Well, I think from the numerous illogicalities and arbitrary design guffs I've run into during my playthrough, that statement doesn't apply equally to all players. For me, there is absolutely no doubt that the game is fundamentally flawed in several ways, and for this reason I will not be finishing it.
The funny thing is I wasn't even playing the game to break it, specifically. I was just playing it the way my character probably would. And somehow I ran into every last design pitfall that mostly everybody else avoided.
I hear people played the game through and completed it and thought it was great. I'm not sure which one I find more surprising: the fact that people liked it, or the fact that people actually could complete it and not get 100% stuck in badly-planned snarls like I did.
Firan's guide to playing the game as an evil character.
Being selfish and antisocial is easy! Just play the game while following the following simple axioms:
1. Never back down from a fight. If anybody questions your ability to kick ass and chew gum, disabuse them of their doubts. You're the Grey Warden and you're expected to save the world - if you can't even stand up for yourself, they've hired the wrong hero.
2. Never pass up a good chance to make a profit. You're the future hope of the world's salvation and they don't even give you a decent salary. Plus they expect you to pay for all the cool stuff you need to do your damn job. This is like working for a third-world government where your meager income can't even pay for your obligatory uniform. What do you do? Shake down the clients dammit. It helps doubly that in this case, the clients and your employers are largely the same set of people - i.e. everybody else in the world. "Nat' luuk at mee, good sir, I know natheeng!"
3. Never pass up a chance to put somebody in your debt. This is not the same as being nice to people. Being nice to people means you help them because it's the right thing to do, or you get warm fuzzies, or something equally cretinous. Putting people in your debt means helping them because then they'll owe you a favor. Note that sometimes this clashes with point 2. above (letting somebody pay you now entails a lesser opportunity cost than letting somebody pay you back later) so it's relegated to third place. If you owe me five bucks and you pay me now, it's still worth five bucks. If I let you pay me back a week later, it's no longer worth five bucks due to inflation. And if you owe me five bucks and I never see you again, then at least it'll have been worth the five damn bucks, due to being an arse. The most important application of this is in the Landsmeet - a dead enemy is useless, but a living enemy with a debt is very useful indeed.
4. Never ever subscribe to the Chantry's lies. The foreign-imported religion of Andraste is a patchwork of falsehoods and holds back the socioeconomic development of the world with dogmatic doctrines, half-baked rationalizations, and frankly abysmal hairstyles. There is no "cleric" class in the game and their religious mumbo-jumbo accomplishes nothing that the other classes cannot. Worse still, the Chantry actively suppresses magical development. If you ever come across holy artifacts of the Andrastean faith, stick some unpleasant bodily fluids in them and call it a day. You'll be doing the world a favor even if they don't realize it just yet. All who oppose you are featherheaded dimwits whose mothers dropped them suckling while they were climbing rubber vines and must therefore be destroyed.
5. Kill all mubari. Every last one. No exceptions. Dogs are not cute, they're not personable, and they're not your friends. They're greedy, simpleminded, lice-infested reeking beasts which have not even made the basic effort of evolving opposable thumbs, FFS. Why risk having some dumbass mutt take a crap in your boots while you're trying to save the world? Besides, as many Earth-based cultures have shown, dog meat is good and nutritious and there are many ways of cooking it so it doesn't smell nearly as awful as the living specimen does.
6. Screw everybody. Both figuratively and literally. War is hell, life is short, and pleasure is fleeting. May as well seize the opportunity with both hands and milk it for all it's worth while you still have it in you, etc.
Well... I would disagree on that if you play as that, you would probably either die or have to load a bazillion times.
Backing out of fights is essential to any good strategist from time to time.
What turned me off eventually from this game was how difficult it was. It was frustrating.
"You truly see what a person is made of, when you begin to slice into them" - Semirhage
"I am not mad, no matter what you're implying." - Litalia My DMGuild work!
"You truly see what a person is made of, when you begin to slice into them" - Semirhage
"I am not mad, no matter what you're implying." - Litalia My DMGuild work!
In Dragon age 2, you'll have the chance to kill bazillions of mubari wardogs.
"You truly see what a person is made of, when you begin to slice into them" - Semirhage
"I am not mad, no matter what you're implying." - Litalia My DMGuild work!
Well, more or less you play the hero. You may not be an actually good guy, but you're geared towards good. You could do some evil here and there and be selfish, but in the end most of the quests are done for the benefit of others (even if you ask payment for that). I.e. you can't go to the evil guy in the dungeon and say "Hi, I'm hiring. Do you want to work with me?"
Apart for that, I liked it. It spans the story of a hero covering many years. Moderate difficulty is just that: moderate. No more frustrating head banging because you were ambushed by 10 random brigands. Fights are more streamlined and I like the new way of action.
The game feels much more personal and since I got in the shoes of a "sarcastic chaotic good/neutral fighter" I find it more immersive than the previous.
Oh, and you can bang 4 NPCs.
If you want to play an evil mage, that game isn't for you. If you want to play a good fighter, then it is for you.
I haven't finished it yet, but I like it.
"You truly see what a person is made of, when you begin to slice into them" - Semirhage
"I am not mad, no matter what you're implying." - Litalia My DMGuild work!
I finally finished the first game, Dragon Age: Origins. The end boss fight was significantly easier than a lot of the mook fights leading up to it. This is not a bad thing - the difficulty level for the end boss was very good: I felt like there was enough leniency in the battle to allow me to try a few tactics and see how well it turned out, rather than "OMG I didn't get the sequence perfect, now my party's all dead". I did have a TPK once while fighting the end boss, and we prevailed on the second try. That struck me as being an acceptable difficulty curve - as opposed to the various scripted fights which killed me 6-12 times.
The game's strong points are in the plot (at least as concerns the people), and in the NPC characterizations. I genuinely cared about the NPCs - whether for comic purposes or to keep them as friends - and the plot had enough deception and knavery that the game deserves its mature-themed "Dark fantasy" label.
The so-so points are the spells/skills and the class progressions. They are an interesting study for balance, distinctiveness, and reward. In the end, I didn't use any rogues as they were too micromanagement-intensive, although I've been told that two-handed weapon users (Sten and the Secret Ally, the ones I kept) are among the least efficient builds for fighters in the game. The game has a similar dynamic to DnD 3E, where the selection of class-dependent powers is a fairly involved, longterm calculation. There is the freedom to pursue an unplanned generalist attitude towards character progression choices, but obviously a carefully calculated and efficient character build will be rewarded. This game scales up the challenge of enemy forces based purely by level, not by efficiency of progression decisions, and so a generalist (or somebody who's just new to RPGs, or somebody who wants to build a very specific character) will suffer proportionately more.
The weakest point of the game is the combat. Even with the logic mechanisms in place to automate ally behavior, combat in the game is difficult to the point where micromanaging is often the only way your party can avoid a TPK. The combat realizes the character models and enemies in 3D with a moveable camera, which is aesthetically significant, but it adds an extra level of complexity to wrestle with the camera and slows combat down quite a bit, especially when searching for enemy targets or casting area-effect spells. On the one hand, the graphics and animations are designed to offer a smooth, cinematic viewing experience. On the other hand, the limitations of the interface and the emphasis on micromanagement tend to force the player to pause frequently to make adjustments. Bioware is heading in the right direction with this technology, but it's not there yet - maybe in another few years. More egregious is the designer's assumption of difficulty - it was routinely too high for me, and one unavoidable battle (Caridin and the Golems) I flat-out could not win without pushing the difficulty down to Easy. (And even then it took me six TPKs before I finally pulled a victory.) This game allows fallen members to automatically return after the battle is over as long as one survives - I suspect the designers thought this gave them some room to ramp up the difficulty of each encounter because "somebody's bound to survive". Instead, this resulted in a rate of TPKs higher than anything I've ever seen in any CRPG. This brings back childhood memories of sadistic GMs who delighted in slaughtering their PCs.
Closely related to the frustration of combat is the in-game economy of expendable items. The crafting components of the various aid items are sparse, and merchants that sell them are few and far between. In my playthrough, my party was frequently resorting to support items to stave off yet another ignominious TPK, and the burn rate generally overwhelmed the collection rate. Trekking back across the overworld map to get back to the one single merchant in the Elven woods that sold healing components got old fast.
All in all, Bioware's come a long way since the days of Baldur's Gate. It's taken a very decent stab at scaling difficulty so it's constant with level, although I disagree with their default difficulty level. It's taken brave steps away from DnD's rules and branched out with its own, though there are still imbalances. Their story writing and their characterizations are top-notch, but then again that's nothing new - they always were good at those.
I didn't finish DA2 because of time issues but I didn't have any problems with the difficulty. It was nothing like the first game, where I would lose to a bunch of bandits that suprised me. Of course, said bunch of bandits would be like 20.
"You truly see what a person is made of, when you begin to slice into them" - Semirhage
"I am not mad, no matter what you're implying." - Litalia My DMGuild work!
