Yep. That kicks ass.
A new trailer!
Shows off some of the various landscape we’ll be traversing:
Man, this engine, looks like it's really going to bring out what the art team has always had in their imaginations.Hype still increasing.
World feels very Skyrimesque. Not that that is a bad thing. The technical of the fighting mechanism will determine if they get my money.
Dragon Age: Origins was a decent game (and DA2 was an abomination), but I’m really hoping they vary up the gameplay in this one. Fighting the same 2-3 types of enemies (Gemlock-types[sic] and Hurlock-types) over a 30-40 hour game is ridiculous, and you just ended up doing the same thing over and over again. Make character (and enemy) abilities even more distinct, rather than just elementally-flavored DPS machines. This isn’t a MMO, so they don’t need to worry about making every class perfectly smooth in terms of abilities - get really jagged with it. It’s probably too much to ask for more interactive non-combat gameplay, but that’s something I could really go for too.
Graphics look fine, but honestly I wouldn’t care if this had the same level of graphics as Origins.
Some ‘new’ (?) stuff from GameSpot:
Plus some stuff about 40 supposedly largely unique endings (or at least not 35 minor variations on five endings) and a comment about no DLC characters like Shale since all the characters will be too deeply meshed with each other in the game to add/remove any.
The ‘environment’ stuff doesn’t really appeal to me at all. I saw the city/fort stuff in Awakenings as more of a detraction than a feature – I play these games for a grand adventure experience, not to play “Sim Castle” and I’d much rather be stabbing ogres in the face than “establishing trade routes”. There’s plenty of other games for me to establish trade routes if that’s the mood I’m in.
I’m slightly more hopeful about the dialogue options. I hate the dialogue wheels from DA2 and the Mass Effect games. I don’t recall ME well enough to say but DA2 commonly had you say something significantly different from what the actual text option was on the wheel and I hated that. I know some people disliked the dialogue trees from DA:O but they gave (I felt) a much more complete conversation experience. Hopefully the new system will be something of a compromise.
Still very much in the “Wait until well after launch for player opinions and probably a sale” camp even after this new information. What I really want is a good adventure story true to the game world with a tactical slant to the combat and interesting characters with compelling relationships between them. DA2 obvious dropped the ball all over on that and I’m far from convinced this will do it any better.
Hmmm. Significant effect…I think back to all the stuff we were told about ME3 and I have concerns.
Defeat enough bandits and the explosion of the end boss changes from red to blue!
This was my largest gripe with the DA series, enemies were completely without personality or variability. The looting/crafting/equipment side was also pretty dull and uninteresting.
Some of the best content was in the DLC chapters which accentuated the feel that the original game was merely a feature-crippled foundation for selling the DLC.
That’s not how DA:O was though (never played DA2 so can’t comment on it).
Past the intro and the whole Ostagar thing you moved on to Lothering (humans, spiders, wolves and bears oh my) then your pick of the mage tower (demons and abominations) ; castle whatshisface (skeletons, followed by demons in a dream, eventually seguing into dragon cultists and newts) ; the Dales (treemen, werewolves and more undead). Only the Dorf quest chain prominently featured darkspawn in its Dark Roads portion - but also dorfs before and crazy golems after. I do think the dark roads themselves overstayed their welcome, but eh.
Then you get the Landsmeet & Denerim (human enemies mostly) and finally the endgame, which admittedly is all darkspawn, all the time - but then that’s kind of the conclusion of the arch storyline about their invasion, so… 
You did have numerous random encounters with small packs of darkspawn throughout, but in all honesty they felt more like “hey, did you forget why you were here ? Here’s a main plot reminder. You’re doing whatever it is you’re doing because of these guys. Sorry, thought we’d remind you just in case. We now go back to your regular program about humans being complete dicks to each other and Alistair being whedonesque.”
Haven’t really played the DLC all that much (never did finish Awakening, now that I think about it) but Leliana’s Song was darkspawn-free and Watcher’s keep… I don’t actually remember. It was demons, right ?
Warder’s Keep was abominations and Return to Ostegar was mainly Darkspawn (few spiders in there as well). That said, a Genlock archer is essentially the same as a human bandit archer or a skeleton archer or any other archer. But while all the humanoids only really different in looks, there was a bit of variety with the wolves, spiders, bears, abominations, little dragons, big dragons, tree dudes, golems, etc.
After the Fade, which all right-minded people hate, the Deep Roads always seem to get the most flack. I actually didn’t mind them half as much as the Dalish forest quests which wear out their welcome for me in a hurry. I always come out of that section ready to put a fence around the whole wood and set it on fire, getting rid of elves and werewolves alike.
I don’t get the criticism that it was a half-finished game to sell DLC; most of the DLC don’t really fit into the main game and the ones that do are nice enough although honestly they make gear growth trivial for most of the rest of the game. You can safely wear the Warden Commander or Maric’s armor until close to the last act and, even then, you’ll likely still pass it on to one of the other melees. Shale is nicely implemented but hardly necessary. Leliana’s Song was okay, Witch Hunt was only worth playing if you’re desperate to see thirty extra seconds of Morrigan and I haven’t played or heard much reaction to the Orzammar (sp) or Darkspawn DLC.
Awakening is a standalone so I wouldn’t call it DLC and it really isn’t very good anyway.
[QUOTE=Jophiel]
I haven’t played or heard much reaction to the Orzammar (sp) or Darkspawn DLC.
[/QUOTE]
The Darkspawn DLC is kind of dumb - it’s the final battle of DA:O but from the opposite pov. You play as a hurlock general, get to pick other, random darkspawn as party members, breeze through a bunch of combats because you’re overpowered as all getout and have a bloody troll on your team, then finally you kill the heroes one by one on the steps of the castle (except for the player character, since his nonexistence is why the darkspawn are winning in this timeline). Then the dragon tells you “good job”. The end.
Orzammar was eh. It’s completely disconnected from the rest of the game. You get a party of two dwarves, one fighter one rogue, and they tromp through a darkspawn dungeon looking for survivors of a previous expedition. Because the dark roads were apparently not enough of that :). Super hard, not very fun beyond the challenge of a select few combat setpieces (the puzzles are dumb and forgettable), what little story there is isn’t interesting or novel (“we’re going to be rich, brother !” “we’re going to get killed…” over and over, essentially) and the end boss is a Dark Souls-level asshole of a brick wall.
All in all, nothing to write home about. I don’t regret playing through it the once, but I wouldn’t do it again.
As for why I didn’t like the Deep Roads : it’s a long dungeon you can’t leave and without access to either herbs or potion sellers so if you come unprepared and your potion stocks aren’t through the roof you’re going to have a real bad time down there. I went there without Wynne and with Morrigan only having the basic heal. So, yeah… Also, straight-up dungeoneering through endless samey caves, some of which are re-used, feels all the more dreadful after you’ve tasted all the fun of dorf politics IMO. The Brood Mother is a good surprise, so is the platoon of death seekers, the crazy lesbian dwarf not so much and her boss fight is… I don’t know, it’s not any different from any other fight I guess. She’s a nondescript boss.
I guess ultimately the “problem” with the zone is that you’ve plunged into dark Moria-lile mines to fight orcs who’re there because They Dug Too Deep in a million other action or RPG games, some of which did it better. For all the hate the Fade gets (I liked it myself… the first time around. In subsequent playthroughs it is indeed tedious as fuck) at least it was fresh.
I’ll second a lot of what you said, Kobal2. One of Bioware’s problems with Dragon Age seems to be a huge inability to accept that enough is enough. They pad the bejeezus out of every. little. thing.
I was playing through DA:O and stopped after I realized that, because I hadn’t fought an optional boss (not realizing what it was) in an area that you encounter once, I’d never be able to complete that sidequest. Which I wouldn’t have really cared about except for the time I’d put into defeating those bosses. I was not amused.
It’s not that bad though. The Deep Roads are broken into 4 or 5 different sections (depending on what DLC you have) and you can always hit town between each section. I guess if you tried doing it all in one fell swoop from leaving town to finishing the Anvil bit, it’d be a resource drag but there’s no reason why you have to play it like that.
I get the general idea of why people don’t like it – it’s a fairly linear set of fights without much of interest in between (and the quests require a certain amount of tedious back and forth through the same linear tunnels) but I still enjoy it. It’s straightforward and I generally do it late enough in the game that my guys are able to use all their sweet gear and skills to beat down waves of Darkspawn.
… I didn’t know that. Why didn’t I know that ?! :smack::smack::smack: