1601

Come on! Don’t you recognize Mount Sexy???

1602

Check Canary’s profile, it’s pretty obvious.

1603

Classes are distinct - you can’t turn a Mage into a fighter-mage, for instance. You’ll have to opt for a fighter, rogue or mage - they all play very differently despite some overlap in powers. Skills can be chosen by any character, even though in other games you’d typically associate them with specific classes (like herbalism, for making potions; stealing; trapmaking – those aren’t confined to mages, rogues, etc. as you might intuitively expect).

Mages are also extremely powerful, but vulnerable, almost to the extent of the older editions of D&D. They’re also very customizable - one mage will play very differently from another based upon the wide range of available spells (you can try to be a jack of all trades, but at high cost, since you could instead progress in the 4 ranks of spells to choose from in each specialization.

But mages are uber-dangerous, which also fits well with the background lore of the setting. While in most D&D games typically one of the easiest ways to blast through the storyline is to have a band of fighter types, that wouldn’t work as well in Dragon Age, where combat is really tough without a mage’s AOE damage and crowd control spells and healing (no clerics, so mages fill that role too).

In my primary playthrough, for most of the game I ended up using 2 mages, a warrior and a rogue (my main), which is a mix that I don’t think I ever used in a D&D game.

1604

No, I don’t care much about the particular items. What I care about is that depending upon where you bought the game, you can’t certain items…even though those items are clearly created in-game content. It’s kind of a weird decision.

1605

In all fairness I thought he was through with PC Gamer when they got rid of all the columnists.

1606

There seems to be some confusion on this part.

All retail and digital version of Dragon Age: Origins, Collector’s Edition or Regular, pre-order or not, include the code for the character Shale as well as the Blood Dragon armor.

1607

ok, but since you mentioned the editions, can you explain where in Europe can I buy the CE, as neither Amazon.co.uk nor play.com have it.

1608

Basically yeah. There’s no way to know or even prove it, fungibility of money and all that. It’s just a common business tactic is to split things up in such a fashion over time to sell the pieces for more. However, it’s not only that, but since they can’t lock each copy to your particular machine, they are slowly slicing up games in such a way that eventually they could get there, hopefully bypassing consumers’ initial negative response to such ideas (generally ideas like that have failed with movies in the US, see DIVX (Digital Video Express)) and bypassing first sale doctrine which makes rentals legal. I big proponent of consumer property rights for media, second hand goods, etc, and I see moves like this as an encroachment.

Is some digital armor a big deal? No, not really. But now it’s a character. What if it’s the “real” ending next time or the third act? And certainly, people don’t tend to buy PC games used because of multiplayer issues generally (or the account based structure of MMOs). However, I gather this is affecting the console game as well. Anyone renting the game or buying it used then certainly doesn’t get shale, unless the code is reusable, which would kind of defeat the point.

1609

Was it a mandated name change or a stealth operation? /end derail.

1610

The game’s supposed to be easily moddable, right? I wonder how difficult it’ll be to just get all of the special bonuses as mods on day one (well, for the PC version, anyways).

1611

One of my big complaints about how DA is being marketed is the lack of details about the gaming system. You’d think they would be providing some details by now, but I’ve not seen that. There is some talk that they may release a seperate character creator prior to release, which would be nice.

1612

This is basically what happened to the baldurs’ gate pre-order bonuses.

1613

There is a “werewolf” style game going on where the players are DC superheroes. Tom agreed to change the players names to their characters for the duration of their play time. Bill D is Black Canary. In a week or so when the game ends or he is eliminated, all the Black Canary names will go back to being his normal forum name.

1614

IIRC, all the in-game NWN 2 pre-order bonuses could be added with console commands. Different game, different company, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if the same ends up being true of DA.

1615

Given Bioware’s intent to sell the extra content, among other DLC, I doubt that it will be that simple to add.

1616

That would be a bit weird, since unlike 3rd Edition D&D for example, character creation is pretty basic since you don’t need to plan for prestige classes/multiclassing, etc. – just attributes, race, class and initial skill and powers.

You can see all that stuff that the Dragon Age wiki if you’re curious: http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Dragon_Age_Wiki

FWIW on the extra material, etc., I agree with Mordrak, etc. that it’s a crappy trend. In this case it seems to be motivated to just try to get people to register their copy though (although it penalizes 2nd hand buyers) since all purchasers of new copies of the game get access. Although I’ve had access to that stuff, I haven’t checked any of it out yet - will do so prior to submitting the review. Let me know if there’s anything else you guys want covered in the review - I have a lot of space for this one, which is a rare luxury.

1617

Your parenthetical side effect is the primary goal of those things.

1618

I’ve never been on PCG’s staff - game writing is just a hobby for me, so I’m happy to write for any publication if the writing topic is one I’m interested in and the article will get decent exposure.

1619

Well, obviously the publisher doesn’t anything from 2nd hand sales (or piracy), so it’s natural to introduce incentives to get people to buy the game at retail. But getting people to register their copies is also something of value.

1620

One of the bonus items listed as being in the CE is Grimoire of the Frozen Wastes: a special book that adds +3 to all attributes when read. At first glance, +3 to all attributes sounds like it could be rather powerful, even more so since it is a tome and not something that has to use an equipment slot. I don’t know anything about the DA character system, so if attributes can go up to say 100 and you gain something like 20 points per level, then +3 to 6-8 attributes is not that big a deal. But if we are talking about attributes that max at 20 or so, then that +3 across the board seems to be a rather powerful trinket.