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Dragon Age

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ackblom12:
Alright, looks like it should be shipping from amazon today so I should be playing by Wed or Thursday. Until then, I'm gonna try my damdest to get the last 7 levels for my Hunter in Borderlands.

Also, I need to finish that flash game. I wants my goodies.

Storm Rider:
The Flash game is decent fun, considering it's a free flash game, but I cannot create an account for the Bioware network so I can get my rewards from it and the character creator into my game. It keeps telling me on the sign up page that not all fields are filled in correctly, even though they definitely are. Highly irritating, maybe I can get it fixed before I start playing the game tomorrow night.

KvP:
So yeah, I'm playing the PC version as an earth / ice mage and so far it's playing more like NWN than BG2, in design, pace and interface. Which is to be expected - Bioware never looked back after changing their design philosophy after BG2. I've been playing it for 5 hours now and it's, well, it's not BG2. Even for how big it was BG2 was fairly brisk in its pace, and Dragon Age really, really takes its time. Sort of fun, but it's not got that love at first playthrough feel that BG2 or even Mass Effect had. But then I'm only about 5% through the game. It could get better.

As for the story and characters, it's definitely got more of a KOTOR vibe than anything else, but that might just be because with full VA it's hard not to do that. I've yet to see any real intra-party interaction or naturalistic character development but I've only procured 4 party members so far (dog's the best character thus far, which is... good?) so that could change. I doubt it will though. The game has already told me that party members will only really open up at "camp", which I suppose just means that character backstory will be doled out in increments between portions of the main quest, as it was with all Bioware games post-NWN. For all the griping people did about Serious Conversations immediately after slaying bands of orcs in BG2, it felt a lot more natural than this. Ever since that time Bioware NPC development has basically been a parallell quest running alongside the main storyline. Which is obviously the easiest way to implement it, but it feels canned to an unnecessary degree. Intra-party interaction has been limited to light banter ala Mass Effect's elevator rides.

My biggest gripe thus far has to do with the camera. Not to use a tired term but Dragon Age for the PC is pretty well console-ified. playing isometrically BG2-style only kind of works, and that's just in combat. The control and camera system are straight out of KOTOR otherwise. I would like it a lot more if you could enable camera rotation by moving the cursor to the edge of the screen. In over-the-shoulder mode moving the cursor does nothing, in isometric mode it scrolls but cannot rotate. To do that you have to use the keyboard. It's been consistently annoying me since I started playing.

As for the story thus far, It's nice that they've made their own setting and all, but I don't find Lord of the Rings very interesting, so I don't find this terribly engaging either. The nice thing about the Baldur's Gate series was that it was in effect a personal sort of narrative - it was about your status as a child of a God and the people who wanted to manipulate or kill you because of it. I don't think the whole Saving The Universe spiel works as well, although I really liked it in KOTOR, which I guess you could call a hybrid of the two approaches.

One thing I'll say for sure - Holy shit is replaying through the beginning of the game going to be a slog. Like I said, I've been through this for 5 hours and I've hardly gotten to the beginning of the game. Make sure you know what you want your build to be before you play. You don't want to waste hours on a character just to figure out you don't like him.

Alex C:
Oh my fucking god. I had originally pre-ordered this from the EA store rather than on Steam since the latter hadn't announced many details of what their release was going to look like. Well, I did that before finding out the EA store is a buggy piece of shit. I couldn't even check my order history or anything that you should easily be able to do on a modern online store (hell, at one point I couldn't even log onto my account anymore), so I got cold feet and decided to cancel. Besides, by then Steam had released some more details and I liked their pre-order bonus better, plus I could now get a Steam discount. This shouldn't have been a problem because EA's cancellation policy is simple: If it's not in stock, and it hasn't shipped, you can cancel at any time, and this was around the 18th that I made this decision. I got in contact with customer service and by the next morning they said that it'd take 5-6 days to waive the charge from my card. I responded with an email saying that should be fine because they hadn't even actually charged my credit card yet, another one of the many funky things I didn't like about going through their pre-order process. As long as I wasn't going to be charged, I was fine. No further responses. I then went ahead and ordered the Digital Deluxe version from Steam, which of course went smoothly. A few minutes ago, I checked my credit card balance and found out that EA just charged me 72 fucking dollars, sending me 3 dollars over my credit limit and netting me a $40 overdraft fee.


It's going to be really hard not to send them an email containing phrases like "Bitch, I will destroy you."



P.S.

What bothers me most is that I feel like I should have sort of have expected something like this from a publisher that could conceivably survive without an online store. That they're in a privileged position in the industry isn't an evil in and of itself, but the fact remains that a certain amount of financial success in one area can insulate you from the fallout of having serious shortcomings in other areas. I guess I just kinda figured it's 2009 and that an online store should work better than theirs does, but I guess this is what assumptions get you.

KvP:
I want to know what y'all have named your dogs.

My enemies are feeling the iron jaws of Poochie.

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