This reminds me… I really need to play the last 3/4 of this game.
Yeah, Bioware’s “solution” for their DLC in this was quite poor, probably brought on by the lack of a proper digital distributor and the need to ride the fence between retail and digital consumers. Nowadays, all DLC for new games would just be kept in Origin or Steam. But the need to effectively do a double-login with a service up and running and an elevated prompt while staying online just in order to get full access to the game is “cumbersome” to say the least, and incorporates more potential points of failure than anyone in their right mind would ever want. The whole “manager” system in addition just reminded me of old FTP interfaces.
That said, the game is worth it. Well, the Fade part gets annoyingly long, but it’s still waaaaay better than the dream sequence in Max Payne, lol.
I’ve only ever had DRM prevent me from playing purchased DLC twice: Borderlands and Dragon Age. I only got about an eighth into this game then gave up in anger and frustration that I couldn’t get the DLC for the Ultimate Edition to load properly or activate.
-Todd
I haven’t replayed Dragon Age: Origins since my original playthrough, but I also found this pretty jarring even at the time. It was kind of strange that your character was the only one that spoke through text.
Irony being, that technique was likely chosen so as not to be jarring - the player wouldn’t hear someone else’s voice in the role of the protagonist, and could therefore better imagine themselves in the game. That said, I had great fun with the D&D games which let you pick from various voices (of course, that was just party banter and exclamations).
My Commander Shepard is taking a break from saving the galaxy, so I thought I’d try to finish up the game from my last playthrough. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what in the heck my rogue’s motivation and story was, so I started from scratch this afternoon with an Elven Mage. Just pissed off the Circle for aiding and abetting a Blood Mage. Off to the Wardens I go!
I’m playing through this as well. I’ve gotten much deeper than on previous attempts. Enjoying it quite a bit, surprised I left it this long.
A nice long read about maps, framed around discussion of Dragon Age’s map.
Dragon Age: Origins eventually found its setting in Ferelden, the kingdom in the bottom right bulge of the sketches, so it left a huge portion of the sketched world unused, which the team presumed no one would ever see. “We thought that was going to be the only one,” he says of Dragon Age: Origins. “That’s why when you get to the end of Origins, there’s so many epilogues that cast off far into the future, which, if we’d known that we were going to keep going and keep going with history, we wouldn’t have said, ‘Oh, in fifty and one hundred years, this is going to happen.’ I think we would have played our cards a little closer to our chest.”
Thanks for sharing. It’s interesting but only in so far that people continue to follow Tolkien’s lead I guess. You don’t even have to have a fantasy map per se if you’re not into that kinda thing at all. Still waiting on a fantasy world with a mango economy myself.