Where does DAO rate as a CRPG for you?

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After playing a variety of CRPG’s over the years I have come to a conclusion that DAO is my all time favorite RPG and here is why.

1) The origin stories – they bring you into the game
2) Character development – the options may at first seem limited but there are many ways to develop a character
3) Overall story – the origin stories are just the start to a fantastic game – many will say it is the same old dark fantasy story line with the same type of game development and evil power. It is but the way the story unfolds, how the selections you make impact NPCs and the game world, and finally each origin has various ending makes up for DAO being a dark fantasy type RPG
4) Banter – I know some players hate it others love it. I’m in the middle on this as most game developers don’t know how to implement good banter – Bioware does it best and this game is no exception if not there best effort yet.
5) Game formats – Bioware developed the game for 4 formats – it was a very smart move and allowed more copies to be pushed at the stores and for those of us who like to play multiple formats it is a winning formula.
6) Morales choices vs. Alignment – I like how this was implemented

Even though the game is my favorites it does have its limitations….
1) The game world is not open – the story has sequences it needs to follow before the next thing can happen
2) A lot of get this and I give you this…but that is very typical of a RPG
3) Even if you play a prick you are not evil by any means in this game – even T. Logain isn’t evil – just misguided. If the game would allow you to side with the dark spawns that would be unique and evil of a PC.
4) Without the expansion, all of the morale decisions you make are pointless until the expansion comes out to see how your decisions impacted the world

More to come…

This is the first game in the DA series (hopefully more to come) – the greatest CRPGs always tend to be the 2nd in a series… (BG and BG2:SoA – most will say BG2 is better, NWN and NWN2 – those who played both OCs will agree that NWN2 had a much more compelling story, etc). I’m excited to see what Bioware will bring to the table with DA2….

Time to replay DAO for a fourth time….

 

I don't feel like doing my own thing, so I'll use the same points as you and insert my own comments instead.

1) Origins. Honestly this was the weakest point in the game for me. The only one I went through was the mage origin and it was weak enough to almost make me stop playing entirely (something that happens very, very rarely to me). Their effect on the game itself is a pure gimmick - as far as I can tell they have no effect whatsoever on choices and options you have and only add minor flavour to dialogues. In this respect they're no different from Mass Effect's "backgrounds", except you get to play the background - and since that was the low point of the game for me...

2) The character system is horribly limited. Mages seem to have it a bit better, but even then I found myself using the same 3 spells over and over again in every encounter, so the large number of options doesn't mean much. However I still like the system and think that with a bit of tweaking it has a lot of potential.

3) The main story and the way it unfolds is as generic as it can get, and painfully so. Impact on the game world is nice, but this is hardly the first game to do so (and IMO Arcanum pulled that off much, much better). I also don't buy the whole "dark fantasy" thing - aside from some elements it's pure heroic fantasy. The problem with those "dark" elements is that they're so painfully executed - the Joining just doesn't work, the sex scenes are beyond ludicrous, and the "blood & gore" was so hilarious that I quickly had to turn it off to get any immersion from the game. As hard as it tries not to the game is still pretty black and white, as if Bioware wanted to do shades of grey but were too afraid to fully commit to that. It's a shame because the one area where they did commit (the 2 dwarven would-be kings) is so well-done that it really does feel there is no right and wrong choice (it becomes pretty obvious that the "noble" would-be king is a liar, a cheat and badly outdated in his thinking).

4) The banter was alright, much better and less intrusive than in other games (for a change the NPCs will wait for YOU to talk to them before dumping their little problems on you). It's kinda broken by them insisting on having some very, very, very annoying NPCs in there. Alistair could've made a much better NPC if he wasn't so WHINY all the time. That said Shale was awesome and easily the most interesting NPC companion I've seen in a while, especially if you go through "his" quest all the way through. Seeing that amount of character development on an NPC companion is pretty impressive.

5) I don't see multi-platorm release as inherently good or bad. For Bio/EA it means more money, good for them. For me it means nothing as I do not own any consoles (and don't plan on changing that), so the only interest I have is whether the existence of the other platforms influences the game that I am playing. In this case it does seem to have influenced it negatively: the PC-only isometric view is so useless and limited that I have to wonder if they spent as little time on it as possible because it would only be there on the PC. If this is the case then the multi-platform release killed a feature of the game for me.

6) I like the complete absence of any alignment, karma meter or anything of the sort. It lets you the player decide if an action is good or evil, and that's the only way to do darker fantasy. I'm a little disappointed however that all quests (save for the afore-mentioned 2 kings one) has a very clear optimal solution. You can do this or that... OR take a third option and make everyone happy! You get warned that trying to take the third option could be BAD... but then nothing bad happens and this is never mentioned again. The lack of alignment would have worked much better if the choices also followed a true "no right and wrong" approach, but at least it's a big step in the right direction.

Now as for your limitations:

1) I don't really mind this so much. BG2 was very much like this, PST even more so, and the latter is one of my favourite games. My problem (and one that Bio has in every one of their games) is that their "pick up the 4 sticks" design automatically makes it so that nothing you do somewhere has an effect on what is going on anywhere else. The game almost subverts this with the Redcliffe/Circle thing... but then doesn't because there is no penalty to taking the third option (see above).

2) As you said this is typical RPG. The game does have some interesting twist on this though and I'll get to it later.

3) Loghain is evil - Stupid Evil at that. I cringed every time someone in-game tried to pull off the "but he's not evil!" excuse, because every single thing he does or says in-game points to a big neon sign over his head saying "I'm the evil guy here!" He even LOOKS UGLY for crying out loud! As for playing an evil PC, no game really allows you to be evil. In all RPGs with evil options being "evil" means either being a prick (as in DAO) or being psychotic (cue evil laugh here). PST is probably the only exception that I can think of.

4) Actually some of the choices do affect the slides you get at the end, and I was surprised by how some of them turn out not quite the way you expect them to. As I said it's nothing new, but it's good to see more developers go for this approach rather than the bland "would you like to see the Good ending or the Evil ending?" that lots of games still have.

I'd like to add a couple more points, since you didn't mention them and they're what I liked most and least about the game. Starting with the bad (so I can end this post on a high note ) although I liked the character system and thought the combat system itself was average (not a fan of MMOs) I thought the encoutner design was atrocious. There are some interesting fights in there, but they're spaced by dozens of identical filler combats, always against the exact same group of enemies. As much as I like other things about the game, every time I think of a replay I imagine myself having to go through all the filler combat and I just give up. It was bad all along the game, but I almost stopped playing (again) at Deep Roads because the endless corridors of same encounters was really getting to me. The final act was much the same.

But what makes me want to go back and replay the game (and I will eventually) is the brilliant quest design. As I mentioned earlier most of the sidequests are the typical "fetch this, kill that" quests, but some of them surprised me because of the way they're linked together. The "favors for interested parties" are like this, and you may not even notice how they're linked unless you do them in a particular order (I did without even noticing... until I realised that the path I took made me fail some of the others). The quest "Unintended consequences" was like this too, as I did not expect what I had done previously to have any later effect (it's not the first RPG to do this, but it's certainly a first for a Bioware game). There's quite a bit of this within each main quest too, slightly marred by the "3rd option is optimal" cop-out and the lack of true link between the 4 main quests, but I'm being too nitpicky here.

Also, Simon Templeman is awesome (especially at the Landsmeet). I think he pulled an Irenicus with this one - take a mostly-generic villain and make him memorable by sheer delivery alone. I was almost rooting for him during the Landsmeet... then again his only competition was Alistair's whining

All in all I liked the game (I know, you couldn't tell from all the negativity up there). Its flaws were really annoying, but its strengths are good and show a lot of promise. Now here's hoping they actually expand on all this potential in the sequel...

 

I thought it was ALOT like Kotor, to be honest. You travel to four places, looking for pieces of the map for the star-forge, and in DAO you travel to 4 places to get allies. Same recipe really.
I have started playing DAO for a second time now, after having finished it. And I find it to be kind of a drag. Doesn`t seem to have too much replayability to it. Apart from the origins, wich can be finished in 20 minutes. Still, i enjoyed myself when playing it for the first time. I`d rate it as an above average crpg, I guess. Way better than the nwn games, and kotor 2. Maybe on par with the first Kotor. DAO did have some very good NPC`s though. Way better than in other crpgs.

 

DA:O is F***ing sweet! It's definitely my favorite game in the past 5 years with MassEffect as a close 2nd. BG2: SoA & ToB will always be #1. DA:O will always be in my top five along with StarCraft.

What I like the most about DA:O is the PoV system. I like playing though most of the game in 3rd person, but during a large battle, I love that I can scroll my mouse wheel and the PoV zooms out & up above the battlefield so I can set tactics, then zoom back in to watch all the gore close up!


One thing I don't really like are the romances. I mean, once you f*** someone, it's pretty much over. That being said, when I romanced Morrigan and f***ed her good and hard...I had to tell Liliana that we had to stay "just friends" to continue to f*** her. But as I was playing last night, I talked to Liliana...and ended up F***ing her too! Who am I to turn down sex when the opertunity arises? Anyhoo...after wards, I talked to Morriganm and she didn't say anything about it. No reaction at all...as if her coders decided that once you screw someone, you no longer want to talk with them.

So now I have 2 chicks that I can sleep with anytime I want with no conciquences. Sounds good to me, but I'd like *some* sort of dialog on the matter! Now...to get them in the sac at the same time....


Also, who the hell wears underwear during sex? It that even biologically possible? The game is rated "M"...as in MATURE!!! Is it just because BioWare coders have never actually *seen* a naked woman? I think I'm going to try out a certain mod on my next run through.

 

I have one small thing I would like to say that is really getting on my nerves now that I play a melee character. The PC isometric view is fake, it doesnt work, it is not a real view. Sure you can zoom out but at max zoom the camera gets stuck, you cant swivel it around to actually use your zoomed out perspective. Why on earth is the camera stuck on max zoom?

As for rating this game, I don't know modern single player rpgs just feels so incredibly limited, rigid and small. I know I am getting a bit repetitive by comparing it to WoW but it is true and the sad thing is that although DragonAge has copied the gameplay from WoW they have not even managed to do it better or even as good as in WoW. The DA gameplay is much slower, more rigid and a lot less polished. It is like a slower, more limited, clumsier version of WoW.

I am sounding awfully negative here but I still enjoy the game, I would rank it with Kotor and Oblivion slightly above Fallout3. I really like the skill and level system in the Bethesda games I just wish they implemented some kind of structure on their games and for the love of god stopped with the level scaling. In Dragon age they pretty much have to level scale as there are so few options and the story is so narrow that it would be kinda sucky if you get stuck half way through one of the main quests due to not being high enough level.

One small thing that really gets to me is why your character can't go everywhere? It is not like DA has a big open gameworld, it is small maps you can go to but why when you are on a map are there paths you must follow? Even back in BG you could pretty much go anywhere on any specific map, you iddnt have to follow the path unless you were in a city and there were houses in the way. I really dislike it when every area is constructed like a dungeon whether it is a forest, a meadow or a dragon's lair.

 

I don't have that issue. I can zoom in/out, swivel, and pan up/down just fine - zoomed in or out. Some times my PoV get's stuck if my party is cornered against the edge of a map, but as soon as I swivel around, it works perfectly.

 

I agree that there are quite a few encounters that are atrocious and against the same group of enemies; however, other CRPGs have the same issues.

I personally don't have an issue fighting hords of dark spawns with filler fights because you are defending the land from a blight, which is when dark spawns take over the land. Also, there are only so many types of dark spawn within the game and well you do get a mix of them with each fight. To me, the dark spawn filler fight is like a random kobold encounter in BG1 when the party rested.

I wish there was a way to avoid some of the filler fights; I believe if you beat the game once an option should come up to select avoid random dark spawn encounters on the map, etc... Some thing to reduce the vanilla encounters in the game that just waste time.

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How long has WOW been on the market? How many expansion has WOW had since it was launched? Why are you comparing a MMO to a single player RPG? These are two different games. One recently released with limited expansion and another that has had time to mature with mutiple expansions.

I agree DA should allow a bit more free roaming, but it is limited because most of the game development went into the story, the character acting, and making sure the story had a certain flow to it. If the game was truly open eneded you could of sided with the Darkspawns.

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I have now played the game 4 times and no way is Loghain evil. He is misguided in his thinking. He doesn't believe the blight is the threat to Fereldan; he believe the threat lies to the north in the Orleasians.

Play Ostagar again. Pay attention to what Duncan says and other at the camp. Watch the meeting movie again and how the king disrepects Loghain.

When I was a human noble I let Loghain become a GW because of how he helped his country and I believed he should deserve a 2nd chance.

Loghain is similar to Shale and Sten; you have to befriend (give him plenty of gifts) him to learn more about him. I really do like him as a NPC; it is too bad that you cannot have Alister and Loghain at the same time.

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You can only have one lover (two if you play for both teams) at the end of the game. Only one will stay at your side. Though Morrigan always tend to leave.

 

DA:O is fast becoming one of my favorite games so far. I'm growing to like it more each time I play it. It's not perfect, but groundwork has been lain and the game lives up to at least BG1.
I wouldn't compare WoW to DA:O since WoW is an MMORPG. I've been playing MMORPG's for almost 10 years now (sometimes for as much as 16 hours/day during the summer), and let me say that as time goes MMORPG's start to become more and more repetitive until the only reason you keep playing the game is to chat with in-game friends/guildies. You can become the greatest warrior, the greatest mage, the ultimate PvP-er, or you can drown yourself in in-game lore but unless a GM notices you and decides to create an in-game monument in your honor (or makes you a GM) you will get bored/discouraged/indifferent/too tired of maintaining your status/too set in your ways to improve yourself as the game changes, and you will start again/play another game, and the process repeats itself. While I do not discourage playing MMORPG's (it has its moments), me and my old online buddies agree that this is just how it works.
Personally, I've grown tired of such things. I've grown tired of MMORPG stereotypes (most are actually true, btw), and the countless number of annoying players who play such games.
DA:O, although it borrows heavily from MMORPG's, seems to be more background/story and (more importantly) quite consequence-driven so far. A welcome change of pace.

 

That is just it, if you decide to more or less rip off the gameplay from another game you could at least do it equally good. Blizzard did the groundwork and hte polishing and DAO borrowed most of it but left out a few small things that makes DAO feel slower and more rigid than a game that is five years older. Just suck a tiny thing that my character can't jump, at all and can thus be as hindered by a tiny barrel as by a mountain just feels stupid.

I am comparing DAO to an MMORPG because the actual gameplay is so very very similar to an MMORPG I have spent way way too much time on. For me DAO plays like WoW where the massive multiplayer bit is removed and a story inserted. The combat is identical except that it is smoother, faster, more intuitive and more versatile in WoW which quite frankly is rather sad. One of my biggest gripes with WoW is the lack of spells and abilities you both have and then actually use but in DAO it is just as bad if not even worse and that is kinda sad as DAO is a single player game and thus do not have nearly the balancing issues an MMO has. I like DAO, I like to follow a story and talk with NPCs, I like making choices and affecting the gameworld.

I am also aware that I am sounding like a broken record here but truth be told, the more I play DAO the more I see it as an inferior copy of WoW with a half decent story and voice acting but even an inferior copy is worth playing if the original is good enough. Oh and Scythesong, everything you said about MMOs is correct but even if you are tired of a game you can see its upsides and well, then you play other games even inferior copies.

 

"Inferior" is relative. I don't see WoW and a "copy", I see WoW and Dragon Age: Origins, where skills work a bit like WoW. The direction DA:O's gameplay is taking is very different from WoW's, and as long as that doesn't change then the distinction will remain. And as long as it stays that way, I'll be content.

 

Morrigan is kinda weird like that. Here's one more thing you might know - if her approval is very high, as in 90+ late in the game, she doesn't sleep with you almost right until the end. It's strange, but in the context of what she's planning it makes some sense - plus, she says several times she does not like the notion of love as a) romantic or b) entangling, and it might be she's afraid she's getting there if she cares that much for you.

On the other hand, I was fairly far in her romance when Zev came along, and after my PC had a more-or-less friendly chat with him she was all over PC-boy. "So, you like elves," and all that.

 

Yeah Morrigan's reaction to polygamy is odd. Everything she says or does clearly points to her being in favor of it, yet as soon as you try to get involved with Zevran or Leliana she has a painful jealousy crisis (eventually at least). I didn't like this as it flies in the face of her entire character and the excuse she comes up with ("I do not like to share") also makes no sense in light of other things she says earlier. I can understand why Bioware wanted to keep it to a certain level of monogamy, but in this case they just shouldn't have designed clearly polygamous characters like Zevran and Morrigan. It might even have worked if only one of them was polygamous (the other one would then want to break it off regardless), but the way it plays out now is silly: Zevran the Polygamous wants to break it off because even though he doesn't mind he thinks that Morrigan the Polygamous would be jealous... and sure enough she is. It's like a bad soap

That said, Morrigan not wanting to sleep with you does make sense, in light of her character and what happens later on. I was surprised when she started to decline, but in light of her character and her plans it does fit in well. If you played your cards right with her you can get an interesting admission from her at the end.

 

Something struck me about Morrigan recently. She gets pregnant with a god-child, aparantly. She has Flemmeth`s tome, wich explains pretty much the stuff Flemeth can do. Now Flemeth raised daughters, and took their bodies right? And now Morrigan has a god-child in her belly, and knows how to take its body. Makes for a decent "badguy" in a sequel, I think.

 

Spoiler

What about Flemeth returning as a spirit and trying to take the child? It would for one of her ambitions be a far more attractive vessel than Morrigan.

 

That would aslo work, I guess. The situation does smell like sequal-material though.

 

Since I had not finished the game, that makes a great spoiler. I was going to find out what was up with this by finishing the game, but no need now. Thanks

 

I am sorry Chandos, I really am. I saw alot of spoilers in this thread, and asumed everyone had finished the game. I honestly didn`t mean to spoil the game for you.

 

NP, Rawgrim. It's really no big deal.

 

Besides, that's one ending. It isn't necessarily so.

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Just to make sure: You are aware this is a computer game?

 

Calling DA:O your all time favorite... I can't say I can agree with you there. I would rate it below Morrowind but above Oblivion, maybe at the same level as Jade Empire, with RPGs like Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2 and Torment taking the top positions. It has many good points, but the bad points did manage to overshadow those points in the end.

The NPC interaction for one was very well done. Shale was hilarious, as was the Mabari hound (though it didn't have that many different 'dialogues'). Morrigan was ok, but her disapproval of every good deed, even it made a lot of sense to do it in the greater picture (gaining goodwill and thus support), annoyed me somewhat. Alistair needed to stop whining and toughen up a bit, Leliana was a bit of the same at first, but turned out to have a tougher side as well, which I really liked.

The origins were an interesting novelty, but apart from providing six different starting levels, it does not offer that much of a different experience for other play throughs, I suspect. It's nice to actually play through your back story rather than have it read to you at the start of the game, though.

The story is pretty standard fantasy fare, serving mostly as a reason for you traipse all over the countryside in search of four pieces with which to solve your puzzle, gathering treasure and experience points as you go, of course. So far, I have seen nothing that would make it a dark fantasy game, except for the excessive gore and PG-13 sex scenes. It's interesting how even fighting skeletons will have you splattered in blood like someone put a piece of meat in a blender and didn't put the lid on. I can only assume the blood is yours or your companion's. Mind you, I haven't finished the game yet, so my rating of the story might still go up, should I ever manage to finish the game. More on that further on.

Side quests and the dialogue of non-joinable NPCs were fairly well done. While many of the side quests are the standard FedEx quests, a fair share of them do offer interesting choices and a deeper understanding of the game world.

I like the absence of some arbitrary morality index (or: alignment system), but many of the different conversation options with which you express your PCs morality don't seem to affect the conversations trees that much. It might change one or two lines before the NPC continues his story in the same way he would have as for any other dialogue option. But then, that's what I'd expect from a Bioware RPG.

The camera positions never felt quite right to me. The third person view is limited and somewhat annoying for moving around and the top down view is even worse. In top down view, the camera can't zoom out far enough, which wouldn't be so bad, if you could move the camera around freely. But for some unfathomable reason it has been tied to the currently selected character, allowing you to only move a small distance away from it. It's good for getting a good overview of your party during a melee battle, but I've lost count of how many times I've had to switch to third person view during a battle, just because some archer was pelting me with arrows, but I couldn't move the top down camera far enough to actually see him. All in all, I couldn't stop thinking that a camera implementation like in Medieval 2: Total War or, even better, Supreme Commander would have worked much better.

But the camera is only a small annoyance compared to the combat of the game. The dungeon crawls inevitably become a chore to go through after a while. I'm sure most everyone here will agree with me that the Deep Roads were far too big for them to remain enjoyable all the way through. For me, I went to Orzammar fairly early in the game, and the boredom with the battles in DA:O set in then. It wasn't just there that I felt that way, though. The longer I played the game, the worse it got, to the point that I've quit playing it all together.

Every battle is very similar and such a large part of the game is spent fighting that this soon becomes an annoyance. At no point in the game are there battles with multiple opponents that you'll just breeze through so to survive I have to keep my party back and lure enemies to them a few at a time, so that I don't get swamped, or at least get to choose the battleground. This, however, makes progress through any dungeon slow and ultimately boring.

I completely hate it, however, when I work through a dungeon very carefully, and then when there's a boss battle - a very hard battle, that is - you'll often get a cutscene, ending in your entire party being trapped in a specific area along with the boss and its minions. It's like the moment you relinquish control of your party, they immediately become the biggest idiots in the world and run headfirst into every trap ever created.

However, the main problem with the combat is, in my opinion, that every fight is equally difficult. A fight with random soldiers is equally difficult at level 1 as it is at level 20. And for everyone gushing on about the Grey Warden's prowess in battle, it is amazing that every red enemy you encounter is so much stronger than you, and even the mages of this category have about twice as much hitpoints as your main fighter.

This is ultimately what made me quit playing the game: the fact that every opponent levels with you, so that there is never a sense of progress, of your character actually becoming stronger. Imagine what it'd have been like if the kobolds that whooped your ass in BG 1 were still handing you your ass in ToB. I hated it in Oblivion, and I still hate it in DA:O.

If I ever do finish the game, and then even play through it again, I will do it as a rogue, maximising stealth early on so I can just bypass every enemy and cut straight to the boss fights. It's not like they'll get any harder, anyway - they'll just adjust their level to yours...