A Land Far Away

Just currious, did anyone pick this up or plan on buying this? I picked mine up from Gamestop today. Installing now.....

Last exam on Saturday. Will be getting it then.

Got the Character creator some time ago. Not sure I'll buy the game..if it ends up a dead ender..not really worth the money to me....Besides...The re is no other form of life it's Either ALFA or "afk"

It's pretty damn awesome.

My only complaint so far is that the Blood Dragon Armor DLC (that comes with every copy of the game) is Plate only and doesn't change depending on your character. Kind of a waste for non-warriors.

My only complaint was slow load times. Appears AMD Quad Cores, lag the game in frame rates and loads. I found a fix by goog'lin it. 1 minute load times from 5-8 minute load times makes a big difference. Still currious why my vid card needs updated. The graphics are OK, but not ground breaking. The story so far, I like very much. Other than that I highly recomend it.

Further update, while fun and still pretty awesome, a bit to much dungeon crawling for my taste. Some of them are just way to big.

The difficulty seems to spike in places quite unexpectedly. More than a few times i have been happily running through a dungeon, fairly easily knocking over the groups of enemies and then, from seemingly nowhere, a group will appear that just kicks your ass 10 ways to sunday.

Either that or they will just throw 20 fucking dudes at you, just to see how you handle it and, tactically, unless you want to blow your own team up with AoE, it devolves fairly quickly into trying to focus on one at a time while praying you got the healing to get through it.

I picked this up on Tuesday, and it's really fun. The plot may be a bit cliche but they did a really good job on the dialogue, combat, and overall feel of the game. Some of the responses you can make are just hilarious.

BEWARE of RANDOM ACTS of RAMBLING

I'm playing a goody noble human warrior. I think next ill play an eval s.o.b. mage. Playing im finding some of the quests are kind of lame. The King Arthur and the quest for the holy grail stands out most. Some delve into christain like religion, merging a Joan of Arc w/ Jesus. Gameplay is fun. Combat is smooth, if not at times chaotic. I like the slot-less inventory. Would be nice though to be able to store gear somewhere though w/o having to buy the Grey Warden's Keep addition.

The King Arthur and the quest for the holy grail stands out most. Some delve into christain like religion, merging a Joan of Arc w/ Jesus.

I actually thought the Urn quest was some pretty good writing.

The influence of Baldur's Gate on Dragon age brings a nostalgic smile across my face from time to time while I play. The gameworld is really well thought out. While I'm hesitant to call it unique because a lot of stuff is borrowed. For instance, the opening battle reminding me of LoTR movies along w/ other references (anyone remember the movie willow?). But the atmosphere, dialog, and voice acting is just fantastic and that should be expected from a bioware game. I should say something about the music because I don't see it mentioned in many of the reviews of the game. The music really sets the mood for this game. It can get dark, moody, and epic. Perhaps my only really problem with this game is the lip movements / expressions on the characters. It's a bit stiff and makes me not want to look at the characters at all and rather read the dialog. I suppose i've been spoiled by viewing expressive characters in Mass Effect, Half-Life 2, and yes, even Neverwinter nights 2. My complaint is pretty minor and this game is one of the best I've played in a long time. The story is engaging (so far) and side quests are abundant, yet not entirely unique for the genre, that isn't bad, but it's not good either.

I don't have much else to say except, it's worth a buy. Have fun with Dragon Age ALFA. You might get drawn from one toolset to another.

Swift wrote:Either that or they will just throw 20 Ƥøا dudes at you, just to see how you handle it and, tactically, unless you want to blow your own team up with AoE, it devolves fairly quickly into trying to focus on one at a time while praying you got the healing to get through it.

I'm playing on the hardest difficultly and I'm finding the combat easy to cope with most of the time. However, there are some things from a tech standpoint that really bother me. For instance the refresh rate on spells/abilities could use some tweaking but maybe I'm not used to that sort of MMORPG stuff. The tactical combat AI stuff really annoys me along with its associated skill (why is there a skill?) I don't want to spend time going over what works in what category for my NPC comrades. I just want them to kill shit effectively on their own.

HATEFACE wrote:The influence of Baldur's Gate on Dragon age brings a nostalgic smile across my face from time to time while I play.

Meh. Haven't got far into it yet. Playing it doesn't really make me itch to keep playing. The "origin" stories are supposed to take hours of play... maybe if you add them all together! Longer than the 10 minute origin quests in ToEE, but not very long, really. And if things go on as they have thus far, I'm guessing that of the 80 hours of play, 60 hours of that is going to be cut scenes.

Tactics may be needed, but I still miss the ability to set up a formation in BG and when a character dying actually meant they were dead. And now characters regenerate health instead of needing to be healed.

As for being a completely original world... Darkspawn, the blight, lead by an arch-demon *cough*darkone*cough*, ghouls *cough*darkfriends*cough*, mages being corrupted by demons because of their magic... Why not just call it a The Wheel of Time game?

PROTIP: Use shield bash to remove enemies that are gnawing your companion's face off.