Dragon Age: Origins

[wiggum]

Well after my experience with Oblivion (played it till my Xbox literally burned the disk) I told myself getting this game would be a mistake. That and I didn't like Mass Effect, which I'm told is similar to this game.

In the end though I simply couldn't resist and I bought it yesterday after work. I just got past the prologue so I can't say for sure, but all signs so far point to this game getting wiggum's seal of approval.

I'll admit though that I was expecting an experience much closer to Oblivion, this seems to be a bit more old school to me, but still pretty fun. I know it just came out yesterday, but I'm sure there are some people on this forum have played a lot of this. So what do you think?

[ArtZealot]

I hated oblivion for whatever reason, also hated neverwinter nights 2. When i say hate, i mean i feel like my money was stolen from me. However, today i caved, and decided to go against my better judgement and give dragon age a chance, and i really like it! it's got good gameplay, the voiceovers are great, the story isn't cheesy and doesn't try to be funny like so many fantasy games of similar genre do. It's great, i can't complain. I bought it today and probably put about 5-6 hours into it already.

[wiggum]

I'm actually a huge fan of the old dungeon crawler style RPG, I think that is why I loved Oblivion so much, there is just something so cool about wandering around and discovering random dungeons to explore, especially since you never know what you'll find.

Dragon Age seems to be a bit more structured, but still fun. I'll admit after my first post I started getting more than a little frustrated with the combat system, but I just set the difficulty down a bit and everything has been fine since then.

[Costau]

I want to get the toolset to work, but I'm getting that annoying MYSQL error when I'm installing it...

The game is great so far, but I'm a Modder first, not a playa.

[ChaoticKnight]

The lack of multiplayer kinda killed it for me. I don't often enjoy shelling out a full 50$ for a single player game. I'll probably wait to try it

[Ninjerk]

The fact that Bioware made it has honestly given me pause. The whole "variable linearity" approach gets old after a few games (especially if you try to freshen it up with a Cassandra complex).

[Kanga]

I love oblivion and am still playing it. I just tried risen, and bought it back to the shop the next day and traded it in for dragon age. So far the things I like about it are the fast loading times and smooth runnings :) The characters look great and being able to not only choose class choosing the look of your alter ego is great fun. The story line is pretty good and I really like the voice acting. The text is legible on my not so HD lcd screen. With risen I couldnt read a freakin thing.

Things I don't much like,
I am in a pipe again, feeling like wolverine where I cant fall to my death due to a collision corridor. The witcher suffers from this too. No roaming here.
In the cut scenes you see there are no normal maps on huge poly areas meaning they are flat as pancakes, in camera for a long time and look simply awful. The vegetation also sucks after oblivion, but this is probably where we get the fast loading and stutter free play from.
The combat system blows. I am being magnetised to a frontal view most of the time, or some view I dont want which means I am slashing, but at what I dont know. Push the button, wait a bit, push again, eek.

Indeed feels a bit dated but I dont feel ripped off and suspect after a bit I will begin to forget the cons.

Cheers

[henrinaiara]

Is Dragon Age really that good or is it overrated?
Im still to decide whether to buy it or not :(

[tobbA]

I'm loving it... A lot better than that overrated piece of somethingsomething called Oblivion ;P

Been playing for three days straight. Not much drawing done those days... Think I'm gonna make myself take a pause now :P


"Things I don't much like,
I am in a pipe again, feeling like wolverine where I cant fall to my death due to a collision corridor. The witcher suffers from this too. No roaming here.
In the cut scenes you see there are no normal maps on huge poly areas meaning they are flat as pancakes, in camera for a long time and look simply awful. The vegetation also sucks after oblivion, but this is probably where we get the fast loading and stutter free play from.
The combat system blows. I am being magnetised to a frontal view most of the time, or some view I dont want which means I am slashing, but at what I dont know. Push the button, wait a bit, push again, eek."

I agree on a most of those points. Though after a while you start overlooking it. The graphics might be techincally underwhelming, but imo design wise it's a lot more appealing than oblivion. No free roaming is a little annoying but doesn't really hamper the experience on the whole.

Don't know what you're doing in the battles (I guess you're playing the console version?) but I always zoom out to overhead view and have no trouble making things out for the most part.

Probably the best w-rpg since KotOR imo :)

[Kanga]

Don't know what you're doing in the battles (I guess you're playing the console version?) but I always zoom out to overhead view and have no trouble making things out for the most part.

Yep, on xbox, likes to keep me workstation clean ha ha :)

I am finding the characters so attractive I am just going to keep playing it. Really not a waste this one.

Cheers

[wiggum]

Well I've given up on it. I stopped playing for a couple days and when I can back I just couldn't get into it, and all the problems I had with it before seemed to amplifiy themselves.

So I traded it in and Decided to retry Mass Effect, remember when I said I didn't like that game? I've changed my mind, I don't remember it being this good.

[Jason Rainville]

Well I've given up on it. I stopped playing for a couple days and when I can back I just couldn't get into it, and all the problems I had with it before seemed to amplifiy themselves.

So I traded it in and Decided to retry Mass Effect, remember when I said I didn't like that game? I've changed my mind, I don't remember it being this good.

I think I also gave up on it, at least for now. Same situation, just stopped playing and nothing really got me back. I was playing a section of the deep roads, basically the dwarven underground highway, and battle after battle after battle... just got boring. The strong characters and somewhat funny dialogue couldn't get me liking the boring combat.

Bioware lore is really bothering me too. Morrowind (and even oblivion) did lore right, having you collect books both fiction and nonfiction that you could read. Each of those books was fun to read and concise. Having reams and reams of white on black text to read through is about as fun as the incredibly redundant dialogue common in bioware games.

And before anyone harps on me for wanting all sorts of action all the time in my games, look up Galciv 2 and blades of exile. Loved those games, and they have no and little action respectively.

[Straight Edge Ryan]

I played it for a couple of days and at first I didn't really like it. The controls were a bit awkward for me, I kept wanting to use the mouse to look around, like in Mass Effect. I got to that point in the tower early on in the game where you have to re-light that flame and I kept dying so I was just like "screw it" and I focused on playing Borderlands instead.

Anywho, came back to it and I'm enjoying it more. Maybe it's just me but it seems like the crux of RPGs in general is that for the first hour or so, they're usually pretty boring. All the time spent accclimating the player to the plot, controls and general gameplay seems to bog it down. But I remember not really liking Mass Effect the first time I played it, then the more I played it the more I loved it

[wiggum]

I get the impression that my patience wouldn't have run out so quickly if I was playing this on the PC with the ability to zoom out. I agree with Rainville though, it just takes too long to get into the story, and once you do the combat really isn't engaging enough to keep me occupied.

I've continued playing Mass Effect, and it does a lot of thing right that Dragon Age: Origins just isn't very good at. The dialogue isn't boring (because they bothered to record dialogue for the main character, I was surprised by how big a difference this made to me), and the combat, while a little wonky, was usually pretty fun. I've fallen in love with the lift ability, an enemy just floats up and then you can shoot it (I kind of wish Shepard would yell "PULL" just before using this ability).

I love it so much that I actually went back to the store and pre-ordered Mass Effect 2.

[Straight Edge Ryan]

Been playing this game for days now and I can say I have 1 main gripe about it: I frequently find myself in situations in which I feel like I can't win. On more than one occasion I've had to send one guy out to a horde and just attract one or two of them, and lead them back to the others so we could pick them off one by one. It's a fun game but it's frustrating at times. I think I've hit quick save and quick load more times on this game than any other

[tobbA]

Yeah... I agree. The difficulty gets really high from time to time... Altho I've found it's mainly about having the right tactics. Make sure to slay the mages first because they usually deal a shitload of damage and so on... Having a good healer in the party definately helps too.

[Azurs]

It took me a while to get used to this game but I simply enjoy it! I would have liked to have seen a multiplayer function like in Neverwinter Nights but I suppose that was never likely to happen.