Jakub
1701
Dammit, you guys are sucking me in with the lore.
No meter or any indicator of any kind of what your choices could lead to. If NPCs react to you, it will be based on your deeds that they know and care about.
You can tell what each companion thinks of you at at any time - i.e. there is a visible “meter”, but it’s personal to each NPC.
NPC influence is a timesink (and it’s possible to “game” it through giving gifts) but a pretty rewarding one – companions have a ton of dialogue, so you’ll miss a lot unless you buddy up to them (and miss the romances, of course), but even then there’s a lot of context specific dialogue, so you’ll never hear it if they aren’t in your party during the event – or if another companion that they riff off of isn’t also in the party at the time. They also have some decent personal quests, and the conversations that companions hold with each other while you’re walking around are also substantive and relevant, far beyond the amusing little barks they’d have in BG, for instance.
But playing with different mixes of companions will be one of the biggest sources of replayability - they’re all pretty interesting and different.
Joe_M
1704
Good news. It’s not make or break by any means, but the more surprises the better as far as I’m concerned. :)
Now the only problem I’m left with is a month till release.
You can tell what each companion thinks of you at at any time - i.e. there is a visible “meter”, but it’s personal to each NPC.
I wasn’t thinking so much of companions, but random NPCs you meet that may have tasks for you to do (or want to kill you because of your reputation or what have you).
So what are the odds this will be fully playable at launch with a minimal of bugs?
I’m tempted to wait 4-6 months for them to work the bugs out, first.
You might want to scroll up and reread the last few posts by Desslock.
Yeah, seriously - only a dozen possible race-class-origin combinations? Is Bioware even trying, or are they just setting us up for the DLC money vacuum?
Bioware has had a pretty good track record with their last few games, so I’m willing to trust they’ll get DA:O right. Hopefully that faith is not misplaced.
Of all my misgivings about the game, this is definitely not one of them. I didn’t like the way D&D character creation spiraled out of control in 3rd edition – having a small number of distinctive options is much more appealing to me.
It has also allowed them to give each character a very distinct starting story.
Sorry, I forgot to include the “<sarcasm>” tag there.
I can’t even imagine how difficult this game was to QA, given all the choices and variations, etc. – crashed zero times in 121 hours, no bugs, one incorrect journal entry (which had no affect on gameplay). It’s actually amazing that there weren’t evident scripting errors. Actually maybe one incident I can think of where characters acted like you had knowledge of something that I hadn’t actually scene. but very clean technically.
Only technical issue is that system requirements are pretty high, especially given the nature of the graphics. Unfortunately, given the protection labyrinth I had to go through to get a build, I was only able to install the game on one of my systems, so I only saw its performance on a high end machine (video card seems to be key). I previously played it on a mid-range card at BioWare for a preview and it was fine - it was a slideshow on a low-end card, however.
Can you name the “mid-range” and “high-range” cards?
Did you actually time this for review purposes or does the game include a counter? I’d almost be too scared to find out.
Can you specify as to what your classes of videocards mean? What is “low-end”?
Yeah. This is where they should have focused their marketing efforts. A deep RPG with a thoughtful, interesting setting feels a whole lot more “mature” to me than the awkwardly edgy gorefest/dating game that we see in the trailers. I’m really not sure what they were thinking when they came up with that whole ad campaign.
Mid-range anything that was a good video card over the past 3 years (i.e. geforce 8800 GTS+). Anything more recent is certainly fine. I wouldn’t recommend it on the official min-spec of an ATI x800-gen card or geforce equivalent.
I played it at 2560x1600 with AA maxed though on a high end current card and it was completely smooth, as you’d expect.
I spent almost a whole page of the review (in a sidebar) on this exact point.
Nice to have 8 pages to work with, heh.
It’s funny how my interest in this game has transformed from “want to see how a trainwreck this game is going to be, it has to be entertaining in a sick way!” to “i just want to play this game, it may be one of the best rpg in years!”. Desslock, i hope you recieve a nifty swag from Bioware, because your marketing efforts has been much better than theirs XD.
