Dragon Age Origins: SUBMIT YOURSELF TO THE TAINT

Can this conceivably live up to the hype? It's a day one purchase for me (which has kept me away from Borderlands and Brutal Legend) and a serious commitment, so here's hoping.

yeah I'm kind of buying this immediately

it looks good but will it be DUMBED DOWN FOR CONSOLE

fuck console for this IMO

fuck pc for anything imo

but yeah you're right I fear :*(

^_^ yay PC wins

i'll be playing my (preordered) copy on 360 and while I'm generally of the opinion this'll play better on PC; it'll DEFINITELY look better on my HDTV.
We can contrast and compare. The suggestion that this is a more epic less otaku FFXII has me a bit excited.

I'm excited enough for this that I spent an afternoon playing Dragon Age Journeys; and really, if you're willing to waste time on a shitty flash old-school tactical point & click rpg just for some cheesy special items, then you're as big a loser as me.

Will get on PS3 because my Mac is too crappy to make into a dual-boot gaming platform.

finished demon's souls just in time for this as planned but couldn't fight the compulsion to start a new game of demon's souls with a different type of character. i am genuinely at a loss for what to do now. i will probably buy DAO next week and then sit at home just staring at the two boxes, paralyzed with indecision. why could one of these assholes released their game in the summer?

last sentence is an affront to written communication but you get the gist

i'm a bit aghast that I have this en route on Tuesday and have not yet even started demon souls.
Being an active video game hobbyist requires lots of money time and devotion these days.

holy shit @ everyone's worlds being pushed to pure black all day halloween. pure genius and pure evil.

don't know anything about this. my brother is responsible for modeling the dragon in the ads though. also did the big spider that one of the characters turns into in the longer promotional cinematic.

this game is just gonna be 100 hours of "tis it St Swithin's day already?", right

Weird Eurogamer review, where they say it's fatally flawed, then talk about all the things that make it great, then reiterate that it's flawed, then give it 8 our of 10:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/dragon-age-origins-review

game critic thought process: 80 hours? Okay, B+, 8/10, whatever, I gotta play COD:Terrorist Sim II.

im kinda more prone to believe bad reviews these days cuz so few people actually give them haha

I bet videogame developers (who from what I understand generally have metacritic bonuses tied in to their deals) must fucking hate any review site that doesnt use decimals in their reviews.

This game makes me wish I had a decent PC. I really dont think I'd be able to run this game through bootcamp on my one year old imac. =\

metacritic chooses decimals themselves when they dont

Not with sites that use numbers instead of letters or nothing. It just translates to 80. Its probably just a drop in the bucket of averages, but still.

But yeah Im with u s1ocki. It makes more sense to read the bad reviews these days since most reviewers are lazy or too beholden to the publishers/developers for precious access and give any aaa title a 80+ no matter what.

this is sitting in my mailbox right now and i have work + class until 9pm ;_;

just came in the mail; can't imagine I will crack the wrap for at least another month. oh, demonsoulspaws

stfu u ps3 pusher

i'm still just a hopper; not entirely sold on the system yet. just that one game.

what is this oh __paws crap

I'm old here, so what is... 'Oh, Wrinklepaws'?

dot dot dot

oh, nhexpaws

don't you have a password to look up, webinar

: (

i admit i did get a good laugh when i was rifling through my junk mail and finally realized when your username was referring to

I bought this today. Even got the "Collector's Edition" because I'm a sucker for cloth maps for game worlds. Have not played, but the packaging is very nice. I'd give the packaging a 9.4 out of 10.

hmm sounds like a must-buy

early part of your review made it sound like an 8.3; i smell a sellout

played an hour last night. immediate thought: my 12-year-old Dungeon Master circa 1990 wrote better dialogue.

Demon's Souls certainly ain't free of groanworthy sub-Tolkien/AD&D malarkey, but at least it doesn't immediately drown you in it.

isnt malarkey-drowning the point of playing games like this?

The dialogue is cringe-worthy yet apropos; absolute Tolkien-esque schlock. I haven't played Baldur's Gate 1 or 2 in a decade, but I don't remember them as particularly noteworthy in the dialogue realm either. However, this has much better dialogue than Sacred 2.

By the way, if you've seen the intro to the Fellowship of the Ring you've seen the intro to this game.

dialog is fine, i don't know what people are expecting. the voice acting is decent so far too. it's a nicely presented game. bashed thru the dwarf commoner origin last night and am enjoying.

This armor you can get for mass effect 2 is mighty shitty looking

dialog is fine, i don't know what people are expecting. the voice acting is decent so far too. it's a nicely presented game. bashed thru the dwarf commoner origin last night and am enjoying.

― aarrissi-a-roni, Wednesday, November 4, 2009 7:26 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

^^same on all that. as I always do on rpg's, made a stabby/sneaky thief (female dwarf lol). Only thing that really bugs is her arms are too long so she looks like e.t. :(

Did we all play as dwarves last night?

I played for an hour whilst being drunk so I might have to revisit some of my decisions at some point today.

http://i34.tinypic.com/2eow8s3.jpg

"Dude, I got so drunk last night I created the UGLIEST character class..."

Still can't decide whether I want to play this on PC or 360.

that girl on the right looks like this face-tattooed homeless lady i see by the train stop some mornings.

I finally got a chance to play this for multiple hours and got really hooked. I'm an Elf Warrior (city version) because I'm boring like that.

I'm as far as The Joining, which was pretty sweet. Lord of the Rings vibes left and right, not that I'm complaining.

Also, I love how important the taint is in this story. I only managed to grab one screenshot
http://i36.tinypic.com/2jg7y9x.jpg

There was one part where Duncan was like "You will learn much more about this in the months ahead..." that kind of snapped me back into the reality of the time I'm going to end up sinking into this.

looool at title change

Sorry to post over and over, but how's everyone else doing? I'm guessing that everyone's been sucked in, so that's a sign of good things to come for me..

yeah, I think I'd rather have the evil corporation charge twice as much as they should for an add-on than have them obliterate the talent that made them truckloads of money in a hamfisted attempt to avoid paying bonuses, but that's just me

(re: Activision, I really never thought I'd encounter a publisher that would make me say positive things about EA as a corporation, but there you go)

I'm going to do another un-through of the main game before I buy a $40 expansion, even though I want it. Just costs too much - horse armor redux.

Run-through, obv.

i don't buy "EA is just charging enough to pay their employees fairly" argument; sounds more like they're trying to establish "full-size expansion should totally cost roughly the same as a game" to mollify share holders.

i don't buy "EA is just charging enough to pay their employees fairly" argument

no one is making this argument...?

$40 < $60

it's a lot, but it's still less than the orig game. a little bit.

I'll just wait for the inevitable GOTY edition, when I'm ready to play it in about 2015 or so.

"I'd rather have the evil corporation charge twice as much as they should for an add-on than have them obliterate the talent that made them truckloads of money in a hamfisted attempt to avoid paying bonuses"

You are drawing exactly the wrong conclusion from that statement.

EA price-gouging consumers as a scheme to make more money is more understandable and defensible than Activision promising bonuses, doing way better than expected and sabotaging/canning the guys in charge of developing their runaway hit as a scheme to make more money. There's no "they need to pay their employees fairly" defense.

it was a confusing post

well it dropped sometime in the wee hours of the morning, every last spoiler should be up on the dragonage wikia by now, i'll see if it's worth it.

i guess what i was trying to say is, you pay $60 for a game for which price you get the whole engine of the game plus the story or whatever. surely the engine of the game is the bigger part? if you are getting an expansion of the storyline that uses the same engine etc, and in fact needs a copy of the original game to work, then you can't be charging 2/3 the cost of the full game, surely?

i am just getting worked up about this because i am totally cutting my nose to spite my face on some lame principle that for no obvious reason i have decided to soil my underwear about.

then you can't be charging 2/3 the cost of the full game

welp, we'll see won't we

I think that if you remind yourself that this is a total luxury purchase, the relatively exorbitant price becomes more palatable.

(this from the dude who will wait to buy this when the price drops and use built-up Amazon store credit to do it with, lol)

I spent wayyyyy too much time playing the main game, so I will probably hold off on this. $40? goddamn. And its dlc not a disc?

so, i bought this.

and my first impression is good! mostly because, in other rpgs, when you get to be super high level, i feel like the rest of the world should quit treating you like an adventurer and more like a leader, and your responsibilities should change too.

and that's exactly how this is working out, at least to start. you've got a land and people on it who are all asking you about what to do next and what they need. pretty interesting.

i don't know if it's worth forty bucks yet tho

The 360 version of Dragon Age has a million bugs that probably will never get fixed. The rogue is the most broken character.
Then there are things, that aren't necessarily bugs but are completely stupid: if you return to the chanter's board (or blackstone irregulars etc.) after completing 2 or more quests you will only be rewarded for 1, I can't set my rogue to auto-steal, there's no option for auto-revival spell casting if a player dies. etc. etc.

fter completing 2 or more quests you will only be rewarded for 1

this isn't true!

Says it's true right here. Happened to me on my 360 for both Chanter's Board and Blackstone Irregulars. I had to use a money cheat to offset this

oh. that sucks.

anyway, Awakening is ok but probably not worth the 40 bucks. some good ideas, but not fleshed out very well, and a few glitches here and there that show a rushed product. probably those will be fixed, but who knows. if you're on the fence, wait.

this game needs cooldowns.

I lied about passing on this upthread.

Im liking it, but I find it to be pretty goddamn easy. I've had some harder battles now that Im probably 3/4ths of the way through it, but the first half was a total cakewalk with an imported character. And one side-effect of this cakewalkery is that Ive barely dabbled with any of the new skills like runemaking or new armor, weapons etc.

Just started playing this. I'd forgotten how much western RPGs suck me in.

And I'm having a very difficult time not immediately going to gamefaqs and reading up whatever will let me increase my companion relationships as much as possible. I'll wait for the 2nd play thru, shoudl i do that, for it.

eh just go to gamefaqs, life is short

the gift mechanic is not very well designed. the conversations are worth going through blind tho, they're pretty well written

i guess it depends: is part of the enjoyment of the game is actually figuring out the systems and ddoes the game gives you a fair chance to do so, or is it so complex that you'll waste hours and hours putting in stats into a failed character forcing you to restart?

I did the latter and never came back. Seems like a game that I need to play on PC not console.

http://social.bioware.com/project/855/#details

So, are the licensed novels any good? I'd eagerly read any spin-off bits if the dialogue is as cracking as the game's.

so there's three dlcs for this since i last checked? anyone played any of them?

i have started playing this. hopefully i have not done a totally fucked character build, but i guess well see

use a guide. trust me.

well it's probably less critical than other games, but still.

if im just rolling over peeps so far (just finished that ogre tower deal) do i need to worry?

ok fine i imagine answer is yes, but eh if i have to graph paper stats ride this game im going to end up losing interest and shit-canning it soon enough anyway

and i did read some guides but unless im missing something most of the advice was kinda lunkheaded stuff like "concentrate on your main attribute dont spread everything out" whcih i thought was kinda duh and the idea that i should make a ton o damage dude and a tank dude and that was about it i guess?

― coz (webinar), Thursday, November 5, 2009 6:57 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Hahahahahaha, you get that from NeoGAF? That's my character. Her name was Ugmo. I was not drunk.

yay

I cleared out the mage tower

it's amazing how not playing WoW leaves you time to play other things

i was fronting like i wasnt gonna buy this but guess who didn't shower this morning so he could get a good 90 minutes in before work

this is pretty fun although i am tempted to start over and make a mage instead of double stabby rogue. Hard mode is genuinely >hard<.

who has played Inquisition? is it any good?

started it, am getting into it slowly. There is LOADS to do, like Skyrim amounts of stuff

pro-tip for inquisition: don't spend too much time in the first zone. you get access to more interesting places and opportunities to advance the story (which is important since several interesting events require story progress) pretty quickly

if you like intimidatingly huge fantasy RPGs and have a colossal amount of free time, go for it. i've ploughed 35 hours or so into it on ps4 recently and i'm enjoying it a lot, although I think i might need to take break from it for a while soon. the sheer size of it and the amount of stuff to do is actually kind of exhausting.

it's like the Far Cry games, every new area you open up has in the magnitude of 100 icons, each representing something you have to do. Gaming as a series of chores!

i'm starting to dread seeing the words 'new area unlocked'

Picked this up in a big Bioware sale and apparently this isn't playable on Deck. Can I play via keyboard + mouse?

If you haven't installed windows on your deck yet.. I'd highly recommend. a 1tb ssd from aliexpress, 15 minutes with a screwdriver, partition your harddrive to 500gb steamos 500gb windows, and your dreaming. Nice having the ability to play absolutely anything that the steam deck hardware can match. Currently playing Deadly Premonition, Resident Evil 0 and Catherine on Windows which all won't work on steam OS. That + gamepass, real great stuff.

Good call! I haven't looked very much into tweaking my Deck so I hadn't thought about adding Windows to it, though I'm kind of scared to open it -- I did find this guide which has instructions on installing it on a microSD card, which is a lot more palatable for me.

That was my first plan but l it’s not good for lifespan of the microsd, like apparently it just runs through the read/write cycles it can do in no time flat and makes the whole experience not very smooth. I’m not a technical guy at all, but I was still able to do it. Watch a YouTube video of an install. It’s just unscrew the back, unplug the ssd, plug in the new ssd, screw the back on again. Doing it myself, I think you’d really have to try mess it up, or do it very drunk to do any damage.

Windows is a joy on it, I thought I was going to have to jump through a new hoop every day with it but it’s been seemless since I installed and I would have no issues doing it as my singular OS (and would pick it if I had to choose).