[Gothos]

Gifts and conversations are the only factors for them liking you or not. Of course, by not taking them with you you lose out on some possible conversation options for influence.


Also, you can save Connor if you don't mind dabbling in some blood magic as I recall.

[Tiste Simeon]

Ah. I went to the Mages Circle to try and save hm but I ended up doing the whole Mages Circle mission and so they were in no shape to help. Then everyone got really mad.

I also asked because Sten is a better fighter than Alistair and Leilana is a better rogue (with regards to opening locked things) than the assassin guy who joins your team (though now the crows or whatever are after me to join them - good decision or no?)

The only chopping and changing I might do is between Morrigan and Wynne.

[Gothos]

If you build the Warden right he/she hardly needs any party members anyway. Anyway,

Sten is a better dps warrior. Allistair is more of the tank guy.
Leliana is more the thief/archer type. Zevran is the stabby battle guy.
Morrigan is more of the damage focused mage. Wynne is more of a healer/buffer.

Of course, they are all pretty malleable, as characters tend to be in western RPGs. Ultimately it matters very little besides cosmetics and your personal preference. I tend to run with Sten, Zevran and Morrigan.

EDIT: UNLESS THE GOLEM IS AVAILABLE, HAHAHAHA Shale is awesome.

This post has been edited by Gothos: 01 September 2014 - 06:58 AM

[Tiste Simeon]

Not reached Shale yet but I enjoyed being a golem in the Fade.

[Tiste Simeon]

Finished DA:O. Enjoyable game and the decisions you have to make keep it interesting enough. I finished up putting Alastair on the throne as I didn't have high enough coercion to persuade him to marry Anora. I sided with Bhelen in the Dwarf Kingdom and managed to turn the werewolves back into humans, gaining elven support. I lost the mages but got the Templars.

Pretty good game overall. I heard the 2nd is rubbish though, anyone played it & can agree/disagree?

Now playing Dishonoured! Seems like a fun game too, I'm guessing decisions will affect things later in this one too.

[Morgoth]

Tiste Simeon, on 09 September 2014 - 06:12 PM, said:

Finished DA:O. Enjoyable game and the decisions you have to make keep it interesting enough. I finished up putting Alastair on the throne as I didn't have high enough coercion to persuade him to marry Anora. I sided with Bhelen in the Dwarf Kingdom and managed to turn the werewolves back into humans, gaining elven support. I lost the mages but got the Templars.

Pretty good game overall. I heard the 2nd is rubbish though, anyone played it & can agree/disagree?

Now playing Dishonoured! Seems like a fun game too, I'm guessing decisions will affect things later in this one too.

The second is rubbish. They had less than a year of development time, and someone higher up clearly decided they needed to ride the Mass Effect 2 wave. The result was a bland mess of a game with a story a little more shallow than than the D&D campaign I made when I was ten.

Not to mention that the dialogue was awful. It felt like a 14 year old's idea of how adults talk. It was especially cringe worthy when the characters tried to talk about emotions.

My advice is to read a wikipedia synopsis of DA2, and wait and see if DA:I gets favourable reviews or not. I'm assuming it'll be crap too, but I'm holding out a slight hope for something interesting.

This post has been edited by Morgoth: 10 September 2014 - 06:45 AM

[Tiste Simeon]

Thanks I might do that. From all I've heard it isn't up to much.

[Gothos]

Well, DA2 wasn't a TERRIBLE game like Duke Nukem Forever, or C&C4 are. It's just not nearly as good as DA:O. The gameplay and rival/friend systems are pretty interesting. The characters and story aren't, though. The game also railroads you to make a disaster, that you can see coming for miles, happen.

They also made the mistake of trying to make Hawke a fantasy Shepard. Nobody duplicates Shepard. Not even Shepard.

[Slow Ben]

I think it's worth playing once, but Morgs dead on about the dialogue. Do yourself a favor and always choose the smartass option, because the good/evil dialogue is laughable.

[Tiste Simeon]

It is very cheap in CEX at the moment so I may get it and play it later. Have been reading a lot of the arguments on the Dragon Age subreddit and most people say it's worth a play if you go in not expecting anything like Origins.

[Illuyankas]

There is a conversation where two party members discuss the story they are writing of a third party member's romantic times with her love interest. They explicitly call it 'friendfiction'. Also, kill all elves.

[Aptorian]

I've got a free Steam key for Alpha Protocol if anybody wants it:

VKR73-ELD5B-9LZ3V

Alpha Protocol is a third person shooter Spy RPG where you can play like James Bond, Jason Bourne or Archer depending upon your choices. It's a sort of broken game, I ended up quitting at an impossible boss fight, but it's also really fun when you get into it.

[Gothos]

I think I actually already have it, just never played. Steam is my personal "to play pile".

[Werthead]

Tiste Simeon, on 09 September 2014 - 06:12 PM, said:

Pretty good game overall. I heard the 2nd is rubbish though, anyone played it & can agree/disagree?

The two games are comparable in quality. DA:O is bigger (although it drags a lot, so not necessarily the better thing), has more going on and allows more player choice, particularly in character customisation. The separate origins thing is clever as well. Combat is okay, although kind of inept compared to the Infinity Engine games (which is problematic, as DA:O is supposed to be the modern IE-beater, but never comes close). The writing is pretty risible and the voice acting downright godawful (Claudia Black, of course, excepted). The main plot is kind of dull, but some of the subplots are pretty good. There's also some good worldbuilding, even if the best is hidden away in the codexes.

DA2's gameplay is certainly weaker. The world is a lot smaller, there's painful re-use of the same relatively small number of outdoor and indoor areas. The combat is downright despicably awful, especially the multiple waves of enemies spawning mid-fight. It's also a lot easier a game. On the other hand, the writing is much stronger, the characters are much better-deployed (DA2 gives you reasons to use all of them at different times, whilst with DA:O there's no reason whatsoever to not just stick with Morrigan and Alastair, and it feels like the game even punishes you if you don't by only giving them decent story endings), the voice acting is much stronger and the worldbuilding is vastly superior. The game cleverly uses Kirkwall as a sort of BABYLON 5 analogue, finding excuses to bring major world-altering events to its doors. So the quarian and mage/templar plots, which are present but almost ignorable in DA:O, are much more central and important in DA2 which is necessary as they appear to be the major plot elements of the trilogy. That's not to say the plot and writing are fantastic, and the ending is incompetent, but they're better than DA:O.

Frankly, the best part of the series so far is AWAKENING, which combines the superior gameplay of DA:O and the stronger writing/characters/focus of DA2. It also really redeems the darkspawn from the mindless, pointless bad guys of DA:O into something far more intereseting. AWAKENING also sets up a lot of stuff for DA2 and apparently 3, so make sure you play it.

Or say sod it and go and play THE WITCHER games, DIVINITY: ORIGINAL SIN and now WASTELAND 2 (and probably the forthcoming PILLARS OF ETERNITY), all of which as RPGs leave the DRAGON AGE games coughing in their dust

[Morgoth]

Werthead, on 23 September 2014 - 07:34 PM, said:

Tiste Simeon, on 09 September 2014 - 06:12 PM, said:

Pretty good game overall. I heard the 2nd is rubbish though, anyone played it & can agree/disagree?

The two games are comparable in quality. DA:O is bigger (although it drags a lot, so not necessarily the better thing), has more going on and allows more player choice, particularly in character customisation. The separate origins thing is clever as well. Combat is okay, although kind of inept compared to the Infinity Engine games (which is problematic, as DA:O is supposed to be the modern IE-beater, but never comes close). The writing is pretty risible and the voice acting downright godawful (Claudia Black, of course, excepted). The main plot is kind of dull, but some of the subplots are pretty good. There's also some good worldbuilding, even if the best is hidden away in the codexes.

DA2's gameplay is certainly weaker. The world is a lot smaller, there's painful re-use of the same relatively small number of outdoor and indoor areas. The combat is downright despicably awful, especially the multiple waves of enemies spawning mid-fight. It's also a lot easier a game. On the other hand, the writing is much stronger, the characters are much better-deployed (DA2 gives you reasons to use all of them at different times, whilst with DA:O there's no reason whatsoever to not just stick with Morrigan and Alastair, and it feels like the game even punishes you if you don't by only giving them decent story endings), the voice acting is much stronger and the worldbuilding is vastly superior. The game cleverly uses Kirkwall as a sort of BABYLON 5 analogue, finding excuses to bring major world-altering events to its doors. So the quarian and mage/templar plots, which are present but almost ignorable in DA:O, are much more central and important in DA2 which is necessary as they appear to be the major plot elements of the trilogy. That's not to say the plot and writing are fantastic, and the ending is incompetent, but they're better than DA:O.

Frankly, the best part of the series so far is AWAKENING, which combines the superior gameplay of DA:O and the stronger writing/characters/focus of DA2. It also really redeems the darkspawn from the mindless, pointless bad guys of DA:O into something far more intereseting. AWAKENING also sets up a lot of stuff for DA2 and apparently 3, so make sure you play it.

Or say sod it and go and play THE WITCHER games, DIVINITY: ORIGINAL SIN and now WASTELAND 2 (and probably the forthcoming PILLARS OF ETERNITY), all of which as RPGs leave the DRAGON AGE games coughing in their dust

I fully agree with your criticism of DA:O , I very much doubt it’ll be remembered as a gigant of the genre. It’s main claim to fame, I think, is that it arrived at a time when the market lacked much in the way of decent RPGs.

DA:O was alright. Well, it was good, just not good. DA2 however was pretty terrible in every measurable way in my opinion. The writing was certainly not “stronger”, or even halfway decent. No matter if you consider character development and side quests, or the overarching plot.

The plot was absurd, especially if you did the first game as a mage like I did. But, let’s start at the beginning. In DA:O Flemmeth was an old crazy woman living in a hut in the forest. She dressed like someone living on her own in the woods would, and she was clearly a very dangerous person. Perhaps the most dangerous individual you come across in the game. Flemmeth of DA2 was the evil stepmother of Snow White crossed with some sort of dominatrix costume. A comic book villain dressed in the classical Marvel style.

Now, following that you arrive in Kirkwall, a city where mages are killed on sight by the Templars whom basically rule the city. You need to build power enough to insulate yourself from their wrath you are told. Not long after you kill people in the street. With magic! You walk around in robe carrying a glowing staff on your back, using magic in daylight. On the street! You talk to a Templar, blood all over you, a glowing staff on your back: No Mr. Templar, I haven’t seen any mages about. It would be comical if the game didn’t take itself so seriously.

And dialogue was so embarrassing. I cringed. I tried to play DA2 when my wife wasn’t home because of how awful it was. This is not how adults talk. This is not how people talk!

Now, the Arishok part was genuinely interesting, I’ll agree to that. His motivations and struggle were interesting and somewhat well done, but I suspect they only seemed that way in contrast to the absurdity that was the other main plotlines. Alas, an intricate part of that Act was Isabella.

As for the final act: The developers clearly wanted to make the decision ambigious, but if you play through the game once you realize the only right side in the Kirkwall conflict is the Templars. Sure their leader is crazy, but the Templars are right. The mages, every single one of them, will reach out to demons at the slightest hint of adversity. You know this because they do so in game.

Now, I’ve heard people say before that the characters of DA2 were decent. They really weren’t. They were two dimensional archetypes recycled throughout the fantasy genre again and again. Varric wasn’t interesting. He was fun, entertaining in his banter but exceedingly shallow. The same rogue you’ve met everywhere since, I don’t know, Silk?. Meril? The only thing that set her apart from all the other versions of her archetype was a cute accent. I actually kind of like the soldier woman, in as much as she was a warrior first and foremost and didn’t wear a chainmail bikini. I mean, she wasn’t an original character, but at least she was a woman who did not obsess over the main character in a romantic fashion. S

Now Isabella, she was godawful. By far the worst of the bunch. Every dialogue. Every camera angle (think Miranda’s ass shots were daft?). She was supposed to be sassy, I guess. In the sort of way a fourteen year old boy fantasy kind of sassy. Sarah literally laughed when Isabella arrived in the game and opened her mouth, and she still enjoys teasing me about the sort of games I play with that as her prime example. It’s hard to disagree with her.

This post has been edited by Morgoth: 25 September 2014 - 07:48 AM

[Traveller]

I brushed the dust off my 3ds and got Fire Emblem - Awakening.

All I can say so far, is wow. The last strategy game I played was Advance Wars on whatever handheld that was on. Having been sceptical of the 3d before, this game really makes effective use of it. I've only played a few battles to get started but I'm impressed so far.

How much does the starting class affect gameplay? Whatever strength/weakness I've tried the avatar starts as tactician... but from a brief search there are a ton of classes.

Do you choose one as the game progresses?

Thanks for the recommendations in the 3ds thread.

(I meant to post this in the Game you're playing at the moment thread if anyone can be bothered to move it )

This post has been edited by Traveller: 25 September 2014 - 08:32 AM

[Gothos]

Morgoth, on 25 September 2014 - 07:47 AM, said:

DA:O was alright. Well, it was good, just not good. DA2 however was pretty terrible in every measurable way in my opinion. The writing was certainly not “stronger”, or even halfway decent. No matter if you consider character development and side quests, or the overarching plot.

The plot was absurd, especially if you did the first game as a mage like I did. But, let’s start at the beginning. In DA:O Flemmeth was an old crazy woman living in a hut in the forest. She dressed like someone living on her own in the woods would, and she was clearly a very dangerous person. Perhaps the most dangerous individual you come across in the game. Flemmeth of DA2 was the evil stepmother of Snow White crossed with some sort of dominatrix costume. A comic book villain dressed in the classical Marvel style.

Now, following that you arrive in Kirkwall, a city where mages are killed on sight by the Templars whom basically rule the city. You need to build power enough to insulate yourself from their wrath you are told. Not long after you kill people in the street. With magic! You walk around in robe carrying a glowing staff on your back, using magic in daylight. On the street! You talk to a Templar, blood all over you, a glowing staff on your back: No Mr. Templar, I haven’t seen any mages about. It would be comical if the game didn’t take itself so seriously.

And dialogue was so embarrassing. I cringed. I tried to play DA2 when my wife wasn’t home because of how awful it was. This is not how adults talk. This is not how people talk!

Now, the Arishok part was genuinely interesting, I’ll agree to that. His motivations and struggle were interesting and somewhat well done, but I suspect they only seemed that way in contrast to the absurdity that was the other main plotlines. Alas, an intricate part of that Act was Isabella.

As for the final act: The developers clearly wanted to make the decision ambigious, but if you play through the game once you realize the only right side in the Kirkwall conflict is the Templars. Sure their leader is crazy, but the Templars are right. The mages, every single one of them, will reach out to demons at the slightest hint of adversity. You know this because they do so in game.

Now, I’ve heard people say before that the characters of DA2 were decent. They really weren’t. They were two dimensional archetypes recycled throughout the fantasy genre again and again. Varric wasn’t interesting. He was fun, entertaining in his banter but exceedingly shallow. The same rogue you’ve met everywhere since, I don’t know, Silk?. Meril? The only thing that set her apart from all the other versions of her archetype was a cute accent. I actually kind of like the soldier woman, in as much as she was a warrior first and foremost and didn’t wear a chainmail bikini. I mean, she wasn’t an original character, but at least she was a woman who did not obsess over the main character in a romantic fashion. S

Now Isabella, she was godawful. By far the worst of the bunch. Every dialogue. Every camera angle (think Miranda’s ass shots were daft?). She was supposed to be sassy, I guess. In the sort of way a fourteen year old boy fantasy kind of sassy. Sarah literally laughed when Isabella arrived in the game and opened her mouth, and she still enjoys teasing me about the sort of games I play with that as her prime example. It’s hard to disagree with her.

I'd say Dragon Age's worst crime is not being as good as Mass Effect. But not many games were. Gods, these games were brilliant. I can even forgive them the RGB ending.
Now, if I could just have the combat gameplay of 3 with the seedy underworld atmosphere of 2 and the exploration (yes, I loved Mako missions. Sue me.) and villain of 1... We'd break the universe.

Conversely... does anyone want to play some scheduled ME3 multiplayer (PC)? Servers are empty these days...

[Tiste Simeon]

OK another question to throw out from the perpetually-behind-everyone-else-Tiste Simeon!

I have been reading stuff about the Fallout series, and I think it looks pretty sweet! The Fallout, Fallout Tactics & Fallout 2 Bundle is only £13.99 (about $22) on Steam right now. Is it worth playing those games or is it better to start in the "modern" period with Fallout 3?

[Gothos]

I was never a big fan of Fallout for some reason, but their reputation is impeccable. Fallout 3 did keep me at the screen for way longer than 1 or 2 did, and I never tried Tactics, so you might as well try starting with the Bethesda title. It would also make it easier/quicker to jump into New Vegas, which is far and wide considered the better, if not best entry overall.

Damn. I think I should actually finish Fallout 3 at some point in my life...

[Traveller]

I really, really enjoyed Fallout 3 - having never played any of the previous ones I wasn't unhappy about any changes that were made.

Just something about the atmosphere I guess - the landscape, the map in general, settlement types and such just make it memorable for me.