Something I read today that I can’t believe I didn’t notice before. The name of the world in Dragon Age is Thedas. How did they come up with the name? It comes from THE Dragon Age Setting.
Also a question: This may be dumb but I am in the Hinterlands right now. Is it okay to go back and forth to Haven? I am afraid I will lock myself out of story if I leave too soon.
You trigger all the story quests yourself. Just going to Haven or leaving it won’t trigger anything as such.
You can come and go as you please. Sometimes it feels a bit silly to casually trapise across the country to make a new sword with your drakestone ore and then immediately return but you can do just that.
Yes, in fact, you shouod advance the story a bit, visit the first location for your main story (Val Royeaux). It opens up the game so you get new regions and new companions.
You won’t be locked out of any major exploration zones.
Protip: When adding a companion to your group who you’ve ignored up until now, maybe spend a few moments setting their thirteen skill points BEFORE the tenth time you enter combat 
So I really, really liked the end of act one. Pretty awesome all around.
Some questions:
I kind of recall the darkspawn Corypheus, back in DA2, he was supposedly one of he magisters who entered the golden city, and he was imprisoned by Hawk’s mage father - or maybe re-imprisoned. Don’t recall.
Any relation to the “architect” from the Awakening expansion? Was he also one of the first dark spawn?
Also, anyone having issues with quest updates constantly popping up? The Lotus and Root quest pops up every time I pick up one of those herbs, and sometimes random quests I solved hours in the past, pop up as completed. Weird…
I haven’t seen the quest thing. I have noticed (unrelated) that some companions are giving me approval just for living. I’ll kill some desert chicken, loot it and get a “The Iron Bull slightly approves” pop-up.
Some quests you need to turn in to get the quest marked as “done” and that is not always obvious. Particularly the quartermaster stuff at the Table of Requisitions. You need to build whatever it is you were collecting stuff for then it gets “turned in”.
As an aside spend time exploring your castle (after you have gone out on at least one mission so people start fixing stuff up). It is astounding how much stuff and detail is there. Hell, your bedroom alone rocks. Also other places like a library and wine cellar are there. I am repeatedly astounded at the level of detail there is in this game.
One other thing…sit in judgment when you get a chance (should be obvious). If you’ve completed the Mire (I think) you get a pretty funny one.
Finished this at 50 hours played. There’s an interesting scene after all the end credits so you might want to check that out. A bit sad my romance with Josephine never went anywhere past kissing in the garden and there’s all sorts of small and medium complaints I got but in general a great, massive game with amazing art and dialogue.
My GOTY 2014 - sorry, Divinity: OS!
Did you make an effort to check out everything, or was more of a go with the flow of the story and leave some things unexplored playthrough?
50 hours?
Wow…that’s fast. I am 40+ hours in and barely past Act I. That said I am a bit of a completionist and I like reading most things I come across but still…50 hours seems awful fast. Like going out for a really good dinner and scarfing down all your food.
To each their own though.
50 hours seems a little faster than the reviews pinned it (I think I saw 60-70 for the main plot line) but each person paces differently. Even if you skip much of the optional content the first time around, that gives you an excuse to play it again with a different race/class and explore new places and run new missions.
I’ll be playing this more on my Hard difficulty rogue instead. I got bored of Normal but didn’t want to change difficulty halfway through and I also hit lvl 19 or so which makes basically every enemy you usually run into to be too low to be a challenge and give no xp. Seeing the main plot from two different perspectives feels to me more valuable than doing everything you can with one character.
I do think the whole level thing is one of this game’s flaws since it makes large areas of the game obsolete (as far as combat and loot is concerned) fairly quickly. Skyrim doesn’t have that problem.
Yeah I’m almost 35 hours in and just got past Act I. I think this baby will last me well into the holidays.
I was leaving stuff for the next character to do. 
It’s a double-edged sword. In games like Skyrim and Oblivion, I never felt like I was really progressing in relation to the world. You’d go back to a “starting” location and fight level 40 bears instead. Also, from a metagame perspective it gets silly to think the local farms are surrounded by swarms of beasts that take a heroic effort to defeat.
That’s not to say DA:I couldn’t have balanced it better, especially if they have tons of content for you to out-level the game on. I haven’t had the problem yet but I’ll trust your assessment that it’s in the future if I try to hit every bit of content.
In Skyrim it wasn’t quite that bad. Instead of everything leveling up with you, it went from “only easy enemies” to “easy and medium level enemies” to “easy, medium and high level enemies”. Even when you were wearing full Dragonbone and swinging a Keen Fiery World-Destroying Ebony Greatblade you ran into the occasional ordinary wolf or poor, deluded basic bandit. Oblivion sucked, I agree with that, but it’s old enough you don’t need to use it as something to aspire towards.
As for DA:I, I think the enemies scale up to a point. One thing that gave me tons of xp and in hindsight was probably a bad idea was killing the High Dragons. I think just one of those gave me almost 1/3 of a level, and I killed a few.
How the heck do you transfer items between characters? The only way I can figure out how to do it is to move the item to Valuables, switch characters, go to valuables, and equip from there. It works, but major pain in the ass. Please tell me there’s a better way.
You don’t have to do that. The “valuables” section actually means “junk I’m going to sell.”
Any character can wear anything that’s in the general inventory. You can switch characters from within the inventory screen and then equip them with whatever you want.