Dragon Age - Discussion Thread

[John Clark]

Guess I was lucky. She seemed much darker all the way through the game and though I'd generally made orders/comments that I thought would make her friendlier, I thought I'd mucked it up.

I'd just read Masked Empire and Last Flight before I started the game properly (Enjoyed them).

For my next run, I'm going to try and make everything as dark as possible.

 

[Evil Twin]

I've been playing a whole lot of multiplayer lately. Surprisingly, the necromancer has turned out to be my favorite, most fun class.

-Cast blizzard on a group of enemies
-Fade step into the middle of them, activating ice armor
-Virulent walking bomb a target and detonate it, starting a chain reaction
-Everything dies around you, restoring your health and mana via death siphon passive

On the boss fights I can just stand in front of the door and keep blizzard up indefinitely, blowing up everything that comes near me. So much survivability! Kind of regret not taking the necromancer specialization on my latest qunari mage now.

 

[SPCTRE]

For some reason I managed to harden Leliana, which is strange since as far as I can tell I didn't do any of the things that are supposedly meant to cause her to go that way. A bug perhaps? Either way it's annoying since she romanced my Warden and I'd really like those two to reconnect.

Oh and if you'd like to have some idea as to what's up with Weisshaupt, I suggest reading the most recent tie-in novel 'Last Flight'. Can't wait to see how that plays out in the next game/DLC.

Ouuuh, that sounds actually interesting. The Anderfels always seemed like a cool part of Thedas.

 

[Reverend]

Sadly, you don't get much of a sense of what the Anderfels are like in the book beyond the broad strokes. For the most part the Anderfels are just the location of the framing story--a mage refugee from the war and potential Grey Warden recruit researching old Warden records--the main body of the book is an accounting for the fourth blight from the perspective of Garahel's sister and fellow Grey Warden, which mostly takes place in the east. That said, by the end of the book it'll be quite clear as to why Weisshaupt suddenly went silent at the end of Inquisition.

 

[SPCTRE]

^ Okay, thanks for the headsup, that still sounds very interesting! I'll have to check it out.

I just hope that

Spoiler: DAI main story

my FemHawke will be okay, she's on her way to check in with Weisshaupt Fortress

 

[Reverend]

In other news: Why make a shop so hard to find?!

I have to say, I didn't expect them to put that in a patch instead of a paid DLC. Fantastic addition. I just hope the armour tinting will also extend to the Inquisitor's pyjamas.

 

[SPCTRE]

Black Emporium is back. Great that they're adding this, but I'm 100% done with the game for the time being.

I'll definitely enjoy the benefits when I do a second playthrough, two years down the line or so.

ETA: Blaming cert is a pretty disingenous, shitty thing to say.

 

[Reverend]

^Yeah, I was always under the impression that cert only affects the console versions, not PC.

 

[SPCTRE]

^ Yup, but even on closed platforms with cert, it's a lame excuse. They have been super slow to act with (significant) DAI patches so far, no matter how they spin it now.

Certification for patches does delay things of course, but not to the extent they're claiming now.

 

[Reverend]

I doubt they're being deliberately misleading. I mean why bother?

Honestly I'm mostly just confused as to why this is being introduced as a patch and not DLC (free or paid) along the lines of FireWalker and the ME3 extended cut. To my way of thinking, a patch is meant to either fix something that's already in place but not functioning as intended (broken quests, plot triggers, engine stability etc.), or to add minor functionality upgrades in response to feedback (key mapping walk for example.)

This feels a lot more like a content update as it'll include a new area (albeit a relatively small one) with new art assets, voice over (at least one hopes, as Xenon was hilarious!) as well as new shops and a storage chest.

I think the clue to all this may be tied to the way they're beta testing the patch in this way (i.e., not in-house), which combined with some of the persistent problems as yet unresolved by the first four patches to me, leads me to think that they're genuinely struggling to get frostbite to behave itself.
I say that also partly because from what I've read, BF4 also suffers from similar problems well over a year after launch. It's clearly a powerful engine, but it seems to have some very deep rooted stability issues.

 

[Evil Twin]

Ok, Bioware is just plain trolling me now. So I'm doing multiplayer tonight, on one run I get a purple out of a treasure room chest... and it's a crappy dagger. On the next run I get two purples IN A ROW out of treasure room chests, one's a low DPS bow, the other's a two hander I already have. I buy two large large chests afterwards, they each have a purple in them... and they're both runes.

 

[Reverend]

^On the plus side, that's plenty of crafting materials to salvage and use to make better armour.

 

[SPCTRE]

I doubt they're being deliberately misleading. I mean why bother?

Honestly I'm mostly just confused as to why this is being introduced as a patch and not DLC (free or paid) along the lines of FireWalker and the ME3 extended cut. To my way of thinking, a patch is meant to either fix something that's already in place but not functioning as intended (broken quests, plot triggers, engine stability etc.), or to add minor functionality upgrades in response to feedback (key mapping walk for example.)

This feels a lot more like a content update as it'll include a new area (albeit a relatively small one) with new art assets, voice over (at least one hopes, as Xenon was hilarious!) as well as new shops and a storage chest.

I think the clue to all this may be tied to the way they're beta testing the patch in this way (i.e., not in-house), which combined with some of the persistent problems as yet unresolved by the first four patches to me, leads me to think that they're genuinely struggling to get frostbite to behave itself.
I say that also partly because from what I've read, BF4 also suffers from similar problems well over a year after launch. It's clearly a powerful engine, but it seems to have some very deep rooted stability issues.

Traditionally in IT, patches were indeed intended to contain minor corrections and/or modifications to software.

In the games industry, especially with mid- to long-term support for games (originating mostly from subscription-based ones), the term has been expanded to also encompass significant content additions/free addons.

 

[Reverend]

Applications for the Patch 5 beta are now open. I was tempted, but I think I'd rather just wait and see the finished product. Plus, I'm not thrilled at the idea of having to back-up all my saves, possibly loosing any SP progress made in the interim and (unless I'm reading it wrong) all my multiplayer progress.

 

[137th Gebirg]

So, been playing this on my Xbox One and there appears to be a really bad glitch on the "Dragons' Bane" achievement. Apparently, even though you kill all 10 of the high dragons, the achievement doesn't pop, only keeping you at 90%. I haven't gotten all the way there, yet. I've gotten 7 of them so far but the achievement progress is showing only 60% (6 out of 10 total).

This is a known issue on the X1, 360 and also the PS4. People claim that you can go back and kill earlier dragons from old saves and that it cumulatively adds it up, but this isn't true. I went back to an earlier save to kill the one in the Western Approach several times (one of the easiest, IMO) and my achievement progress stayed locked in at 60%.

It's a pretty big piece of the game to get all the high dragons, especially since it's in the name of the product to begin with! Anyone else experience this or know if BioWare is going to put out a patch for this? Has this been a problem on PC versions of the game?

I think I'm going to try to go after the Crestwood dragon again. It's also an easy one and, from what I've seen on other forums, this might be the buggy one that was overlooked in the kill count for the achievement.

 

[VDCNI]

I'm playing it on XBOX One and got the achievement without any glitches.

 

[137th Gebirg]

One of the boards out there discussing this problem, someone mentioned that the kill count might not increment if the player was in control of another character instead of the main Inquisitor character at the point when the dragon went down. Unfortunately, I can't remember if it ever happened that way for me at any time.

 

[Evil Twin]

This happened to me. The achievement unlocked however when I killed my first dragon on my second playthrough.

 

[SPCTRE]

Achievement was bugged for me as well. I don't care enough to jump back in and get it at this point, it'll be some time before I return to that game - too much shit to play and not enough time

 

[Reverend]

In case anyone didn't already know, the latest patch is out and the storage chest (and armour tinting!) has been successfully implemented. No sign of the Black Emporium yet, though I gather they're still working on it following the last round of closed beta. Apparently it won't be ready for the next patch either, so it'l looking like either the patch after that or as a separate (hopefully free) DLC. Indeed, given that it'll include new assets, the file size may (and this is just me speculating) be too big for console patch restrictions and the DLC route may be a necessity.