OK, so I started playing Dragon Age: Origins. It was full of spells and magic and mysteriously dressed women and so on. “RPG!” I thought to myself. “Coool! Also, my cousin and Tiggs have been harping on about it” I eventually got to a dungeon to crawl through and had to stop to rebuild my pc (unrelated), and lost my save games. Do I want to reinstall this game?
I hate dungeon-crawling, because it is just very dull, and I am very boring and feel I should look through each and every room — just in case The One Spell is hidden in a disused box which still has a lock that works. I do the same in open maps, unless I force myself to just march straight through and ignore all the things; Incidentally, this is why I hated The Witcher — going into houses took far too long.
So aside from the dungeons I kind of did enjoy the game. The character development at the start was fun, though I found the enemy AI a bit wanting; They fell for fairly basic trap of tempting them off their line. Also I recall a bit of just spamming the crap out of you with troops, so you had to drag them to some stationary NPCs, and yeah. Combat, therefore, could be a bit irritating and came down to just moving guys about; Fiddly, but fun.
Spells always piss me off — I find the choices are not quite all they're stacked up to be, though with more play time this might become less of a problem. This is something I have found in a lot of games; They either start out with powerful initial spells that you hardly bother changing, or you have to spend a billion, billion XPs on to get somewhere. This really ties into the party members. I did like that I could switch out and in depending on what I felt like doing (except if you get ambushed on the road with your light troops or some stupid setup — bam. That breaks the flow for me. A lot).
It was finding people though that I think I found the most satisfaction from — Collecting people and units. Then I would develop my favourites; I did this in Red Alert and Civ as well and those units that had survived to almost victory got a healthy retirement. I kinda of wish there was more finding people only to discover they were at the brothel or out farming something illegal so then you blackmail them or something.
I played as a light fighting Elf. I think this might have been a bit of a mistake. I like playing this kind of character, I spent a whole real life year (not consecutive) in a game playing this style, but one problem with it in these games is it usually means you need to spend a large amount of time learning side spells and, in battle, keeping your heavy front-liners going. This comes back to something I mentioned earlier; Your band members only seem to follow your pre-set commands when it most suits them. Incidentally, this is a feature I sort of stumbled across. It seems a little dumb because, once again, there is almost too much choice and not enough pre-set options. Why not just have some decent standards? I like the ability to choose, but most of the time there is no need to, so decent defaults would be nice.
Other issues: As in most RPG’s, talking, talking, oh and more talking. This is, of course, more a problem with RPG’s in general than just Origins. As this one seems particularly open there is little sense of what is important to do first and personally, I like to follow as many stories as I can. Along with this is that I often want to play the middle ground (The Witcher was craptacular about that — I felt it was too easy to make enemies). Compared to, say, an open world game like GTA or somesuch, where choice is the name of the game, the choice of where to go and dick about seems to be just irritating. I know I should probably get Skyrim and delve into that, but it is many more dollars than I want to spend. (Note: just after I wrote this, it went on sale for 75% off, so I did buy it).
The biggest failing is the refusal to automatically backup or use the Steam Cloud system. I now have to start all over again as the stalwart hero of the land. Personally, I knew from the beginning it wasn't going to get started again. I am now in the mood for RPG’s, but I have to find something that will be full of fun grind.
I am excited to hear the next in the series is coming out soon. Being cheap, I'll buy it on sale (also because I hate the Best beaches tax and have been burnt in pre-purchases too much — SR:IV) so it will at least be until Christmas before I buy it and rave at Tiggs about it.
You may ask what I want from a game, and it seems to be this is where it is going. I like the idea of Skyrim's open world, but my experience of even the relatively small worlds of Saints Row leads me to think that they end up having just too much to do and half of it not being worth doing and short-cuts seem to just become too easy, especially on replay. So that leads us back to the map idea from Origins; I found it a bit less “immersive” though.
I missed out on Fallout 3 — the battle interface drove me up the wall. Again, too fiddly (incidentally, the reason EU series is not something I have gotten into), but I hear the travel could be interesting.
So, should I play it again?
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