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So a couple of Dragon Age characters are appearing in Maxim along with the real-world models on which they were based. Maxim? Really, BioWare? It’s like… it’s like I don’t know who you are anymore.
I’ve been observing the strange, oversexed marketing campaign for Dragon Age and I played around with the puddle-deep character designer. I have to admit I wonder where they’re going with all of this. It’s possible this is an effort to reach out to the less nerdy demographic and get them into some RPG-esque games. That would be fine. But the other, more cynical way to look at it is that perhaps they noticed that Mass Effect – despite being their most shallow and character-thin story in a decade – has outsold their earlier, deeper titles. Maybe they noticed that, and decided they needed less roleplay and more sexay.
On the other hand, Susan Arendt over at the Escapist had nice things to say about it in her Twitter feed.
Really Shamus? Are you really pinning your hopes for an entire company on a slightly favorable remark in someone’s TWITTER FEED?
Yeah… Look, I don’t know. I’m just trying to read the signs here. We don’t have a lot to go on. Russ Pitts gave the thing decent marks at the Escapist, but I haven’t really calibrated myself against his reviews yet.
I really don’t want to believe that BioWare is just abandoning their branching RPG format for interactive Sex In the City on rails. Where else will we look for our next KOTOR? Is this the direction they’re going, or is this just a feint by marketing? Consider this infamous trailer: (Warning: Contains gore, nudity, swearing, and lack of character interactions aside from aforementioned gore, nudity, etc.)
| Link (YouTube) |
I don’t really object to them aiming a game at grownups. I’m not going to flip out if they decide that they need lots of particle-effects blood and bare polygonal asses to sell the thing. Just as long as they keep what has always made their titles great: Compelling settings, interesting characters, meaningful choices. Rutskarn makes a very convincing case that we shouldn’t get our hopes up for Dragon Age in this regard.
It comes out today. I guess we’ll find out soon. Dragon Age will probably be my next target, after Borderlands.
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I bet you won't even read all 105 comments before leaving your own.
First, and least important: typo in last sentance. “comer” should be “come”
On to my main point (hopefully without any major spoilers)…
I have to admit to enjoying it. Yes, there is a bit more railroading (Joining the Wardens is the perfect example. No matter what you say, someone dies. You see it in the Violence trailer).
Still, this is somewhat expected from a prologue, and from what I’ve seen in attempting to recruit the Dalish Elves, doesn’t have quite as tight a grip later (it is still there however).
Yes, the origin stories are somewhat disappointing. They are rather limited, especially in the human and dwarf choices (Noble or Mage, Noble or Commoner).
But I still get to choose how I act. I went City Elf, and there are a few sidequests that give you options – not just the evil asshole and good saint option, but at least one in between. Several dialogue trees do give you at least a few choices in how you respond to the marriage – maybe your character is excited, or you might have played through like me and decided “I’m not at happy with this, where’s my freedom going? Who decided this shit anyway?”
What I find rather annoying is the sidequests. I’m doing many of them for the money and experience and absolutely nothing else. Kill some bears? Sure! Murder some bandit gangs? Why not? Some kids mother is dead, lost in the wilds north of town? Yeah, I’ll loot that body for you and bring back an heirloom. Maybe one in four or five of these sidequests is at all meaningful – who wouldn’t give medicine which you can now make at that point to the elder? I’ve really only encountered two that seem to have any meaning so far – one in the origin involving a family being evicted, and one in Lotharing involving a merchant.
Still, I spent something like seven solid hours playing last night and I’m only 6% through, and I approve overall. The one thing I’m waiting on to make a definite choice as to how I feel about DA is whether any older quests influence what I do later in a noticeable way. I look forward to seeing your take on it however. Same with Rutskarn. It’ll be interesting.
The marketing for this has been horrible, however I did hear an interesting point about it. They’re not marketing it to you or me, they don’t need to; they’re marketing it at the kids who like Halo or whatever the latest greatest thing is. That it comes across as hateful and strange is unfortunate but it hasn’t put me off pre-ordering so it’s sort of done it’s job.
If you’re looking for other reviews, PCG UK gave it a big thumbs up, the review is online at CVG.
That trailer makes me NOT want to play DA. I don’t mind a little blood, but that’s excessive enough to make me go “ick” and not want to play. If I want to see blood sprayed all over the place I’ll go help some friends kill and process chickens (dinner!). I also prefer my games without any softcore porn, which is what it looks like it’s getting pretty close to.
Pararelevant Disclaimer: The only Bioware game I’ve spent any great length of time with was the first Neverwinter Nights game and its expansions, all of which left me unimpressed to the very core of my being. What little time I had with Baldur’s Gate was spent playing the German language translation. Weil Deutsch kein Muttersprache fuer mich ist, I can’t really speak for the quality of the writing or voice acting other than to say that I hope it was a lot better auf Englisch.
Actual Point of Comment: Despite not having seen the fabled brilliance of their writing ever shine through, I do think that, in the past at least, the flexibility of Bioware’s tech has been hard to fault. The Infinity and Aurora engines, though museum pieces in this day and age, are nonetheless quite impressive feats of gaming architecture. If nothing else, I’m interesting in seeing what the mod community does with DA:O.
When will we see soldiers fight in an intelligent way – in formation?
Instead of going Stupid Spartian and charging up like uncivilised barbarians…
That trailer is literally one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen. This, truly, will be BioWare’s eventual downfall.
Yes, well, I’ll let you know how I get on with it when the damn thing is finally released in the UK! It’s frustrating that the whole thing is sitting on my harddisc in encrypted form until Friday night, because the suits who make these decisions still haven’t realised how the world with internet works.
Same with TV shows, movies, CDs, etc. In a world where global communication is instant, there simply is no place for separate release dates. Unless you positively want to encourage piracy, that is.
I know, patience is a virtue. But this wait is brought on by all the wrong reasons.
People from other countries often express bemusement at Americans’ seeming preference for gore and violence over sexy content in their entertainment, and I kind of tend to agree with them. This trailer is a case in point – in two minutes and change, we get about 10 seconds of suggested foreplay, and 90+ seconds of impalements and splattering blood – and it’s the former that’s more controversial. I know which of those things I would rather look at – and which one I’d be more upset about if my 3-year-old son happened to walk into the room and see it.
This trailer, and the whole marketing around the game in general, doesn’t represent the game at all. It simply seems like the Marketing Dept realized that anyone who would care about this game (basically, people who love RPGs) already know about it. So instead of wasting their time seducing us a second time, they probably decided to try and lure in a completely new audience.
Played it a fair bit (games says I’ve completed about 12%), it’ll feel different from past Bioware’s game due to the new system they use, but otherwise it still feels like it was made by them.
(The blood splatter can be ridiculous, but at least you can still disable the gore option.)
The sexy in game portions equate to Characters in their underwear cuddling. It is tamer than Mass Effect in the showing department. Also the models appearing in Maxim are the real ladies that they model the characters after and it’s it was less of Bioware throwing them out there, EA were the ones that sent them to Maxim.
The RPG in this one is deep, as the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate it feels right.
I like Bioware, but I’ve always felt that their games never left me feeling like my choices actually impacted the world around me, dragon age seems no different. I’ll wait till this is $20, then pick it up.
There are two built-in kinds of people who will buy Dragon Age.
There are Bioware fans (such as myself) who will buy anything they produce. They simply do not make terrible games, and even their worst (Sonic RPG) was worth playing. These people do not need ads.
The second group are old school tactical PC RPG players (which I am also one of). People who grew up playing the gold box games, and then Infinity Engine games. This game feeds right into the legacy left by Baldur’s Gate and Planescape. These people are generally smarter, pickier consumers. They possess the ability to look beyond the ads, and see the actual real gameplay behind. For example, this Giantbomb quick look sells the game to these people far better than any ad (http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-dragon-age-origins/17-1477/).
So rather than cater to these built-in audience, the advertising is focused on people who wouldn’t give the game a second glance normally. It focuses on the things that get peoples attention, sex and violence, and uses it to great effect. This game has gotten more media coverage because of it, keeping that name in the headlines of the Joystiqs of the internet. We’ll see if that translates into sales.
As for the game itself, it is fantastic. I sat down last night after work and played for six hours straight, eating dinner at my desk in order to keep playing (As an aside, my wife allowed me to do this because she was playing it as well on her computer. I am a very lucky man). Definitely recommended for anyone with a half-way decent PC.
I guess the free press time they got out of the blue butt in Mass effect really made an impact on the bottom line and now they’re going for a repeat success. Actually saying anything worthwile about the product is unfortunately completely optional…
I believe the ’sex and violence’ ad campaign was mostly EA’s doing, it is not exactly indicative of the game experience so far (I am 8 or so hours in). The game definitely has a Baldur’s Gate vibe with some Kotor features thrown in.
It’s also quite challenging. I’m playing on normal and I’ve been dying quite a bit. Part of the problem seems to be a lack of healing magic early on; your first mage doesn’t start with any healing spells. It has a tactics system which works like FF12’s gambits, so you can set up decent AI routines like auto-potion use but you’ll burn through your supplies very quickly.
Some other comments;
-Questgiver NPCs have giant exclamation marks over their heads? Whaa? I thought this was a serious fantasy epic, not kill-ten-boars-and-bring-me-their-hooves-which-they-may-or-may-not-drop.
-There’s no karma meter but there are plenty of moral choices. Without a definite good/bad reward for your actions I have no idea how I’m supposed to resolve anything! :)
-Your party members have approval ratings ala Kotor 2’s influence system. Messed up an made someone hate you? You can still bribe them with gifts.
-Characters who drop in battle are revived afterwards with a critical injury of some sort (broken bone, fractured skull, etc) that penalizes their stats. My characters often end up with 2-3 of these each.
@ B.J. sounds interesting (although not $50 interesting). I may consider picking it up once the price drops to like $20.
Does anyone know if this game requires online activation because that’ll kill any interest I have in the game?
@Matt K.
The retail copy of Dragon Age Origins has only a disc check. EA is appearing to learn from their mistakes with Spore. This is the second major release (the first was Sim 3), that uses a simple disc check. Good sign of things to come.
There’s no online activation, however it has a bunch of strange online features which require you to open an account with EA/Bioware’s flimsy gamer-social-networking BS. It lets you upload stats and screenshots from your progress through the game, which is sorta pointless to me.
That Rutskarn article, wherein he bashes a game he’s never played, is (shockingly!) way off base. He complains that the origin stories didn’t appeal to him; fair enough, but surely six choices is better than zero choices? Most RPGs either foist a single pre-determined background onto you (Kotor, Jade Empire) or are generic enough where your background never matters (Neverwinter Nights). Dragon Age attempts to add options which are missing from 99% of the other games in the genre.
He also states the game has no social stats, which is incorrect. There is a ‘coercion’ skill which allows you to either persuade people using your cunning stat or intimidate people using your strength stat. Hardly deep or complex, but it’s about the same as NWN’s diplomacy/intimidate/bluff.
You can cure injuries with healing items (not the basic one, though).
And as for the trailer… yeah, the game is pretty bloody. You won’t notice it in combat so much, but any time you have a conversation after a battle it’s pretty noticeable because your characters will be splattered with blood.
It seems like a pretty cool game. And Rutskarn’s review misses stuff – you do get to pick abilities/skills when you make a character, there is a persuasion skill, etc.
As for the backgrounds… what were people expecting? They made 6 backgrounds, all pretty different. Anyone hoping for ultimate customization and the ability to make their character anything they want before they even start won’t find that in a videogame. You only get one choice as a mage because there’s only one reasonable choice, given the setting. It’d take some pretty ridiculous stretches for a non-circle mage to become a grey warden.
The DA marketing has been atrocious and seems to be aimed at the “Madden ‘09 frat-boy Xbox 360″ crowd. Over at Rock Paper Shotgun, a ton of people have been horrified by the videos and and were voicing the same concerns as Shamus does above. But if you look at the DA web site materials on the characters, setting, etc, it’s all quite RPG-standard – no sign of the rockin’ Marilyn Manson, sexed-up, super violent game of the trailers.
As for “teh sexay”, I don’t mind some adult content (maybe even welcome it), as long as it’s handled in a mature, non-puerile fashion. While I haven’t played Mass Effect, I don’t think that was an issue there. Bioware hasn’t let me down yet, so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Right now, I have the game loaded on Steam, but I’m still playing Torchlight, and I had wanted to run through the Dragon Age: Journeys web game to get some of the freebies there first, so it’ll probably be a few more days before I can get to it.
And of course, my copy of Borderlands finally arrived in the middle of all this. Why do all the good games have to come out in the span of one month?
I think this is less Bioware designing the game and more EA’s marketing department selling the game. My theory is some exec figured out that when all the stupid “controversy” over Mass Effects lesbian relationship angle it actually helped sales. So now they are gonna push Dragon Age as an ultra violent sex fantasy.
Don’t get me wrong Dragon Age does come off as a very mature dark Fantasy game, similiar to say Planescape Torment. The marketing campaign is making it more sexy to sell games to teenage boys and “manly” gamers who don’t usually play silly RPGs.
Ditto. I’m actually pretty tired of games ignoring this rather important feature of the dramatic narrative tradition. I understand why they do, of course, but it’s time for the industry to grow up a little, weather the storm of puritanical outrage, and then move ahead.
I actually differ with Shamus in that I even liked the way this was handled in The Witcher. Hell, I liked the way pretty much everything was handled in that game (other than the loading times). I’m finding more and more that PC games out of Europe are much more to my tastes, on average, than those out of the US: Beyond Good and Evil, Indigo Prophecy, The Witcher, and the Penumbra series are all near the top of my list of most interesting (I won’t say “best” necessarily) games ever, and they’re all European productions. I suspect that part of this is their increased focus on psychological drama, social relationships, and compelling characters, as well as their (frankly) more grown-up attitude toward sex and sexuality (e.g. their depiction of female characters).
I have played through 6-7% of the game (two character origins interested me and I couldn’t decide). As a mage if you create a character from scratch you can pick your spells. I chose heal as one of them. I was an elf, not sure if that affected my choices. My other origin/character was human noble warrior.
As I haven’t gone through much of the game I don’t know whether my background will pop up later. I hope so considering the fact that they left some things unresolved (particularly with the human noble).
Overall there are a lot of dialog choices, in some cases I feel there are too many. Especially with Bioware’s track record (in Mass Effect) of giving you dialog options that end up garnering the same answer.
As for depth…I am always amused when depth is mentioned in relation to game plots. I played Baldur’s Gate, etc and I don’t recall being particularly impressed by the story’s depth. Length? Yes! Number of sidequests? Yes! Deep meaningful story that I connected with and didn’t want to end? NO!
Get over the nostalgia and judge the game for what it is, not for what all the other games were.
With that said Dragon Age is okay, too early to tell. I need to stop feeling the locomotive pushing me up the hills.
First, it’s not all EA’s fault. Baldur’s Gate didn’t have blood spatter or a romance subplot.
Second, this demographic is EXACTLY who you want to market to. Think about what types of gamers there are:
Rock Band gamers are out, they’d never finish an 80-hour RPG.
Madden/FIFA gamers aren’t interested in a nerdy game, but they’re fine with a long and repetitive one.
Call of Duty gamers aren’t interested in a long and boring game, but tangible benefits could keep them playing for 80 hours.
RPG gamers are already aware of your game and they are going to buy anything Bioware puts out regardless.
So you want an ad campaign that makes your long, repetitive, generic fantasy epic into an exciting, adrenaline-fueled thrill ride of blood, sex and violence. You can’t mention stats or dialogue trees because it will scare off Call of Duty types, and you can’t mention world-building or moral dilemmas because it will alienate FIFA types. So they added some hard rock, played up the blood spatter, and called it a day.
I really want to play DA, but I don’t know where I’ll find the time. I just recently played through two long rpgs and as much as I enjoyed it, I’d forgotten what a time committment it can be. There are more games in the queue ahead of DA already too.
It’s sad they’re marketing it so poorly, because it does look like a pretty epic fantasy experience. KOTOR is the only BioWare title I think I’ve played, and I really liked it. I’ll be interested to hear your take on their new offering, Shamus.
The big issue I have with Dragon Age’s marketing is that it seems to be targeting a group of people who have no interest in RPGs whatsoever. The violence and sex in the game is actually only a very small part of it (about on par with something like Knights of the Old Republic), yet it’s made out to be a very bloody action game. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to buy it and be disappointed when they realise it’s actually an extremely dialogue-heavy, tactical, difficult and nerd-fetish-appeasing role-playing game. There is no “new shit”; the marketing is totally divorced from the game itself. You won’t hear a single power chord ever, and the sex, reportedly, only comes in very late in the game, and only if you have certain people like you enough (which is harder to manage than you’d think).
That said, I got my copy yesterday (preordered the collector’s edition) and the game is fucking excellent so far. I know some people have reservations about BioWare due to their tendency to repeat common themes and character archetypes, and they also have a habit of “but thou musting” the player into submission. Dragon Age doesn’t seem to change too much of that, and it follows the classic “linear intro segment, then several objectives to be completed in the order of your choosing” formula, but the game world is far more compelling than anything I’ve seen BioWare do in a while. Yes, it is horribly cliche in places and the amount of choice the player has doesn’t approach that of a truly open-world game, but for a story-based RPG it’s pretty damn well done.
My biggest praise so far as been the dialogue and voice-acting. Every single line save for the player character’s is fully voiced (which would be impossible to do given the number of possible combinations, not to mention that the player can name him or herself). The writing is absolutely excellent, and is far better than anything in previous BioWare games; moreover it’s also acted on a level that exceeds their previous games. There’s none of that focusing on the main characters above all others – almost every single person in the entire game, down to the most inconsequential of merchant NPCs, has a fairly significant dialogue tree, and both the writing and acting for them is more or less just as good as the best of it in the game. It’s truly massive, too – to put things in perspective, Deus Ex has 80,000 lines of dialogue; Dragon Age has about 800,000.
Some people might be tired of the old fantasy cliches, and it’s true there are some, but BioWare also seems to subvert and invert some of them. They aren’t looking to reinvent things, but rather to cast them in a new light. To that end they have almost completely got rid of the whole binary good and evil that plagues most role-playing titles. There are definitely moments where you can be a pompous ass if you want to, but the situations are much less clear-cut and being a goody-two-shoes will quite often come back to bite you in the ass. Having no moral compass means that your actions stand alone, and the reactions of other characters to them feels extremely unpredictable at times and exceedingly natural.
The combat, I mentioned, is quite difficult, even the more mundane battles. There’s very little in the way of hand-holding – sometimes, the dice will hate you, and sometimes you’ll have to reconsider your strategy a half-dozen times over before it works properly. If you mess up in developing your characters, then you’re going to have to live with it. The interface for both combat and the game in general is fantastic and I couldn’t imagine playing the game without a mouse and keyboard – it really has been designed around the PC and I feel sorry for those who have to compromise by playing on consoles.
Overall, if you have some appreciation for BioWare’s games, you’re probably going to enjoy their newest offering. It’s huge, it’s well-written, and engrossing. The lore, in fact, is as deep if not deeper than in any other role-playing game I’ve played, so if you’re a fan of really immersing yourself in a universe, Dragon Age totally delivers. At the same time it does have some of those old BioWare trademarks (or blights, as some would call them), both in terms of game design and story. If you can get past them (or enjoy them), I’m not sure if I would hesitate to call it my game of the year pick – and yes, this is before some of the bigger games like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Modern Warfare 2 come out. Frankly I’m not sure how they can even compete – they might have better production values, but they just can`t compare with the amount of depth Dragon Age has on offer.
@Sheer–I tried for like five minutes to select one, and when I gave up it didn’t say you have points left to assign or any crap like that.
Maybe I’m a moron, maybe I missed something, or maybe (and this would be baffling) the demo didn’t have as many first-level customization options. If so…what the hell? What are they playing at?
Not to sound like a broken record, but this is another thing I really liked about The Witcher: despite having a very specific feel and a specific main character, I actually felt that it forced you to make difficult and complex choices that really ended up defining your “character” in the original sense of the word. I’ve seen few other games that confronted the player with these kinds of choices — Deus Ex had one at the very end, where it didn’t make any difference, but I can’t think of any other than The Witcher that presented these choices early enough to make a difference to the world and the story.
I think I’m hung up on The Witcher in this thread because everything I’ve read about the world in DA sounds like they decided to directly rip off the feel of the world in The Witcher: elves languishing in urban ghettos or fighting for freedom in the disappearing wilderness, dwarves alienated from a human culture covetous of their wealth, and various other “gritty” elements seem lifted directly from TW. Not that there’s anything wrong with stealing, mind you — I would love to see more games steal elements from the best.
I’m enjoying the game so far. I thought that of all the origin stories, the Dwarf Commoner would be the worst, so I decided to play that one first… and I was pleasantly surprised. In the pre-release character creator you couldn’t choose skills, talents or really any spells, but you can inthe actual game, which is a big relief.
The origin prologue and the battle at Ostagar are pretty much prologues and so they are sort of railroaded in the sense that you are going to become a Grey Warden no matter what, but the conversations have lots of options to roleplay your character, there are good sidequests, detailed areas to explore, interesting NPCs, and, lets be honest… the battles can get pretty epic.
I do not count being totally splattered with blood after killing a huge evil demon a bad thing. So far the characters seem a lot more alive than in Mass Effect. (And there are no insanely long elevator rides either.)
I’m very pleased with this game. Bought the collector’s edition for PC and it came with a quality cloth map, complete with bloodstains on the corners.
The game is fun, who cares how they market it?
Well, players care how they market it because these marketing materials will affect how ordinary people view the game – as a depraved refuge for sex and violence.
Anyway, I did not read the comments in detail, haven’t played the game either, but I will only react to:
The NWN original campaign had none of those. I believe that, after the initial rush and possible disappointment, DA’s main point of interest will be its module builder, in a possible repeat of how things went for NWN.
Anyway, I don’t need to care about reviews/critics; I’ve already decided to get this game. I’ll see for myself whether DA is as disappointing as some people have predicted.
From what I’ve heard, the choices are in fact deeper than some of their past games. A review talked about many of them being “a lesser evil”, rather than a straight up good/bad cut.
So basically, they saw how good The Witcher did and decided to do something similar. (The Witcher, incidentally, is fighting with NWN1 for the “Best RPG” spot in my mental roster)
Anyway, regardless of what the issues are…I’ll probably play this. Even if your review craps all over it, Shamus. Now to find a job so I can afford it…Unless they decide to release Brutal Legend for PC, in which case I’ll probably just play that.
@ 30 good points, all.
NWN1’s defining stuff was about the Multiplayer and persistant worlds.
That said, it had some people developer more classes/Spells/feats, also known as the PRC pack.
They aimed to do it for NWN 2 too, but the way it was changed was to horrible for them to bear and they went back to NWN 1.. that is until DAO comes out.
They said, back when I read it, that they would get to modding Dragon Age, add more classes, spells, feats, everything you could possibly want.
This already makes me think that a game that has a fanbase that will get ready to mod it as soon as it comes out, or even before, is bound for some good stuff. No matter how it is market. Others may perceive it the way it is market, but does that matter to the ones who buy it and enjoy it?
I personally will aim to make my own opinion on it, games others found shambly and boring I enjoyed, others that people found exciting I found plain boring (I am looking at you Counterstrike!).
But in either case, the game looks great, and I can’t possibly wait for the modders get onto it and make new content for it.
@23 Robyrt:
I agree, this isn’t the campaign directed at RPG players. gamertrailers.com does show some of the other, more traditional ones.
Interesting enough I was a FPS guy until I picked up a cheap copy of KOTOR because it was describes as “the best Star Wars movie since Empire Strikes Back”. I fell in love, and mostly left the shooters for both KOTORs, NWN 1 and 2, Vampires Bloodlines with the Witcher and Dragon Age on my “to get list”. This may bring more fans into RPGs.
I too was underwhelmed by the character creation, I’m glad you have more options in game.
Having played Dragon Age, I have only two thing to say. It is just as good (or bad) as previous BioWare games. And the ramped up gore just looks laughable most of the time.
well, the problem is that the game wants to be “dark and edgier” not “laughable”, looking at some screenshots of your characters talking while covered with blood i can imagine the classic Bioware scene of a character nagging you for “romance” but this time while covered with fresh gore, ewww
I’ve only played through the mage origin and a little beyond so far, but I’m enjoying it. The moral choice you have to make there isn’t your standard old Bioware good/jerk choice. The world building around the tension between the mages and the church is very well done, and I like the setup there in general. I know some people are turned off by the “generic” elf and dwarf races, but the way magic works seems pretty original.
A few notes regarding some of the comments above:
Exclamation points: Yeah this is annoying, fortunately you can turn it off. It seems like a reasonable feature for the crowd looking for an action RPG, but I’m going to talk to everyone anyway, so I don’t need the quest givers labeled.
Blood splatter: You can turn this off too. So far I haven’t though, and I’m not sure I will. In any rpg like this you are going to do a lot of fighting, and I’m not sure it makes sense to come back from a war looking all shiny.
Romances in BG: Well BG1 didn’t have any romances, but BG2 sure did. I ended up married and she was carrying my child by the end.
@ 26 Rutskarn:
You got it right. The character creator in the game let´s you personalize your character a bit more. It has some of its limits, though. Depending on your background you get certain skills. For instance, human and dwarven nobles get two skill point to put whenever you want. But you ALWAYS get one, which you cannot move, in “shield bash”(or whatver that skill was called). Also, you start with predefined stats, and are given 7 or so to alter them but you can´t make your character worse in a stat to favor others (unless you used those 7 points, that´s it).
On regard of the backgrounds, they always put the character in a “you must leave, or leave” situation, ussually leaving your character with a missing friend or an enemy that could potentially come back later on. I haven´t played enough (my computer has a crappy graphic card and the game lags a lot at some poins) but it would be quite awesome if they did that.
What I´m disliking right now about the game is the fact that the plot has too many resemblances to Mass Effect. So far, which is only the initial areas and a couple of hours after the background sub-plots:
1) You have a race of highly violent and incivilized creatures that weren´t seen since long ago, but are now coming to the surface again to OMGRAZE everything. (Geths/darkspawns)
2) You have a faction whose actions are far the authority of any king/organization, and the PC becomes a member (Spectres/Grey Wardens)
3) There´s an old empire who angered the local god and now they are gone (Proteans/forgot the name in DA).
Really, Bioware needs to tell his apparently only writer to be more creative.
I feel like I’d seen Bioware’s ad campaign when I saw the comic they had the guys at Penny Arcade make, and now I’m seeing EA’s ad campaign. Or perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.
@acronix: mass effect was a lot like kotor and kotor was a lot like nwn’s first expansion, and nwn’s xp1 was a lot like the nwn oc … do you see the trend here ?
First off, my all time favorite game is the Baldur’s Gate Trilogy. Between the story, the memorable characters, the fairly creative/interesting quests (especially BG2) and the length and replayability of the game make it second to none for me.
That being said, i’ve now logged a few hours in Dragon Age. So far….it may replace BG as my favorite all time game. It’s got the strategy, the great character creation options, the fleshed out NPCs, and brilliant character interactions. I have yet to see how good the story is or how long the game is. But so far, this game just “feels” spot on as the true spiritual successor to BG.
@@acronix: That sounds like it’s the result of the rule system they are using.
Damnit, the game isn’t released until Friday here, and I’m fairly sure I’m not getting any release-day shipping. So it won’t be until Monday that I can actually play.
You could probably add this sort of thing to your “reasons people pirate games”. I’m fairly sure the pirates will have broken it long before my preordered copy arrives.
I am hyped, though. It’s good to see a game world without elves who are elitist jerks.
Marketing is usually the publisher’s domain… and EA’s domain is the lowest common denominator. Beat people over the head with weapons, breasts, and blood to a hard rock soundtrack.
EA would have made videos for Dreamfall: The Longest Journey that focused on the protagonists’ breasts jiggling in combat.
It showcases the most irrelevant things possible, and that’s exactly what EA does.
This is when EA doesn’t even do a one-up on that and actually just corrupt the game itself into some sad, tortured cripple. Look what those dicks did to Spore. No wonder Will Wright turned his back on them.
This is actually not the first time Bioware has advertised in Maxim.
The audio sync in the trailer you embedded is COMPLETELY fucked. This one is much better, by which I mean “makes sense and comes with the option of HD”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SuJ5T9sfAA
Shamus, I can tell you as a fan of Baldur’s Gate, Kotor, and all that is holy, that this game has absolutly nothing to do with the Rock and Roll trailers we have seen. Dragon Age is awesome.
I bought the collectors edition as soon as it was put on the shelf at best buy, and I have been loving this game. If the rest of the game is as great as the first 10 hours, then it will be my RPG of the decade.
I found the marketing campaign offensive, and the gore is pointless and a bit silly – it’s just red spattered on everything. Still, it’s a Bioware RPG, so I was going to buy it anyway. I guess there was no need to market it to me.
I’m eight hours into it now, and I’m enjoying it so far. I have a few quibbles, (You finally wrote a better NPC AI system, but you’re making me choose between that and new combat abilities when I level up? Really?) but it’s still fun.
Personal opinions aside, BioWare has been in Maxim before. They put together a sexy picture of a nymph for Maxim, I think, to advertise Neverwinter Nights.
Okay, so here’s the question I have for all y’all:
Social persuasion. Does it exist? How robust/useful is it? Because ever since KotOR, I don’t have a ton of use for a game where I can’t talk my way out of situations.