To be fair, I think the closest anyone has ever come to acknowledging speccing characters as blood mages in a Dragon Age game is one conversation in Awakening, where Anders is going off about templars or blood mages or some similar thing, and -if- you’ve given him the blood mage spec (which you should really be giving to all your mages because it’s awesome), you have an option to go “Hey, Anders, you’re a giant hypocrite because you’re a blood mage yourself” and he’s like “…oh yeah.”
Spam
2902
Rogue, Aveline, Anders and Varric
Spoiler friendly thread, ahoy.
There’s tons of interesting things to do with Anders but I wasn’t interested in dealing with his marginal fake ass. From what I’ve read Aveline gets better once you help her avoid her difficulties.
Fenris isn’t special but actually gets better (whaoah! i almost fell off the couch when i realized he wasn’t 2d) after you and Varric work on him for a while. Isabela, well, who doesn’t love good times and sailboats? She comes around when you clarify everyone’s understanding of Qun hypocrisy. So, not exactly the quickest run but it worked well enough.
I’ve seen some bad writing (most of it my own) but this game takes the cake. Seriously.
The hell you say, I can remember Bioware devs releasing unofficial patches nightly on their forums for several weeks after game release. One of their guys even used to release unofficial quality of life fixes and help people get around really obnoxious gameplay issues that he personally agreed never should have went live, UI, stuff like that.
Today, all you hear is we can’t do anything because Xbox limits us on our patches.
maxle
2904
A few hours in, and so far mostly unbothered by the waves though, yes, they’re dumb. Mostly. I just finished an encounter that was total bullshit, and it was total bullshit in large part due to the waves. First wave there’s a leader and a bunch of trash, not particularly taxing. Midway through the fight a mage appears out of thin air and he one-shots half my party with some absurd AoE damage and kills the rest of my kids in a few seconds. Cue a few wipes while I try to figure out where he spawns in–this is made difficult by the fact that, surprise, he teleports when he’s not one-shotting people. Pin down his spawn, learn that he relocates almost immediately, wipe a few more times, including once where my last party member goes down at the same time the mage does.
The winning strategy? Keep everyone togetherish, wait for him to spawn, and then bum-rush him, ignoring the dozen other active enemies. I get him stun locked, he dies after killing a mere one of my party, and the rest of the encounter is cake.
Least satisfying, most annoying victory ever.
Did Desslock ever give a review of this game?
I was the same a few hours in. I even liked the waves 10 hours in, I liked lots of time and enemies to try out my new spells and toys.
Somewhere past that, I started getting annoyed, and thinking…really another and another wave?
Then I got to a dungeon that wasn’t even a boss or story fight(if there is a story), and it was wave after wave for a good 20 minutes, full of assassins that one shot anything they get close to. The result of that battle was a rotting scarf, my 20th amulet of nothing special mana/stam, and maybe an armor of nothing special that I can’t use, and even if it was good, none of my other guys can use it either, because they prefer their fashion sense over utility.
I lost all sense of epic battles, and lowered difficulty to end the game quickly, and lost interest before the end because I really didn’t care about the story or the combat. I can carry a game on one, the other, or both, but not when I care nothing about either of them.
Tony_M
2907
I don’t think he got the game at the same time as most reviewers. But the fact he hasn’t posted his impressions here gives me hope that someone has paid him for a proper review and hes still giving it a thorough play through.
Tony
Budvar
2908
Yes I also get the sense of insecurity. But what I perceive to be insecurity could also just be stubbornness, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
This is Desslock’s impression.
Senjak
2910
Possible Minor Spoiler (though I doubt it)
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Does the mine ever produce anything other than expenses? I’ve owned half of it since Act I, but I’ve never seen a single copper of profit, and I just had to pay 15g for new pickaxes because my co-owner is a cheap dumbass. If it’s just a source of very expensive side quests, I can deal with that, I’d just like to know if my long term financial planning should list the mine under assets or liabilities.
I never even had the pick axe thing happen. I forgot about it the second I became his partner and never received a letter. Gold is pretty meaningless in this game. I hope there is a payoff for you, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t.
There are holes, definitely, but the surface level banter and interactions are pretty good. I’m also learning to enjoy little surprises like Character-based encounters that crop up unexpectedly and derail you from your plans (no, really, this helps keep things feeling more organic which is the key magic that needs to be performed in a “chose your own adventure” scripted style of rpg). Also I’ve noticed that sometimes minor quests morph into bigger things. And some of the writing is quite fetching. The one I’m thinking of right now happened last night. It involved a patrol along the Wounded Coast and Aveline.
I’m kinda liking some of these characters enough that the logical holes (and they’re huge, especially as noted in this thread, as regards to Hawke’s powers and the lack of companion/storyline reaction to them) are easier to overlook. I’m still not blown away by any particular character. Morrigan, Leliana, Sten, Oghren, Alistair and Shale are pretty damn hard to top. But there are just enough moments that I like adventuring with these folks (most of them, whiny or not, most of the time).
Whiny? Sure. One guy had lyrium burned into his flesh and was kept as an assassin-slave, another is a apostate mage being hunted by Templars who has a spirit living in him and slowly driving him mad and then there’s the elven keeper who’s being tempted by a demonic mirror that killed her friend and is exiled from her tribe.
They whine? I’d friggin’ whine too! Jesus. What the hell kind of characters do you want? Shale whined. About pidgeons. Ohgren would get all mopey about his ex-wife. Morrigan was only such a bitch because she’d had a pretty damn terrible life and if she didn’t whine it’s because she was absolutely terrified of showing any vulnerability, Leliana missed glamorous Orlais and would go on and on about how much better it was than Ferelden (politely, of course). Sten wasn’t big on whining. Or, well, anything else except making you feel stupid and inadequate. Which he was brilliantly good at. Then, yeah, there’s Alistair who more than made up for Sten’s stoicism.
But the point is that characters are going to tell you about what’s bothering them because how else are you supposed to know? ESP? And if you don’t care about NPCs I’ll reference an earlier post of mine: Why are you playing a Bioware game again?
I’m getting tired of the bugs. First, there’s the selection bug where you can’t select anything in the play field. Only fix is to exit the game and relaunch it. Then there’s the hang, where everything just freezes. You can’t even alt-tab, it looks for all the world like your comp is hard-locked. But if you wait a minute, or two, or three, it will recover. Usually happens in combat. When it recovers, surprise, stuff was actually still happening in the background. One time it happened to me fighting a quest-boss and when it un-froze I was in conversation with the hostage.
Razgon
2914
The freeze is usually when the game tries to contact the server, which isn’t responding.
Jag
2915
Thought this was interesting:
What you are noticing is the Reactive Drop System.
The goal of the Reactive Drop System is to keep the player stocked up on certain items as he progresses through dungeon content. We certainly hope this affected your gameplay experience in a positive way.
Health Potions, Lyrium Potions, Stamina Potions, and Injury Kits all drop globally with a %-chance based on how many of each, respectively, you currently have (which eventually hits 0.) This %-chance is also modified by the difficulty level, which is why you see Casual or Normal players getting higher amounts of these items than Hard or Nightmare players.
There is no prevention that would halt the system if you use too many potions: due to the larger cooldown on potions this time around, we want to encourage players to use them more.
http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/308/index/6514221
Maybe it was in the manual, but I don’t think Steam got one!
Killzig
2916
Switching the character I was controlling fixed this one for me. (You can cycle through with the F1-F4 keys)…
They built up a lot of good will in their earlier years by doing stuff like that – there is a reason they have been such a highly regarded developer for so long. But now they seem dedicated to squandering/spending as much of that currency as possible.
CD Projekt was in a similar position with The Witcher 1. They built up immense good will due to the patches and extra content they provided for that game months, if not years, after release. Their position against DRM helps as well, I’d wager. I only hope they do not go the route of BioWare if their success continues.
I thought there might be some sort of automatic potion drop rate adjustment - someone on RPS was talking about potons dropping all the time, which has not been my experience, but I also barely use them.
Here’s what I got from him so far:
Of course, as noted, he’s been a little quiet on the subject since then.
Razgon
2920
He’s probably being kept in a cellar in Biowareland…
