Well, I did it. I beat Dragon Age: Inquisition’s final bit of DLC, thereby completing the franchise, before the official release time of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. As I’m writing this, there are still four hours left before I can start downloading the game, so the victory isn’t as clean or as neat as I’d like. No victory is clean or neat or entirely complete when you’ve stayed up until at least 2am every night prior and then just didn’t sleep during the final night. It’s not quite pyrrhic, but definitely not a victory I feel super great about getting. I mean, that doesn’t invalidate my win or anything, but this so-called win is just a silly little goal I set for myself after talking about it with my Dragon Age “Book” Club (which might even include actual Dragon Age books someday, who knows?). I feel proud of having done the thing, but I wish I also hadn’t filled my upcoming day (the day I’m writing this, October 31st, a week before you’re reading it on November 7th) with as much stuff as I did. I’ve got a blood test (which I’ve been fasting for, meaning I did all this on no sleep and no caffeine in the last 20-ish hours), breakfast out with myself after that (for caffeine and food following the fast), my Veilguard download to start, early voting to do, and then physical therapy in the early afternoon. I was originally planning to go to a Halloween party tonight, but I don’t think that’s going to work out [turns out it worked out. I went and had a nice time being around people for a couple hours. And, you know, doing literally anything that wasn’t a Dragon Age game]. Even if I still wanted to go despite being tired, I don’t think it’s terribly safe for me to drive across the city twelve hours from now [I rallied and had no problems], in the dark. Just feels like I might be tempting fate at that point, even if I can have as much caffeine as I’d like once I’ve gotten the blood test [I had a normal amount].
Continue readingDragon Age Inquisition
Everything You Need To Know For Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Have you or someone you care about decided to play the fourth installment in the Dragon Age franchise without playing any of the prior games or having only played one or two of the previous entries? Has it been multiple years since you played a Dragon Age game and the constant stress of this past decade have driven all recollection of them from your mind? Well, I’ve got everything you need right here because I played through all of them, and every single bit of extra content, be it game expansions or downloadable content, in the last three months. Rather than bore you with the specifics of every single one of those games, though, I’m going to tell you everything you need to know to be able to make some amount of sense of the world based on the thirty-ish hours I’ve put into The Veilguard as of writing this on Monday afternoon (two days before this goes up) and what I’ve gleaned from other people about what I haven’t yet played. There will, of course, be spoilers for all of the three previous games (Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age: Inquisition), but those games are at least ten years old and the entire point of this post is to tell you what you need to know, so I’m assuming you’ve already left if you want to avoid spoilers or don’t feel like there’s anything you need to know. They will be fairly light spoilers, scant on the details and the execution of things, so you should be able to enjoy yourself if you go back to the older games in the franchise after playing through Veilguard (but, honestly, probably don’t do that because the game play is RADICALLY different in the original game, more so in the second game, and then slightly less so in the third game), but you will know all the important bits from those games. Now, without further ado, Dragon Age: Origins: Awakening.
Continue readingThe Last Day Before Dragon Age: The Veilguard Comes Out
I’m writing this about a week ahead of time (I’m still slowly recovering my buffer) and I have no idea if I’ve gotten close enough to the end of Dragon Age: Inquisition that it might be a reasonable goal to finish it before the fourth game in the Dragon Age Franchise, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, comes out. That was my initial goal, months ago during the summer when I first made these plans, but so much has happened to derail that plan that what felt like a decent amount of buffer space has slowly slipped away from me. I mean, I even had a two-week period where I barely touched the franchise because I was so burned out from a mixture of sleep deprivation and work demands that I couldn’t over my dread at the thought of returning to Inquisition for the first time since 2017’s failed attempt to replay the game. I’ve overcome that, though, as I’m writing this (technically I overcame it weeks ago, but I’ve also overcome ALL my hesitancy to play the game), and am approaching the one-hundred hour mark (I’m in the mid-seventies right now). It actually feels like clearing the whole game and its DLCs might be achievable now, since I can absolutely melt every boss I encounter and I’ve made it through the biggest of the world maps in the base game. I don’t know how long the three DLC pieces are going to take me and I am saving them for a bit further down the plot line, but I think it might truly be possible if I can actually use my final weekend well. Still, all I’ve got is a pile of plans and the desire to feel hopeful about literally anything, so this might be wishful thinking on my part. I’m sure the version of me editing this the day before it goes up will have a better idea of how achievable that goal is [I don’t], but right now it feels like it might be within my grasp despite my fears of the week prior. Especially because I’m taking days off and can spend more time than usual playing video games in the last three days before the game releases since I won’t be doing any overtime.
Continue readingThe Mightiest Creatures Wandering Dragon Age: Inquisition Were No Match For My Blade
In the almost-week since my last Dragon Age: Inquisition post, I’ve put in a significant number of hours, made exactly one step forward in plot, gotten swamped by the newly available huge maps, chosen a mage specialization, and killed six dragons, two of them almost single-handedly. It’s been a wild few days of gaming and I have to say that, while I’m definitely still struggling to feel like I’m having fun with the world exploration stuff, I am absolutely loving combat as I’ve locked into a fun build that, as it turns out, is VERY popular on the internet due to its huge damage and nigh-invincibility. Sure, there’s a necromancer build that CAN do more damage, according to the forums and posts I’ve looked at, but playing a Knight-Enchanter Mage with gear that grants my character, Echo, guard on each hit means that I’m pretty much always invincible. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve taken actual HP damage (excluding the times I’ve jumped off of something I shouldn’t have because I was too impatient to walk around after fast-traveling) since I locked in my build on Sunday (nine days ago as you’re reading this), and I’ve beaten down two dragons that were three levels higher than my Inquisitor after the entire rest of my party stood in an AOE and instantly died. Sure, they were grueling and lengthy fights, especially the one against a dragon that had a huge amount of resistance to the damage type of Echo’s staff, but I was able to work my way through the entire dragon, including one that kept giving itself a full bar of guard, without ever one taking a hit to my Hit Points. It was exhilarating to discover that I could do this and then pretty boring to just keep up the same sequence of abilities for the next twenty minutes. The other four dragon fights, though, where most of my party survived or didn’t fall until the end of a grueling fight, were a lot more fun.
Continue readingDragon Age: Inquisition Is Stressing Out My Completionist Heart
Originally, I started this post complaining about how my completionist nature felt more like a curse while playing Dragon Age: Inquisition than while I was playing any other game, but then I started making comparisons to and excuses about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and I had to admit that that game, actually, was the one that made me feel the most cursed by my compulsion to do things completely and perfectly. That said, my experience with Dragon Age: Inquisition is no walk in the park, as much as it feels like a walk in the park in comparison to FF7: Rebirth. Sure, I don’t feel constantly stuck and like the only interesting or fun parts of the game are trapped behind horrible, long, and boring stretches of open-world exploration whose only benefit is to provide you with the crafting supplies you need to use a crafting system that feels like it was built solely to justify the expansive, open, and empty maps of the game, but I definitely feel like there’s way to much junk to do in this game. I’m about forty hours into the game as I writing this and I’ve only just finished the first major plot (the first face-off with Corypheus and the destruction of Haven). All because I’ve spent so much time trying to do side quests, collecting resources, gathering influence, and trying to make sure I’m well-enough supplied to make all my own armor and weapons because the stuff you find usually pales in comparison to what you can make, all of which requires a pretty significant investment of resources and time. Time you have to spend pretty regularly if you want to keep everyone wearing top-notch armor. Which feels funny to do, considering most of my party members are wearing accessories that I got in the first ten to twenty hours of the game.
Continue readingRomancing My Least Favorite Character in Dragon Age: Inquisition
I actually had a really difficult time deciding what kind of character to play when I started up Dragon Age: Inquisition. I knew I didn’t want to be a Human, since I’d played a human in both the previous games, and I knew I wanted to be a mage which meant I wasn’t going to play a Dwarf, but I couldn’t decide between playing a Qunari or an Elf. I’d been having a lot of fun learning more and more about the Qunari in my replays of the first two Dragon Age games and, since I’ve apparently never spent much time or energy trying to learn about them in previous play-throughs, thought it might be fun to play through this (currently) final game with a Qunari lens over the whole experience. I was interested to see how the general residents of Thedas responded to my character, to be a giant woman, and to see how those who knew about the Qun responded to my character, a mage who had grown up outside the Qun and absolutely not let herself be collared and leashed in the way that most other Qunari mages were. On the other hand, knowing what I know now about how Inquisition can end and how Veilguard starts, I thought it might be fun to play an Elf and finally go through the romance sequence for Solas. I’d started a playthrough as an Elf, once, and thought it was pretty interesting to see how everyone reacted to an Elven Inquisitor, but I’d never actually romanced Solas before. I tried to flirt with him a bunch once, but I was playing a Human woman and he was not interested. Plus, Elven women are pretty fun! They’ve got the most flirt options and, personally, I’m interested in flirting with as many companions as possible! That said, since I’d be playing an Elven woman and absolutely won’t be playing through Dragon Age: Inquisition again any time soon, I knew that this was my one shot to actually romance Solas and see what its all about before Veilguard made it clear to me.
Continue readingWrapping Up Dragon Age 2
As you might have guessed while reading yesterday’s post, I’ve finished Dragon Age 2. I had a decent time with it. I genuinely enjoyed the storytelling within it, working my way through the tragedies that befell the Hawke family, and it felt fun to shift Hawke’s personality a bit as more and more stuff happened to them. I went from an aggressive, confident Hawke in Act One to a somewhat aggressive but mostly confident and diplomatic Hawk in Act Two and then an aggressive and quick to strike Hawke in Act 3, all reflecting what had been going on in their life over the total of seven years that the game covers. After all, Hawke learned the lesson that sometimes you need to strike first and ask questions never when someone rouses your suspicions. It’s not like you can see your mother turned into some unholy abomination and perversion of the magic you value so much in your own life without learning that maybe some people just don’t need to be alive anymore. The only time I really felt like the game failed me–or at least fell short of allowing me to take the actions I wanted to as part of roleplaying my character–was at the start of Act 3 when Meredith implies that Hawke’s mother’s death was Hawke’s fault. If I could have pointed out that she was explicitly charged with handling rogue mages or just, you know, struck her down for suggesting Hawke was at fault for what happened to Hawke’s mother, I’d have been much happier. Other than that, I felt like the game did a pretty good job of letting me direct my Hawke freely while still steering the game toward the tragic. I mean, I was definitely leaning into it most of the time, so take my satisfaction with a grain of salt, but I still think the game did a pretty good job of allowing for player choice within a much more contained narrative than we’ve seen in in Dragon Age: Origins or Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Continue readingDragon Age 2: Legacy Doesn’t Pass The Test Of Time
I realized over the weekend that I was about to start the final mission in Dragon Age 2 and immediately stopped what I was doing so I could do the final narrative DLC first. It was a close call, that, but it wouldn’t have been too bad since I am still compulsively quick saving every few minutes, so I could have easily gone back to do the DLC if I’d accidentally pushed past the point of no return in the main game. All of which feels like an appropriately hurried start to Dragon Age 2: Legacy since it’s a bit of an odd duck of a DLC. Not only was it the hardest thing I’ve done in Dragon Age 2, but it felt somehow both much more direct (mechanically) than most of Dragon Age 2 and much less direct (informationally) than the rest of the game. I know I’m not as clear on all the details since my sleep-deprived brain has been letting go of some of the short-term memory stuff that isn’t super important, but it really feels strange that the entire premise of this DLC was that my character’s father was press-ganged into maintaining a bunch of magical barriers for the Grey Wardens and that now she was needed by a couple factions because of her blood-relation to the guy who made the barriers. The primary faction was a group of darkspawn-tainted people who all wanted my character’s blood in order to disable those barriers so the guy trapped within them could be set free and my character chased them down into the prison such that she got trapped as well, all of which meant that this guy, Corypheus (the main villain of Dragon Age: Inquisition), had to get let free so I could leave as well. There’s no relevance to any other plot, no attachment to the broader world, nothing but some guys attacked me, Hawke, the Champion of Kirkwall, so I had to go on a little vacation to hunt them down and murder them, thereby unleashing an ancient horror on the world that was so great that it spawned an entire video game.
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