Holy god, BioWare, is there anything you don't do frighteningly well?

Yeah, make games. After Jade Empire and Mass Effect, they have two strikes with me. Dragon Age is their last chance to redeem themselves.

I'm going to try to get a copy to play this weekend. I hear it's got some serious sociological issues.

Well, I'm certainly hooked. While it might look like D&D lite at first, it's their best writing since KOTOR, with plotting to match. Sure, the graphics won't change the world, but any time graphics get prioritized over gameplay, it doesn't turn out well. I don't think Dragon Age made that mistake...

I know my opinion's not worth much of anything around here, but man, I love this game.

I'm looking forward to it. I just started replaying Mass Effect in preparation for the release of Mass Effect 2. Now I have a dilemma ... to continue or to abandon it and go get Dragon Age?

Why does life have to be full of such tough decisions?!

Considering you can probably beat Mass Effect in 10 hours, if you're enjoying it, I'd say stick with it. It won't take you long to plow through it, especially when you get to the point where your teammates can pretty much fight all your battles for you. Mass Effect is incredibly short for an RPG. My first play through I took my time and finished all the side quests and still finished the game in under 20 hours. My second play through I just tried to see how long it takes to play through the game without the side quests and clocked in at eight hours.

I know this thread is rather old now; but I must say, I just finished my second playthrough of Dragon Age and am tempted to try out another class and build. This is the first game to have gotten me so hooked in a long while.

Aelwyn
I know this thread is rather old now; but I must say, I just finished my second playthrough of Dragon Age and am tempted to try out another class and build. This is the first game to have gotten me so hooked in a long while.

I'd definitely recommend playing through each of the six different origin stories, even if you don't take them all beyond Ostagar. In each of them you'll recognise one or two of the minor characters from the parts they end up playing in the main story later!

I have a pair of friends who are current/recovering WoW junkies, and they've each played through the entire game 3+ times as human mages. I don't know if they've tried it any other way, but they're fascinated by the mage spell tree. That completely goes over my head; wasn't the whole point of the different origin stories to, you know, entice you into playing as more than one sort of character?

Then again, they might be enjoying it more than I am by virtue of the fact that they've not... stopped... playing it.

Bastards.

I think you guys just convinced me to go buy Dragon Age.
(I've read up a few reviews of it as well, after reading this thread.)

@ Isukun:
Why do you consider Mass Effect a strike? All reviews seemed to be positive about it.

mlai
I think you guys just convinced me to go buy Dragon Age.
(I've read up a few reviews of it as well, after reading this thread.)

@ Isukun:
Why do you consider Mass Effect a strike? All reviews seemed to be positive about it.

Ditto on the buying of Dragon Age and ditto on the Mass Effect strike, I also only read good things about it (oO) I still got to try it for myself though.

mlai
I think you guys just convinced me to go buy Dragon Age.
(I've read up a few reviews of it as well, after reading this thread.)

@ Isukun:
Why do you consider Mass Effect a strike? All reviews seemed to be positive about it.

Because he was only willing to play through the game twice?

I honestly can't think of a game that I didn't like that I beat, did all the sidemissions, and then replayed the main story mode.

I consider Mass Effect a strike for a number of reasons. One was that it was unreasonably short for an RPG. Bioware decided to try to add longevity by making it so you couldn't choose a new class with the New Game + mode, but also required you to play different classs to get all the achievements. Also, any unlockables required you to make a new character to use them, you couldn't use the unlockables on your current character. The game was too easy, about half way through you could basically have your teammates fight your battles for you. The story was incredibly cliche and purposely ends halfway through. If they had simply taken all three games and made them into one game, they would have had a full RPG on their hands instead of just part of one. Elevators. Planet exploration was boring and repetitive. They had four building designs for the side missions which they reused over and over again. The RPG elements felt forced and poorly implemented in the game, while the shooter elements felt like something just slapped together. The cover system was seriously flawed. The dialog wasn't very interesting for the most part and the story really didn't have enough branches to make it worthwhile to play through over and over again. The PC version is a little bit better than the 360 version, but only because the controls don't suck as hard.

Well, that convinces me not to buy Mass Effect. I was against buying it anyways, after reading that it's an action RPG. I'm pretty much sick of action RPGs and long for a return to the turn-based genre.

I've bought Dragon Age and have currently played it for 1 day. I think it's a great game and I intend to buy all the downloadable content, as soon as I figure out a way to pay Bioware while being in another country.

Story:
I am very immersed in the plot. The game world and bg history are all suitably epic and detailed. Nothing corny or cliched, except for intentional genre-humor such as fighting giant rats. So far, I've been surprised and emoted at major plot points.
You mileage may vary, because this is the first Bioware RPG I've ever played, and the last USA RPG that I've played is Pools of Darkness (Forgotten Realms Pools of Radiance series, the 2D 8-bit one not the "recent" polygons/rendered one).
This is my first/current character. I wanted to experience the "default" storyline first, so I made a human male ex-noble warrior, and I'm playing him straight (no being snarky at the King, etc). I'll try the antisocial dialogue choices later, when I use a rogue character.
You design your own character's face. I designed him as befits his "young NE European nobility" bg, so no facial tattoos or whatever. Also I edited him to look like his mother. So, here we have an Anglo pretty boy ready to right the wrongs and help the helpless. So far, he's getting his (and my) expectations smashed. The default story is pretty good up to now.



Graphics, Gameplay:
Graphics/sound are all very good AFAIC. Not as good as Crysis or Farcry or whatever (probably getting those titles' names wrong), but much better than WOW etc. The dialogue system kind of reminds me of Shen Mue, but the voice acting is much better. No character feels corny as he/she speaks.
What really stands out for me are the combat animations. Characters parry, hit, recoil, fall down, all in multiple smooth animations and in sync with their target/attacker. There is no "one death animation for all situations", or "looping fighting animation independent from target". Combatants seem to affect each others' animations.
I'm not a big fan of the pause-and-command play system, especially since you can't cue multiple commands in a string for a character, such as "Use this ability, then perform this other attack."

I just finished my first playthrough of DAO, as "lawful good" male human noble sword&shield warrior. Wow, what a game. There were quite a few unintended consequences to my decisions, despite me playing lawful good to the hilt. This game really tests your moral mettle.

I went the opposite spectrum now, starting my 2nd game as "chaotic neutral" female dwarf commoner rogue. Ha, the game is really well-scripted! I sort of had something in mind as I thought up the character, but both the character face creator and her dialogue options have molded her personality into something even better! LOL the mouth on this girl; she just doesn't know when to back off! And the voice I picked for her is perfect (snarky).

I'm very glad that I made her to resemble her family, accidentally, on the first try. I had to restart my human noble 3 times, because I didn't want him to seem adopted. Anyways, she looks like her deadbeat drunk mother, but didn't inherit her mother's vibrant red hair. Her docile elder sister turns out to be the rose of the family. Perfect.

I pickpocket EVERY SINGLE PERSON I come across, including the Gandalf of the game (and he caught me on it, gave me a long speech, but I keep trying, LMAO)! The only people I didn't (attempt to) steal from are my mom, my sister, and my dwarven wingman/buddy.

Has anyone played the Awakening add-on pack yet?
Is it as disappointing as most add-ons or worth getting?

I quite enjoyed DA:O and sunk nearly 60 hours into it for my playthrough (a female dwarf commoner rogue with a huge sense of fairness/duty but iffy ethics otherwise). I was surprised actually that I liked it so much, because I find RPGs, inventories, etc extremely tedious and quickly lose interest. At least with DA:O I was able to set combat to 'casual' and let the game do all its own tactics etc, I just wanted to enjoy the story and take unlikely people with me to hear their conversations.

I've just finished Awakenings as well. It was about 15 hours and just as good as the main story, but £30 for 15 hours seems expensive after DA:O's time investment. General thoughts:

1. Most of the new characters are really likable (except that elf bitch), but WTF giving back the one character I hated from DA:O? Give me back Alistair or the dog or something, not that stupid drunk dwarf. I earned my royal lover in DA:O dammit, I wanted him back in this one. >:[ Although Anders was an OK substitute, snarky mage with the same VA. Nathanial and Sigrun were surprisingly useful, Velanna I wish I had kicked to the curb. Justice I didn't get to play with enough to say much about, because I picked him up last.

2. You don't get very much time to interact with your new characters. You get 6 of them, but there's only 3 main plot missions (you pick up 1 more character each) before you more or less start the endgame. There are a lot of missions, but most of them centre around the 5 main plot locations and can be solved without leaving the area. There were a couple good puzzles though, and the environments and maps as usual were big and had interesting things going on. The plot missions were quite long and two of them had major changes halfway through, sort of like how in DA:O you got captured near the end of that rescuing the queen one.

3. I think they could have done a little better with the story. I had no real idea wtf was going on and who these new darkspawn were until one of them shows up right at the end and gives me a too-brief explanation. I really didn't feel quite as invested in the plot, but I guess that's expected with a short expansion?

4. There are a number of bugs, I experienced a few big ones and the wikia page mentions more. I never managed to get Velanna's or Sigrun's loyalty quests (something about triggering other quests/events before getting them), had to revert to an earlier save because two side quests are mutually exclusive and you can end up making neither side trust you, my "potent health poultices" all vanished at one point and even if I picked up or made new ones, they would not appear in inventory (thus I could not finish a quest), and... oh, with Justice I couldn't seem to avoid somehow maxing out his approval at +100 after asking him to join me, I didn't earn any more for gifts but he also didn't trigger the improved abilities. Wikia says the same thing can happen with Sigrun. I am hoping they release a patch with some bug fixes because some of them were pretty significant.

5. Wade made lots of cool stuff for me, I love that guy.

6. You level up and earn money much faster in this one. I started the expansion at level 23 and ended up nearly at 34. There is a lot more stuff to buy though, if you get into the runecrafting and want to buy some of the unique armor pieces. Some quests involve giving people money too.

7. There were a number of decisions to make which had implications in later plot pieces and the final battle. I think I somehow managed to cobble through one of the best endings (except one incident with a peasant riot and another murder) but I could see how you might manage to make it go pretty bad. It's a bit worrying at some points when you're asked to make a decision and you're not quite sure how it might go. I'm still not really sure if my ultimate decision at the end was a good idea or not, but I'm sticking with it.


So! It was good- but perhaps a little overpriced right now, and in need of some bug fixes. If you liked the original game, the expansion is another 10-15 hours of the same.

Oh, one other thing I appreciated was the ability to buy a 'tome' (infinite number, 6 gold each) and completely respec a character. It came in very useful and let me specialize some characters a bit better.

Thanks, SM! I must admit I loved DA: Origins, which had more than a few bugs of its own. I couldn't get the download for that golem character (Shale?), for example. Oh, and my favourite "glitch" of all was having Queen Anora eulogise Alistair for his heroic death when he was standing right next to her!

I'll definitely be buying Awakening at some point but, from what you say, I think I'll wait until I can find it on offer in a second-hand bin somewhere. Until then, I guess I'll just have to play ME a few more times!

If you're a very casual gamer who doesn't mind a few to a lot (your mileage may vary) of bugs, then yes Awakening is a good expansion for you, albeit the price seems steep: $40 for a 15 hour expansion... expansions are supposed to be cheaper since it's not a full game...

If you're a PC gamer even halfway knowledgeable about DAO game mechanics, and who uses mods, you'll want to avoid Awakening (and its required buggy patch 1.03) until a better patch for it comes out, and/or its price decreases. Stay with DAO patch 1.02a, the last stable patch for DAO.

Cons:

1. Patch 1.03, which Awakening requires, breaks more than it fixes. In fact it fixes almost nothing; mainly a transition patch for Awakening.
2. Patch 1.03 can break your gameplay mods (which fixes bugs Bioware cba'ed to fix), and introduces new bugs.
3. Awakening is relatively short, poorly balanced in gameplay, has some bugs which affect gameplay, and carries over unfixed DAO bugs.

Rants:

1. Rather than being an expansion to the original game, Awakening is more like a long stand-alone module. You cannot play Origins with the Awakening items/abilities; Awakening only works for Awakening.
2. All but 1 old chara carries over. Alistair shows up for all of 30 seconds and says something noncommital, even if he was your lover or best bud in Origins. Your "imported" deeds in the first game hardly gets mentioned, and has no gameplay effects, unlike ME2 which handled it much better and in-depth.
3. The Origins companion conversation system has been *streamlined*. You can no longer control the pace of who/when you want to talk to. You can love it, hate it, or not notice it, depending on what you look for in the game. Many gamers complain that they feel no connection to the DAA companions, unlike the DAO ones.


At the Circle Tower, Snotra teaching Sten the victory dance boogy woogy.


Unfortunately...


...Qunaris can't dance.


-- Did he just make a sprite comic?
-- T'is a sad day.

===============
APR 5, 2010

The game's graphics may not be cutting edge, and Mass Effect 2's characters may look better... but the Character Creator is more robust than I thought. Here's my new human mage that I created.

P.S. The forum's image autosizing is really messing up this picture. The game does not have jaggies or this low res.

I know I probably shouldn't be resurrecting this thread after all this time but I've finally got around to buying the "Awakening" add-on, and I have to say I love it!

I am missing some of the old characters but - perhaps because I waited so long to buy it - not as much as I thought I would. Oh, and I love Sigrun - whoever thought of introducing a perky, optimistic dwarf deserves some kind medal!

Okay ... this thread can go back to sleep now!

Mlai
Well, that convinces me not to buy Mass Effect. I was against buying it anyways, after reading that it's an action RPG. I'm pretty much sick of action RPGs and long for a return to the turn-based genre.

Buy it, it is cheap now and a great game. yes it does seem a bit short for an rpg but it is great. The game mechanics are quite streamlined but overall it is a magnificent game if not a deep as DA;O


Thanks DAJB I think I may well get awakening once I finish red dead redemption.

I still wouldn't recommend it, and even moreso now that the sequel is out. ME2 isn't even an RPG anymore, just a mediocre shooter with dialog trees and a pointless story which is quite literally all filler.

loved them both, but 2 was a bit of a disappointment as it was streamlined but I actually found the story of both more involving than that of dragon age origins. Well opinion is the name of the game here and there are both cheap now so people can get them cheap and see for themselves.