Dragon Age is out

[Ghost Rider]

I toyed with the idea of starting my current playthrough on normal difficulty, but decided against it when I remembered how frustrating it was.

I was wondering how long it'd take them to do an underwear mod - both sets (male/ female) look absurd. Not to mention making the sex scenes look even weirder than they already do (Mass Effect did it way better).

Yeah, the sex scenes looked hilarious in this game. I mean the were fondling and cuddling bra/panties or underwear....any sense of the tenderness or romance or lust goes straight out the window and in place of it all, is laughter.

They should've done the fade in/out scene or just what ME did if they absolutely wanted to show interaction. I don't think anyone plays the game for sex, and watching that was just sad hilarity.

[Manus Celer Dei]

I was wondering how long it'd take them to do an underwear mod - both sets (male/ female) look absurd. Not to mention making the sex scenes look even weirder than they already do (Mass Effect did it way better).

There's an occasional glitch that makes your armour and helmet sometimes stay on during cutscenes. When that happens for the sex scenes it's hilarious.

[Stofsk]

That happened to me!

[Vympel]

There's an occasional glitch that makes your armour and helmet sometimes stay on during cutscenes. When that happens for the sex scenes it's hilarious.

I got that glitch as well! Luckily I realized it and a quick quite and restart fixed it.

[GuppyShark]

Finally finished it!

Wow. Epic. What a great experience, although I wish the epilogues had been a bit less bland.
Spoiler

Well, the fight with the Archdemon wasn't half as difficult as I was expecting. Ground phase, then ranged phase, then ground phase. And he drops really, really quickly. I summoned the Humans in the first phase and they never actually died, so I couldn't call the elves in during the ranged phase. I had to have my rogue use the ballistas and then when they jammed, blast it with my mage.

I still ended it with a stack of pots despite telling Wynn "Drink as many mana pots as you need, this is the final battle!"

The difficult part seems to be handling the way your party gets split up by the void zones, which can cause problems if it's not addressed quickly.

Amusingly Allistair got the slow-mo finisher on the demon but I managed to run halfway across the map to get to it for the cutscene kill.

[Stark]

Vympel, how far through your second go are you? Is it interesting enough to go through? Some people will always play it over to get all the endings or whatever, but I'm curious if enough changes to make it still interesting. I'm pretty much out of games.

[Vympel]

I'm up to the second part of the main quest progression branch, so I've finished the Origins, the prologue, the first village, and one part of the main quest. It isn't holding my interest as much as my first play through, but that's because I'm not playing an evil character, it's an 'optimised' speed gamey playthrough, as a human warrior again. This allows me to get through it fast though, since I can pretty much skip all the dialog except for the parts where I made different (stupid) choices.

[Edi]

Since this thread is still first page, I'd rather necro it than start a new one to ask basic stuff. I got the game as a Christmas present, so a few questions right off the bat:

I used the codes for Blood Dragon Armor and the Prisoner in Stone expansions, so those are down. Are the others worth buying? Since the new expansion seems to be just around the corner, would it be better to just wait for it before actually starting to play the game? It's not as if I don't have enough on my backlog to last me for a long while if necessary.

Is it possible to play this game without using the bloody scroll wheel? My mouse seems to have managed to get the scrollwheel busted and needing to go out and buy a new mouse just for that would be really fucking annoying. I guess I'll have to look at the warranty on this thing. I managed to configure the keyboard so it isn't a humongous pain in the ass to use that for scrolling, but nowhere near as good as with the mouse wheel.

Any other basic hints and tips would be appreciated as well. More along the lines of what kind of character builds to avoid and maybe some tips on what stats to spend the initial points on. I figured going for a dual wielding warrior or rogue type or possibly the combat mage, but I'm pretty much open to anything.

[Mr Bean]

Are the others worth buying? Since the new expansion seems to be just around the corner, would it be better to just wait for it before actually starting to play the game? It's not as if I don't have enough on my backlog to last me for a long while if necessary.

No unless it's Warden's Keep which is useful, a good "first thing to do" as most of the fights are only moderately challenging instead of ball crushingly hard.

Is it possible to play this game without using the bloody scroll wheel? My mouse seems to have managed to get the scrollwheel busted and needing to go out and buy a new mouse just for that would be really fucking annoying. I guess I'll have to look at the warranty on this thing. I managed to configure the keyboard so it isn't a humongous pain in the ass to use that for scrolling, but nowhere near as good as with the mouse wheel.

No

Any other basic hints and tips would be appreciated as well. More along the lines of what kind of character builds to avoid and maybe some tips on what stats to spend the initial points on. I figured going for a dual wielding warrior or rogue type or possibly the combat mage, but I'm pretty much open to anything.

Concentrate on combat during your origin story, and during the first part of the game. Once things open up and your free to travel where you want to you can start branching out into conversation skills, trap making, posion making ect. The first part of the game is combat, combat and more stabity death. The except I believe is the Mage and Dwarf origins and it's minor in both.

[Netko]

A dual wielding warrior is a nice damage machine but ultimately problematic from a stat-allocation point of view since you need to spend points on both strength and agility in large numbers (42 strength by the end and 30something agility to get access to top tier armour and dual-wield top abilities). Now, that doesn't mean its a bad build - my first run was with just such a city elf warrior and by the end she had a 60% of party damage dealt. But it was a bit frustrating in that I was able to equip all my other warriors with top-tier armour sets long before my main, so purely from a gameplay perspective it isn't the most satisfying build. A rogue anything on the other hand will miss out on the good looking armours entirely (for some reason, Dragon Age has a really crappy realistic look for leather armours). Yeah, yeah, its a bit pointless nitpicking, but hey, this is a single-player game, so aesthetics come into it much more for me then they would in a mmo or something.

I'd personally recommend either a sword-and-board warrior as your main (as an advantage, it allows you to be more flexible with the rest of your companions since you have tanking covered), an 2h warrior (great damage-dealer) or, if you want something more complex (I would personally leave it for the second playthrough, especially since you need to unlock the specialisations first and those aren't the simplest ones), an arcane warrior/spirit healer or arcane warrior/blood mage (obviously evil playthrough that) build. Or maybe a pure DPS/crowd control mage.

The initial point allocation isn't very important - generally, as a warrior (unless dual wield) you should be focusing (ie. 2 points into it per level per lvl up) on strength up until 42 (the magic number requirement for top tier armour) and then bumping rest of the stats (with cunning being regularly given the remaining point until you can open up all the dialog influencing options). With mages its pretty much the same except Magic is the stat to focus on (with 42 again being the answer to everything ( ) if going for an Arcane Warrior build since they substitute that stat for strength for requirements purposes). Rogues have a somewhat more complex situation in that they by default require dexterity, cunning as well as moderate strength (if you want to have any real armour selection options) - there I'd go with requirements for skills depending on what build you want, but I haven't really focused on rogues.

[Molyneux]

Are the others worth buying? Since the new expansion seems to be just around the corner, would it be better to just wait for it before actually starting to play the game? It's not as if I don't have enough on my backlog to last me for a long while if necessary.

No unless it's Warden's Keep which is useful, a good "first thing to do" as most of the fights are only moderately challenging instead of ball crushingly hard.

Is it possible to play this game without using the bloody scroll wheel? My mouse seems to have managed to get the scrollwheel busted and needing to go out and buy a new mouse just for that would be really fucking annoying. I guess I'll have to look at the warranty on this thing. I managed to configure the keyboard so it isn't a humongous pain in the ass to use that for scrolling, but nowhere near as good as with the mouse wheel.

No

Any other basic hints and tips would be appreciated as well. More along the lines of what kind of character builds to avoid and maybe some tips on what stats to spend the initial points on. I figured going for a dual wielding warrior or rogue type or possibly the combat mage, but I'm pretty much open to anything.

Concentrate on combat during your origin story, and during the first part of the game. Once things open up and your free to travel where you want to you can start branching out into conversation skills, trap making, posion making ect. The first part of the game is combat, combat and more stabity death. The except I believe is the Mage and Dwarf origins and it's minor in both.

The scroll wheel handles, what, zooming in and out?
You can use pageup/pagedown for scrolling big chunks, and I bound "," and "." for small zoom, manually.

[Ghost Rider]

Since this thread is still first page, I'd rather necro it than start a new one to ask basic stuff. I got the game as a Christmas present, so a few questions right off the bat:

I used the codes for Blood Dragon Armor and the Prisoner in Stone expansions, so those are down. Are the others worth buying? Since the new expansion seems to be just around the corner, would it be better to just wait for it before actually starting to play the game? It's not as if I don't have enough on my backlog to last me for a long while if necessary.

Warden's Keep is worth it. The storyline is short, the abilities are okay, but the gear is easily the nicest in the game as well as access to the best sword(2 hander or single) in the game.

Is it possible to play this game without using the bloody scroll wheel? My mouse seems to have managed to get the scrollwheel busted and needing to go out and buy a new mouse just for that would be really fucking annoying. I guess I'll have to look at the warranty on this thing. I managed to configure the keyboard so it isn't a humongous pain in the ass to use that for scrolling, but nowhere near as good as with the mouse wheel.

Well, you found a solution but they really like having one use the scroll wheel.

Any other basic hints and tips would be appreciated as well. More along the lines of what kind of character builds to avoid and maybe some tips on what stats to spend the initial points on. I figured going for a dual wielding warrior or rogue type or possibly the combat mage, but I'm pretty much open to anything.

Dual wielding is a rogue bit. Yes, Vympel did it with a warrior, anyone can. Hell you can have a duel wielding arcane warrior, but the rogue actually exploits it. But as for tips.

Get Persuasion. Being able to convince people is one of the few ways of altering the game rather then killing every possible thing. You still have to kill 90%, but it's not 100%.

If you want the easy path? Go Mage. The AoE, damage, and crowd control has no equal in this game. A party of 1-2 mages, a rogue, and whatever you want will destroy everything. The tank role is there to confuse people because if you can stunlock then kill something...why do you care it's looking at someone else. And I mean this even unto dragons. There are some broken builds, but FAQs can tell you which ones make the game your bitch. If wondering, if you find your way to access the Blood Mage and the Arcane Warrior, by the end game...you can solo the rest. In fact find the quick way to access the Blood Mage and then have it saved for use. It's easily the most absurd speciality within the game.

[Ubiquitous]

Do any of you play this on the PS3? I watched the IGN review and it looked pretty poor on the PS3 compared to the PC, is it still worth getting?

[Ghost Rider]

Do any of you play this on the PS3? I watched the IGN review and it looked pretty poor on the PS3 compared to the PC, is it still worth getting?

The PC version has more mods and is slightly better depending on the system. The PS3/X360 isn't flawed, but there are few things Bioware just went completely stupid about aka the need to get Warden's Keep on the 360 for a FUCKING STORAGE BOX.

[Questor]

Do any of you play this on the PS3? I watched the IGN review and it looked pretty poor on the PS3 compared to the PC, is it still worth getting?

I have it on the PS3. I don't do many games on PC. It was good, but I don't care about graphics.

[Edi]

Looks like the Return to Ostagar DLC expansion got delayed by about a month or so. The bitchfest at the bioware forum is rather gigantic.

I'd been looking forward to having it, but oh, well, these things happen. And they'll be releasing an expansion pack/sequel in March according to a new announcement.

[Vendetta]

I'd been looking forward to having it, but oh, well, these things happen. And they'll be releasing an expansion pack/sequel in March according to a new announcement.

March 16th

[LadyTevar]

I would rather wait another month to make sure its' got all the bugs out of it anyway.

Nit's been playing all the characters, but he let me do the Dalish Elf Origin. I've got a rogue, and I have been very anti-Chantry A little Anti-Human as well at times, hey, they're not MY people.

However, the flirtation with Alistar I swear is based on Nitram. He RPs with one of the designers.

[LadyTevar]

O.M.G.
I have to share this one, it had me laughing too hard

* Oghren: So. With the boss, aye?
* Alistair: Pardon?
* Oghren: You and the boss. Rolling your oats.
* Alistair: I don't know--
* Oghren: Polishing the footstones.
* Alistair: --what you're--
* Oghren: Tapping the midnight still, if you will.
* Alistair: What are you going on about?
* Oghren: Forging the moaning statue. Bucking the forbidden horse. Donning the velvet hat.
* Alistair: Are you just making these up right now?
* Oghren: Nope. Been saving 'em.

[charlemagne]

Yeah, Oghren has some really funny lines. Like that "Wait, are you drunk??? Do we even carry around alcohol?" - banter with Alistair, another good one

[Edi]

Some of the dialogue between Morrigan, Leliana and Alistair has had me in stitches. Haven't seen Oghren yet, but I've not had a lot of time to play.

Return to Ostagar just came out, by the way.

[LadyTevar]

Must. Get. return to Ostagar.

But first, I SWEAR Alaistar is based on Nitram!! They act just alike when flirting!
The sex scene with him was romantically touching, imho. Long gazes, long kisses... *sigh* So like Nitram.

[Edi]

I haven't gotten to it yet, but it cost a whole whopping €3.19, which is literally less than the price of a hamburger. The DL size wa<s just 266 MB too, so it was done pretty quickly.

[LadyTevar]

So, is Ostagar out for Consoles?

[Ghost Rider]

So, is Ostagar out for Consoles?

For the 360 it is, 400 points.