Dragon Age? What the hell happened to you?

Memorable Characters? A few (imo), at least more than other newer games have in. The Story and the "universe" is a mix of many different influences, clichés etc which pissed me of a bit (especially the lord of the rings rip off is obvious)
Same as Mass Effect it is planned to have 3 Chapters (Games), so you have sort of a cliffhanger at the end. The story wasnt that surprising, but not that bad, imo.

The game has it's potential, I'd say it's worth the money.
 
Astiaks said:
Okay guys. I might want to spend my money on this game. But my question is: Does the game have memorable characters and a good story? Is the story good enough to suck me in?
How is the story and the setting compared to a game like The Witcher for example? Because i really loved The Witcher game.
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if you're into fantasy rpg's you're probably gonna enjoy it. it's not as dark and "mature" as The Witcher, but a bit more so than most other games in the genre.

not much more can be said that hasn't already been said in this thread. it's your typical Bioware game. the story is good, although full of clichés. you will remember the characters, but only after comparing them to other characters in other games which they will remind you of. combat will be tough at the start but will pretty much only getting easier the further you get (although I don't know if this is true until the very end of the game yet).

the biggest risk you're facing is probably the same as me and many others: the game will get too easy at higher levels and the dungeon crawls will be one too many.
 
I happen to enjoy it, still after gathering up all the allies; the dwarves, elves, mages and humans. I only have the final part left now I guess.

I like the main story so far, and some of the twists there. But then again, I liked Mass Effect, and it's basically the same shit (they said it was the new shit but...). I feel that if you liked mass effect you are going to like this. It's just as 'epic' as ME, and some of the quests (especially the side quests) are just as epically meaningless like ME.

Quest: Oh noes, darkspawn has attacked villagers; go and investigate!

*you go to the spot on the world map*

And what you end up doing is killing 10 random darkspawn in a small enclosed area filled with dead bodies. Return for reward. :|
 
Thanks for the comments people.
From the above posts i can understand that the game is pretty much what i thought it is:

-Happy cliche fantasy setting(unlike The Witcher which had a dark and unique world)

-Boring sidequests

-Monotonous Dungeon Crawl crap

might give it a try once the price has dropped though.

damn, why did The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf got cancelled? :(
I wanted to play that game on the ps3 so bad. Now i am left with my ps3 and my netbook. My damn 8800 ultra died on me :(
 
Phil the Nuka-Cola Dude said:
I can't think of any interesting dungeon crawls. If anything, there was way too much, way too long dungeon action.
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Fixed.

Don't get me wrong, the game was alright. The story and setting were cheesy, and yet I liked it. But good god, I'm sorry, the gameplay was monotonous bullshit, and the Deep Roads were too much to bear with when combined with Orzammar's endless, pointless fetch quests.
 
Phil the Nuka-Cola Dude said:
I really wouldn't call the setting "happy" and I can't think of any boring dungeon crawls. If anything, there wasn't enough dungeon action.
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On the other hand I found every area and every bloody quest filled with unnecessary boring filler fights.

I really loved Icewind dale as well as Baldur's gate series, so I'm not against a lot of fighting and dungeon crawling, but there you always had different fights and enemies. In DA you constantly fight against same enemies just scaled to your level.
 
Hamenaglar said:
In DA you constantly fight against same enemies just scaled to your level.
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And they're constantly laughing like idiots. They sound like Jabba the Hutt with emphysema. Apparently being a Darkspawn gives you a permanent case of the giggles.
 
coliphorbs said:
Phil the Nuka-Cola Dude said:
I can't think of any interesting dungeon crawls. If anything, there was way too much, way too long dungeon action.
Click to expand...

Fixed.

Don't get me wrong, the game was alright. The story and setting were cheesy, and yet I liked it. But good god, I'm sorry, the gameplay was monotonous bullshit, and the Deep Roads were too much to bear with when combined with Orzammar's endless, pointless fetch quests.
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I actually enjoyed the dungeon parts as well (referring to Phil), and wished them to be longer. The many side-quests are monotone, but some do have intriguing stories, and I don't mind doing them in interesting settings such as new areas during the main quest.

And I wouldn't call it a happy fantasy cliche setting. It's not as far out there as you'd might like, but it's still not *that* bad.

It's like a good hollywood movie. It might be shallow as fuck, but you would want to watch it again; if that is your thing. This is coming from a guy who view Con Air and Face/Off as classics though.

And I think I have seen The Running Man 6 times. I wonder if this might undermine my judgement :P
 
Deadman87 said:
It's like a good hollywood movie. It might be shallow as fuck, but you would want to watch it again; if that is your thing. This is coming from a guy who view Con Air and Face/Off as classics though.
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I dunno man, I don't watch shallow Hollywood movies more than once, unless I have to. And I certainly won't be coming back to re-play DA anytime soon if I ever complete that very last dungeon crawl.

It's not bad, but the sag part is that Bioware used to make games that were actually engrossing and replayable, and the trend as been towards reducing quality.
 
Just finished the game.

All in all, not bad, well, pretty good actually. After some time it becomes highly noticeably though that they've consciously 'spaced' their quest-time and kill-time. Every important mission starts out with a nice amount of conversation. After that, you end up doing quite a hell of a lot of dungeon crawling. They seem to have tried to put as much of the dungeon crawling in as possible, and then interrupt it at times with a few nice encounters, and end with the crawl just before it gets boring. Sometimes they overdid it though, and then the endless corridors of endless encounters starts to become a drudge.

This isn't all that bad, dungeon crawling is a big part of such games anyway. But they should've camouflaged it better. Most levels are obviously artificially made so as to last as long as possible. In the mage tower, every new floor makes you go all around the sodding thing, in other levels barricades, heaps of stone or whatever nonsense are placed in strategic spots just so as to draw more time from you, or, to voice it better, to maximize the amount of gameplay per load/level.

The voice acting is good, the combat is good, and the story is pretty decent apart from being very much not-that-gray. The art at times is quite stunning, which makes me a bit sad when I find out that the camera is so uselessly limited when zooming out. I seriously want more angles than just one. If anything, they should've hired better level-designers so as to create levels with a more...natural plan to them. Just not placing doors and a few more walls, and making the argument that some places just have shitty architecture would've made a more convincing argument than placing random amounts of debris that magically blocks your passage.

Mild spoilers.
[spoiler:3ade909fe0]
Oh and they should've made the grey wardens more...well, grey. Seriously, what makes them grey now is a bit of demonic blood, the occasional murder of new recruits, and the opportunity for sacrifice. If anyone was gray its Loghain, whose 'ends justifies the means' makes him a far more interesting character than most of the other one-sided morality crusaders. Granted, the game gives one a nice opportunity to be a Loghain-like character, if you'd choose for the werewolves, for the golems, and such. But the problem is that this doesn't really give any advantage. The final battles are a pushover. If truly I had had a need for the army that I was given in the end, and would've benefited from going with stronger but more evil choices, just so as to win from a greater evil by using lesser evils...well, that would've been interesting. Right now you can just stomp through Ferelden, be good all the way, and have no problem whatsoever doing it.

Having the ability to be good and consistent with your choices is not the problem though. But I dislike that being good isn't hard at all, and only in a few moments is it questionable what 'the good' thing to do actually is. The story would've been more interesting had king Cailan been a miserable commander who, wanting to do good and act for glory, turns out to lead everything into destruction. Seriously, they should've just given the player character a role closer to Loghain's, or one of his supporters, with the choices he had to make. A few grey warden collaborators on the side of Loghain would also have been nice. They would've had to not make Loghain blame grey wardens then though, which was politically speaking a stupid move anyway. There was a serious potential for grey-ness on the side of Loghain. The current version should've named them white wardens, who ride griffins and have a moral compass equal to Jesus.
[/spoiler:3ade909fe0]
 
I played the game and it reminded me too much of the Neverwinter series which I frankly ... dislike to be polite. It gets boring very quickly and story isn't that good to be honest. Graphics are remarkable but who cares about them in an RPG game. I still prefer Morrowind or Gothic over this. But if you like fairy RPG and/or NWN series, go for it. Otherwise, I recommend playing Risen instead of this (if you want to buy a new game).
 
Risen had a fuckton of bugs. At least dragon age does have some interesting characters(the combat can go either way, but i dig the rtwp system)
 
sydney_roo said:
Otherwise, I recommend playing Risen instead of this (if you want to buy a new game).
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I actually had a lot more fun with Risen. I recommend playing both though, they're quite different from each other.
 
@ Edmond Dantès

That's how Bioware games have been since NWN. You go chat for 30 minutes, that go dungeon-crawl for 3 hours.

The camera does get annoying on small maps (think random encounters in Denerim...). Well, at least they let you zoom all the way out on PC. From what I heard console players had to play it all in 3rd person view.

Very much agreed on the greyness... It was sort of sad that they tried so damn hard to make the only gray character look like ebil.
 
Pablosdog said:
Risen had a fuckton of bugs. At least dragon age does have some interesting characters(the combat can go either way, but i dig the rtwp system)
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It's true but not any huge ones and the story and gameplay overall really makes it up to you. Gothic II also had heaps of bugs but it didn't stop me from completing it 5 times.
 
I didn't experience many bugs at all in Risen. all I can remember were some graphical glitches that went away easily.
 
I never liked the way Neverwinter Nights did stuff. The story, especially of the first (never finished the second out of boredom) was so ludicrous and predictable it had me in agony. Pretty much the moment I saw him I knew the paladin-dude was an evil guy, just like all of his paladin cronies giving 'blessings'. That was like a textbook error on the usage of stereotypes. And how the story went with that female paladin was equally stupid. God, there wasn't a single redeeming point about the entire story I think. And the only character I remember as interesting was the pirate/swashbuckler fellow who did the stuff he did for kicks and fun.

Dragon Age at least tries to go further than that. It often fails horribly and only gives the impression of complexity while being pretty shallow. But a good illusion of complexity is often the same as complexity itself. Well, as long as you don't start reading up on stuff, or try out every option. The Witcher did the grey stuff better, probably because the developers and story-writer had a more grey view of the world to start with. Bioware just loves to tout greyness as a slogan, but they can't help ending up with more refined black and white scenarios each time they give it a shot. At least they've got that down pretty well, but it severely limits them in their possibilities. The betrayal at the beginning was mandatory for example, because otherwise they simply couldn't make sense of why Loghain was actually evil, which their idea of the entire story required him to be. And that betrayal itself was simply ludicrous and stupid, since Cailan had as of yet not proven himself to be a real danger. That's just bad storytelling. A story has to flow naturally, not be forced to go a certain way because that is what you'd like to end up with. If you'd really want the betrayal at Ostagar, then make it plausible, make it flow to that end, either beforehand or afterwards, instead of making it seem an act of insanity. I liked how they pointed out the history of the Orlesian occupation in which Loghain played a central role, but if that was his motive, then make his motive revolve around it, instead of making it a side-matter only to be mentioned once. Had they handled all that better, they could've finally done something games usually abhor: give you the possibility to join the villain so as to battle a greater enemy. But then again, bad storytelling is becoming pretty much commonplace, with shows like Heroes lowering the bar every episode.

I like that they've thrown out the morality meter in Dragon Age though, unlike back with KotOR, Mass Effect, Jade Empire. It puts more emphasis on your companions, but sadly the world itself still doesn't give a rats ass about what you end up doing.

Morrowind...I never really liked the story part of Morrowind. The game itself is nice, but the story had too little complexity, too little feeling in it. All the characters I met were cardboard cutouts, with only a few occasional gems that sparkled in the mud.

Gothic on the other hand, damn, that was a good solid game. Played through it twice, once with the Old Camp and Gomez, and once with the swamp pot-smokers. Wonderful atmosphere, a bit of a simply story at times, but well brought and executed. Never played II, or III, or Risen, but I'll do so one of these days.
 
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