Haha my thoughts exactly.
Even that fetch quest in DA:O could be completed a number of various ways, and the various ways of getting the sword also differed depending on what else you did before you got there. Getting the sword changed the way Sten spoke to you/about you, and the entire quest featured a ton of new dialogue with Sten, and the opportunity to drive him closer or farther apart from you.
All of that, for a fetch quest. So, lol indeed.
Yet it was still boring as hell 
DA2 is the kind of game with some really solid ideas and elements but just comes together very poorly. I think the idea of limiting the setting to mostly just one city focusing on a more personal jouirney was actually a really interesting idea with a lot of potential. And most of the cast of characters was quite strong (I like Varric quite a bit). And the central conflict of mages vs. templars could have been pretty strong. If they’d taken another couple years, gotten some decent writers to take their time and revise the plotting, and spent more effort fleshing out the areas of Kirkwall there’s no reason it couldn’t have been a great game.
…But it’s really just not very good outside of the few bright character interactions. The environments are bland and oh so repetitive. The plot is rushed to the point of being nonsensical. The combat is horribly repetitive. Really, the amount of people you murder to get just about anything done is completely and utterly ridiculous. It’s like, “Here’s your dolly back, little girl. Just ignore the bloodstains from the three dozen lowlifes I had to cut down to get through the alley.” You kill an unreasonably large number of people in most RPGs, but in DA2 it’s just completely over the top. And of course, they took the formerly fun and entertaining character of Anders and turned him into the most awful person to be around.
One thing that WAS good (or at least an improvement over most RPGs) was the character relationships mechanic. In most games, companions either simply like or dislike you. In DA2, you basically have a scale with “agree and support” on one side and “disagree with and push to change” on the other. Either way, the companions respect Hawke, but the idea that you can try to convince your friends to change their ways rather than just support them in everything was a good idea. It forced you to pick one extreme or the other, which was bad, but it was still better than most games.
I wouldn’t recommend DA2, but it’s an interesting case study in things going wrong and it’s a bit of a bummer that a lot of people seem to have learned the wrong lessons from it.
Nah, mostly he sleeps like a rock. Thing is, when he’s up he’s UP. He’s either asleep or going a hundred miles an hour.
More boring that picking up healing weed #10,999?
When you gathered elfroot in DA:O, it was a cornucopia of plot decisions, combat flexibility and character based pathos 
Dragon Age fight! Dragon Age Fight!
Recently finished Borderlands: Pre Sequel. It was a long, sloggy, blandly written chore. I doubt I’ll ever try it out again with any other characters. If you’re itching for irritating fetch quests that would comparatively turn Dragon Age into Lord of the Rings, then this is your game.
I’m now playing Witcher 3. This game is truly amazing, what a fun ride.
As compelling as the ongoing Dragon Age debate is…
Stealth games are on sale this week on Steam, through Friday I think. Most of them I already had, but I picked up Invisible Inc. (haven’t played yet), and two others I hadn’t heard of before, Volume and Party Hard.
I’ve only played the first few levels of Volume, but they really look and feel a lot like the great VR missions from Metal Gear Solid.
Party Hard is an interesting title. In the same vein as Hotline Miami, it has crude pixel graphics and your goal is to kill everyone. Unlike Hotline Miami, this is a lot more about stealth than action and gore. You walk around, dance, find partiers passed out or wandering off alone, murder them, set some traps, then go back and dance some more. It’s pretty fun, but I can’t imagine there’s much more to it than what’s presented in the first non-tutorial level.
Invisible Inc. is pretty fun!
I’ve been trying to stay interested in The Witcher 3, but it’s an effort. I have more fun playing Gwent than I do slicing up packs of drowners. Might try to get into Elite: Dangerous this weekend. We’ll see.
The witcher 3 is so good with story, but the combat is grating. Feels unresponsive and it’s rather boring.
Pushing myself to finish the expansion, and I think I’ll be done with the Witcher after it. Still it was a great ride. Will always remember the consequence of playing two sorceresses 
I played Witcher 3 for a while but got slogged down and bored during the whole Big City sequence of plot lines. I think some other anticipated title came out, I dropped Witcher 3 to play that and never picked it up again. It’s weird because most people seem to love it and I wish I could find in it what they’re finding in it because I’d like to love it, too.
I looked into the single player options for Ark: Survival Evolved since it was asked about and you can definitely play it single player locally. The two main setbacks are that resources won’t replenish quickly since their timer will only run while you’re in game and the skill trees are intended for multi-player since you can’t get every skill available. However, you can mod both of those deficits out fairly easily, accelerating the resource timer and upping the maximum player level from 88 to 100 so you’ll get enough skill points to learn it all.
We won the 2019 National Championship, our fifth title in a row and seventh overall, and I’m now 2-0 in the 2020 season with wins over Alabama and Auburn.
I wish I still had one of my old NCAA games. I used to do the same with Western Michigan.
The team I struggled most to do anything with was Wyoming.
If you ask me, the biggest tragedy about the Ed O’Bannon ruling is that there will be no more NCAA Football games.
I played through Bioshock:Infinite again recently, spurred by a deep philosophical discussion. I’ll try it on 1999 mode some day.
I’m also playing Kerbal Space Program (just a bit more science for the moon landing!)
I bought Verdun a while back but I really need a new graphics card to be able to have it run well. I have all the graphics settings at a minimum and the frame rate has still been pretty bad.
Oh, I also got Guns of Icarus at the recommendation of some people here and played through the tutorials, but I have yet to find a match to play in. Did it die or something?
I would do this with Ball State as well.
Apparently the only way us MACcers can win a National Championship 
Mmm. I actually moved Kent State over to the Big Ten, dropping I think Minnesota down to the MAC. Ohio State is my biggest rival; in the three years I haven’t won the title, it’s usually because the Buckeyes beat me.
Anyway, the real-life Flashes made it to a bowl game for the first time since '72 a few years ago, and if they had won the MAC Championship game, it would even have been a BCS bowl. That was a pretty exciting year for me, personally.
Having a bit of trouble with several new hardware acquisitions lately. Annoying.
My Famicom was damaged in the post and has a gaping hole in its casing that needs repairing.
My PC Engine appears to have a damaged extension bus, and possibly some blown capacitors.
My Commodore 64’s SID chip seems to have blown, meaning there’s no sound. Thankfully it’s socketed so a replacement should be an easy job…
My Amstrad CPC 464’s keyboard is faulty, which could either be the membrane or the processor is starting to fail. I’m hoping the former!
I upgraded my PC last week, went from an AMD Phenom X3 to an AMD FX-8350 8-Core processor. Still using my old 750Ti video card. I’d say this doubled my frame rate in GTA V and Planetside 2.
I’ve been playing:
Civ5: Always fun but addictive, I hesitate to play sometimes because I know I will be playing for hours. I recently downloaded a Forgotten Realms mod called Faerun that adds D&D creatures, places, and spells. Works pretty well, I can still see Civ 5 shine through but it is 60% different.
Planetside 2: There is really no multiplayer shooter like it. Infantry, air, and land vehicles can go anywhere on 4 different continents. Facility battles range from a handfull of people up to a couple hundred. Or you could wind up meeting enemy forces halfway between bases in fields, desert, or mountains. You can go anywhere any time basically. And there are usually dozens of battles on a continent 24/7. There are no maps or rounds, nobody wins or loses (in the long run, you can win bases or capture the whole continent for a while), it’s just 24/7 action over vast areas.
GTA V: Hype and violence aside GTA V is an amazingly detailed virtual world. Day/night cycle, traffic, pedestrians, hugely varied buildings, beaches, mountains, rivers, etc. The online component is flawed and can be obtuse, but there is a lot of fun to be had with deathmatches, capture, air/sea/land races, tennis, golf, or just free-roaming. Most servers have between 10 and 25 people, plus all the traffic and AI running around of course. Official organized races (for cash and experience) and other events are instanced; they don’t occur in free-roam. But you can race/fight anyone you meet in free roam. Plus you can design your own races and events, you have the whole big map to work with, it is as big as a county IRL. Rockstar recently added more occasional free-roam events such as “fly upside down as long as possible” or “deliver this suitcase to the destination.” Of course other players are working with/against you depending on your situation. My basic almost-daily procedure is log in, look at my daily objectives (which can be things like “Fly under a bridge in an air race”, “Destroy 10 cars”, or “Mod a car at the mod shop”), free-roam a while and listen to music, and try my luck in a few races. I like collecting and modding cars too. I have 4 10-car garages, one has nothing but muscle cars.
Also played Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance (old PS2 game) and Shank local co-op with a visiting friend. Both are great games, Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance is a Diablo-type game and Shank is a side-scrolling beat-em-up a bit like Final Fight, but with more moves and action.