Dragon Age Origins & 4E

[HuManBing]

Yeah, if I could go back and try it again, I would definitely have gotten Blood Mage - for all the reasons you point out. It sounds like a lot of fun.

Fortunately in the add-on there is a thing you can get which basically allows you to rewrite your character from the ground up. I'll be doing that.

[Isabella]

I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure if you unlock a specialization with any character/save, it unlocks them for all your instances - so if you made a new character and got the Blood Mage specialization you'd be able to train Firan into it.

At this point the complete rebuild is probably the way to go, though.

[alhoon]

Start over again?
It is good but not THAT good.

[HuManBing]

It is good but not THAT good.

This is my sentiment about the entire game actually.

It's a good example of game design that breaks away from DnD rules. It's also got above-average plotting (what with the shades-of-grey treatment of Loghain). However, it plunges you headfirst into a whole compendium's worth of background lore with very little acclimatization - much like most other CRPGs have done before it. And combat is still very finicky and dependent on micromanagement even with the tactics.

They did a good job of the 3D models and animations, and the voice acting is superb. But they still have problems with difficulty curve vs. sandbox style play, and the extensive focus on item bartering that most of its predecessors have too.

The game lies firmly in the "worth playing" category. It does not belong in the "OMG MUST PLAY" category.

[HuManBing]

As it turns out, Firan has only been a Spirit Healer for about 30 mins of gameplay. So reloading is not that redundant.

I went back and got the Blood Mage specialty from the desire demon, then reloaded. Firan is a Blood Mage/Arcane Warrior now. Happy days!

[alhoon]

As it turns out, Firan has only been a Spirit Healer for about 30 mins of gameplay. So reloading is not that redundant.

I went back and got the Blood Mage specialty from the desire demon, then reloaded. Firan is a Blood Mage/Arcane Warrior now. Happy days!

Should have warned you...
That's a BROKEN combo!
BROKEN as in Solo finishing the game. The designers admitted they botched there.
If you want a breeze in combat and to concentrate in the plot use it. If you want a challenge with that combo, push the difficulty to hard and travel alone. That's how broken it is. The designers tried for more than a year to balance it out but I don't know if it's possible.

A friend of mine with that combo, killed the dragon, alone.

[HuManBing]

I'm glad to hear it. Personally, I found the combat harder than I'm used to. Part of this may be the fact that the mechanics of the game "handwave" the penalties of falling in battle so it's much less serious than in prior games. (In earlier games, you're dead, dead, dead. In this game, you're merely "knocked out" and come back with a lasting injury... assuming at least one person survives in your party.)

Ironically this causes combat in this game to be quite a bit tougher than in earlier games, because the designers have now made enemies upwardly scalable to your level, and then they set the challenge level pretty high so almost every fight has a considerable chance of knocking out your entire party. Because falling in battle no longer removes a character from your party like it used to in older games, it's something the designers are bolder about doing. This results in some fights I've had to try multiple times or even just avoid altogether because they nearly always result in a TPK. Based on my difficulty in getting through the game, I have no qualms about using a shortcut placed there by the designers.

Your concern for my enjoyment of the game is touching, though.

[HuManBing]

I am probably stuck. The warrior level-up system has a skill path you may choose, which focuses on damaging golems. It takes about four level-ups to get all the relevant skills.

I went to the dwarf underground Anvil quest with warriors who had no anti-golem skills. There were few golems until one big massive end of quest battle, where I am facing one big golem, two medium ones, and two weak ones. Without anti-golem skills, my party collapses quickly. I'm basically being punished for not choosing anti-golem skills over the past four levels. In my defense, I will say that there were very few golems around and taking those skills seemed like a wasteful specialization lacking in general utility

In fact, let me rephrase that. Taking those skills would undeniably have been a wasteful specialization lacking in general utility.

Worse still, I can't rearrange my party to be more combat-centric. The plot locks you into the underground area, preventing party rearrangement.

If I reload at an earlier save point, which is looking increasingly necessary as time goes by, I will have to reload before the "no exit" point of the level to rearrange my party. Or worse still, I may have to reload at the start of the entire sodding dungeon in order to have enough level-up opportunities to acquire the anti-golem skills for my warriors.

I told my brother about this and he said he honestly does not understand why I'm having so much difficulty with this game. It is a sentiment I heartily share.

Everybody else seems to enjoy it greatly and recommends it as a very well crafted game. And for some reason it's just me who stumbles into every last bumbling "bad design" loophole, demonstrating that the design studio still has not perfected the genre by any stretch of the imagination. What is this perfect game everybody else is playing? Can I have a go on it some time?

This is just the latest of a series of bad design decisions that I'm amazed the game even shipped with. If a live DM tried this sort of arbitrary BS on a gaming group, they'd end up with a TPK and a quiet agreement among the players never to let that DM run a group game again. Exactly how Bioware got such a good reputation when they're putting out games like this is a mystery to me.

Maybe the majority of CPRG gamers today never actually played a tabletop game and hence don't know any better.

[Jester of the FoS]

Everybody else seems to enjoy it greatly and recommends it as a very well crafted game. And for some reason it's just me who stumbles into every last bumbling "bad design" loophole, demonstrating that the design studio still has not perfected the genre by any stretch of the imagination. What is this perfect game everybody else is playing? Can I have a go on it some time?

This is just the latest of a series of bad design decisions that I'm amazed the game even shipped with. If a live DM tried this sort of arbitrary BS on a gaming group, they'd end up with a TPK and a quiet agreement among the players never to let that DM run a group game again. Exactly how Bioware got such a good reputation when they're putting out games like this is a mystery to me.

Maybe the majority of CPRG gamers today never actually played a tabletop game and hence don't know any better.

I got stuck. Alot. Always resisted the temptation to slip the difficulty down. It's often about finding the chock-point on the map or trying a different strategy. Oh, man did that game frustrate me at times. The hardest parts I found was against plain old human mages with fireball.

Does it affect everyone? Yes and no. They made three different versions of the game (PS3, Xbox360, and PC) with some gameplay differences between the console and PC variant. This varies the difficulty in a few places.

I remember that fight being a nasty one, but I had much more troubles with the brood mother. Musta been party set-up. I had the DLC "Shale" character who can be pretty badass.

[HuManBing]

I totally hear ya - sometimes having just one bit of level architecture to hide behind can save your entire party. (There was a Blood Mage and Genlock fight just before the Brood Mother, and they kept on flattening my party... until I discovered there was a wall to hide behind and make them come piecemeal to us.)

In a certain sense, I like the deadliness of the fights, but past a certain point the game walks a very fine line between "a refreshing combat-deadly view of fantasy gaming" and "you'll be reloading this fight a dozen times before you succeed".

I'm not sure how you can remedy that though. :/ A live GM could drop hints and allow some fact-finding ahead of time to tip off the PCs about gear they'll need or tactics they can use. But in a CRPG where there's limited adaptability and give-and-take between gamer and GM, you don't have that.

I have dropped the difficulty down to Easy and tried it once. We had a TPK, admittedly, but the margin of failure was very narrow. Only one golem remained standing when my final character bit the dust. I think I'll have to finish this one on Easy and then bump the level back to Normal for the rest of the game.

Assuming I can be arsed, which may take a while. Historically, I am not an easy gamer to arse. I lack arsing motivation and thus may be classed as Generally Unarseable.

[alhoon]

In a certain sense, I like the deadliness of the fights, but past a certain point the game walks a very fine line between "a refreshing combat-deadly view of fantasy gaming" and "you'll be reloading this fight a dozen times before you succeed".

As I said, I stopped playing the game because it was too damn hard.

[HuManBing]

That makes two of us then.

[Jester of the FoS]

I liked that it was too hard. Or rather hard but doable. Too many games I play are just too easy because they want the most number of people to play the game, to cash in with the casual gamer market that wants to play, beat, and move onto the next game.

[HuManBing]

I liked that it was too hard. Or rather hard but doable.

I would have liked DAO too if it had been one of those games.

Sadly, it wasn't. I sent my save game to my brother, who was the one who got me onto this game in the first place, and he agrees with me that I am essentially screwed because of a lack of support items and the choices I made in levelling up my characters. This is not the first part of the game I've encountered where the game became a tedious chore instead of a recreational pastime. It is, however, the first part of the game where success is effectively impossible.

I could reload to an earlier save, but that assumes I can regain enough momentum to continue, which is something of a heroically inaccurate assumption.

It seems like a lot of people loved this game and thought it was the best CRPG they've played in a long while. I honestly have no idea where they're coming from - for me it was so flawed that I have no interest in finishing it. There are interesting things they did with the game but ultimately I can't shake the feeling that I want my money back.

The saddest part of all this is I've enjoyed their games immensely apart from Baldur's Gate I, for which my disappointment has been vocally noted here before. My experience with DAO suggests that despite all the technological novelty in DAO, they're backsliding in design to BG1 days. I found BG1 so bad I was amazed they ever did BG2 and the rest of the games. After the debacle of DAO, they're back in the category of "designers I'm not paying for" once again.

This game has also convinced me that my tastes are fundamentally different from the mainstream, and it is no longer sufficient impetus to get me to buy a game merely because "person X or gamer Y likes it". Even if that person is somebody I hold in high regard, like my brother. :/

[alhoon]

This game has also convinced me that my tastes are fundamentally different from the mainstream.

That.

You're different and strange.


The game isn't flawed or anything, it's good (though not THAT good) but very difficult. It's not geared towards the average 25-30 years old guy that wants to bash a few things with a nice back story to relax after 8 hours of work. I can see some of those people, working in kinda frustrating jobs (customer service, taxi drivers, etc ) dropping the game after the first hour or so.