The game just went gold across all three platforms. So the PS3 which was scheduled for later in November is also coming out on the 3rd now.
Just 1 week and 4 days away!!!
I have no life. I’ve now unlocked all the achievements in Dragon Age Journeys. If anyone is interested in playing go with a mage the first time out. It’s by far the easiest. Not because of the spells mind you but because they get a staff that fires a bolt that covers 3/4ths of the battlefield and does about 50% of the damage of an equal level warrior strike. So you can burn down creatures as they walk towards you. Heal yourself and your party at will and don’t have to worry about counter attacks or glancing blows (worst annoyance of that game is when you have a warrior burn up all their stamina on an ability and have a glancing blow for about 10% of the normal damage then have the enemy counterattack you. You’ve wasted all your powers and took more damage than you dealt).
The warrior is the next easiest with rogues being a pain.
Hmmm. I did it with a rogue first. I mean, there were some tricky battles, especially at the end, but overall it wasn’t so bad. But the sneaking was next to useless. The ability to counter-attack was perhaps the most help.
I figured sneak would be useless so I skipped that talent tree. I’m still not finished with my first play through. I’m playing on hard though and when I get one of those alphas + an Ogre it gets bad quick.
My wife cares nothing for RPGs but asked me last night for the name of the game I’ve been salivating over for the last month. I told her it was Dragon Age and she said, ''I just saw a commercial on television for it. …I think I’m going to have to watch you play it." I told her that she was more than welcome to start a character of her own but she just wants to watch.
Do people play games like that anymore, with people watching? Back in the halcyon days of yore, I recall that we had a lot of fun socialing in the livingroom while one person played a game – Final Fantasy VII, Tomb Raider, Discworld. Most recently I played through the Sam & Max games with my wife. Since I had already beaten all the games, it was basically like running through a episodes of a TV series.
Dragon Age, though, may be a more individual experience.
Well if you thought rogue wasn’t bad then you’ll sail right through if you try the other classes. With my rogue I had to stock up on healing and mana potions and had a few party wipes (the fight with two alphas and an ogre downed me twice in a row). The other characters I didn’t bother buying any potions and no party wipes.
We may just be talking about a difference in perception. I was playing in a Baldur’s Gate sort of spirit, in which you expect some tricky combats that have to be re-done at least a couple of times with different approaches. I did buy extra mana and stamina potions. I had the bard with me, and that guy blows through stamina at an alarming rate. And I don’t see how you’d get through the battles with those huge mothersons toward the end if you don’t have the revival and the mind blast.
It was a bit of a drag at first, but once I got into it I was hooked for a while. But I’m also trying to unlock the giveaways. But…
Frankly, I don’t know if I care for this “unlockable items” paradigm. It used to be that if you pre-ordered a game you’d get real-world swag. Now different operations compete for your pre-order by offering in-game items which frankly are probably not manifestly superior to all the other magic items that will be thrown at you over the course of the game. And you know, back in the days of Baldur’s Gate II, there was a pre-order deal that netted you a +5 sling – the patch for which was a tiny file on a CD. And of course all the other people who didn’t suffer through having to wait to get the damned thing in the mail got a hold of that tiny file anyway.
That’s how it starts… soon enough, she’ll have to have her own gaming machine. If you’re lucky, Bioware will make it easy to copy saved character data so you don’t have to fight with her over your installation of the game because she doesn’t want to start over and lose her characters. 
My wife didn’t exactly watch me play Mass Effect but she would surf the internet on the computer in the same room many nights while I played. One time when I left the Normandy. She quoted right along with the game: “The commanding officer is ashore. XO Presley has the deck.” 
I didn’t think she’d been paying attention but she had nearly the full plot of the game down and had been enjoying it.
Huh ? All the games based on the Infinity Engine (Baldur’s 1&2, Planescape, Icewind 1&2… and come to think about it, NWN 1&2 as well) had bonus merchants for pre-orders, not free loot. Plus, the code for the merchants was always on the CDs, and Bioware always released the patch to allow normal players to have the merchants too sooner or later.
I’m with you, though. I really dislike the merch trend of giving buyers of the Collector, Pre-Order or whatever version additional swag in-game. I’m really, really happy with the swag I got for buying the complete Heroes collection (to whit : a poster, a Tarot deck, the series’ complete soundtrack and a big classy artbook). I thought the cloth map given with some version of Arcanum and Icewind Dale were insanely cool. But bribing me with teh phat lewt ? That’s really low. And a good show of “nah, we’re not gonna make any effort” from the studio as well…
ETA : and don’t get me started on fuckin’ DLC items. Or DLC in general. 8 bucks for über units in Total War ? There’s a special circle of Hell for the fuckwit who came up with that. And people who talk at the theater.
Here’s a question: I like the idea of having a sibling (amazingly, I believe character should have relatives), which might incline me towards City Elf background. Can I still play a mage-type, or is magic locked unless I take the actual mage background (or at least heavily disincentivized)?
Humans and elves can be mages, but yes, mages must take the mage origin.
In the world, magic is heavily regulated and the Templars, a branch of the chantry, keeps constant watch over them. Magic in the world stems from the “fade” which is a sort of dream world that demons inhabit. Because of this, there is always the danger of a demon corrupting and even possessing a mage to the detriment of everyone around.
There are apostates, wizards, who are not part of the circle of mages, but they are hunted down by the templars and even other mages and either brought back into the circle or killed.
I suppose an apostate origin wasn’t in the cards, possibly due to story reasons.
Has anyone else heard something about DA:O armor that carries over to Mass Effect II? My friend said something about it but I didn’t quite grasp the details.
I think the way it goes is you get a code when you buy a new copy of the game that unlocks both a suit of armor in DA:O, and one in ME2
It’s a pre-order bonus offered by Amazon. I don’t know if there’s another way to get it.
Details for the armor are here:
BioWare Social Network (scroll down).
So, the idea is that this stuff is what you get for not buying a used copy of the game?
Just about 4 days to go. Holly molly, I don’t get excited about game releases anymore (not since the bomb that Hellgate London was), but I was re-playing KOTR 1 and just got Mass Effect and was thinking “Man, those guys at Bioware really know how to make RPGs!”. The only one which I disliked most is NWN. I guess it is because they use the D&D 3.5 rule-sets.
Now they roll out their own system I am a happy camper. Of course, there’s still a chance that the game would falter and fail towards the end-game. So I’m here with baited breath
There are reports of some stores selling it as early as today. Unconfirmed so far though, but I’m hitting my local shops just in case over the weekend. 
Still no word on steam pre-loading for this game either. Common steam! It’s 16 gigs, I need at least 6 hours of pre-load time!