Dragon Age

[Sky]

He's my tank for a later playthrough. My party is set for rp reasons :)

[Ingmar]

Thus far on my 2nd playthrough, I'm actually having a much easier time of things in most cases with tank/2h/melee rogue/mage than I ever did with 2 mages (or 3 mages.) The room in the Circle Tower with the templar that can actually holy smite was a joke this time around, but with 3 mages it was awwwwwwwwwwwwful. I also have a much easier time with orange named guys who tend to resist a lot of status conditions from magic. The Redcliff wave fights were also easier (particularly the 2nd bit down in the village.) There are a few fights that have been harder this way but not a ton.

I think the real reason for that though is not carrying an archer - my typical group on the first playthroughs was mage PC, alistair, leliana as archer, and morrigan. Archers just seem really weak overall, so having Leliana along as an archer meant I was carrying a fair amount of dead weight - the song buff was nice but her damage output was pretty anemic even with her special bow etc. I will probably do an archer playthrough at some point just to see what the deal is. I haven't applied that dagger/archer mod-fix thing.

[sidereal]

I still have no idea how Talislanta didn't make a billion dollars for all the hate that people have for elves.

Their publisher was too busy making a billion dollars from Magic: the Gathering.

I dropped Shale from my Nomage playthrough.  She's entertaining, but it's just so fucking weird having a golem wandering around that it's distracting.  Immersion?  Broken.  Thanks for that.  Plus I didn't like the whole mode-shifting mechanic.  It made changing tactics in realtime clunky.  I'd have to switch modes, unpause, wait, pause, then queue up the ability I actually wanted to use.  It probably makes more sense for people who don't want to pause much and just let tactics run, but that's not how I roll. 

Right now it's a dual-wielding Champion, Alistair, Lel, and Wynne (I said no mages, not no clerics!).  But Lel's damage output is for shit.  I'm thinking of finding and/or building a mod that lets poison apply to her bow, which might make her more usable.  Otherwise, I'll probably swap her out for Oghren and give up on chests.

[Ingmar]

You could just use Zevran, although I think it will probably take a few levels to get his lock stuff up to snuff.

[Slyfeind]

Poison doesn't work with bows? I've been using it a lot, but never bothered to check....

[Sky]

Yeah, she's definitely the weak point in combat in my group, but she's with us 'til the end, dernit. Arrrrrrpeeee!

I also wish poison worked with arrows, and I need to apply that dex fix at some point.

[jakonovski]

Leliana definitely has her place as a buffbot and grenade chucker and later, if you made her a bowman, with the Arrow of Slaying.

[MournelitheCalix]

has anyone attempted a playthough with Dog as the tank?

[Ingmar]

Dog is more equivalent to a 2h damage dealer type guy than a tank, really. I would think you could tank with him on normal fine, though.

[sidereal]

I also wish poison worked with arrows, and I need to apply that dex fix at some point.

Do it after the random encounter that puts you up against like 15 Darkspawn archers.  Yowza.

[Sky]

The reason for my posting about mage strength was really a battle down in the blood mage subplot of Denerim. There's a point where you have three doors do a large room with three blood mages (one yellow) plus a bunch of qunari and archers. Took me three tries to nail it, but I still ended up using up most of my goop...and that wasn't the end of the dungeon. But I did enjoy trying to win that battle, took several tries.

Finally, I had my 2h main go in the left door and Al go in the right door. Beeline for the mages, knock 'em down and chop them up. While they did this, I had Wynne and Lel at the center door. Lel knocked the yellow mage down and Wynne threw an earthquake in the middle section so everyone would have to approach the warriors. Wynne and Lel had the yellow mage down past half health by the time the quake ended, then everyone rushed those two and it got hairy for a minute :) 2h sweep and threaten ftw. Slow timers ftl, heh. That's when I opened the next door, almost goopless, and saw yet another battle and decided to take a walk in the woods.

[dd0029]

Finished up the Urn quest last night.  That was entertaining until the leap of faith.  That's a puzzle my mind is just not built for.  Had to youtube that one.  The dex fix patch is kind of  .  Massed archers, ie more than 1, are really nasty. 

[apocrypha]

My PS3 copy arrived today. Well, 2 arrived actually, no idea why they sent me 2, but whatever.

Took about 15 mins to install, then it said I needed to update my PS3 firmware, which took (I kid you not) an hour, then it took another 40 mins to install the DLC that the retailer included codes for for free.

When I finally got to play it I ended up rolling a dwarven warrior. I didn't want to start with a mage because I'd heard how cheesy they were and I didn't like the sound of being a noble and I can't stand elves, of any kind, in any game anywhere ever. So Stumpy the dual-wielding warrior it is!

Haven't got far yet, not had time, but it plays fine on the PS3 in terms of controls and combat, although the framerate is a bit  at times. Also, this is an ugly game. Very ugly. Since I don't remember any of you lot mentioning this I'm led to suspect this is a PS3 only problem.

[Ingmar]

Maybe it is a PS3 thing, or maybe it is just an eye of the beholder type thing. It is a bit too brown, certainly. On the other hand I think they really did a nice job with the faces/changing facial expressions, for a game in the 'realistic' style in particular.

[stray]

It's an ugly designed game in many parts, I think. Many faces are shittastic.

What i heard is that PS3 isn't all that different from PC. The 360 version though has a lot of complaints.


edit: I think the expressions are hit and miss. Play the opening mage cutscenes for example. Wtf is wrong with the main character as he walks into the harrowing? Is he expressing "fear"? WTF? Looks constipated with something stuck in his eye.

Oh, and everyone's hands are huge.

[tmp]

Got finished yesterday. ~120 hours with skipping k10rats side-quests, although it'd be probably half that if i got out of habit of walking rather than running...

It winds up with some loose ends, not sure if all of them intentional but i definitely wouldn't mind a sequel or two following these up so i guess that's a positive.

On the graphics: thought they're decent mostly thanks to the depth of field tricks, at least on PC. one elf's life in 80 pictures as reference. Full of spoilers obviously and all scaled down from the original 1680x1050 because that Bioware social site is apparently really concerned about their disk space usage...

[Musashi]

The facial animations are horrible.  Maybe it's that there's so much emphasis on the story in this game that makes that matter.  But in this game it definitely does matter.  And they're bad.  They don't break the game.  But they're a huge distraction, at least for me.

[sidereal]

They're pretty bad.  Slightly worse than Vampire: the Masquerade quality.  Leliana gets bizarre forehead wrinkles every time she talks.  It's like they exaggerated the facial expressions by about 2x just to show they could do it.  They should have scaled way, way back.

It should have been a warning side that the facial expression slider you use to set your expression for your character icon during chargen produces 99% fucking stupid expressions and the only acceptable one is to not move the slider at all.

[stray]

bah, they don't have the expression slider on the ps3 version. i was wondering where peeps were getting those avatars. oh well, not missing much apparently.

i wonder if the entire character gen is a bit different on ps3. i have a really hard time making faces. i tend to just to go to the barebones template, and form some lame looking dude from there. i consider the whole damn thing fubar though cuz some templates/presets might have a preferable eyebrow shape, or lip shape, and then horrid fucking broken looking noses. while another template has good noses, but lip shapes that all look like my character is constantly puffing up and blowing air. i don't understand why all of these aren't individual parameters i can adjust.

oh well, that's probably the fifth time i bitched about it.  

[Rasix]

You break your shift key?

Expressions didn't bother me much.  My rogue looked pretty vapid throughout. 

[caladein]

The faces didn't bother me so much because I was just glad to see people out of their stupid hats.

[rk47]

The reason for my posting about mage strength was really a battle down in the blood mage subplot of Denerim. There's a point where you have three doors do a large room with three blood mages (one yellow) plus a bunch of qunari and archers. Took me three tries to nail it, but I still ended up using up most of my goop...and that wasn't the end of the dungeon. But I did enjoy trying to win that battle, took several tries.

Finally, I had my 2h main go in the left door and Al go in the right door. Beeline for the mages, knock 'em down and chop them up. While they did this, I had Wynne and Lel at the center door. Lel knocked the yellow mage down and Wynne threw an earthquake in the middle section so everyone would have to approach the warriors. Wynne and Lel had the yellow mage down past half health by the time the quake ended, then everyone rushed those two and it got hairy for a minute :) 2h sweep and threaten ftw. Slow timers ftl, heh. That's when I opened the next door, almost goopless, and saw yet another battle and decided to take a walk in the woods.

If you really had to include a Rogue in a party, at the very least invest on some crafted grenades to increase her damage contribution.

[stray]

vapid throughout. 

Charmed, I'm sure. 

[tmp]

If you really had to include a Rogue in a party, at the very least invest on some crafted grenades to increase her damage contribution.

Rogue damage seems fine; when behind with the momentum going it's like critcritcritcritnext, sorry 2h warrior, are you still in middle of taking that swing? Though in a fight like that would be probably prudent to slap some magebane and deathroot on the blades -- turns mages into thin, useless napkins which can be more useful than the extra dps.

Grenades being AoE can be more trouble than worth unless one is careful about aiming.

[Ingmar]

Yes, it isn't that rogue damage output its bad; it is that archery specifically is a bit weak.

[tmp]

Ahh; i'm rolling with the dex fix pretty much from the beginning so it works pretty decent for me really, but can imagine it to be lackluster without.

[stray]

It is lackluster at first.. umm, I guess. Didn't really have a reference anyhow. But once you get Lethality it's still ok.

Archery is weak on paper, or even AI. But like anything else, it's great in the control of an actual player.

[Tebonas]

Exchanged Alistair with Oghren for the Orzammar part, and damn does 2h-survivability suck compared to sword'n'board. If he draws aggro, he is toast. And damage output isn't that much higher either.

[apocrypha]

Yeah it's mostly faces that my ugly beef is with. The way that one half of the face will change expression independently of the other half in an attempt to achieve non-symmetrical expressions is soooooo badly done it makes them look like joke EVE character portraits taking a painful shit.

Plus a lot of the textures, particularly environmental ones, seem to be far too low res, whereas others are fine, notably character armour. I suppose it's performance tradeoffs on the PS3 but it looks like shit when you've got a blurry, flat textured door right next to a shiny, crisp, sparkly suit of armour on an NPC.

Anyway, not overly bothered by it, the gameplay seems great. I've found myself reading every single codex entry that I get and roleplaying my casteless dwarf, which is very unlike me in this kind of game 

[stray]

Some of the blur effects though I think are intentional...? Emulating cinema/bokeh perhaps.

[apocrypha]

I have no trouble with the focal plane blur etc, that's cool, just the crappy low res textures! But really, it's not that big a deal to me, it's certainly not going to come within a million miles of stopping me enjoying the game.

Just struck out into the Wilds with my first party and already am wishing I'd brought a mage along and that I'd gone sword'n'board instead of dual wield with my dwarf. I shall continue for a bit and see how I do. Also, they're all male! There's nobody for my dwarf to try chatting up yet, that may have to be rectified.

[amiable]

Yeah it's mostly faces that my ugly beef is with. The way that one half of the face will change expression independently of the other half in an attempt to achieve non-symmetrical expressions is soooooo badly done it makes them look like joke EVE character portraits taking a painful shit.

The only face I had a real problem with was Lelani, who was an attractive girl whose facial expression made her look like she was constantly being violated in a most unpleasant way.

[Xilren's Twin]

First playthrough done: 60 hours almost exactly (i know i skipped a few sidequests), 91% of the world explored but only 39% content complete.  :)
I like how they let you continue to play after the main plot is done (no matter how you choose to end it) but want to start again.  Only odd thing to me was despite having maxed relationship with Lei, never got an oppotunity for romance.  Convesation choices dried up about half way through.  Played the good aligned hero that run which was fine.

On to #2, the puppy kicking playthrough.

[rattran]

Certain puppy-kicking choices make things interesting:

[schild]

39% content complete.  :)

Misleading. This probably includes conversation choices you missed, which I wouldn't really call "content" as it probably doesn't change too much of the game. Unless you're like Rattran and cut entire bits off at the neck.