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 readingDragon Age: Origins
Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening And It’s Messed Up Little Guys
I try to avoid swearing in my blog post titles, but this post was titled “DA:O-A and It’s Fucked Up Little Guys” while I was writing it. Which is to say that my overall impression of Awakening was that BioWare looked at the darkspawn they’d created and asked themselves “how can we absolutely fuck up these little guys?” They then went on to completely knock it out of the park, too. Sure, we’ve got our standard flavor Hurlocks and Genlocks (and their Alpha and Emissary subvariants), but we’ve also got some messy little guys who burst out of tubes, freaky little guys that are the messy little guys but with really long crab legs, some horrific little guys who are the freaky little guys but More, and then tons of flavors of normal Hurlock but with special paint and decorations so we know that this is one of the Darkspawn What Can Talk. All, of course, without mentioning the stars of this show, who are the most fucked up little guys of all: The Architect (who is a fusion of a Hurlock and a Normal Guy With Avant Garde Shades) and The Mother (who is what you’d get if an early 00s Manic Pixie Dream Girl replaced the “humanoid” half of a Broodmother). Absolutely wild choices that any big Triple-A game studio would be too much of a coward to make in a modern game. Video games as a whole are lesser for it.
Continue readingDragon Age: Origins Was A Lot Longer Than I Remembered
I finally finished Dragon Age: Origins. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy my time, it was just a much longer game than I remembered. On top of having a decent time playing a game I once loved enough to play all the way through at least six separate times, I got everything in this run to come out the way I wanted it to. I got the girl, became a queen, outlived an archdemon, and sent my bestie off with the child of my political husband (which is what you get out of a political marriage meant to secure yourself a crown). All in all, I had a great time. Except for playing it all on minimum graphics and needing to develop a compulsive quick save habit (which has begun to rear its head in other games I’m playing) so I wouldn’t lose too much when my game inevitably crashed. Because it always crashed. It even crashed as it tried to load the post-final-boss bit of the game where I’d get to have one last chat with my companions. Luckily, it had already autosaved, so I didn’t need to re-do the boss fight, but it was certainly annoying to need to launch the game again for that tiny bit of play time considering how late at night it was by the time I got there. It was annoying and it colored my entire playthrough, though especially so in the later parts of the game when there was a lot going on and my attempts to maintain the tension of the story ran aground every time the game crashed and I needed to repeat my game-launch ritual. Still, it was a decent use of my time and wasn’t so frustrating that I was desperate to move on to Dragon Age 2. If it had gone on much longer, I expect I would have been, but I got out just in time.
Continue readingDecisions And Outcomes In Dragon Age: Origins
I’ve gotten most of the way through Dragon Age: Origins at this point. I finally cleared Orzammar (the Dwarven city and a REALLY long series of missions for how little happens there) and seated my chosen king upon the throne (Bhelen, for those who want to know, but there’ll be more on that later). It was a bit of a slog, but I’m finally on my way to wrap up my side quests, to launch into the final bit of plot [well, it turns out I forgot about a whole bunch of stuff in Denerim that means this was the penultimate bit of plot I launched myself into, not the final bit], and then to start working my way through the DLCs. It wasn’t a bad slog, but it did often feel like it was never going to end. Maybe that’s because there’s technically two separate decisions you need to make and each one has its own string of supporting and side quests, but some of the exploration stuff felt like it was just going on forever with little to no benefit. It also didn’t help that I missed an important piece of gear and had to go back for it, which involved walking from the end of an area to the start of the area and then back again. Between that and how much back-and-forth I did while working through the Dalish Elves quest line, I feel like these are two of the most video game-y parts of the game. Which is too bad! Both of these quest lines actually had something to say (even if I didn’t much care for what the Dalish quest line had to say for the particular ending I chose) and I really wanted to like them. I’m not sure I can get over my distaste for the whole “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” thing going on in the Elf versus Werewolf conflict, but I think I can feel pretty alright about the Orzammar plot sequence.
Continue readingGaining Steam On The Dragon Age Hype Train
Well, I’m back on the hype train again, but at least I know when my stop is this time. Finally, after what feels like along time but is probably only a couple months at most, we have a release date for Dragon Age: The Veilguard: October 31st. Halloween. Which means that, in my little group of enthusiasts, I won the betting pool for when the game would come out (my guess was mid November and no one guessed earlier than I) and now have Bragging Rights I’m never going to use. It also means that it won’t come out for two and a half months, which might BARELY be enough time to play Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and all of the DLC I’ve apparently owned for nearly a decade and never once played. My “book” club has resigned ourselves to putting all our actual books on hold until sometime this winter as we try to blast through all of these games and then the new one in time for what might not wind up being monthly conversations. After all, that two to three hours of talking is time we could be spending on Dragon Age games. It’s going to be tough to do, if I’m completely honest, since I’m not sure I’m going to really enjoy this kind of focused gaming binge. I might wind up streaming again to help me keep up the pace since that helped immensely with getting through Breath of the Wind in just over a month, but that might be more bother than I can muster. The downside to streaming is that it’s difficult to focus on the game itself (a problem I don’t have in BotW) and it is rather demanding to stay that social and verbally active all the time. I’d probably get more game time in a day if I just played by myself.
Continue readingCrashing Out Of Dragon Age: Origins
I’ve been trying to replay Dragon Age: Origins for my “book” club. Most of the time, I can play it. A lot of the time, it will crash sometime after I’ve launched the game. I’ve figured out some work-arounds, thanks to old forum posts, good old trial-and-error problem solving, and a bit of intuition from my years of testing and working in the software world, but they really only delay the inevitable crash. Sure, I can usually see it coming now and restart my game myself, picking a more opportune time to restart rather than just being randomly kicked out of the game by it crashing on me, but it still feels incredibly frustrating to be limping through this game rather than actually enjoying it. I mean, sure, I’ve figured out the reason for one crash and how to fix work around it, but I’m not sure that it works consistently and, as a result, am still spending all my time quicksaving to make sure that I don’t lose much if the game winds up crashing on me anyway. It’s exhausting to be on guard all the time against the game I’m playing in a way that is definitely negatively impacting my experience of the game, which doesn’t even mention how my gameplay experience is impacted by my workarounds and having to play on the lowest graphics settings just so my game doesn’t crash every fifteen minutes (or instantly in some places).
Continue readingDiving Into Dragon Age: Origins After At Least A Decade
As I’ve previously mentioned, my book club will be playing through the Dragon Age video game franchise as we collectively prepare for the release of Veilguard (I refuse to call it The Veilguard). Since I’ll be away from my computer for a week, I decided to set aside my Switch and Unicorn Overlord for a weekend and dive into Dragon Age: Origins. It took a while longer than I thought it would to settle back into the game, since I’d forgotten what most of the stats did and what my preferred builds were, but I mostly got that out of the way in the first day by reading build guides and remembering what parts I used to enjoy about the game. I’m still settling in after about fifteen hours of game run time (an unknown amount of which is me getting restless, walking away from my PC to fold laundry, do dishes, make food, and so on), but I’m mostly comfortable with the game again. Despite how much I played it on my old Xbox 360, coming back to it has me feeling out-of-synch with the way the game works. Maybe it’s because of the almost two hundred hours I put into Inquisition, which has a very distinct and different feel to it. Maybe it’s because it has been over a decade since I last played it. Maybe both. Regardless, trying to get back into this game has me feeling like I found an old beloved shirt that I’m trying to get to sit comfortably on my frame despite how different my frame is even from when I was in college (my shoulders are the broadest they’ve ever been). It’s fine, mostly, but it just feels a little weird and the comfort I remember is largely gone.
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