EvaUnit02 on 7/11/2009 at 04:40

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Never mind Vurt, could you just please explain the relevance of this comment already?

mothra on 7/11/2009 at 14:26

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so far so standard in the dragon age universe. the story is lala sofar, voice-over is very competent but boy, this engine is ugly. low-rez everywhere you look and you have to edit ini-files so you get ansiotropic filtering. about the "party chest", I found it enough to buy some backpack extension sofar and never reached my limit sofar. mapsizes are not that big, the environment is made up of little corridors dressed up as "natural barriers", you constantly get to "invisible barriers", small ledges your character cant scale. The overall design is 100% generic but the banter between your party characters and the options for "approval" by them for you are handled much better than in ME. Where the game truly shines is the pause-party-combat. I love it, it's been so long since I played this type of game and I'm loving every minute of combat in it. I managed to only go down once during the first fight with the ogre, but my party managed to kill it without me. Most important thing for me was to disable all automatic party AI combat slots since this feature aint working well and I don't wanna spend skillpoints on AI slots when I myself do it much better. So I give orders all the time instead of watching the AI fail horribly by their amature mistakes. (like warriors casting "threaten" constantyl although getting already attacked by 4 guys).
And about the origins: they are very small little prologues but all end in the same situation, you leave for osdargad with duncan, I hope it will have more impact later. until then I'll continue try preventing my party from making decisions on their own and keep getting slaughtered(anybody else think that the overexaggerated blood splatter makes the game look cheesy ?)

Phatose on 8/11/2009 at 04:10

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It's not 'some encounters', it's just one.


But still, it's bullshit. And I really do think you should have the option to stab the offending quest giver in the face on principle, and have the game report it back to the devs, since they feel the need for game reporting.

Angel Dust on 8/11/2009 at 09:41

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Actually of the people who have actually played it only denisv seems to hate it and the reast seem to be enjoying it, despite the issues they may have. I'm waiting for a few more TTLG reviews before I think about getting it so if you could elaborate on what you like/don't like about it I would appreciate it. :)


Maybe I'm blind or for some reason you made it up but where the fuck is this demo of which you speak? :confused:

denisv on 8/11/2009 at 10:59

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Sorry, there is no demo. What I meant was that I downloaded the full game to see if it was worth the purchase (it isn't.)

In more detail though, comparing with BG2.

Graphics: Mostly bad with occasionally nice environments (the mage origins seemed the prettiest). Indoor lightning is atmospheric. The blood and character animations are just bad. Water effects... wait, what water effects?

Camera control: Horrible. Can't use the overhead camera because archers and mages have ridiculous ranges and can't use behind camera because then you only see 1/3 of the battle at a time and you have to constantly rotate and fiddle with it.

Difficulty: Hard, and because of the level scaling, encounters don't get any easier either. I didn't appreciate the difficulty, though.

Interface: Dull, confusing. Text is all over the place, instead of the console like in BG2. There's no information about rolls or anything. Presumably this is to hide some sort of adaptive difficulty. Inventory is limited by the number of items, not their weight. You can carry 70 types of feathers or 70 types of Plate Mail.

Magic: Remember BG2, where mages ruled? I do. There was a combination of spells for every occasion. I played through it with only a magic user (sorcerer, mage, cleric/mage) several times. Half the spells I saw in DA:O were party buffs and the rest were pewpewpew damage spells that made my mage into an archer who shoots fire/ice/whatever arrows. Kinda like, ya know, MMORPGs. Not that I've played any MMORPGs :)

Environments: Generic Greco-Roman combined with some Gothic and... Disney/Pixar. Lots of invisible barriers. To me it looked poorly thought-out, as if they had a bunch of clipart and put it together somehow without really giving it any thought.

Writing: The worst part of the game. The writing is consistently horrifyingly bad. I'm going to have to leave it at that, as it's too big a subject to tackle.

Characters: Way too pretty, modern, serious-emo. It was like watching Xena The Warrior Princess, but without any of the humor.

Enemies: I got really sick of constantly fighting Orcs and Bandits. Especially since my level made no difference.


I think giving DA:O more than 2/10 would be nonsense, since it fails across the board and is a huge step back from Baldur's Gate.