Dragon Age:Origins and a question

I'm not really that surprised that you were proven wrong about something.

 

Necropost to update:

I played this this week. It's bleeding amazing. A lot of the story elements remind me of the Witcher, but that's never really bad. I played both a Male Human Noble and a Female City Elf and played through totally different origins and had very different interactions with people. I am still in Ostagar right now, though, so I'll post up in another week or two to say what I really think.

 

On the railroading:

Yeah, it's still the same kind of Bioware railroading as usual. Which is fine, you can still meaningfully affect the ending.

Arcanum was just about as railroaded, so I'm not complaining. ^_^

 

I'll get this game next month, and what I've read so far it should be good.

 

I think this game is going on my christmas list.

 

My friend bought it the other day and let me play it today. Seven hours later, I'm seeing daggers when I close my eyes and will probably be dreaming about this damn game when I got sleep.

I fucking LOVE IIIIIT! My Human Noble Rogue is just a barrel's worth of backstabbity fun, the voice acting is INCREDIBLE (as is the cast, I mean holy fuck, that's Tim Curry and Claudia Black right there and that automatically equals win), the game handles really nicely on the PS3 and looks absolutely beautiful, and I am so desperate to play it again that I'll be hanging off his windowsill for the next week.

Oh, and Alistair = Love.

Fangirling done now, slinking off into a corner...

 

Playing as Dalish Rogue and have been playing for 35 hours or more. I must say that I'm pleased with the Ranger specialization, it's just too bad the other Rogue specializations doesn't work so well with bows.

Oh, and remember this: Specialization unlocks ain't locked to specific saves, but is instead saved on the active account. So, save before you buy a manual, buy and use the manual, then load. It'll save you some hefty sums of gold.

 

I played as an elven mage. By endgame, I had gone from elementalist to arcane warrior/bloodmage with a high enough magic stat to equip dragonbone plate armor. Activate every possible buff spell, keep the spirit healer party member with you, go kill everything. Fun times.

 

Everyone plays Elven Mage for some reason. (Because it's better than human mage, duh.)

Blood Mage/Spirit Healer for me though. Dressing up in dragonbone isn't too appealing. (Plus, haven't gone to the place where you get AW yet. ^_^)

 

That's pretty much the same set up I have right now on this play through. AW/BM wearing Juggernaut Plate gives me pretty much 100% resist to everything. And blood mage is OP with Blood Boil (or whatever their third spell is called). There's me as an AW/BM, Leliana as Bard/Ranger, Wynne Spirit Mage, and Shale because Alistair left my party the royal bastard.

Bard goes well enough. Buffs to your companions and point blank AOE stun is very handy. Especially since you most likely will have Melee Archer so you can get into the thick of things to use the stun.

 

I kept wishing that Morrigan's mother would tell me to "Get off my hut" when I realized who the voice actor was.

 

I'm never going to be able to look at Morrigan's mother again without seeing Professor McGonagall. Damn you, Harry Potter! (Only not really, because those books were actually a decent read.)

 

Xiao, Morrigan's mother is played by Kate Mulgrew, who plays Captain Janeway on Voyager.

 

*makes a mental note to NEVER listen to her friend when it comes to voice actors again, he thought Armin Shimmerman was Colm Meany too...*

Holy fuck it's Janeway. Now I'm gonna want to stand to attention every time she opens her mouth. ...I must own this game for myself!

 

It is irritating that most of the challenging battles are preceded by dialogue, which means that it is impossible to use the hold command to position party members where I want them prior to combat because they all cluster together for the dialogue. So I can't throw a fireball without knocking my entire party to the ground, and the tougher enemies are the only ones who are left standing because they pass a physical resistance check. So gay.

 

I'm having a somewhat of a graphics issue after installing it the other day. The entire game area is covered by a glaring, red "haze", making it difficult to see the playing field. I've posted this issue in Bioware's support forums but have yet to see a response. I figured it might be a lighting issue, but playing with different settings in OPTIONS hasn't fixed the problem. Here are a couple screenshots to demonstrate:

http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t29/ ... Screen.jpg

http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t29/ ... creen2.jpg

Anyone else come across this?

EDIT: Driver update for graphics card fixed it.

 

Blood is important to Dragon Age's theme, Grimm, so they were just submersing you in it.

And yeah, I also find the combat to be ridiculously difficult at some points. Apparently it's easy if your team is made up of mages, but right now I only have Morrigan.

 

have her horror 1 target and winters grasp another until you get more aoe crowd control spells.

 

Having known basically nothing about this game before jumping in, except that everyone was making a big deal about it, I'm kind of confused how to approach it. I like to fly solo in most of my games, but DA really seems to push the whole squad-based, tactical style to accomplish things. I have no problem just letting the AI handle most of that, if only it occasionally incorporated the "intelligence" a little more hand-in-hand with the "artificial". As it is, all my companions just blindly rush into battle and get slaughtered, leaving me (a mage) the lone bone to deal with waves of enemies on my own anyway. Will I have to take a firmer grasp on my party's tactics to have any success, or does the game eventually allow for more diverse playing styles later on? Right now:

Spoiler

I just killed the big ogre (after multiple fails) before lighting the beacon and getting overrun by darkspawn at the beginning of the game.

 

Yeah, the tower of Ishal is one of the harder bosses you will encounter because you have such a lack of abilities.

The default tactics tend to suck, but if you edit them yourself you can have a much more intelligent team. For example my Alistair has his tactics set to the following.

1 - Self: Surrounded by 2 or more enemies - Activate Taunt.
2 - Self: Surrounded by 2 or more enemies - Activate War Cry.
3 - Self: Health less than 25% - use health poltice
4 - Enemy: Elite rank or higher - Activate Shield bash
5 - Ementy: Mana greater than 50% - Activate Holy Smite

There's more but those are the ones that I can think of on his tactics list. It has him charge in and use taunt followed immediately by warcry to ensure he has all the threat and debuffs the enemies. If his health gets low because he isn't getting enough heals, he'll heal himself. If there is a ranked enemy he will focus on that by first knocking him down with shield bash but if there isn't he'll scan the battlefield for a mage to destroy their mana. Otherwise he just auto-attacks until taunt and warcry are available again.