Maybe it says something about me as an RPG player, but I didn't mind the lack of protagonist voice action in Morrowind and Oblivion, and I don't mind it so much in Dragon Age, either. In fact it lets me put their "voice" into what they're saying myself. That's just how I see it anyway.

Yes, many games do that purposefully, because the main character is supposed to be you, so why should they give a voice to you? You can already speak can't you? (Sorry mute people)

I know this was very specifically pointed out for Half-Life as to why Freeman never talks.

Oh, sorry, she's running a Darksun game, 3.5 for me. Now that's love.
Darksun's just an interesting subject for me. Lots to say about it.

Ah, got'cha. The sentence makes sense, now. I was just trying to figure out what "Dark Sun game" you were talking about, and you had me thinking there was some sweet new boxed set, or skirmish game, or video game, or something that I hadn't heard about. I guess she had to convert stuff to 3.5 for it (no kiddin', that's love!), huh? I much prefer 3.0/3.5, myself, but I don't remember any Dark Sun stuff coming out for that whole edition.

The closest I came to giving the gift of gaming this Christmas was stealing our regular group away from Mrs. Crit (who's GMing a Dresden Files RPG game) for our last session before the holiday, and running them all through a Missions adventure I'd just gotten done writing. Two of them had never played any Shadowrun before, the other five were old hands at SR1-3, but hadn't played any SR4. Everyone had a blast -- even just running pre-gen characters, and trying to "hustle" to keep to a convention time scale -- though, so I think it might turn into a regular campaign.

Athas.org has lots of good 3rd edt stuff, and there was a short series of stats and character builds in an issue of Dragon magazine, and creature stats in a few Dungeon issues. Those are a great help.

Typically for Christmas or Birthdays, I offer my players a chunk of karma or an "OH SHIT!" card. It's basically a Get Out of Jail Free card that they can use once, sort of like Hand of God, but a little more flexible. I have seen it go very 'out of the frying pan, into the fire' before as they just made more bad decisions though. Hilarious for me.


Sounds like a great way to really test it out for a conventions crew. I just started looking into Missions, and I'm pleasantly surprised. Thinking of starting a game in Denver or Manhattan now instead of Seattle. Feels like blasphemy just typing it.

Oh yeah.... Dragon Age rocks! Just got my sister addicted to it. It's like video game crack. *Yay topic save!*

I just beat the high dragon on the mountain top at with all my chars at only level 11. Not gonna lie, as soon as i killed it, some fist pumping may or may not have taken place.

I beleive I hold the record for using the most OH SHIT! cards.

On Nightmare?

I finished the DA:O and Awakening twice now - Human rogue and elf mage. I completed all the origin quests, but I have only played the dwarf noble partway through DA:O. I'd say that there are certain skill/talent/spell combinations that are good and some that are really more for unlocking achievements than anything else. And some of the achievements are very difficult to unlock - especially the ones that require you to kill certain boss creatures on Hard or Nightmare.

On normal setting. It was still hard as hell. I cant even imagen the headache nightmare wouldve been. At the moment im just running through human noble. Good storyline so far.

I would say it pretty damm directly stated that the cousin got raped, as you can state that as a reason why you killed the lord when the king asks about it the first time he meets you.

Just because you state it as a reason for killing someone, doesn't make it true.

Man I LOVED the sexual tension between her and Alistar if you keep them both in your party.

MORRIGAN DISAPPROVES. -12 ♥




-k

The chatter between morrigan and just about every other party member is HILARIOUS. Especially Shale. And Allister.

It's pretty clear from the context that it happened. Both the cousin's thousand-meter stare and expression of shock and shame, and the duke's smug prodding will leave you a blood-spattered agent of vengeance in short order.

On my second play through, I often found myself blood-spattered in the name of vengeance.

While DA:O can be very easily soloed by an Arcane Warrior/Blood Mage (especially with the equipment from Ostagar if you're play 1.3, as they tried to nerf some buffs) DW rogues are still execeptionally strong. Archers are just sort of lackluster... until Awakenings. Dear. God. Try it out. Doesn't really matter if you use a warrior or a rogue base, you just need tons of dex (although rogues still get huge benefits from bard and cunning). Those DLC bosses? Piece of cake for an archer to solo that has done Awakenings.

Some parts of DA:O can be soloed but I do not think that the game actually allows you to go truely solo until after the main quests are done. Soloing in the early stages at higher difficulties tend to be quite challenging. Some of the drops seem to be better at higher difficulties though.

I agree that a rogue archer is not really good until Awakenings, even with SoC and high Cunning. I suppose a rogue archer could take on the DLC bosses alone, although I never did try since I was doing Nightmare for both DLCs and was more interested in simply killing the bosses as fast as I could.

Oghren's chatter is some of the best.

I love Oghren's chatter, but you need to hear Zevran and Wynne. Some really good stuff there.

<edit> as a challenge for fun, I think I will attempt to solo DA:O again. The old trick used to be abusing an XP glitch for a mage until you were 14 and could have arcane warrior and blood mage right from before the tower. These days you'd need to wait until after lothering and do some gear grabbing. I'm pretty confident I can do it with a rogue though.

Oghren and Zevran - Broma Brothers. The 2 best reasons to get captured.

I gotta admit, I have stuck with Al, Leliana and Morrigan as my party for awhile, I'm doing the Circle of Magi stuff with Wynne but.... meh. Al is my tank, he pulls them, my human noble origins rogue makes with the damage via dirty fighting and flurry, duelist is VERY nice for this and since I maxed out the unlockable skills with Leliana and her lockpicking I haven't encountered a chest yet that the game will allow you to pick that she can't. I'm also very pleased with the drakeskin armor, my main wears the perfected suit with Leliana in the first, imperfect suit you get. Honestly I'm not too far in but I tend to grind out the optional quests so I'm if anything a bit over powered compared to the area I am in. Gotta say once i am done with my rogue play through I will probably try out a spell slinger just so I can try out the blood mage/ arcane warrior combo though.

Thread necromancy time!

I beat the game with my rogue and am working through as a sword and shield warrior, the mage was just not pleasant to play for me. So far it is fun and combat is alot cleaner for my side but it is frustrating waiting to unlock chests till you get Leliana, Daveth is useless for the brief period you have him. I'm going to focus on filling out skill blocks this go around and I'm getting all the dlc next week, so that should greatly extend the play time, I'm gonna hold off on getting DA II till I have everything done in Origins though, especially Witch Hunt.

Started afresh (Elf tower mage - basically the "nicest" origin story IMHO) and decided to try a few new things....

God god, greasefire = instawin, even more fun when fireballing. Decided to head to the dalish and be a Hard hardass (I play paladin types in CG's, something my long-suffering wife finds endlessly amusing - "Go on, sell him out!") and suddenly they're all, "oh, you're hard but fair great one."

...Goddamned elves.

We (The lovely likes to watch me play while she perfects her Sim3 breeding program) enjoy the fact that elves are either tribal nomads or refugees, so much for the usual fantasy dreck.
And the dwarves are a lot more spiritual and industious than "Let's get drunk and hit things until loot comes out or we sober up" (except for Oghren).

Lots of depth to the game in the background details..you wish you could take a break from THE WORLD IS ENDING - GET HELP main quest and just, well, go slaughter a village in rebellion, or something

I liked it how people were proper bastards for the sake of success, power, etc, not because "evil is cool" (Apart from some of the mages, way to stereotype) but REALLY got tired of taking crap from people I couldn't blast apart at that moment because of plot.

And the Fucking Broodmother. Yeeeech. Rule 34 that thing and be prepared to weep

DA2 coming soon! Woot!

-Tir

And by soon you of course mean Tuesday. The 8th. Not much longer to go... can't wait.

Also started afresh, with a male PC this time for the purpose of eventually getting freaknasty with Morrigan. Mmm, Claudia Black's voice...

I'm honestly surprised there isn't more rule 34 stuff about Morrigan....

Too easy, there's no challenge involved.

There is a challenge. Try to come up with something about Morrigan that hasn't been Rule 34'd.

Esp with her being a shapeshifter...

And her mother being a shapeshifter...

And her mother being voiced by Kate Mulgrew... threesome with Janeway and Aeryn! Woohoo!

Alright...who's got DA2?

i don't, but i read Bioware has an HD Texture Patch for it.

I'm waiting to finish all the DLC for Origins which... will honestly take awhile, saving up for a wedding is rough on the gaming budget and most of my gaming budget is going to books these days.

poor? guy?

I do, stayed up until 4am playing... then woke up at 7 to go to work. I'm still not tired. It was magical.

I do. I played 5 minutes of it before going back to Retribution.

Don't take that the wrong way: I did this because if I didn't, I'd play DA2 until the cows came home, and never finish Retribution! I owe it to THE EMPRAH to smash heretics unto the end of one campaign, at least.

*snickers*
i'm on my . . 4th play through of the Retribution campaign, i think . . doing it the imperial way this time . .

Really? I kinda want my money back. There's relatively little conversation to be had by bioware standards, the voice acting isn't so great and the level design feels like the worst bits of NWN2. The game isn't really outright terrible or anything, but there's so many good games to be played these days that I'm not sure I'm going to sink more time into it. Maybe it's just my self-imposed spending limits talking though-- I rather wish I had just gone ahead and gotten the Tactics Ogre PSP remake instead.

If you're genuinely interested in ditching it, feel free to toss me a PM. I'd offer more than Gamestop would.

I picked up TO and Radiant Historia as well. I'm greatly enjoying all of them. It got the ME2 simplification process which isn't bad or good, just different.

Nah, steam version, unfortunately, or I'd consider it. I don't really regret my affinity for digital versions though in any case, since I have a bad habit or losing discs and registration codes. And as you said, gamestop doesn't exactly give you much anyway. This way I can never lose X-COM again.


As for the mechanics, I would say they're different and some of it is bad, but not in the way you'd probably expect. For example, I sort of wonder why they bothered including attributes at all given the extent to which they railroad you with equipment requirements-- as far as I'm concerned a feature that doesn't really encourage decision making (or even makes an aesthetic difference) is basically superfluous. The skill trees, on the other hand, are fairly spiffy and unlike stats they actually affect what you choose to do a bit, which is nice. That's all minor stuff though and not even really a hassle. What really bothers me is the level design and the spawning-in-waves from around and behind you BS. It gives the impression of being a bit too cheap and time consuming when you set the difficulty higher and waaaay too easy when set to the standard options. It's a bit like Jade Empire in that respect.

Anyway, I don't mean to come across as too harsh. Games are released at a pretty high standard of quality in general these days. I just wouldn't call my experience magical.

Well, I've been on an RPG binge as of late and it makes the perfect complement to SRPG (TO), traditional RPG (with interesting battle mechanic, Radiant Historia), Western RPG (Fallout: New Vegas), and now a more action oriented but still story heavy RPG, Dragon Age 2.

I do totally agree about the stats, they make you think taking cunning with a tank warrior would be useful for the defence boost... but then you won't meet the strength and Con requirements for the better armor and shields. Skill trees are a blast, I wish I had more points. I just finished in the deep roads, I really like how there are 3 different and major outcomes for the finale there.

So far the most striking thing to me about the overall Dragon Age 2 experience is not the game but its reception and the strong feelings it has aroused both from detractors and defenders. More than anything, it reminds me yet again that game reviews--"professional" game reviews in particular-- really ought to just be decoupled from numeric scores so that the writing can stand on its own merits. I say this because it seems that there's a real stigma attached to any score below an 8.0 or 80/100-- I rather get the impression that a big budget title would have to practically break into your house and start molesting your pets before getting a score below 7.5 from the review machine these days, something I find interesting since oftentimes what I read in a text and what I read in a score box often seem at odds. I say this not because I think Dragon Age 2 deserves a particularly low number or anything, but rather to point out that I think such standards contribute to how shrill the discourse on any given game quickly becomes. After all, we exist in strange place where one guy writing for a big game site reserves a 6 only for the gravest of sins while Joe Fanboy on gameFAQs may be happy to throw 0s and 10s around like they're going out of style.

We exist in strange place where one guy writing for a commercial interest reserves a 6 only for the gravest of sins while Joe Fanboy with his own agenda is happy to throw 0s around like they're going out of style.

That definitely plays into it. I remember the Kane and Lynch fiasco quite well. Another thing to keep in mind is that for every writer who's not afraid of being seen as an idiosyncratic pedagogue ala Armond White we have another critic who's terrified of staining his own credibility. Beyond that, we also live in a time where a certain amount of polish is pretty standard these days. Even the movie tie-in shovelware is fairly competently made these days compared to past years, so to an extent I can see why some general ratings inflation might creep into things given that each generation of games usually at least looks better than the previous.

Plus, I hate to say it, but I'd rather trust the guy with commercial interest and an obvious bias than Joe Fanboy on the internet who nobody ever calls on their bullshit. I mean, for god's sake, I know a guy who ostensibly gave Mass Effect 1 a 0 because you couldn't bang Wrex. Sure, his steam page still said he played the game for 70 hours and I know he was taking the piss, but that was still the message he decided to send, for better or worse. I guess I'm just happy to have a few friends with similar tastes to lean on rather than really relying on the 'net.

Got DA2. I have to say that, although I'm only a couple of hours into it, I'm not as thrilled as I was with the first. The game isn't bad, it's just lacking some of the things that I loved in the previous, mainly the way approval and dialogue between characters worked. It seems that if they had three options : keep it the same system, take it more towards RPing, or take it more towards combat, they chose the combat side.

The combat does work well so far, and looks pretty cool. Hoping that in the long run it'll shine enough. There still is an approval system. Just not as good. Haven't seen any of the Gifts yet either.