Topic XI

After initially being rebuffed (which prompted a "couldn't he have done something?" from me), Alistair has been properly deflowered.

As for the game as a whole, I'm seriously considering putting the difficulty level down and just blowing through it. I believe that BioWare is rather overrated.

First of all, let's show you what you can do in the equipment screen!



Shameless, I know! I thought he'd be a bit bigger built from wearing all that armor, but oh well.

I would like to point out that if there's a game that focuses heavily on the party, then having a section where only one character gets played for a couple hours is BAD DESIGN! Yes, JRPGs do it, but at least half of that time is taken up in cutscenes!

Those familiar with the game may connect my comment above with the Mage's Tower, specifically the Fade areas. I am not entirely sure what they were trying for with that section of the game, but I don't think it was very successful. Oh sure, there's plenty of opportunity to increase your character's stats, but that's only one part of the game.

I have stumbled into Radcliffe Village and found out about Alistair's background. Of course, I took the teasing option. Alistair likes a girl with sass! I also found out that he doesn't like wine as much as ale, so I'm not going to be able to solely rely on alcohol with him.

I feel an urge to finish this game, but I have to admit that there is theoretically this world with a lot to do and a lot to explore, and it just doesn't make me interested in exploring it or doing beyond what the main plot requires. And that's perhaps the most damning thing I can say about a game.

All the creatures of Dragon Age: Origins have extremely high blood pressure. So much that killing a little rat causes a geyser of blood not found outside of Kurosawa samurai movies. I turned the "no gore" option on as soon as I could.

I have had a curious hankering for Dragon Age: Origins. I generally don't believe in playing games on the PC, and BioWare has avoided consoles that I have, so the first game of the sainted company that I could have played was a Sonic the Hedgehog game on the DS. I passed on that and picked up Dragon Age: Origins for the PS3.

The previews that BioWare released did a good job of lowering my expectations; there are 4 different ways to do combat (how about focusing on one and making it good?), we add extra METAL music to our trailers but that music isn't going to be in the game (I don't know where to begin with this), we are BioWare you will love us (that doesn't work on me). It also didn't help that my PC that downloaded the character creator couldn't properly install it.

Anyway, I hunted down a copy and started it up. I decided to go with a female human noble (aka a fighter) because I wanted a relatively simple introduction to the much-vaunted depth of a BioWare game, and, well, because I wanted to romance this guy:



Yes, I am aware that my picture shows up under the "shameless" entry in the dictionary. Shut up.

I ended up with a character named Maria. I was surprised to see that you weren't able to adjust the height/build of the character. Seems to be a fairly standard character creation option and the game didn't have it.

Starting out, I found that Maria's father was about to go out with the king's army with her older brother. So, Maria was going to be left in charge of the castle and the land, how progressive in a generic fantasy kingdom! For whatever reason, Maria's mother wasn't put in charge, despite still being there are coming across as a sensible lady. So, perhaps we're not that progressive!

There was the old "rats in the larder" miniquest. BioWare, I hate to break it to you, but making fun of this quest doesn't work if you PUT THE QUEST IN THE GAME. As a reward, it allowed Maria to have her pitbull-I-forget-the-fantasy-name as a NPC. I promptly named the dog Slippers. As a side note, I play in a Scion game where my character is the daughter of Loki named Maria and has a wolf named Slippers. So, I was working on some conjunction with that.

After a completely telegraphed betrayal, Maria was down one nephew and sister-in-law. Soon after, she was down a mother and father, and conscripted into the Grey Wardens, a paladin-ish order.

After completing the quest to officially join the Grey Wardens (and the downfall of the order is apparent when the ritual ends up having one out of three candidates survive, OSHA would not approve), we then go to cliche #219 and have the adviser to the king betray him. Seriously, I'm surprised he didn't have the Snidely Whiplash moustache. It would have been better to play up the family dynamic since said EVIL ADVISER is also the king's father-in-law. And they decided to confuse things by have said EVIL ADVISER become the reagent instead of his daughter, the highly intelligent queen. Progressive!

Let me talk about the combat system instead of the exceedingly generic story. After all, you will end up in combat for quite a bit of the game. The gameplay tries for mediocrity and often fails to reach that lofty height. The pathing is ATROCIOUS since all your party members cluster around enemies and your character is often left to run around them to be able to have an opening to attack. Using abilities not hot-keyed is difficult and seems to be under the impression that you have an iPod-ish wheel attached to your system for ease of use. Trying to be careful isn't an option as opening a door on a level of a tower means that the enemies open all the doors on the level and rush you. The one interesting part that they handled with death/resurrection is that after falling you get back up after combat and take an injury that provides a penalty instead of requiring a raise dead/phoenix down. You still need an item/magic to get rid of this injury though.

Last night, my linkshell did a swift belt run. It was the second run. On the first run that I missed, we went 1/6 on the item. At that rate, I figured that for the rest of it, it would take somewhere in the area of 5 or 6 more runs, provided nobody went 0/20 on the item like some nightmare reports were mentioned.

Out of the 11 pop items we used, we had 9 swift belts drop. It blew our minds.

So, we're all set for swift belts until some of our friends catch up on the Chains of Promathia missions!

I got my Scholar to level 48 and saw a huge increase in damage done by spells. Whether it's that the extra INT from the level and items did it or what, soloing became less of an problem for that camp. Still, I think it will be very difficult to solo to 75. Fortunately, I have friends with Black Mages that want to buffer/merit!

I finally finished Enfeebling Magic merits! I will probably work on Sentinel recast and Elemental Magic next.

Thanks to the wonderful Bemused, I was able to duo to get my Scholar to level 47. Quite honestly, soloing is not really a good option for the job; the nukes do considerably less than a black mage's (and that's not even getting into the higher tier of nuke that a black mage has). I am considering using Fields of Valor and the sleep-nuke method as an alternative if I can't continue to persuade people to duo (she needs to build her buffer, so it's been working out for both of us).

I've been dabbling in Rogue Galaxy, and it is a very middling game. It does a lot of stuff, but I'm not sure it does any of it particularly well. I give LevelS credit for trying something different, but it seems to lack a certain amount of polish (and this is the enhanced version that Westerners got, so I shudder to think of what the original is like).

Partied with the linkshell last night. Made some good progress on people's upcoming jobs and managed to get my Paladin buffer to just under 10,000 of the maximum cap. Now, I can get swap to merits and get some extra abilities.

My original plan was to finish off Red Mage before working on Paladin, but circumstances have put Chivalry as my top priority. Fortunately, I'm not far from it.

I cannot carry a tune to save my life, so why do I have 2 Singstar games? Admittedly, they are Singstar-ABBA and Singstar-Queen, so there is a certain je ne sais quoi about them. But it is painful to butcher those songs.

And, just saying, I'm totally there for Singstar-Cher! Don't disappoint me, Sony!

I am generally not in favor of power-leveling, but I can understand its allure. Traditionally, an outside healer cures the party. A modification was suggested where everyone participates in campaign, but I think that has some limitations given the inability of low level characters to adequately participate.

However, as I've been doing some Cape Terrigan fields of valor, it occurred to me that a possible solution would be for low level characters to sign up for the same page as the "power leveler" and get the bonus from the field manuals. That's where the majority of the exp comes from in FoV. The limitations are that it could be difficult to get to an appropriate manual, and that AoE attacks could cause the lower level characters considerable problems. Still, it's a possibility to consider.