First Impressions

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Yeah, I totally agree. Someone pointed to me though that the elves have an infinite amount of elfroot herbs you need for the health potion. Combined with the infinite amount of bottles your camp merchant has, it's just a mather of money...

 

Party control ...

I am fully aware that and how I can re-adjust chars and their tactical behaviour, but still, some of the automatic NPC's actions are peculiar, not to say borderline moronic.

So I equip Leliana with Arrows of Andraste, and task her with pommelling that overpowered bloodmage at the end of the room. She fires one arrow, and then either targets the closest next enemy, who accidentally doesn't need use of those precious and relatively rare arrows because he is a melee char, or she draws her melee weapon - while the mage, able to cast his spell uninterrupted, fries the entire party with a fireball. Reload.

Or, when they follow the main char and stop attacking whoever they're supposed to be attacking only because the main char moves. Or when they rather attack the next standing char, far, far away, after they knocked another one off his feet and could kill him off *easily* and without the travel ... instead they run around like headless chickens and waste combat actions

I'll spend some time tonight trying to fix my party AI settings, because yesterday night, it drove me

That said, I like the tactical nature of combat. I should use grenades more often. And I need to start utilising traps to guide enemies into proper kill zones, or keep them boxed in.

 

remember to not only set all the tactics to ranged attacks but also change the AI from whatever it starts on, to ranged combat. That will force Leliana to stay ranged. ( you can also remove her melée weapons altogether, that certainly forces her to stay ranged, but I wouldn't advice doing that).

the tactical aspect of this game is something I haven't seen in any game, espacially not rpg's, for a long time. And it is nice to see it back.

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Even more stupid (IMHO anyhows), is that several of the specializations can be bought as books that tell you how to become one. My dwarven fighter harnished is rage to become a berzerker, by reading about it in a book.... I guess the rage he harnishes, is his nerd-rage.

 

Any mage who learns to be a SH and has the regular healing spell will cut down on the health potions used.

 

I don't invest in tactics for the main since that's the character I will be controlling most of the time.

Getting tactics right cuts the micromanagement down and it's definitely needed for minor fights which only get time consuming if you have to constantly switch between your characters.

You can order them to stand their ground (H) that helps.

I know, "nerd rage" is quite appropriate. The way these specializations are implemented is definitely a weakness in the game.

I had to build Morrigan that way (healing and stuff) after the Dalish elves refused trading with my bad guy. Without healing the game was way too hard. It felt so wrong for her to be casting healing spells though.

EDIT:

The ring is for uploading a character with the character creator and the Edge is a dagger for those who bought the game before the end of November.

 

The dagger is now explained. The other is probably because I sent an email to Bioware as I did download and upload a character prior to the game being released but used a different username and email address on the Bioware/EA account.

 

Have been playing this game on the PS3 - my PC can't handle it and I don't feel like spending a couple of thousand bucks to get one that will.
Overall pretty good, though playing the game gives me more of an Arcade/adventure Zelda/Oblivion type feel than a BG2 CRPG type feel. This might just be because of the PS3 camera settings, which make big battles difficult to micromanage and it's tough to really see what's going on sometimes (too fast).
Also, one thing which is a bit disconcerting is the fact you regain your health so fast in between battles takes away the whole prudence aspect in a sense, since you're usually near full health before a battle. Finally it's also weird that when you lose all your health in battle you don't die if party members survive, but wake up with an injury. It might be just me, but that whole healing fast / not dying element takes away from the game a bit.
This said, the storyline and plot development is nice, and the NPCs are well done. And overall I'm enjoying the game, though I wish it were a bit more old school in its gameplay. I expected the game to be some sort of BG with 3D. The gameplay is more like Oblivion/Morrowind with BG2esque elements though lacking the freedom and open world of the former, and the depth of the latter in terms of tactics (the BG2 tactics with Stealth, exploration, battle tactics possibilities are superior to those of Dragon Age IMHO).
If I had to grade it, on a scale of 1-10 it's a 6.5. (BG2 would be a 9.5, Morrowind an 8.5, Oblivion a 7.5)

 

My brother and I decided to try out DAO this weekend. We're playing on the XBox 360 platform, as neither of our PCs can run it, and neither of us own a PS3. We've probably logged about 10 total hours between us on the game, and thus far, we are not overly impressed.

There's nothing we can point to about the game and say we hate this or that, it just lacks the "wow" factor we were both expecting. If we had one complaint it is that it is hard to give orders to the party simultaneously. Perhaps this is different if you played on the PC, where you can get an isometric view during combat. You can certainly switch from character to character and play whichever party member you want, but there seems to be no way to control multiple characters' actions at the same time (like using the pause feature in the BG series).

That doesn't make it a bad game in and of itself - it's just a tad annoying, but that combined with the lack of a "wow" element, just didn't do much for me. Perhaps you need the PC version to like the game.

 

The isometric view on the PC doesn't fix this issue: when you go isometric the camera is fixed along the vertical axis (so you can only rotate horizontally) and it's very, very zoomed in. You can scroll it a bit but only to an extent, and the limit of how much you can scroll seems to obey some very bizzarre laws (the limit would dynamically change while the game was paused...). The whole party control during combat (or lack thereof) does become extremely annoying once you start getting loads and loads of indentical encounters thrown at you and combat becomes very repetitive.

That said I'm getting a copy of the game for Christmas as I'll definitely be playing it all the way through, but from what I played already (a bit after Lothering) I was unimpressed. It's nowhere near as bad as the trailers had made me think, in fact some aspects of the game are very good (especially quest design), but I think there's a lot of wasted potential there. Then again the game does seem to improve a lot when the map opens up. We'll see.

 

Aldeth BG series is a legend in CRPG. No other CRPG game will even come close to its legacy. With that being said I approach all CRPG with a very low expectation. Of all of the CRPG I have played since BG in 1999 only one game really made me want to vomit and I even completed that. That lone game is NWN1 the OC. That game sucked the life out of me. I had to force myself to play it.

As for Dragon Age Origins, I find the game to be fantastic because I didn’t expect BG results. Instead I played it for what it is and well, it is a fantastic game within itself. There are some things that are lame but the game has an excellent story and there are 6 different stories. Actually there are 14 different stories because NPCs treat you different if you are a male or female (14 because there are a total of 4 choices with race and sex selection for mages).

Also, there is no alignment restriction. Instead your action impacts what happens in the game. This is great because you can replay the game selecting different options only to alter the story.

As for NPCs, if you level them up yourself you can select the skill tactics. This allows you setup more tactics for the NPCs. This is what I do and than I customize the NPC tactics to supplement the main character abilities and skills. This is actually quite easy and allows you to concentrate on managing just your character.

DA is no Baldur’s Gate. In fact, I don’t even think any developer would want to recreate such a game. Also, read all the codexes. They explain a lot about the game world, its history, etc…

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Have you used the Stealth skill in DAO? It is awesome. Especially once you have 4 levels in it with a cunning score of 30+

 

=> I have used the skill with the NPCs I've encountered. My problem is not the stealth itself, but how do you get your party members NOT to follow you around when you go in stealth? i.e. is it possible to leave some members behind and just go do stealth by yourself? BTW I have the PS3 version not sure it makes a difference for this though. Maybe I'm missing something, but sometimes I'd like to leave my party members at point A, and have my scout/rogue use hi stealth to explore areas far away from point A. Can that be done?

 

On the PC you just have to hit the H key, I'm pretty sure there is a command for that function on the PS3. The game is not playable without it.

 

I pre-ordered this, excited at the thought of a new BG.

Seriously disappointed. No problems with the graphics, or the story (the story is actually quite cool, though not sure I care too much about some of the characters) or the detail in general.

But...

The combat mechanics suck. Massively. Why do I have to spend leveling up points to give NPCs more complete gambits (i.e. Combat Tactics)? Why can I not pause the game outright like in the Infinity Engine games?

I'll give it another go, but whilst I have my Modern Warfare quick fix addiction I struggle to even put the Dragon Age dvd in my PS. I dont want to play with a substandard combat model.

So I've done something which I think you'll all agree is a very sensible move. I've decided to return to the glory days of Bioware.

I missed out on Icewind Dale 1&2 and Planescape, so I bought them on Amzon (£25 in all) and will spend a much happier christmas playing games that are recognised classics (tho I appreciate Icewind Dale 1 is less so) and ignoring a game that plays like an overly complicated MMORPG (Dragon Age).

Just my two pence.

 

Dragon Age is much simpler than the infinity engine games imo; and, are you playing the console version? Otherwise, you should be able to pause whenever you want. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the game I thought it was much better than anything released in quite awhile.

 

Hmm, Ok, I'll check the manual to see how to get my NPC to stay put. The PS3 manual for DAO really sucks.
Thanks for the tip!

 

You're welcome Phoceen, I've watched some gameplay videos of the console version and I can understand that it makes issuing orders a pain compared to the rather straightforward PC interface.

I had low expectations so I really enjoy the game. Rahkir is right, it's certainly the best CRPG in a long time (The Witcher is more of an adventure game, a great one but still an adventure game and Fallout 3 suffers from a rather weak main quest and a serious lack of depth compared to its predecessors).

@TomMcV: welcome to the boards, Dragon Age is not that complicated but you may want to check out some mods if you're playing it on the PC.

 

I can help you out Phoceen as I am playing the game on PS3. First I recommend setting up the game so that pressing L2 once and not hold it brings up the radial menu. Below is how you can go about telling the NPC to hold their position, though they will still use their tactics if needed.

L2 and select the advance command on the radial menu. From there select hold position. This will allow you to control each NPC individual and all other characters will not move.

I do recommend reading the dull PS3 manual. It doesn't explain in everything in detail but it is helpful. I do recommend reading all the codexes.

 

I will try it out as soon as I play it again. I was going crazy that all the group kept moving together, so holding your ground commands can sure open up some tactical possibilities.
This should definitely make the game more enjoyable for me.
Thanks

 

Dragon Age is really a nice game, but after about 67 hours i really couldn't go on the campaign, i was bored.
The problem for me was the world's background: the detail put into it was great (the codex has an amazing quantity of detailed information on EVERYTHING), but simply i didn't like it compared to the Forgotten Realms.

 

The Dragon Age world isn't going to appeal to everyone in the same way FR does, for certain. Ferelden is a very dark, even depressing place where people fight to stave off great evil. Faerun certainly has its dark corners as well, but when I think of that world I'm more likely to consider to the hope of a few young adventurers looking to make their marks on the world.

I finished DA once, started a second runthrough, which I put the brakes on fairly early to play runthrough 100ish of Baldur's Gate 2.

So yeah, I can sort of get what you mean, although I enjoyed the DA campaign immensely.