Dragon Age Origins & 4E

[Scipion_Emilien]

That fight is hard. It was my first fight were I needed to use potion to end it. Fortunately, not all fight in the game are that hard.

[Jester of the FoS]

Managed to get a chance to play yesterday. Had to get back on the horse and made attempts 11 and 12 on the darn tower.
Set-up my tactics this time, and tried a change of approach, and also used the wizard's spells this time (flaming weapons, shield for him) and put ice/fire arrows on my archers. Went much smoother.

It's a HARD game at times, but alot of people like that.

[Brock Marsh Runoff]

In fact, I see a resurgence of Dark Fantasy in the lasts years, and can't help but ask: why? Was there a change in pop culture that made a shift from High to dark fantasy?

I've been thinking about the same thing, recently. Just so I don't throw this thread off track, I'll post a new topic about it in The Dark Beyond.

Anyway, Dragon Age rocks. The fights are pretty brutal, but in my experience it's all about learning how to keep the bad guys herded up. Cone of cold has saved me plenty of frustration.

[tryst_91]

I love dragon age! I tend to have a tactic minded way of banging through the level anyway so i don't generally have much of a hard time with it. It is pretty much pause the game and see what works best were for me.

My Char is a warrior and I have died only a hand full of times... mostly because i wasn't paying attention at the time or there were just WAY too many things going on at once and I missed something.

It is a cool game and hopefully will find a good modding community to support it. The toolset itself is amazingly difficult to get your head around but is quite powerful once you do.

[HuManBing]

I finally caved and got this game after glowing reviews from friends. I've played about 20 hours and for me this is a game that does not deserve its great reputation.

It does, however, deserve a good reputation.

Plotwise, they've done a large amount of worldbuilding. Lots of factions, historical facts, and info about beasties and magics are tucked away in a Codex. For me, however, they will almost never get read - my interest in the game is not strong enough to go wading through a primer treatise. (This is interesting because the same designers made Mass Effect, a sci-fi game, and the Codex there was very interesting. I'm not sure why I like one and not the other. I suspect the Mass Effect sci-fi was unusual because it was carefully written to be "hard" sci-fi - at least vaguely plausible. Whereas Dragon Age Origins is Just Another Fantasy Setting Where Stuff Happens Because The Designers Say It Does.)

The characterizations are above average. You have people behaving about as stereotypically as you'd expect them to, with all sorts of situations requiring complex and contorted "only you can save us" rationales. Some of these are handwaved away by Codex plot devices but I didn't bother reading through them. (What, for example, is the difference between an abomination and a darkspawn? And do I really need to know this?) A few major characters do show real depth and they force you to take a nuanced view of human motivations. The character of Loghain is a good example.

Ruleswise, I applaud the decision to move away from DnD rules, which I think were constraining what prior CRPGs could do, and also limiting the accessibility of the game to gamers who weren't familiar with d20. The game still wrestles with the same problems DnD's designers faced: the balance between roleplaying and combat, and the difficulties of keeping the classes reasonably equal. DAO sticks with a class system and if you're looking to customize your character with cross-class abilities, you're going to be disappointed. This wasn't much of a problem for me though.

I have encountered numerous combats where I died several times before succeeding. I'm playing the game on Normal and you can go down to Easy - but this still strikes me as reaffirming the designer's weakness rather than exculpating it.

My character is a wizard named "Firan" and behaves pretty much as you would expect him to, with a name like that. Like several other games, Dragon Age Origins has a clear design bias that gives in-game rewards to characters who are: a) Lawful Good, b) sexually active with other NPCs, and c) like having dogs around. Given that my character is intended to be a) Lawful Evil, b) completely uninterested in sex, and c) cut the throat of the first dog he encountered, this is clearly going to be a sub-optimal runthrough.

Regarding party NPCs, you can treat them well or poorly. The catch is that treating them well will give them bonuses when they're fighting on your behalf, and treating them poorly will eventually cause them to leave (as will certain plot decisions later on). All of these essentially act as a huge limitation on the ostensibly freeform gameplay. You have freedom to choose to be evil or chaotic, but you'll suffer indirect punishment for it - so the only gamers likely to do this will be either too stupid to realize the drawbacks, or the ones so dedicated to roleplaying for its own sake that they don't mind the tactical disadvantage. I'm clearly not the former. It remains to be seen whether I'm the latter.

My opinion of this game started off utterly indifferent at first and slowly improved with time. Twenty hours in, I'm stuck in a series of combats that my mage has to tackle alone and which are taking a handful of attempts each before I prevail. The limit of my patience is usually three failures per attempt before I try to go elsewhere in the game world, but here I'm trapped in the area so I cannot leave. The limit of three still stands, meaning I usually load up the game once per day.

[Jester of the FoS]

Well, you can be quite evil at the game. Which is nice given so many early games defaulted to "hero", and there are a number of party members that will be quite happy if you go down the "evil" route.
The character development is a little harder than a tabletop game, but every game is like that.
I just enjoyed the darkness and hard choices. There were alot of catch-22 choices in the game or places where things didn't go well. The number of possible endings and options is impressive.

One of the players in my 4e homegame works at BioWare and says that this was planned as a D&D game, using a D&D ruleset. It was one of the ideas they had for a fantasy game using their own homebrew world. But as BioWare lost the D&D licence they opted to make their own ruleset.

[Jester of the FoS]

Just got the expansion and am getting back into the game and, man, did I forget how hard it could be at times. Especially how some monsters scale with experience. Playing the intro of Awakenings with undergeared new characters when I'm out of practice is lethal. And the game is very 2e/3e with the predominance of magic at higher levels. A good enemy mage can wipe you out effortlessly.

[HuManBing]

[A]s BioWare lost the D&D licence they opted to make their own ruleset.

It's done them a lot of good. The new ruleset they're using is lean and fast, without the usual designers' quirks and legacy vestigials in DnD. Much better suited for a CRPG.


I have stumbled across a surprisingly effective tactic for indoors spaces. One of my mages has Earthquake, which knocks people over. The other one has Death Cloud, which drains life over time. Both are area-effect spells which can be cast through obstacles and walls. I send my Rogue ahead, in Stealth mode, to sneak into a room with waiting enemies. She then returns and closes the door behind her.

Wynne casts Earthquake, knocking people over and keeping them from escaping. Firan casts Death Cloud. We wait a few minutes and then open the door. Problem solved!

[HuManBing]

Update:

I'm into the midgame now and it's gotten a lot better. The game's design is weakest when it's linear, and that's most of the early game. (A flaw that you can trace back through Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment too.) At that point, you're railroaded into whatever encounters the designers had for you, and if your party isn't very effective at resolving them, then you have no freedom to bypass it and try something else. Also, the focus at that point is very much on background Codex lore, and I'm not particularly interested in that.

Now that the game has gone to a more sandbox openworld style of play, most of the flaws inherent in a linear set-path style have disappeared. I'm still too weak to complete several areas I'd like to, but that's no problem because I can always come back later with more spells and tactics. Here, the narrative focus appears to have moved away from the "game contains a history lesson" Codex entries and more towards "these people across the realm have these problems - can you solve them?" which I find far more interesting.

[Jester of the FoS]

[A]s BioWare lost the D&D licence they opted to make their own ruleset.

It's done them a lot of good. The new ruleset they're using is lean and fast, without the usual designers' quirks and legacy vestigials in DnD. Much better suited for a CRPG.


I have stumbled across a surprisingly effective tactic for indoors spaces. One of my mages has Earthquake, which knocks people over. The other one has Death Cloud, which drains life over time. Both are area-effect spells which can be cast through obstacles and walls. I send my Rogue ahead, in Stealth mode, to sneak into a room with waiting enemies. She then returns and closes the door behind her.

Wynne casts Earthquake, knocking people over and keeping them from escaping. Firan casts Death Cloud. We wait a few minutes and then open the door. Problem solved!

I was fond of that. It gets a little harder when you fight enemy mages as they can really devastate your party and if the enemies aren't killed they'll all charge after Wynn (and not the person dealing damage). You need a good tank up there to attract the hits after or a readied fireball (knocks people over and quick cast, very nice spell).
Another tactic is a petrify/freeze spell followed by stone fist to take out a pesky white enemy.

[HuManBing]

Combat challenges in this game are very uneven. Some of the enemies scale up with your PCs' levels so they consistently provide a challenge. Other enemies don't, which means you'll steamroll them if you build yourself up first.

This basically means that in most areas, my party bowls through everything until it reaches a scaled enemy. And the scaled enemy will usually take out my entire party. Sometimes this is a contested TPK (total party kill) wherein we take a few of them with us. Other times it's a completely bloodless TPK where we won't take any of them with us and will just die ignominiously.

I'm at a place called the Brazilian Forest (which is apparently like a normal forest but with less foliage and considerably more pain) and we found a gravestone that will summon a load of badass undead to fight. I've been fighting them with a gang of spellcasters and we've been contested-TPK'd quite a bit.

I then decided to switch out my party. I'll keep Wynne, because she and Firan do well with the Earthquake-Death Cloud combo. But I don't need the other two spellcasters. Instead, I need tanks to control the battlefield and keep my spellcasters safe. I have to backtrack through two maps in order to be able to rest and regroup. I do so and get Sten and Alistair (fighters) in my party.

We go back to the painful Brazilian Forest and approach the gravestone. Before we can summon the undead to defeat them, however, we are set upon by four random living mages, who bloodless-TPK my entire party. Three times.

I have a suspicion that the undead fight is a scaled fight (meaning no matter how tough my people get, I'll always find them a decent challenge). I also suspect that the mage fight is not a scaled fight - they're pegged to a level much higher than my people.

I think I need to go level up before I can beat these mages. Fortunately there's a lot of other quests I can take so it's not like I have to XP-churn like I did back in Baldur's Gate 1 to get past Tarnesh.

[alhoon]

About playing evil and losing some of your chars... what did you expect? That's realistic.

About the tough fights, yes, some sidequests are next to impossible in low levels.

I enjoyed the game very much, but I stopped playing after a while, because frankly the game was TOO difficult. Like TPK at easy. I didn't want to play with elaborate strategies in easy to win fights with bandits. I'm waiting for a patch or something to make the game easier.

[HuManBing]

About playing evil and losing some of your chars... what did you expect? That's realistic.

Maybe I didn't make it clear enough. Playing evil will lose me almost all of my characters, including the most powerful spellcaster in the party (Wynne). There are a few characters who seem to like an evil leader (Zevron and Morrigan) but they're less bothered by good behavior than the good people are by evil behavior. From a viewpoint of "game balance" this doesn't even come close.

From a viewpoint of "realism" in games set during wartimes, this is suspect as well. War brings a significant level of moral elasticity under duress. Games like Far Cry 2, where the player is forced to make dubious choices - and these choices do not necessarily punish immoral behavior - are an excellent example of this. DAO is not.

Either way I'm building up my main character to be powerful enough (and depriving my allies of level-ups) so that I can do evil stuff and then kill them quickly when they inevitably and predictably revolt.

[alhoon]

About playing evil and losing some of your chars... what did you expect? That's realistic.

Maybe I didn't make it clear enough. Playing evil will lose me almost all of my characters, including the most powerful spellcaster in the party (Wynne). There are a few characters who seem to like an evil leader (Zevron and Morrigan) but they're less bothered by good behavior than the good people are by evil behavior. From a viewpoint of "game balance" this doesn't even come close.

Either way I'm building up my main character to be powerful enough (and depriving my allies of level-ups) so that I can do evil stuff and then kill them quickly when they inevitably and predictably revolt.

You consider the old lady Wynne more powerful than... MORRIGAN?!?!?
And the Tall guy with the two-handed sword is honorable... but evil. I think I may lose him if return to the game and I keep acting good. And he's the best fighter.

So, nope, evil chars are the best IMO.

[Jester of the FoS]

A couple characters (Alistar and the red-head) have the opportunity to be more morally-grey after you do their loyalty mission. In the meantime, you can rely on gifts to keep people happy and in your party (I'd recommend cheating and checking a Dragon Age wiki for which gifts work best for who).
But I agree there could have been more immoral characters that you had to push to grey. But, really, given you get two spellcasters (damage and healing) yet two rogues, three fighters, plus dog (and Shale who is down-loadable but pure awesome), you end-up lacking in options for spellpower.
If you keep going evil you'll probably lose Wynne, so it's good to prepare and slip a few healing spells for Morri (and force field as a healing substitute) and train someone in using herbalism so you can have plenty of poultices.