Awesoooommmmmmmmmmeeee so far.

Human Mage atm, and the whole feel of the Fade was hands down some of the coolest storytelling. Mouse was pretty cool is you follow the right path, the Sloth demon was sweet as well. It maxes me out on both cores according to Logitech G15's built in app, dunno what it's really doing, but uses up to 75% memory. Ordered 4gigs more, lets see it fucking touch THAT.

Will play more. The controls need some redoing, it's clearly designed to not be stuck in Isometric mode (yay!) but suffers from controlling the camera by right click and moving -itis, and by that I mean, the right click makes you interact with stuff. So I find myself moving away when I'm really just trying to fix the camera.

 

Fuck yeah.

This is one of the best games released this year I think. Mostly because of the clawesome cast. Tim Curry (Best Villain Ever. ;D), Kate Mulgrew... Fuckin Claudia Black... Ive had i hard for her since I got Uncharted 2. D:

As far as the game itself, Im liking it so far. Controls ... arent terrible, but they could be better, the class/character system I dont like at all, really. I wish there was more variety. Mages, Rogues, and Warriors are nice, and all, but it'd be nice to have something like the Neverwinter.

The story on the other hand is awesome. The characters outside of the PC are pretty well done and likable. Morrigan is my favorite at the moment, but Zev is a close second.

>_> Of course Im only stopping right now because firefox pop up screwed mah gaming experience. Im going to piss and get food, then its back into it D:

 

There will be mods. All in good time. One edition (I think deluxe?) of DAO comes with a scenario/campaign builder, which will be spread around the internet sooner or later. Mods should flow freely.

I honestly don't get why Morrigan is heterosexual, I mean, she's a witch who's lived secluded from society for her whole life, and she's... evil. It should be easy to corrupt her. Well, whatever.

Spoilars

Spoiler

Secksy Tiem:
Morrigan: Male only
Leilana: Male / Female
Zevran: Male / Female
Alistair: Female only

I'm in Lothering and really liking the game now. Combat is much better now that I have some skills to use. I don't care for Morrigan's starting spells and I'm finding it difficult to keep all the characters I like in my party (

Spoiler

War Dog

is awesome, but w/o any character development I gotta pass on for my first play through) and still win battles. Leilana has an intriguing accent but she's a rogue like me, dunno if I can afford to keep her.

 

Yeah. Shale, the golem if you got the DLC for it, is pretty fucking win. Pretty much DA:O!HK-47.

And on Leliana's accent... It seems the Orlesians are the DO:A equivalent of the French. :|

 

I found it amusing the way they seemed to set out to make them confirm to French stereotypes. Cf: Shoes discussion.

Anyway, regarding DLC, I can't get the Warden's Keep to work. It says I've installed it, the guys is in the camp but whenever I tell him I'll go look for the keep, he tells me he'll add it to my map, though it never appears. The golden "!" never leaves his head and I can't seem to find wherever it is I should go on the world map. Can someone tell me how that quest should go?

Btw despite my natural inclanation to rave about a Bioware game I have to say that in terms of gameplay the combat is pretty terrible, a real step back from KOTOR 1 where at least you could stack actions and plan a few turns out, rather than have to continously pause to command each and every action, as there's no way you can leave anything in the hands of the moron AI.

Thats a mod I would like to see, one that adds in the combat interface from KOTOR.

 

Register the PC version on Bioware's Website to download the toolset

http://dragonage.bioware.com/toolset/

 

I bought the collectors edition, and I see it comes with a bunch of cards, with key codes on them. I have the Warhammer free trial one, one that tells me "to get our fexclusive downloadable items" and then I have TWO for the blood armor/Shale with different key codes

Am I supposed to enter them both, or hold one for Mass effect 2, or did someone fuck up and give me an extra code card???

 

Magus: I can't exactly remember but either the conversation at camp might be able to take you there directly. On the map the DLC areas have gold boxes surrounding them, the keep should be to the northeast on the map.

Midknight: I think you are supposed to enter them both, I downloaded off of steam and all keys were used. Since you have to synchronize the website account and the game account it probably won't matter, ME2 will probably have the same synchronization.

 

I'm not sure yet if it's a good or a bad thing, that you often can't tell what the "good" or "evil" action is and thus how your party members will react. On the one hand this creates a better immersion in the game world, but on the other hand it's harder to plan out which characters you want to befriend.

Spoiler

For instance Redcliffe Castle:
At first how you deal with Jowen; I helped him and both women on the team approved for different reasons and Alistair disapproved of it. Later I decided to let Jowen sacrifice Isabell and this predictable upset Alistair again - but it also upset Morrigan when I send her into the Fade.
Here I thought I would do the nice thing and not kill the little bastard and I only earn scorn.

 

Yeah you have to enter both of the keys on the one card that has Shale, and the other side has the blood armor. I got that done. I still has an extra key then, doesn't matter I guess, since everyone gets the Blood Dragon Armor and Shale so long as they buy the game new.

 

Got it yesterday for the 360. Sadly, my PC can' keep up with games these days. I've started with a Rogue Dawlish Elf.

 

The game is more about macromanagement than micro. Yes you control your party and position them/order them, however besides for the mage, you don't directly control how they fight. I'm talking about the right-click/attack function here, where you just order them to fight and hope they make the best of it.

After playing a game like mass effect, where even if you've got low health you can still pull off a battle by being quick and manually putting enemies down-It was very annoying to have the game automatically do my fighting.

That said, I've come to understand the system on DA:O, and actually have come to enjoy it. Took me a couple hours, but I've found it to be very effective after you get the hang of it.

Story is of course top notch, only about 10 hours in but from what I hear you can easily pull 60 hours out with just the main story line. Very impressive.

The hardware requirements for PC aren't too bad, and my lappy can run it just fine. I have found that after about 4 hours of playing, I will start to get heat build up (all settings highest possible, nvidia GTX geforce 260m). And needed to turn my cooling pad on to remove the resulting frame rate stutters. However that's more my laptops problem than the game's, just doesn't remove the heat fast enough =/.

 

Seeing as how this is from Bioware I'm expecting it to be kick-ass but from what I gather it seems to be a bit more of the Kotor style for actual game play, correct?

 

Nah. Not really. More ... Bauldurs Gate than KOTOR.

 

I'm wondering if they didn't optimize stuff as well as they could have. I'm played Very high, maxed everything settings (AA maxed out in game, set to application control in driver settings) Quality setting in the drivers, and while I'm getting 40+ fps in the game, my both of my CPU cores are maxed out without having much in the background going on. Ram is pegged at 90% out of 2 gigs in use. I have another 4gbs coming, but still.

The Witcher graphically is superior by a bit if I'm remember correctly, with very high, and 8xQfsaa 16xansio in the drivers, and didn't do anywhere near that stressing of my rig. Then again I played it on Xp Sp3, not Win7. I am interested in running a comparison between the two when I get around to installing Witcher again.

Could be the Dx11 ain't as good as it should be compared to Dx9, I do remember loosing a lot of performance running Dx10 in Vista. Might try installing DA into XP and see what happens.

My bioware page so far
http://social.bioware.com/playerprofile.php?game=dragonage&nid=2264151707

 

I'm getting longer and longer loading times after a couple of hours playing and have to restart when that happens...
I have 4GB RAM - is that still not enough?

 

The same thing happens to me, however I'm inclined to think it's the heat build up more than anything else.

Is your computer/laptop bad at heat dispersal? Check your temps when playing, my GPU will get up to 87C or so, and my CPU will get to around 63C. Add cooling pad and I get a drop back down to 78C and 57C respectively. The load times go back to normal after that.

That said I've got a question-

Spoiler

There's a reason I've included a spoiler tag, if you haven't gotten to the mage tower yet, DO NOT READ BELOW THIS! It contains critical parts to the story!

Anyone know how to complete the sloth fade/dream world part? I've currently got 3 of the shape changes, the mouse, man-on-fire, and the spirit. However I can't find the last, and I just keep going over and over the 5 levels open to me without much luck.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

You're supposed to bring up the dialog option that brings up the option 'go to circle tower and ask mages for help'. Any other choice you make will piss of somebody.

Rule of thumb: Morrigan hates being bothered to do anything. Unless you're refusing to do something or are killing someone randomly, do not expect to get +favor with her. It's not necessary even - she has enough events and personal dialog to get high affection while still being a goody goody.

Spoiler

After hearing her story about the mirror, go to Ozammar and buy a gold mirror from one of the merchants, give it to her... +20 favor right there.

Where is Shale located, by the way?

Right now I'm sort of screwed up story wise. I've cleared Redcliffe and have finished the Dalish Elves quest, but I'm just sort of doing side quests now. Level 13 and I've cleared so many dungeons now I'm too tired to continue right now. I think my party make up isn't optimal... way too many close calls.

Oh and, it took me a while to realize how you could 'rest'. I accumulated atleast 15 injuries on 2 of my characters from going through several dungeons w/o rest. That whole time I was barely scraping by even on easy encounters.

 

There is already a PC patch out

---

Wiki says he is in Honnleath. I am still waiting for my damn game to arrive, so I can't verify myself

 

Yeah, so just got this game and I honestly don't see what the fuss is about. The way everybody was going on about it made it sound like the Second Coming of Jesus, but the gameplay is just like NWN2- crap-, the graphics are so-so, the movement is annoying and the voices already piss me off.

I'm gonna play a little more, obviously, but it hasn't been a great first impression.