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.
Continue readingDragon Age
Running Through The Dragon Age 2 DLC: Felicia Day’s Big Trip
You know, I’d heard at one point in my life that Felicia Day was somehow associated with the Dragon Age franchise. I’d never looked up how or why, since it made sense that she would be based on what I knew of her career up to that point, but I found the answers to those questions recently when I decided to launch myself into the first of two narrative DLCs for Dragon Age 2. All of the story-based DLCs for DA2 are in-game narrative asides rather than entirely separate campaigns like most of the DLC had been in Dragon Age: Origins, so I’d planned on waiting until I felt confident in my builds during the latter part of Act Two or early Act Three before I tried any of them out. So, with having reached Act 3 a couple weekends ago, I decided to spend a Sunday evening playing through one of the DLCs and was surprised to see Felicia Day’s Dragon-Age-ified face staring back at me from my monitor. It was unmistakably her from the very beginning and entirely surprising that they essentially stuck her face onto a character in the game. I know that’s a bit more common in modern video games, what with motion-capture technology and all, but I was surprised to see it from a game from the very early teens. I haven’t really looked up most of the other characters and their voice actors to see if any of them look similar, but I’d be kind of surprised if they did. It really wasn’t that common of a thing back in the day and, frankly, I found it rather distracting the entire time I spent playing the DLC since I’ve watched Felicia Day in a lot of other things and seeing her in rough animation was unsettling.
Continue readingDragon 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 readingThoughts About Post-Stress Crashing But For Back Pain And Getting Enough Sleep
I’m two days (and nights) into sleeping on a futon mattress on top of my old, severely dented mattress. This has been a learning experience that has left me not only a little loopy for reasons I’ll speculate on later, but that has me thinking about just how easy it might be to detect a pea beneath twenty mattresses, if those mattresses are thin, old, or scrungly enough. On one hand, I’ve learned that there are many types of back pain, some of which you might only feel as you slowly recover from worse pain. On the other hand, now I know what it means to climb into bed as an adult. And how my last partner felt every time we both stayed at my place. I mean, it’s not like my current pillow-topped mattress was particularly low (the perfect height for me to settle back on without needing to really bend at the knees, but now my bed surface is above waist-height on me (I’m six-foot-three, for reference) so I have to actually CLIMB onto it’s weirdly spongy surface. Sure, neither mattress feels like that on their own, but the weird way that pressure settles through the futon mattress into the foam-topped spring mattress beneath makes it all feel like an old, damp, slightly mildewy piece of memory foam that springs back instantly. It’s mildly upsetting to touch with my hands, but the sensation disappears once I’ve got most of myself into the bed, so I only have to put up with it for a few seconds at most as I clamber.
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.
Continue readingI’ve Accidentally Gotten On The Hype Train For Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Despite a years-long (nearly decade-long, actually, given that it started in the year or two following the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition) effort to avoid getting swept up in the hype for a new video game or movie, I’ve fallen victim to the excitement around the latest entry in the Dragon Age series: “The Veilguard.” I missed the initial announcement, so I was a little late to last week’s party, but I apparently follow enough Dragon Age fans on Bluesky that I couldn’t help but run into people talking about it. Since it initially seemed like not a whole lot of information, I decided to take a peek. From there, I’ve slowly slid from my place of peace and balance to my current position in the deep end of the Hype Pool as people keep talking about it, as my book club and I turn toward playing through the Dragon Age franchise, as the Dragon Age social media accounts post more and more about it, and as I’ve slowly given up on trying to keep my cool. After all, I’ve been a fan of Dragon Age games since one of my friends in college got super excited about the second one and introduced me to the series as a result (for which I will forever remember her, even if we’ve fallen out of contact at this point). I have plenty of other series that I’ve enjoyed more and franchises that will always get me to buy the next game, but there’s nothing quite like the release of a new Dragon Age game to get me excited about video games. An excitement that, unfortunately, doesn’t always last past the start of playing the game, but which is still fun to indulge all the same.
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