I have played both of these games, even gone back and played Oblivion to make sure that I wasn't remembering it wrong.

What I like...
Dragon Age: Above average dialog, the setting, and the NPC's (yes, I admit that I have more than a passing attraction to Claudia Black...so sue me.)

Oblivion: The visual aspect of the game seems better than Dragon Age, the game system intrigues me far more, AND you can keep playing once you have finished the main quest.

If it were not for the dialog and Claudia Black, I would have to say that Oblivion is simply a superior game in every aspect.

What do you think?

I've been playing a modded Oblivion quite a lot a few years ago. It was fun, though even the mods, which finally added proper balancing and interesting characters to my game (something Bethesda utterly failed to implement into vanilla TES IV), it was "just" a nice dungeon crawler (with an admittedly awesome background story, which, however, sadly is only told through books and the like).

Dragon Age, on the other hand, had more than just the nice background. It actually had an interesting (if not too innovative) story and characters you'd actually care about. However, DA wasn't without flaws either - it's gameplay was utterly terrible and consolified, and EA clearly left it's mark on the game in form of a NPC giving you a quest and then telling you to pay money to do it >.>.

Ultimately, I'd say that DA is more fun to play, though both Dragon Age and Oblivion are both (hugely) inferior to the Baldur's Gate Trilogy, which is just plain unbeatable when it comes to CRPGs .

I have to say though the background for TES is really huge I its defiantly easy to understand having play the others.

You know, I tried playing through the Baldur's Gate Trilogy and I just couldn't manage it. Although, I did like Neverwinter Nights.

I agree that DA is certainly fun to play, but it doesn't seem to be a huge break through that Oblivion did at the time. Oblivion, had a bigger set of things that a player could do though and just felt like you were getting more for your money.

Again, this is just my impression and I am no expert on the subject.

The number of places that you can wander around is very impressive in TES. There was a huge amount of effort put into it. Still there are things that I would like to see done differently, in terms of the system, crafting items, a gem based socket system like Diablo, and so forth.

Wait, trilogy? I don't remember there being a third one. The 2nd one already had you getting up to mid 30s or something in level. Or maybe that was the third one and I'm thinking that was an expansion to the second. Still, I agree, it was a great game. They actually followed the rules of what it was based on, there were tons of interesting characters and plots and stories and yada yada awesome. Only thing I didn't like was the exceedingly limited inventory space, though they sorta fixed that with the introduction of quivers and bags of holding.

As for the original question of DA vs TES, I'd have to say TES. Not sure why exactly, perhaps just that TES is more open ended. I can play through the game a few times, and play entirely different games. With DA though, the only thing that is different is that origin. After that you play the exact same game every time, because even though you may be a fighter in one game, and a mage in another, your party is still fighter fighter mage archer or whatever, and you end up with all the battles being exactly the same except for which of the four people running around is you.

It's like playing through an RTS multiple times, where once you always pretend that the first peasant produced is you, and then you pretend that the second peasant is you. Or maybe more accurately, that you pretend one of the melee types is you, then pretend that one of the ranged types is you. Battle still plays out the same, you just have a tiny focus on who you care about keeping alive the most.

Wish I had my BG disks with me

Well, yeah, there were only Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, but Throne of Bhaal (the expansion pack for BG2) was easily as long as 1 and while it used the same engine and picked up where BG2 ended, it's almost a game of it's own (oh, and it usually brought you up to levels around 40-50, but maybe that's just me being a completionist ). Thus, trilogy.

And yes, the TES series definitely do have a higher replay value. It keeps you playing longer, sure, but I think it really lacks these "Wow!" moments a game with more railroading, like, say, Mass Effect 2, has.

For me this is not even a contest.

Oblivion was utterly boring and lame, while Dragon Age is just awesome (though I like Mass Effect even more)!

Bye
Thanee

That is exactly how I feel and it bugs me that I can't point to one particular thing and say X makes TES better or Y makes DA less stellar.

Replay value isn't very high on my list of important factors for an RPG, which might be a reason, I like the more story-focused games better.

For replay value I have Diablo, StarCraft and L4D.

Bye
Thanee

Good point. I wonder what game I've logged the most hours playing. Warcraft III is a likely candidate, as I loved the online custom games.

WarCraft III somehow totally didn't appeal to me. I hated the (importance of the) heroes from the first moment onwards.

StarCraft forever!

Bye
Thanee

TES III ate my life I really have done almost if not every quest side quest/ unmarked quest. In fact I have played TESIII to the point its hard to play it again. I knwo for sure I've put in total over 1000hour in to that game as I know for a fact I have 4 250+hour chars at least. Most loved game at least one of up there with the zelda games for the n64.

I can't even come close to making that claim! Wow. Until now I thought that I played it alot. If the wife unit ever complains about me spending too much time playing a video game I will just hand her a copy of your post!

For me Oblivion hands down, I enjoy things like finding Goblin Jim's book and then go exploring till I find the cave he wrote about. I've been playing Elder Scrolls since Daggerfall and loved reading all the books and the free form nature of the game. I can't wait for MMO. The intro alone got me, after all these years I was coming home, to the Empire.

TOB brought you to 40 max and that was for thieves. Yes, thieves, not rogues but thieves. All other class had considerably lower maxes. My human berserker/theif was 13/39 maxed.

I replayed SOA+TOB quite a few times for all the romances as well as the redeem your evil companions things. But I finished it with essentially only 2 main characters.

Yeah, I was never overly fond of core WC3. It was fun, I liked going through the campaign and liked the story well enough, but what really got me playing it was the custom online games. From what I've heard most of them were more or less copies from SC, but I got SC back before battlenet, and so never experienced that.

I do admit that I really hated that your skill in the game was basically dependent on how good your hero was, since a good enough hero could basically take down an entire army on her own. Of course both SC and WC3 suffer severely from twitch play. I despise that a strategy game essentially comes down to how good you are at strafing with two zerglings or hydralisks or whatever, and how quickly you can push the right combination of 13 buttons and mouse clicks that gets your units to use all the right abilities at the right times on the right people.

All bow to mighty Morrowind!

(with ~1.5 Gigs worth of mods, texture replacers and MGE of course)

Speaking of custom mods...

I have taken a peak at some of the mods out there for Dragon Age and a lot of them are pretty interesting (beyond the naked skins for Morrigan)!

I wonder, if the game companys put out these mod kits as a means to search out new talent or a means to guage interest in certain aspects of the game?

Well if you've got any recommendations, feel free to share

On topic, Oblivion is a great game for sure, but it has its flaws. Still, I'm eagerly looking forward to the next installment in the TES series, and I hope they'll manage to improve on the strong points of Oblivion and maybe bring some of the greatness which was Morrowind up to date, that would make up for an incredible experience of a game, IMHO

While Dragon Age has its flaws as well, of course, it just "drew me in" in a way hardly any CRPG has managed to do before. I loved the style, the story, the characters in a way that simply wasn't possible with Oblivion, because for all it's great features, it felt a lot more sterile, keeping me from getting too invested in the game. The ending of DA had me close to tears at a certain moment, which is something Oblivion could never come even close to, and for a computer game, that's quite an achievement. So all in all, Dragon Age gets my vote.

I think they do it because it means the game gets tons of extended life (and thus attracts more customers to buy it) because of people adding more content. It's like all the work of patches and updates and added content and all that other stuff, only done for free by other people.

For example, one of the most popular mods for oblivion is the one that shrinks the menu sizes so you can see more than two things in your inventory at once. Had that mod not been made, customers would have been less satisfied. But the mod was made, and so the game as a whole was improved, and the game as a whole is attributed to the company that made it, even though it was some gamer working for free that made the mod that improved satisfaction.

Simply put, its free labor, free ratings boosts, free extra customer loyalty.

For me, the dialog was such a huge part of Dragon Age drawing me in! The ones that made me laugh the hardest...Shale, Oghren, Zevran! I was really bummed about Morrigan leaving too.

Yeah well I spend my early teenage years on that game!

Certainly not the worst way to spend that time...I think I put nearly as much time into modding Morrowind as I spend playing it

I may have done the same. I own 4 copys of that game. GOTY for PC and xbox and just morrowind for both...

My girlfriend spent about the same amount of time on Morrowind, I think...



Oh yes, most definitely. And I'll have to add Alistair to that list. Yes, he's a fool sometimes (well, most times, really ) but damn, I can't help it but like him. And it really broke my heart when...

Don't get me wrong, I think that all of the NPC's (save for Wyn) had really good dialog.

Alistar was something of a goof, but an excellent tank! Oghren was a really good tank if you built up his sword/shield. The two-handed weapon guys seemed to do best against the really big slow opponents.

I guess the reason that I started this thread was that I felt the story and dialog of Dragon Age were great but I was really surprised by just how common the graphics came across and the very limited replay value of the game.

My hope is that they do an addon/sequel where you get to follow through with Morrigan and the...well those of you who have played through it know.

Hm, I just realized that my current Morrowind install just includes ~1GB of mods, textures et cetera...that used to be far more

I think the game has a lot of replay value, actually. Maybe not as much as Morrowind, sure, but honestly, I was more motivated to play through DA for a second time than I was for Oblivion. And I thought the graphics were just fine the way they were.

Really? Weird, guess it is just a person to person basis. I think I've played through Oblivion roughly three times (mage, fighter, thief) and enjoyed it all three times because I got to play three largely different games, both from how I approached problems, and from the large amount of side quest stuff. Only my thief became an assassin, only my mage got into the circle (or whatever it is called), only my fighter ran into the middle of hoards of demons and kicked their butts.

When trying to go through DA for a second time though, I didn't get very far, because even though I went from being an elf mage to a dwarf fighter, I noticed that after the intro part, the game was exactly the same. My party was still the same four types of characters, the side quests were all the same, there wasn't a whole lot to do besides the main quest like there is in Oblivion. I felt very much like I'd done everything before, in exactly the same manner. About the only difference was my dialog, but that had minimal affects on the larger scheme of things.

Well, for me, it was quite a different experience. Oblivion never got me into "roleplay" mode much, I've never identified with my character, pretty much all of the quests have an obvious "right" solution, and as Oblivion is only a shadow of the complexity that was Morrowind, it was way too easy to get pretty much most of the game done in one playthrough, at least for me. Especially, it was too easy to make a character that can do anything, from sneaking to melee to magic. So after one playthrough with that "jack of all trades, master of... all as well"-character, I didn't feel like I missed out on much.

I guess there is a lot of personal preference in it.

I couldn't even manage a single playthru with either Morrowind or Oblivion, because these games felt so incredibly repetitive and bland and arbitrary.

Bye
Thanee

I finished the game once with my human rogue and nearing completion on the elf mage with dwarf fighter about hlafway through. And all 3 parties are different.

All parties had at least one member of the 3 classes but they all played differently. My human rogue team did not have a dedicated archer. My mage team had 2 mages (all girls - female Warden, Wynne, Leliana and Shale). My dwarf warrior team has the same party class composition as my human rogue but the rogue is an archer. All 3 teams play differently.

I have tried to go full mage and a ranged rouge works wonders.

Wow. Ya'll play a bunch. I gotta go with Oblivion. Like the story and the gameplay.

Isn't it fun though?

Question for those of you that played Dragon Age: is it like Oblivion, where opponents and quests scale to your level? (So if you increase in level, so does most of the game world?) This game setup makes advancement arguably an illusion, which annoys me; that's part of why I prefer the Morrowind style, where there are places you just don't go unless you're properly leveled and equipped. YMMV of course.

Obvlion dosen't lvl up that much with you and lvling up in Dragon age still adds more skills to you but then you can clone the books via shop glicht and thus be even better

I don't know about the shop glitch, but I have to disagree with you about Oblivion. I've played it extensively and yeah, most of the opposition levels right along with you. You'll still encounter things like mud crabs and wolves at high level, but the NPC opposition, monsters and daedra scale with level.

IDK then maybe I modded it out... I recall aiming for a more Morrowind like game adding for GP fast travle and such. Kept the magika regen and new combat but dropped the moves in the wrong direction (in my mind) it still had free fast travel witch I didn't use unless I had to (RL time constraints ect).

I don't think it does. In the mines of morria that underground dwarf place with all the darkspawn I was wading through them like no ones business as I threw a fireball and followed it up with a firestorm to roast them as they tried standing up, but I think that might of been how it was supposed to feel since there were alot of them, and I still occasionally had a hard fight on my hands, like with the mother thing for example, or the smith. So yeah, don't know if it leveled througout the game, or maybe only leveled boss encounters, or didn't level at all.

I don't think Morrigan's mother levels.

morrowind was interesting thanks to the various designs (especially the leftover dwarf ruins, and the big mushroom-like placed the dark elves lived in) while oblivion was mostly "meh" thanks to those pesky gates and their towers...

It all lvls with you. Though only on your first time entering an area.

i heard that about morrowind, but didnt they drop that for oblivion?

oh, and there was one niggle about morrowind, and that was how crazy any kind of powering up of ranged combat spells would go up in terms of mana cost...

Thats for dragon age. Morrowind had lvld lists for loot and monsters apearing was done well enought as well an made some sense plot wise longer you took to do the game the deadlier the common monsters got likely due to the BBG's plan. Oblivion if i recall lvls every thing madly and you have to do some side quests in a sectain lvl range or there are broken/undoable.

If memory serves there were a few side quests that would become unavailable if you had done things prior to them in Oblivion. And items in Oblivion would level to keep up with you prior to getting them, they stopped once you got them though.

One of the things that I did like about Dragon Age was being able to port over my character to the next (short) installment. Something that I wish more games would do!

The ability to create stuff within both games is cool, although I certainly would like to see it done more. In Neverwinter Nights I thought the whole go mine, smith, and create items was pretty cool, but again I don't really feel that it went far enough. For me, it would be so cool to have loads of options when creating items (weapons, armor, jewelry) to tweak the magical properties of said items.

Speaking of stuff, the Oblivion weapons and armor did stand out to me as being far more aesthitically pleasing (obviously...supremely subjective view though).

Of course Morrowind's enchanting system kicked the shit out of Oblivion's though with enough skill and people playing it we found amazing bugs with it such as dirt cheap spells/enchantments that where permanent when they shouldn't be The power of casting soul trap at your feet ect

That's why you installed the mod that had items level with you while you had them.

Not sure about any sidequests becoming unavailable though. I mean, I know there were a few that would close if you killed the person who gave them or something, but that's about all I know for sure.

Morrigan, Oghren, Zevran is hilarious.

I also recommend in Awakening Oghren, Sigrun, and Velanna.

--



Enemies will scale with your level, however there is a minimum and maximum on how much the enemy will scale.

For instance, if you were to run off to Orzammar right after Ostragar you would find yourself quickly outclasses as most of the enemies are at the bottom of their scale but are still too difficult for you. The fight with bounty hunters in Frostback mountains is supposed to be too difficult for a low-level party to dissuade you from continuing.

Ah, that could explain it. The stuff in Orzammar was likely maxed out and still too weak for me except for the bosses, since that was basically the last thing I did before going to take on the archdemon.

Woo, finally got my BG disks again, and am playing through it start to hopefully finish. Level 4 mage right now, about to go wyvern hunting in the cloakwood as I think I'm a bit behind on experience at this point since I haven't done a ton of sidequests.