You can order to hold ground? One of my biggest pains is cycling through the idiots to hold them back out of where my AOE will go. Maybe I should find the manual.
Yah, under the party portraits is this hand/movement icon. You press H once to get them to hold their position, and press H again to move them. This works perfectly fine out of combat, but during combat, once you hold them, they turn off their AI all together and are just passive blocks of wood. Worst still, pressing H again does not unfreeze them.
I got varied results from my testing. Sometimes I managed to get one or two to follow me. Sometimes none. I tried selecting them all and press H. I guess what’s happening is that I may have set some of the party to hold, and some to follow but there’s no earthy way of knowing.
Out of combat, the feature works fine.
Thanks. Damn I’m an idiot. That would have made some battles much easier.
***mumble stupid people running in front of cone of cold, getting their asses frozen mumble
I did find another bug as well. If you buy a prestige class book, Then find out you have to go back to a previous save the merchant won’t have the book anymore. Happened to me with the bezerker book and then the assassin book from another dealer. So be careful before you buy one, no testing to see what it is.
As I understand it, that’s because you don’t need it anymore. Once you unlock a clas, it’s unlocked permanently until you uninstall the game.
Ohh I didn’t know that, that is… odd.
So uh…
(Spoilers from Morrigan’s sidequest)
Dragons really freaking hurt. I had to use Shale with a large clear fire res crystal and a ton of heals from Wynne to do it.
hehe She kicked 3/4 of my ass too in about 10 seconds. But she didn’t count on a rogue archer with 75% fire resistance. took about 8 minutes, but only 6 greater healing pots. I went back and solo’d it with the archer for fun, takes a while not no real danger, she does nothing but fire.
So I finally got Petrify, one of the highest level spells, and I have to say: Petrify + Stonefist is making this game VERY easy. And very fun. I highly recommend those two spells.
Works with cone of cold as well which you can get at lower level.
Ok, so what’s going on with the nightmares?
[spoiler]I freed Alistair just fine. Now with the other two, I go through the dialog, kill the demons… then it starts again, only the mobs don’t show up. When I was with Leilana (or whatever her name is), she even talked to the “revered mother” who wasn’t there!
Bug… or some sort of weird nightmare thing? I’ve had nightmares like this. I think.[/spoiler]
Bug, it sounds like. I just got done doing that part. Man, that is one long quest/mission there, with the Sloth Demon. The Sloth Demon is one bad motherfucker, too.
On the one hand, I can see how they would try to set up battles where the challenge is that you don’t get to decide your circumstances. I resent having my party teleported into an ambush where I saw well ahead of time I would need them hanging back or spread out. But then, even in a place that is not merely a random encounter map, they refuse to let me zone. Ach!
To be fair, I got it on the second time. I didn’t even have to use a healing poutice that time, though I think I used a couple mana potions. I did it after only my second main quest leg so I didn’t have much in the way of gear, and since Morrigan was one of my main party members at that point (and had so much influence she had master ally bonus) I lost a lot of DPS there.
Now on to a sidequest in the Dalish area
[spoiler]Revenents are officially my least favorite enemy in the game, especially with BACKUP. Two gravestones, and both times I used about half my potions. I pretty much need Wynne to do it, and someone usually manages to die and be revived, often the battle lasts long enough to actually cast revive twice.
Also, for that quest for the four treasures do I need to trade the hermit, if that’s what the helmet was? Because I think I’m screwed, oh well, 3 pieces of the set is good I guess. He was a little too crazy for me.[/spoiler]
GAH! And now I can’t find Lirium Dust (the circle quatermaster used to have an infinite supply, not anymore) or potions. These are pretty much entirely necessary. Why does this game hate me?
The game doesn’t hate you. You just don’t have what it takes to play this game.
d&r
Unfortunately, this is the atitlude on the official boards. I say just cheat and get the items you want. I like it when games pose legitimate challenge, not cheese stuff. I playing more Torchlight than Dragon Ages. I really want to love DA, but the combination of party not responding to me, the toughness and the imperfect party AI is a bit dragging me down. Not touching this until a couple of major patches and mods are out (nothing wrong with archers, for example, but heaven forbids if I invest any talent points in the archery talent)
Yah, once you unlock a class you unlock it for life.
Anyone foresee prestige class books being on sale as DLC?
“Be the uber-warrior! Just for $9.90 you will can have a class with +10 to all stats, and a massive crowd control plus NUKING talent tree!”
I’ve found archery pretty useful, the only problem I’ve had so far is that Le[mumble] keeps switching to her freaking dagger in melee even though I’ve given her point blank shot. And no, it’s not tactics, I have her on what amounts to puppet mode.
Actually, either restarting my client or failing to be blind made the quartermasters restock. Unfortunately, I’m really, really low on gold now (like, just above 1), with little to sell.
Trick advertising, there’s a bug where if you have ever had Morrigan in your party for more than 1 hour total all the nuking talents take 1 more stamina than your max.
Edit: Killing Revanents is much easier with Shale. I think my problem was that my Alistair just doesn’t have the Con yet to tank well. I mean, I still quaffed pots like a madman on Shale, it just wasn’t as bad (granted I’m on hard). Too bad Shale is bugged and randomly breaks for people.
I feel so envious of all the people who are able to enjoy DA:O. Somehow it feels like everyone else is playing a completely different game. I didn’t expect much based on all the previews, but still it managed to disappoint me.
Listening to the plot exposition and reading the codex entries feels like I’m listening someone going on about their beloved homebrew Pen & Paper campaign that I can’t relate with at all. It’s a Bioware game, so I was expecting it to have at least some personality, but based after playing 6 or so hours I’m just being assaulted with massive amounts of fantasy cliches and impenetrable blandness. Everybody keeps going on about fighting dragons, which is apparently one of the highlights. That got old in the SSI gold box games, so I’m dreading of how big a part of the game those fights will be.
I paid 45 euros for this shit, so I’m trying to force myself to play it, but so far there isn’t anything that would really draw me in. The plot seems to be the generic “Ancient Evil Threatening The World”-pap, all the gear looks so generic that I couldn’t give a toss about the loot, some of the dialogue seems nice, but to get to the next bit, you need to mow through hordes of Genlocks.
Combat was a big part of BG of course, but somehow the results of your actions and the combat mechanics seem much less clear in DA:O.
I’m genuinely not trying to rain on anyone’s parade. I’m just completely baffled by all the love this game is getting and wondering what I’m missing.
Should I keep playing in hopes that the plot will get better? I desperately want to like this game since it’s supposedly the spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate games, but I’m having very little success with that.
I’m… checks Steam 32.9 hours into the game and barely under 20%, I’ve seen one dragon and that technically wasn’t a dragon, and was completely avoidable. Now the (and this isn’t really a spoiler considering you should probably find this out within the first few hours) leader of the Darkspawn is an Archedaemon/Dragon, so presumably you’ll be fighting at least one, possibly a few times, but I don’t imagine they’ll ram it in your face (ridiculous 3 dragon melee at the end of NWN anyone?).
I think the results are less clear due to it being a very new system, if you’ve been playing since Gold Box, no wonder the choices in BG made sense to you, BG was one of my earliest exposures to any RPG ruleset and I was baffled (being young didn’t help). It becomes clearer once you start [del]losing[/del] playing some battles and realize what works and what doesn’t, don’t expect to have a perfect build the first time (without resorting to forums and major theorycraft at least). It’s actually starting to grow on me, I like how they kept the skills/talents in a way that made sense. Only thing that was a bit weird is that lockpicking is an ability, but what can you do? It’s really easy to pick up speechcraft and crafting skills without worrying about not having enough points in spellcraft for your opposing spell checks, or needing more in heal or lore or tumble, etc. The actual ability choices are a tad confusing, and maybe not the absolute best balanced things in existence, but that one of those play style things and is actually leagues simpler than D&D (well, TT D&D at least, CRPG D&D was pretty restricted to “MOAR AOEZ!”).
The only thing that really bugs me about it is resistance creep, it seems like half of everything is resistant to half of everything else, or if they’re not they can stun you and take out half of your HP (I’m looking at you, Mabari). And at this stage in the game at least it’s exceedingly difficult to have comparable equipment that does different sources of damage.
I love the voice acting, personally. I also think the lack of an alignment system helps it feel fluid, for example I don’t think Morrigan could even exist on a D&D axis scale. I really do think it lives up to the spiritual successor title, it may be a generic fantasy RPG, but for me it’s becoming THE generic fantasy RPG. If it’s not floating your boat, don’t worry about it.
I find the plot interesting, so far I’ve found the Tower the most interesting place, but that may be the shock of returning since that was my origin story. It also had this somewhat cool [del]little[/del] long dream sequence with shapeshifting and stuff that was actually pretty fun once you got used to it. Redcliffe was admittedly a little annoying, the Dalish forest is in between, a little new, a little bit of a retread of every forest level in every CRPG ever created (minus the spiders - so far - at least). I’m also not even far enough in to really judge it as a generic fantasy RPG really, for all I know the Maker is a Maleficar Ascendant and the greatest trickster of all time, the Darkspawn are all doing His bidding, and you’re a reincarnated Archedaemon, then find out that you can control parts of the darkspawn hordes yourself to fight Him*… which admittedly would probably still read like a generic fantasy RPG, but hey. The character direction is also excellent, I had fun just wandering around camp interrogating my party on their life stories.
- Why am I capitalizing the pronoun of a fictional expy of a fictional deity? Is Leliana rubbing off on me?
ETA: And I hate this mindset that you’re “missing” something. Not every game is for everyone, even if by all accounts you should like it and you don’t, don’t worry about it. There’s nothing any of us are going to say to you that will make you “see the light.” Unless there is a maleficar among us. Keep playing if you want, maybe it will pick up, but if it’s not, it’s a GAME, don’t torture yourself, 50 Euros isn’t worth a headache and a wasted 80 hours of your life.
I still withholding verdict on the plot. The human noble origin is so predictable, and
so is Ostagar (Return of the Sith, anyone?).
I afraid it is because it is fantasy and the cliches are so well-worn by now. However, for some reasons the plot isn’t as compelling (note: I didn’t say ‘as good’) as KoTR, ME or KoTR 2 just because…mm because maybe I am tired of the “so here are 4 areas for you to visit” or some such.
Actually, I am more looking forward to what sort of custom mods will be spawned. And this is really way better than the NWN’s official campaign.