DA:O -- how far behind the gaming curve am I?

[Samurai]

Well, I'm aiming to catch up a bit by giving up on DA:O. I've just got to the boss battle that and discovered I should be something like level 21 by now. I'm actually level 14 and the fight is really quite challenging as a result. I might be able to do it if I literally pause every second and issued new instructions to the whole party, and resign myself to dying a few times before I scrape through, but then what? The next boss fight is even harder. Frustration ensues.

From trawling some four-year-old threads in the Bioware forums, it seems the sealed chests scattered around the game don't just have loot in them, but side quests and thus XP, too. I don't have a rogue in my default party and I've been cheerfully ignoring the chests as a result. It's far too late to go back and find them now, and to be honest many of the side quests I have done have been tedious or annoying.

I wanted to like DA:O, I really did, especially as so many people feted it after it came out. I can recognise it's a good, traditional CRPG in many respects, but even near the climax, I find myself not really caring about any of the characters. Without that emotional investment, I don't want to put what limited time I have these days into either scraping through the rest of the battles just to reach what could still be an unsatisfying conclusion, or going back to a save point 40 hours' gameplay ago.

So instead, I read about the alternative endings in a walkthrough, raised a metaphorical eyebrow at the revelation , and am about to uninstall. If I'm not enjoying a game, there's no point playing it.

Arkham Asylum next, I reckon!

[Sorce]

Shit, man... you got farther than I did; I basically got to the first town and gave up. Too much micromanagement for me, and the idea of a "silent protagonist" that still had written dialog was irritating. That said, the story is still pretty decent from what I read, and if you are planning a runthrough of DA2, it definitely adds flavor to import a save. If you're on PC, there's a where you can tweak what you ended up doing to a slightly more positive outcome. Also, if you ARE on PC, it should be noted that one of the bugs in the game notched up the difficulty. As in, PC Normal = 360 Hard; I don't know why it's there, but BioWare's never bothered to fix it.

DA2 is the better game as well in my opinion, but that's probably just because I actually finished it instead of giving up in the beginning. Less micromanagement too.

[dexeron]

[cain]

Anyone who thinks Dragon Age 2 is a better game is someone you should never listen to about games ever again. Or feed to a woodchipper, one.

[Sorce]

Love you too, cain.

But hell, the fact that DA2's production was 8 months means the game should have been a lot worse than what we actually got. Instead the game is actually pretty good. Obviously it has issues with repeating "levels", and enemy waves appearing out of nowhere, but it's otherwise solid. The characters were written well, and Snark-Hawke is hilarious.

[cain]

The characters were good in both, so that's a wash. the combat was much better in 2, but the customization was much worse, the story was shit, the setting was shit, the types of enemies and challenges were shit, the levels were shit, and all of the endings were so shit that they get a special mention even considering that i've already said the plot was shit.