Dragon Age - Discussion Thread

[Reverend]

I've had a few instances of cutscenes dropping frames until it starts getting into slideshow territory, or even crashing. Not in any particular place though. From what I gather it's an issue that has something to do with the combination of the Frostbite engine, DirectX and Nvidia GPUs.

 

[FPAlpha]

I just did the Orlais Empress story mission and what fun that was.. political intrigue at its best with few fights. Really refreshing change of pace of the standard go there and smash everything up.

One question to the ones who have already finished the game.. at what level was your character? Mine's level 18 and i have about 3 or 4 story missions left before the main story is over.

 

[Evil Twin]

I've done three complete playthoughs now, and if you do EVERYTHING in the game, you'll top out at level 24.

After spending so much time with DA:I over the past month, going back and watching the DA2 intro really is jarring, because man oh man do Varric's and Cassandra's faces look low-res and downright cartoony in that now compared to their DA:I versions, Cassandra especially.

 

[Reverend]

I maxed out at 25, but I really did do just about everything possible and got all the xp boosting perks (though really only for the extra conversation options.)

For my next playthrough I finally settled on a Dalish mage.


Already got to Skyhold, but this time I've been sticking to the main story and moving things along as soon as I'm at the minimum level, so it's going a lot faster. One thing I have learned is to not bother with requisitions. Like *at all*. The game practically throws power points at you so all they really do is drain your crafting resources.

I tried playing as a qunari mage for a while, but sadly I'm just not feeling it.

Still playing around with the CC occasionally. Tried making a Trevelyan mage on the theory that'll give a slightly different perspective on the main conflict for a later playthrough.


She started out as an attempt to do a Ming Na lookalike, but couldn't quite manage it, so I made her albino and gave her a fetching scar instead.

 

[Evil Twin]

Yep yep yep, requisitions are utterly useless. Didn't bother with them at all in my subsequent playthroughs. Plus you run the risk of having them stuck in your journal forever if a mob that drops a component disappears for good. For instance, my rogue has a Hinterlands banner requisition stuck in her journal because one of the component only drops from the warring mages and templars, and once you side with one or the other in the main quest, their spawns are all replaced by outlaws.

As far as power, there's that guy at Skyhold that sells those documents. Buy a bunch of them, sell them right back, you keep all your money and still get the power from them. Totally broken, don't know what they were thinking with that!

I took all of the conversation perks my first playthrough, but figured I'd only take the ones that make sense for my other characters. Why would my noble circle mage have underworld knowledge? What does my Dalish mage know about the nobility? Yeah, you lose out on a few things here and there, but it makes more sense from a roleplaying perspective. I'm struggling to make a DW dwarf artificer I'm happy with right now, but I'll probably only ever give her underworld knowledge.

 

[Reverend]

The only use I can see for requisitions is that if a person wants to open up a bunch of areas very early on, dosen't want to go out sealing rifts and establishing camps *and* has a surplus of resources then it could be an easy shortcut. Later on it makes zero sense. I even made it difficult for myself before I realised what I was doing and that all that blood lotus was better spent upgrading tonics and grenades.

I took all of the conversation perks my first playthrough, but figured I'd only take the ones that make sense for my other characters. Why would my noble circle mage have underworld knowledge? What does my Dalish mage know about the nobility? Yeah, you lose out on a few things here and there, but it makes more sense from a roleplaying perspective.

The way I'd look at it is that choosing one of those perks means that as Inquisitor, the PC has made it their business to read up on these things. I mean my noble rogue has found herself in the middle of a mage war, so probably a good idea to read up on arcane theory. Getting Lyrium for your mages from carta sources? Probably wise to know who you're dealing with.

Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that characters get what should logically be their innate conversation perk by default and it's a shame they didn't do it that way.

 

[Evil Twin]

If each zone gave a finite amount of requisitions, I'd do them just for completeness sake. But since they're infinite, I just have to grudgingly accept that there will always be a rogue exclamation point on every map forever taunting me and move on. Speaking of exclamation points, I found out the hard way that if you only pick up the quest for the class specialization you're interested in and ignore the other two, when you turn in the quest for your specialization and commit to it, the other two trainers will disappear, but their exclamation points will always remain on the Skyhold map.

Yeah, it's ridiculous how much blood lotus you need for the potion upgrades. Post-endgame I took a harvesting field trip to the Fallow Mire to get the rest of it and took along Sera, Varric, and Cole just to hear their banter because when else are you ever going to have multiple NPC rogues in your party? I took the optimal cutting perk this time around and it's actually pretty nice. I figured you'd just get 1 extra 10% of the time but it's actually a random amount. Sometimes I got 10 blood lotus from one harvest.

 

[Reverend]

I'd have liked it if you actually saw some results from those requisitions. Like on the Storm Coast you get some that have your people salvaging the beached ships. It would have been very cool to do that and go see one in the process of being dismantled by a work crew, or just have them gradually altogether. Speaking of changing the landscape, also on the Storm coast you get an operation late on to convert that Dwarven dock to Inquisition use as a trading post. I thought that it'd become a new minihub like the keeps, but unless I missed something, nothing changes there if you return later. Not even the facilities of a standard camp!

On a similar note, I'm at a bit of a loss as to the point of most of the Skyhold upgrades. As far a I can tell, aside from the herb garden they're all purely cosmetic. You'd think with how difficult the logging camps and quarries are to track down with the the advanced scouting perk that there'd be some added more value to reward that effort.

I know I'm nitpicking, but there's so much potential depth to be had here and it just feel squandered. Indeed, the whole game has something of an issue with regards to secondary material. As in once you get off the main quest and inner circle missions, it all starts to feel a bit ankle deep.

Like say in the first two Dragon Age games (and Mass Effect come to think of it) you have the primary missions along with some companion quests (a *lot* in ME2's case since that was the plot of most of the game) and of course you'd have the tertiary fetchy/kill-all-the-things quests that you find in most RPGs. But you also had a bunch of secondary/side story missions and quests that had memorable characters and added some flavour to the experience. It seems to me that this intermediary tier of storyelling is largely missing from DAI.

For all it's sins, DA2 was I think especially good at this as several of them would actually become more important later on down the line. The Ninette murder case being a prime example.

 

[Evil Twin]

Ok, I think I finally settled on a dwarf I'm happy with. I tried doing some more "attractive" faces with the longer hairstyles and while they look fine in the character the creator, the moment you see them attached to the stumpy dwarf body in-game, it just look weird. The pixie cut on the other hand helps emphasize her shortness and shows off the big dwarf ears as well. I tried the bun hairstyles as well, but they seemed a little too prim for a Carta dwarf. Want to stand out from Dagna and Harding!

 

[Reverend]

I think I lucked out getting my Dwarven archer looking even halfway decent.

I've since tried making an sword & shield warrior, but the head ends up looking over-large and misshapen.

On a happier note I think I've finally gotten a female Qunari that I'm more or less happy with.

 

[Evil Twin]

Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that characters get what should logically be their innate conversation perk by default and it's a shame they didn't do it that way.

I'm starting to wonder if the dwarf racial dialogue options ultimately accomplish the same things as the underworld knowledge perk. There's that Inquisition scout, Ritts, near the Winterwatch Tower in the Hinterlands. Normally you can use Varric to recruit her as an agent. In my case I took underworld knowledge as my first perk, and had the additional dialogue options of either underworld knowledge or a dwarf racial option that I could use to recruit her. Hope that doesn't turn out to be a redundant perk!

 

[Reverend]

I was actually reading the manual the other day and was surprised that what I thought was the politics dialogue icon was in fact the (human) race specific one, so perhaps there is some overlap. Incidentally I took the actual politics icon (the crown) to stand for an executive decision...which seems really dumb now I say it out loud.

Small aside, but I note that the manual lists a bunch of icons that I don't think I ever came across. There's a diamond shaped "yes" icon (as opposed to the red cross "no" icon which I did encounter a few times) an "attack" and a "bribery" icon that I do remember from DA2 but never saw in DAI so far as I recall.

Not sure that I ever came across a rogue class specific one either, but I have seen the mage one a few times already. Haven't played a warrior long enough to know how often that one crops up.

 

[John Clark]

I only really started on this the other day and if I'm going for a completionist run, it's going to be a total time sink.

So far, with my Dalish Mage I've rescued the Ferelden Soldiers, explored some of the Hinterlands, recruited the mages and I think I've recruited everyone but Cole. So far, that seems to have taken thirteen or so hours.

Still, fun so far.

 

[Jim Gamma]

Yeah - I've done around 60 hours and am still ploughing through the optionals before the first Skyhold quest. Doing all the various quests and operations, and managing the team quite tightly, it's actually about the same length for me as Skyrim (albeit I missed a few things on Skyrim like the Brotherhood and Thieves' Guild questlines).

 

[starrchild]

I'm still on the fence about getting DAI; I played DAO a while back, never got DA2, but the price and the game bugs are off-putting. Any word about a bug fix patch coming?

 

[Evil Twin]

So here's a cheap but effective way to kill the Ferelden Frostback in the Hinterlands even if you're several levels lower than it. Equip your mage with a frost staff, then run across the battlefield when the fight starts and tuck them behind the rocks near the smugglers' dock. Then just autoattack the dragon til it's dead, tossing in the occasional energy barrage if you wish. Once all your other party members are down, the dragon may frequently shoot fireballs at you, but they'll hit the rocks in front of you. In this case, the dragon never shot fireballs at me, did its flying around shenanigans, or even summoned dragonlings. It just sat there like lump getting hit by my attacks.

 

[Reverend]

^Well that's no fun at all.

 

[Evil Twin]

I'm still on the fence about getting DAI; I played DAO a while back, never got DA2, but the price and the game bugs are off-putting. Any word about a bug fix patch coming?

Well, you could always wait for the Ultimate/Game-of-the-Year/Super-Duper/Whatever Edition that will inevitably be released in the future. In the meantime, I'd recommend playing DA2 if you can get it for a reasonable price. Yes, it's a deeply flawed game, but it provides pretty much all the set-up for DAI's plot, and it's worth playing through at least once if only for the lulz.

 

[John Clark]

So here's a cheap but effective way to kill the Ferelden Frostback in the Hinterlands even if you're several levels lower than it. Equip your mage with a frost staff, then run across the battlefield when the fight starts and tuck them behind the rocks near the smugglers' dock. Then just autoattack the dragon til it's dead, tossing in the occasional energy barrage if you wish. Once all your other party members are down, the dragon may frequently shoot fireballs at you, but they'll hit the rocks in front of you. In this case, the dragon never shot fireballs at me, did its flying around shenanigans, or even summoned dragonlings. It just sat there like lump getting hit by my attacks.

My first meeting with a dragon (Lady Shayna's Valley) didn't go quite that well. She didn't even land before she'd toasted my party. (I was probably under prepared at the time and was trying to sneak through unnoticed. That didn't go too well)

Well, you could always wait for the Ultimate/Game-of-the-Year/Super-Duper/Whatever Edition that will inevitably be released in the future. In the meantime, I'd recommend playing DA2 if you can get it for a reasonable price. Yes, it's a deeply flawed game, but it provides pretty much all the set-up for DAI's plot, and it's worth playing through at least once if only for the lulz.

Yeah, for all the issues with DA2, I had a lot of fun with it, especially with a snarky Hawke.

 

[kirk55555]

^Well that's no fun at all.

But it might mean I have a slight possibility of beating one of the dragon's someday. Except I don't have an ice staff, but I could improvise. Honestly I'd like to beat at least one dragon. Its not a matter of fun, Dragons are too poorly implemented to be "fun" fights, I would just like my (currently level 19) characters to be able to beat one of those a-holes