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 – Awakening
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.
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