Gaming The Inquisition's Here and It's Here To Stay: The Dragon Age Series

I got my new issue of Game Informer today, the article has me pumped for the game!

Evil.

 

Pre-ordered my Collector's Edition yesterday. Can't wait!

 

Yup, although Amazon recently jacked their price for the LCE back up to $75 on Xbox and PS3 (I preordered it back when it was $70, earlier this past summer), so you definitely want to shop around.

From what I've seen, it'll probably play a bit like WoW, if you controlled your entire party simultaneously. The big difference is that DA is not a PnP conversion, so there's no "turns." Casting a spell might not take as long as making an uber-spinning maneuver with two axes, but might take longer than a dodge -> backstab trick, and almost as long as running eight feet, instead of everything taking an arbitrary "one turn" to complete.

Also, because it's not PnP, your opponents doesn't have to play by the same rules as you. Just because your Dalish Elf can't fly, doesn't mean the NPC is wingless.

And finally:

Zevran: Male Elf Prostitute.

 

[image=http://bioware.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/badass.jpg]

BioWare dudes Mike Laidlaw (Dragon Age Lead Designer) on the left, Jay Watamaniuk, and David Silverman (Dragon Age Brand Manager) on the right, taken at PAX.

...Just for funsies.

 

Man, that Shepard uniform is awesome!

Still looking forward to this game. I just hope it's not quite as involved as it's starting to sound like. The big appeal of Bioware for me is that most of their titles don't take more than 30 or 40 hours to complete; "RPG Lite" as I like to say. I do hope it has the replay value it promises, but I don't know if I can invest in a 100+ hour game...

_Max

 

Game Informer says that a speed demon could probably finish the game in about 40 hours with little or no exploring and only focusing on the main quest and skipping side-quests. An average first time play through is estimated at around 70 hours. Or so they say.

 

For me, the big appeal is that I can approach things how I like, with regards to how the character handles things. That's my big turn-off from JRPG games - there's no RPG. There's as much role playing as watching an anime movie. With a BioWare game, I can be the careful, cautious person with a strong quiet faith in justice, the maverick who'll do the right thing every time in an overall sense but who'll make damn sure he gets laid by some hot chick along the way, or the evil bastard who'll cheerfully backstab his own mother in order to get an extra few meaningless credits. I like that choice.


I've pre-ordered my collectors edition, and now I wait...

 

This is good. This is VERY good. Mass Effect's main quest clocked in at around 17 or so hours, and you could get up to around 50 by doing all the side-quests/planets/et cetera.

"Only" 40 hours?

That's Fallout 3 and Oblivion country. Me like.

 

Yes, I know I'm in the minority but I was thoroughly disappointed with Mass Effect. The main game was way to short and the only way to lengthen it was countless side missions which were all exactly the same. Land on planet. Drive around to all the location on your map. Kill everything you see. Lather, rinse, repeat. It all got very boring very fast. I'm hopiung DA is a vast improvement over that.

 

I suddenly fear the worst:

Orson Scott Card to write Dragon Age comic book for BioWare.

In the comic, will the same-sex relationships from the game be quickly followed by a punitive twenty years in the electric chair?

 

He's a good author and I've liked some of the other comics he has written in the past. I have no problem with this.

 

Card wrote some short fiction at the beginning of his career that's really quite good, bizarre, often terrifying and/or sickening, evocative, and mostly devoid of moralizing. You'd never know it was the same guy who wrote the unadorned Ender's Game, let alone his recent hate-filled screeds.

Seriously, every time he pops up again with one of those tracts, people start to ask, "How is this the same guy who wrote Ender's Game?", but the more you look at his writing, the more you really do wonder what the hell happened. People change, obviously, but there have been (only partly tongue-in-cheek) theories that he hasn't even READ Ender's Game, let alone wrote it.

 

The length of Mass Effect's campaign is the reason why I only played through a couple of times. It starts to feel very long after that. I still play Oblivion though, but that's because I don't have to even touch the main storyline to play that game, unlike Mass Effect where you have to play through the story to advance the game.

The 40-70 hour range for Dragon Age sounds great though, especially since you can experience a different game each time with each of the classes.

 

Now before I contradict anyone let me just say that I have both the PS3 version and the PC version of this game on pre-order and that I am a huge BioWare fanboy. That said I have to point out that Mass Effect is not really that different from this game. For example the uniqueness of Mass Effect's classes was definitely there. I had a very different experience when playing an Adept versus, say, a Engineer. So one could draw parallels between warriors and soldiers and engineers and assassins and mages and bionics if one wanted to.

The length of the game is also comparable if one did all the side quests in Mass Effect. Admittedly the side quests in Mass Effect could be a nuisance but if one structured them to fill the gap between main quests like I did that could be overcome.

The part of Dragon Age that I am looking forward to with immense excitement that is completely unique are the first 2 hour unique origins. I'm sure I'm not alone there. Additionally I'm hoping to satiate my inner sadist for a few years by brutally cleaving some vicious monsters.

Regardless, I hope this game rocks.

 

Speaking of Amazon, it looks like they've stopped taking pre-orders on the Xbox 360 Limited Collector's Edition, evidently. Are they all spoken for now? I'm not worried...I preordered mine like three months ago (back when it was temporarily $69.99), but still, it makes you wonder if the fence-sitters are now out of luck.

Yeah, there's definitely going to be some serious replayability built into this one, especially given the huge number of different origin-classes you can experience. As you mentioned, you still have to play on the rails to a certain extent to be able to experience all of Mass Effect's content, but it sounds like you can say "**** it," and do your own thing in this game, much like in Oblivion.

And even better still, as noted in the post above, this game is going The Elder Scrolls one further, in that you get a completely unique and distinctive opening each time you pick a different character-class. In Oblivion, the prison-break with Patrick Stewart is always your first step, no matter what you choose to do later on.

 

20-minute look at Dragon Age, over at GiantBomb...and it looks awesome. Almost the long-lost Baldur's Gate sequel that never got made. I don't know why anyone who watches a clip of a non-boss fight combat sequence would not want to play/own this game. The up-close camera, the awesome animations, and the crisp graphics are killer.

Also:

"BioWare Plans Years of Dragon Age DLC" -- thus saith Kotaku, quoting MTV. Looks like they learned their lesson from Mass Effect. We're gonna be getting at least two years' worth of additional DLC, which should make for some exciting times ahead, assuming some of the DLC is fairly substantial. I can see them offering a mixture of lower-cost, "Horse Armor"-type plugins, as well as full-on, 50-60-hour-long "Shivering Isles"-style expansions. Interesting article here, featuring an interview with BioWare designer David Sims about the DLC development:

---

[color=blue]"To make the console ports possible, the content of [i]Dragon Age[/i] was locked down in the spring. It wasn't possible to add new content past that point, and the VO lockdown was much earlier than that. The game was still tested and improved with bug fixes, stability and performance improvements, etc., but adding whole new adventure like "The Warden's Keep"? That would have pushed the release date back. The PC version had a very long time after content lockdown for testing and final polish, which could have been cut short to ship that version earlier, but it was decided to ship it simultaneously with the console versions for a variety of reasons. But that's a separate issue.

"Could we have taken people from the DLC team and put them on the console version to speed the porting process up? Not really. Porting content requires a lot of programmers, and not very many designers. We had a surplus of writers, tech designers and cinematic designers, and even artists, so we put them to use. If anything, the DLC is taking away from potential future projects, not from [i]Dragon Age: Origins[/i]."[hr][/blockquote][/color]
It's an extremely smart move. My guess is that about six months down the road, the inevitable Game of the Year Edition or other enhanced version will include all the content for free anyway, so the only people affected are those who decided to wait for used copies. From a business perspective, this makes perfect sense. People are encouraged to buy the new product with included DLC, and the people that get pissed off because they don't want to pay full price? Well, they weren't making money with that segment of the market anyhow, so what's the loss? Anyone who buys the used copy and loves it is unlikely to shun BioWare just because they had to pay 15 bucks for some additional content, when they probably saved 15 bucks just from buying a used copy anyway.

Overall, I think it's a very good move, and makes me happy that companies like BioWare are out there. They're pleasing the public by keeping to the November launch date, and also giving people additional content for free that they didn't have time to work into the original game. Only two more days till the Character Creator drops. I'm gonna spend some time holed up with this (even though I'm getting the 360 version), just so's I can tinker with **** before I make my first "official" character on the Xbox. By the time the full game finally hits, I'll have my first Origin-character completely sussed out.

 

Cool, I just hope it runs on my laptop. And yeah, I'm getting it on Xbox too.

 

Got dedicated graphics in that laptop?

 

Yeah, a dedicated Nvidia chip. I meet the minimum specs for the actual game, but from experience I know it won't be worth playing.

 

What kind of Nvidia chip do you have, zac, just out of curiosity? An Nvidia 250 is roughly like an updated 9000-series card, for example. I considered getting this one for PC, but the Xbox 360 version is likely to be extremely close -- or outright equal to -- the PC builds, performance-wise, as we've seen with Fallout 3 and other titles. Dunno yet how the PS3 version will handle (Fallout on that console experiences some pretty drastic framerate drops, and other issues). For myself, although my main PC certainly meets the minimum specs for this one, like zac, I'm not taking any chances. But let's consider, here -- do you want to play this game on launch date, and do you really have the money to spend on parts for your computer? If I was in that situation, I would just get the 360 version.

Sure, Fallout 3 and Crysis might be runnable on low settings, but you'll probably sacrifice the full quality that DA has to offer. Who knows...the blood-spray everywhere might be a feature you'll have to turn off. You might have to dial down some other particle effects, which might ruin the experience, in my opinion. If you ask me, just buy the Xbox version, and save your money for higher-end parts in the future.

A good way to see if your computer will run DA is to wait until tomorrow, and download the Character Creator. The devs have said that if that works on your system, then the game itself should, as they use the same technology. If that doesn't work, you still have three weeks to get a new system before DA comes out.

Also:

User-Created DLC to be Made Available on Consoles.

Confirmed in an interview with Greg Zeschuk. Awesome news! Greg mentions a "little DLC certification process" in that article, so I suspect that's what will happen. This ties in with what Fernando said in his Builders Event/GameSpy interviews. This is not confirmation of availability; it's confirmation that they're trying to make it available, if Sony and MS make it workable. I'm sure somewhere in the EULA, it will say that BioWare has lots of rights over the content created with the editor.

Great news.

 

I'd been on the 360vPC fence for a bit too, but ended up deciding 360. It'll run on my laptop, but not at the quality I'd prefer.

Still looking forward to the character creator though.

 

NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT 256MB

It plays blu-rays, it can run Crysis, Oblivion, even Empire: Total War. Of course they all run at the lowest settings and the frame rate is horrible. The 360 has always been my main gaming rig, I'm too lazy and poor to build a new PC. I may do sometime next year though.

 

A 40 hour speed-run? That sounds like my kind of game.

Hopefully Borderlands will get me through to this game.

The only D20 RPGs I've ever player are KOTOR and KOTOR2, but I really like them. I'm a big fan of stat based combat in general.

 

I feel your pain -- in my case, it's simply a case of laziness, too. I mean, why lay down hundreds of dollars on checking account-destroying PC motherboards and heatsinks when the vast majority of console ports these days are perfectly awesome, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their PC counterparts and run in full 1080p? Whenever there's a choice, I tend to go with the console version more often than not these days. I'm sorry, but whatever extras or control schemes the PC version may have, it can't compete with lounging on my couch in front of a 50" screen with a DTS surround system.

And keep in mind that they've designed this game with cross-platform in mind. They're not going to design a game that "feels weird" on a console. The days of console ports being utter zombie crotch-rot are long gone.

Mine too. As mentioned above, Oblivion and Fallout 3's main questlines ran around 40-50 hours, so this is excellent.

Also, it seems that GameStop is also out of the Xbox 360 LCE, and people are going ape**** about it over on other boards. Apparently, they "oversold" the LCE, and weren't even going to get enough copies to cover the pre-orders, period. So they were randomly changing some of the LCE pre-orders to the "regular" version.

I'd be pissed off, too. Makes the whole WoW Frozen Throne CE debacle look tame in comparison.

 

The new cinematic trailer for this makes me almost want to buy it. Almost.