. This should be good, but he definitely knows my Hawke too well. He reckons she'll be leaving Weishaupt in flames behind her (And though he didn't say it, I'm sure they'll be a quip to black there too).

I do have one annoyance at the moment though. Towards the end, you get a new ability to discharge your rift hand and it just won't work on my pc at the moment. I can't take a step before my Herald blows herself and her team up

I've tried remapping, but it's not having any just at the moment. I'll give it another go when I have a moment

 

[intrinsical]

I actually bought the Ultimate Edition, but for some reason the DLCs and expansions were not installed together with the main game. It took me a bit of digging around, but I finally have them installed.

 

[Reverend]

Well that's good. I got the Ultimate Edition myself in a steam sale way back when. Probably the best value for money ever since I've probably clocked up something like 500 hours over the years.

If you want an idea as to which order to play the DLCs that support character importing; I'd suggest: main game (duh) > Amgarak > Awakening > Witch Hunt (also duh).
Most people seem to say play Amgarak after Awakening because of the difficulty, but the gear you get in Amgarak is so much more useful in Awakening. Witch Hunt is just a short little story thing and not much of a challenge, besides the boss fight.

It's a shame they never came up with an bundle edition for DA2 as the only way to get the DLCs (which are both really good and add a LOT to the main game) is still though 'bioware points', which have always been a bit of a scam. I have about 80 left over that I can't do a thing with.

P.S. You'd still need to go to that link I posted to unlock all the little extras. In case you don't know already, your origin login also works as your Bioware login, so no need to create a new account or anything.

 

[intrinsical]

When I play RPGs, I usually pick a class that excels in crowd control, buffs, debuffs with a bit of nuking ability. So its no surprise I picked the mage with mostly Entropy and Spirit spells.

I have only gone as far as the Tower of Ishal. Other than the Ogre boss fight at the top of the tower, which had me doing a bit of old-school EverQuest style kiting, its been a pretty smooth ride thus far. I love the voice acting. I am perhaps a little too used to the Oblivion-style open world, so I am chaffing a little at the lack of freedom in the main story line. However, I am loving the story and the characters I've met thus far. I especially love Morrigan's spunky attitude, and her mother too!

 

[Robert Maxwell]

For what it's worth, Inquisition has more of an open world. It's not a seamless world to explore like TES games, but rather a set of large, open environments you can explore as you see fit. Exploration is even rewarded with XP, as you can find various landmarks and "claim" them.

That said, Inquisition seems to have had a divisive effect on the fanbase, as it's somewhat different from its predecessors.

 

[Reverend]

Yeah, Dragon Age like all Bioware games is a character/story focused game in the classic cRPG style. It's pretty much linear up until you get out of Lothering, but even when it opens up, it's by no means an open world RPG like the Elder Scrolls games.

Honestly, I prefer it this way. One of my main beefs with Inquisition is that it's move towards bigger, more open environments meant the side-questing got very shallow and MMO-ish. Having a living world was great, but when there's little to do but collect things, fight generic baddies and read codex entries it all feels like it's spread a little thin.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

The nice thing about those quests is that you don't have to do them, though. There are only a handful of such quests you really need to do, and those are meaty enough to not feel super MMO-ish, but the shallow stuff like "find me 10 cotton" and "claim all 27 landmarks in this region" are optional. You can burn through the main story in ~40 hours, or take three times as long to go through and do everything. I feel no need to complete everything, so I just do what appeals to me. Go do a main story quest, send out some missions, then go knock monsters around for a while, whatever.

 

[137th Gebirg]

For a semi-OC achievement/trophy whore such as myself, those side-quests are Manna from Heaven.

 

[Reverend]

The nice thing about those quests is that you don't have to do them, though. There are only a handful of such quests you really need to do, and those are meaty enough to not feel super MMO-ish, but the shallow stuff like "find me 10 cotton" and "claim all 27 landmarks in this region" are optional. You can burn through the main story in ~40 hours, or take three times as long to go through and do everything. I feel no need to complete everything, so I just do what appeals to me. Go do a main story quest, send out some missions, then go knock monsters around for a while, whatever.

I'm not talking about the requisitions as they are utterly pointless. All they do is consume resources better applied elsewhere in exchange for power, which by the end of the game you'll have a massive surplus of even on a quick playthrough.

No, what I'm talking about is the stuff that's meant to guide you through the environment. 'Hissing Wastes' is by far the worst offender as there is literally no narrative story there at all, just codex entries, shards and endless tracks of sand. 'Forbidden Oasis' also has this problem but to a lesser degree since it's a smaller map, who's main function is to serve as the place where you dump all those shards you've collected. 'The Western Approach' and 'The Storm Coast' also have a sort of aimless quality to them.

Compare that to the Hinterlands (trying to avoid spoilers since intrinsical is a newbie) when you first arrive where there's a clear story going on and the side-quests all feed into and are informed by that. Same with 'Crestwood' and the new Jaws of Hakkon area. 'The Fallow Mire' benefits from being a more contained experience, but the trade-off is that there's really much to explore. It's less of an open world experience and more of an old fashioned dungeon crawl in disguise.

The rest ('Exalted Plains', 'Emerald Graves' & 'Emprise du Lion') fall somewhere in the middle with sort of the bones of a narrative, but not much in the way of meat or even connective tissue.

The impression I'm left with is that they spent so much time creating these huge and beautiful environments that they ended up only having time to put narrative elements into a handful of them and they naturally focused most of their efforts into the first ones you get to, leaving the rest feeling very sketchy.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

The extent to which different maps and side quests weave organically into the main story definitely narrows as you progress through the game, and I agree it's a sign they had to rush through completing the campaign and didn't have time to "snowflake" it into each map. It doesn't bother me too much as a lot of games have that issue (I'm looking at you, DX:HR!) and I assume it's a symptom of the poor project management that plagues lots of games. "We have five years to make this. ... Oh, fuck, we have three months left!"

 

[Evil Twin]

Stumbled across something new (to me at least) tonight. It's located a little ways NE of the entrance marker in Forbidden Oasis. After trying various destructive spells I googled it and found out you need to jump on the boards several times and they'll break. Inside the chest is a purple greatsword.

Say what you will about the game, it's got some great exploration. I'm always finding little new things even after over half a dozen playthroughs!

 

[Reverend]

^You can also have Bull smash it with mighty blow.

The extent to which different maps and side quests weave organically into the main story definitely narrows as you progress through the game, and I agree it's a sign they had to rush through completing the campaign and didn't have time to "snowflake" it into each map. It doesn't bother me too much as a lot of games have that issue (I'm looking at you, DX:HR!) and I assume it's a symptom of the poor project management that plagues lots of games. "We have five years to make this. ... Oh, fuck, we have three months left!"

I wouldn't say it bothers me exactly, just that it's one of my (few) main criticisms. The others being mostly about the lack of a sense of cohesion between the different companions (they feel less of a group and more of a set of individuals who happen to hang around in the same place) and the lack of variety in armor, which has more or less been dealt with by DLC. That said, there's no way I'm paying a fiver for a bunch of schematics that should have been in DLC I've already bought. Dick move Bioware!

I suppose what I'm getting at with the maps is that it feels like such a waste to have whole areas that you can easily skip without really missing anything except xp and some loot that's probably already 5 levels below you. I don't necessarily agree that it's a result of poor planning so much as the result of EA's hard deadline policy. With a big game like this they probably should have been given another 12-18 months to really give the game the attention it deserved. On the other hand they should have cut a few areas early on so they could focus on the core areas. So I suppose that does count as poor planning after all.

I gather a similar situation happened with ME3 where EA had dictated a hard deadline and the game clearly wasn't ready. I saw an interview with Freddie Prinze Jr. a while back where he recounted an instance while recording some of Vega's lines. I'm paraphrasing from memory but he asked them something like "OK, so when do I record the loyalty mission stuff?" which was met by an awkward stony silence. The implication being that they'd planned for it, but the tight schedule had basically gutted the game. What we got on launch was clearly only a half baked cake I don't even want to know what kind of disaster it would have been had they not gotten that 6 month extension and launched on the original date.

DAI is my no means as spotty in terms of quality as ME3 was, but you can sort of see a parallel in that most of the good stuff was in the first ten hours, but as time went on, things got thinner like (to borrow a Tolkienisum) not enough butter scraped across too much bread. Culminating in what can only be described as a rushed anti-climax.

I think the main reason for this is that after a very strong introduction, the main villain essentially disappears for half the game while we run around flawlessly foiling his plans left and right. It would have added so much more if they had given us a few Pyrrhic victories and had most of the plots we foil turn out to actually be Zanatos gambits. Usually Bioware games are fraught with tough choices, but in DAI, I can only remember one and it was a choice between killing off a character I treasured from the second game or one from the first game I only kept alive because of pragmatism. Bit of a no brainier really. Of course I appreciate that others who imported a word state in which the character from the first game was a treasured companion, but I can only relate my own experiences. Plus the third possibility was loosing a minor character who only shows up in two scenes in DA2, which is an even less difficult choice.

 

[Jono]

Felt pretty indifferent with the last DLC, though I've felt that way with all of the story based DLC (not touched the pointless cosmetic DLC). It has been a pretty similar experience to ME3 for me in terms of the base game (great start, weak/rushed ending), though I might put ME3 DLC as being better overall than DAI.

I don't know, maybe my expectations of DLC is out of wack. Maybe I can't break from the old expansion pack mould, which means I'm too critical of what DLCs have become.

On a side note, I'll be interested to see how the Witcher 3 goes with its expansions and whether it is really a case of depth of content that is the core of my issues. Thought Witcher 3 was a superior game to ME3 and DAI. It wasn't as a strong out the gates as I felt ME3 and DAI were, but I thought it built nicely and maintained a very good quality throughout. Though wouldn't argue that its ending was also rushed.

 

[Reverend]

I've had a lot of trouble getting into the Witcher games. I played the first one up until a little after the first proper town but hit a brick wall of combat difficulty and never got back into it.
I played Witcher 2 for a few hours but couldn't even get past the first damn courtyard. There's just something fundamental about the combat system I just don't get and it's probably me just being stupid. I know there's a good game there, but I just really suck at the mechanics.

By contrast I've always found modern Bioware games much more intuitive. At least everything post KOTOR, which I also had trouble with. There's something just horrifying about ranged combat in a turn based, dice roll driven system if what you're more used to is first person shooters.

 

[SPCTRE]

You should try The Wild Hunt, they streamlined the combat heavily.

 

[John Clark]

By contrast I've always found modern Bioware games much more intuitive. At least everything post KOTOR, which I also had trouble with. There's something just horrifying about ranged combat in a turn based, dice roll driven system if what you're more used to is first person shooters.

I get that. My first purchased RPG was KOTOR (2 in my case) and didn't really get in to it at the time. A few years later, a friend recommended Mass Effect and since then I've gone back and played some of the older bioware style rpgs. I'm not quite as fond of them but do enjoy it.

As for The Witcher series, I've got the first one and keep meaning to carry on with it but I think I'm still at the first courtyard too.

 

[Reverend]

By contrast I've always found modern Bioware games much more intuitive. At least everything post KOTOR, which I also had trouble with. There's something just horrifying about ranged combat in a turn based, dice roll driven system if what you're more used to is first person shooters.

I get that. My first purchased RPG was KOTOR (2 in my case) and didn't really get in to it at the time. A few years later, a friend recommended Mass Effect and since then I've gone back and played some of the older bioware style rpgs. I'm not quite as fond of them but do enjoy it.

As for The Witcher series, I've got the first one and keep meaning to carry on with it but I think I'm still at the first courtyard too.

Yeah, I didn't go back and play KOTOR properly until after playing Mass Effect either (I'd owned it for years, but never got off Taris.) I should have been more specific when I said "turn based" because I never had an issue with Fallout 1 & 2 being turn based with ranged weapons. I should have said "quasi-real-time-turn-based combat" which is really what KOTOR has going on. There's something about seeing your character miss an enemy three times in a row when he's just stodd there, not three meters away. Takes some getting used to.

You can see why in Mass Effect they made a conscious move towards action gaming mechanics for the combat since it's just so much more engaging, even in ME1 when it was still very janky.

I'd actually like to see future Dragon Age games either fully commit and move away from the traditional cRPG "spell whack-a-mole" setup. Or go back to giving the PC version a full quickbar again. Only having eight active ability slots pretty much hobbles any mage build from having much in the way of utility.


As for The Witcher 2, I wonder if it would help if I tried using the controller instead of mouse & keyboard? I know it was designed more as a cross platform game than TW1 was.

 

[SPCTRE]

You can see why in Mass Effect they made a conscious move towards action gaming mechanics for the combat since it's just so much more engaging, even in ME1 when it was still very janky.

ME1 was another step-between-steps in that way, there was still quite a bit of dice-rolling going on, which made the shooting feel decidedly less-than-great. (It's still my favorite ME game.)

Regardless of all the changes in ME2 that went too far for my tastes (e.g. getting rid of the inventory instead of simply making a better UI), the changes to the core gameplay and shooting mechanics were most sensible.