Dragon Age 3

Since I haven't been following the news, I'm a bit late to comment on Dragon Age 3.  Firstly, that it will exist, which is a surprise enough in itself.

After that, the announcements that state that it will not only continue to involve a voiced protagonist, but also another "I said what?!" inaccurate-paraphrase dialogue wheel were enough to make me stop reading right there.  Those two things alone are symptoms enough to make a diagnosis.  I predict, based on those elements, that it will also include loads and loads of non-interactive cutscenes.  It's baffling, but I'm glad at least that they're bold enough to come out and admit that they're just plowing on ahead in that direction that their metrics interpretations have chosen for them.  It saves me a lot of time and trouble to know in advance that Dragon Age 3 does not concern me at all.

At the early planning stages of Dragon Age 2, after having enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins, I was very interested in the news, and vocal about my concerns about their direction, but that turned out to be a waste of my time in light of all the good it did.  I myself don't need a weathervane to know which way the wind blows.

Dragon Age 3 will come out at some point, but I expect I'll be busy having fun with games that are actually made in a style that I like, such as Wasteland 2 and Project Eternity, and the more recent Spiderweb Software games.  I'm finished hoping that games that have become something else will get back to what attracted me to them in the first place.  What happens in Thedas will stay in Thedas, and it's quite likely that it won't be happening to me.

Neverwinter Nights 2, part 6 (ending)

Aside from some new upgrades being available to build at the keep, and some new keep-related resources to collect, the order of the day in Act 3 is to gather some potential allies for the upcoming fight against the King of Shadows (I agree with the Luskan ambassador in regard to the silliness of the name). Basically, that means that Crossroad Keep has become a new quest hub, with the world map now being restricted to locations that relate directly to this purpose. All except for the town of Ember, which has no one new to recruit. I went down the well to see if I could gain the friendly goblins as allies, but there was no new dialogue with them. There were also some characters available to recruit to work at Crossroad Keep, which don't seem to be directly related to the upcoming battle, like a dancer for the tavern and a couple of extra merchants.

The other locations (with one notable exception) were pretty small and self-contained, not like the similar ally-gaining quests in Dragon Age: origins, which had very large diversions for each one. In at least one case (Highcliff), it seemed like they might have planned them to be larger originally, because they involved some boss-level fights with groups, phases, and adds, but these were all located right there, without having to crawl through a dungeon to reach them.

The simplest of these was also the hardest. I had to fight a character named Light of Heavens in a one-on-one duel. Again, me as an unarmoured spellcaster, and her as an armoured sword-swinger with knockdowns, high hit points, and lots of spell resistance. Once again, with this fight, the devs show their disregard for clothies by requiring it to be a solo effort. This was a slightly laggy location, with dozens of citizens spawning from houses and evacuating the city, but not enough to interfere with the gameplay. It took several tries, but I finally beat her with the use of about 10 summoned creatures (in a series, since I could only have one at a time), 2 or 3 blast globes, just about all my spells, and lots of running around the marketplace in a big circle to gain enough distance to cast spells at her, since my speed was just slightly higher than hers. The process was basically starting with a summon, running away until it got her attention, then casting spells at her until she killed it (which didn't take long), then running away far enough to summon another creature before she reached me, then running some more until it got her attention, and so on.

The one in Highcliff where I had to fight a lizardman shaman king was a much better fight, and much more fun, but it was, again, right there in town.

The druid circle one involved two of the companions, Elanee and Bishop, which gave it more character, but I don't see why it needed Bishop there at all. He was a forced companion when I went to that area, but didn't seem to do or say anything that made his presence mandatory. This was a minor annoyance since I had stripped him of all his gear when I left him behind at the first opportunity, and when he showed up I didn't have any armour on hand that he could wear. I never gave back his dagger, either, because I have Neeshka using it. The only reason I can speculate that Bishop might have been required, since he didn't contribute any unique action, and his commentary was inconsequential, is that perhaps his having witnessed the events there might play a part in a later development. There was some conversation back at the Keep from an earlier plot development when Bishop made some comment about what "we" went through, even though he hadn't been in the party at that time. I don't trust this chaotic evil ranger, and I don't like the fact that he's making his home in my keep, away from the watchful eye of Duncan back at the Sunken Flagon.

The Alliance with the Wendersnaven bit finally addressed the bard issue I had mentioned earlier. Finally, I got a bard instrument (the only one in the game?) that actually boosted bard skills rather than yet another equippable item that does nothing but cast some low-level spells when activated. Finally, a gameplay reason for my bard to carry an instrument!

There was an encounter with the ghost of a dragon in a location revealed to me by Ammon Jerro, which was plot-related, but separate from the "recruitment" theme of the rest of them. The dragon had information about how to reforge the silver shards into the sword we needed to kill the King of Shadows (why it would work this time, when it didn't work the first time, is unclear.) Apparently, Ammon had spoken to this ghost several decades ago when he was researching where to find a weapon to fight the King of Shadows in the first place.

The dragon's ghost was chained to this area due to a giant floating crystal dragon heart being physically chained up in this location, guarded by a couple of smaller dragons. By the ghost's request, I fought those guardians and destroyed the heart to release the spirit. This led me to yet another return to West Harbour, and at least this time one of the companions expressed a little emotion over what happened there. Grobnar did, too.

The best quest in Act 3

The recruiting of the Ironfist clan was the most developed of this section. It's almost out of place compared to the other ones, but you won't hear me advocate scaling it back to match the others. This one had much more companion involvement, and its task actually took place in multiple locations, and brought back events from way back in the storyline, involving an artifact-level pair of gauntlets that we had found at that time, the Gloves of Ironfist.

But talking with other voiced members of Khelgar's clan made me notice that Khelgar's the only one of his clan with that "Scottish" accent! I seriously can't understand how production companies keep doing this sort of thing. It's like Deanna Troi being the only Betazoid with her accent (her mother doesn't have it, and her father was apparently American), or Ambassador Delenn being the only Minbari with hers, or Londo Mollari being the only Centauri with his. Khelgar might have been a required companion for this section (if not, he should have been), but I can't tell because he was already in my party, reclaiming his role as the party tank after the death of Shandra.

To gain the support of the dwarves, we had to prove to the clan that Khelgar was a member in good standing, and not an outsider who had deserted them. To do this, we had to recover the second of the clan's patriarch's artifacts: The Belt of Ironfist. With that and the matching gloves, Khelgar would have the augmented strength necessary to lift the Hammer of Ironfist, once wielded by King Loudram, in a kind of sword-in-the-stone test of worthiness.

The belt was in the possession of some fire giants, so it was off to Mount Galardrym to find them.

Mount Galardrym was the biggest outdoor area I've seen in the game, if I'm not mistaken, and it was the absolutely best designed area. The long, winding paths leading up the mountain, overlooking lava pits, were clearly crafted with love and care. There were numerous watchtowers with trapped approaches, guarded by groups of fire giants and hell hounds who were fun to fight (though perhaps too easy for giants). There were several points of interest and several separate destinations to reach. One spot offered a scouting overlook to any surviving giants that our party may have missed by taking alternate paths, and offered an opportunity to push some large rocks down onto their heads as a surprise attack.

But the highlights of this area, aside from its aesthetics, were the two boss battles, one at the end of each path. One led to a big red dragon, and the other to the powerful fire giant king with his retinue of more giants and hell hounds than I had battled on the way up. Each of these bosses wanted the other one dead, as it happened, but I was not inclined to make any deals with either of them, so I fought each of them in turn. First the dragon, and then the giants.

The dragon fight was very challenging, and a lot of fun. My party was wiped on the first try. On the second try, I memorised a whole different set of spells in preparation, buffed nearly the whole party for immunity to fire damage (as many as I could with the spell slots available), and made sure all my offensive spells had significant damage even if save rolls were made. It was a brilliant light show! I've never had such an enjoyable dragon battle in any game before!

At the end of it, adding to the satisfaction of defeating a worthy opponent, the dragon's treasure hoard waited as a tantalising bonus. A huge pile of gold, and trapped chests filled with high-end gems, scrolls, and enchanted gear. This blew away the most recent other dragon battle I experienced, which was in Dragon Age: Origins (the dragon in the Brecilian Forest ruin, not the Archdemon). The fight there was less fun, and the hoard was much smaller. Here, I actually got to send my staff to haul the piles of gold back to my treasury! My standards had been lowered so far from previous games, I really wasn't expecting to be able to do that.

After I'd finished savouring my victory, I went around the mountain to the other side to face the fire giant king, which was another pretty good fight, but an anticlimax in comparison.

After gaining the Ironfist alliance, there were a few outdoor battles with the King of Shadows' forces, including a rather funny bit where we found part of his vampire army sleeping in their coffins during the day. Breaking the coffins open resulted in a crowd of vampires running around shrieking in the burning sun!

Ammon Jerro's remorse

I came to like the character of Ammon Jerro over the course of the game, despite the ruthlessness of his actions -- especially where it was completely gratuitous. Now, some of his murders were for revenge, though I don't recall if he explained what exactly their offenses had been against him. Other murders, however, were wanton and unnecessary, like the employees at the Moonstone Mask. While it turned out that he was motivated by the goal of recovering the shards to fight the King of Shadows and prevent a larger number of deaths, and considered some innocent casualties along the way to be acceptable losses, in some of these cases he could have just gotten what he came for and gotten out, without killing the people who were not fighters, and who were incapable of actually preventing him from getting the shards.

Spoiler: Click to display/hide

This hidden spoiler block contains spoilers about the death of a particular character

Still, he eventually came to regret what he had done, even though it wasn't until he had unknowingly murdered his own granddaughter.

Throughout the rest of the game, his regret came up again and again.  At first, he was unapologetic even in his regret, maintaining that he did what was necessary, and that he was already going to receive an unimaginable punishment.  Finally, though, in a long conversation that involved an influence check to see how well I had gotten to know Shandra, I was treated to a moving scene of Ammon Jerro falling to his knees and expressing his contrition in the ruins of Shandra's farm.

Solution to a major plot bug

There was a game-breaking bug in the battle at Crossroad Keep, after the siege tower battle, when Black Garius showed up and was giving his speech about how he was about to crush us by summoning an avatar of the King of Shadows, but it was actually pretty funny when it happened. In the middle of his speech, he apparently wandered a little too close to one of the soldiers, who sucker-punched him. This cut off his speech and he started fighting the soldiers, and never got around to summoning the avatar. Unfortunately, he was also plot-immortal at this time, so the game couldn't continue.

The solution is to open up the console and type:

rs 3541_death_nwalker

This loads up the cutscene that should play after you kill the King of Shadows' avatar, and the plot can continue from there. You will miss out on actually getting to participate in that fight, however.

I was also proven right not to have trusted Bishop in this section, since he was the one who just unlocked the gate to let the enemy in after the siege battle.

The ending

The ending was quite the mixed bag, but I'm inclined to forgive the visible signs of the time/money running out. There were subtle signs before, throughout the campaign, such as the design of Highcliff (the "tavern" bit I mentioned in a previous post), some conversations with companions that never went anywhere, and the large difference in scale between the various alliance-gathering missions, but the first really obvious sign I noticed was when I was looking to see what there was to do in the merchant district in Neverwinter during the evacuation. There was a dead man near an outhouse named "Privy Man", who had a mysterious journal on him that described some fearsome beast under the outhouse. I looked around, but found nothing else to do with him, and when I looked for answers online, I learned that it was the remnant of some cut content -- the Archmage Startear would have sent you on a quest to kill a lich who lived under that outhouse.

Nevertheless, whatever else they cut, Obsidian at least made sure to deal with all of the named adversaries introduced throughout the campaign.

Things really started showing the time/budget strain when what I thought was going to be another major battle turned out to be me watching a slide show of retouched screenshots, with voice acting, of Lord Nasher leading his troops to battle, and then a major event in the battle, and its outcome. Surely this was originally at least meant to be a cinematic, if not something in which the player was meant to participate!

Then there was the ending scene itself, which came after the final dungeon. After defeating the King of Shadows (it shouldn't be a spoiler to know that such a thing is possible), I was treated to another very unsatisfying slideshow of retouched screenshots describing the immediate aftermath of the battle (more on that in a second), narrated by a clearly non-professional voice actor (who someone on Youtube described as "Norman, from Accounts"), which then went on to describe what happened with various people and places in the next few years.

What happened directly after beating the boss, I was told by the narrator, was that my whole party was wiped out by the collapsing lair, because the King of Shadows was a "load-bearing boss". In other words: Rocks fall, everyone dies. I was incredulous. I couldn't believe that's how they ended it. And that was the good ending!

I spent the next few hours reading other people's reviews of that ending, as well as watching the "evil" ending on Youtube. Interestingly, while looking around on Youtube, I found that dialogue of my companions had actually been recorded to act out what I was only told had happened, and Youtube user RandonB put them together and posted the dialogue. I think that version of the ending would have been much better than the poorly narrated version, even if they had done it with the slide show method they had previously used for Lord Nasher's battle. It would have certainly been more poignant, as opposed to the whole "Then, offscreen, this happened. But never mind that -- here's what happened elsewhere over the next few years." Doing it the way they did, it actually reminded me a bit of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows (the final book in the series) in how the epilogue chose to answer questions that no one had even been asking, while keeping mute on issues of actual interest and relevance.

But aside from the actual ending, I enjoyed the climax very much. First was the showdown with Black Garius, and his attempts to seduce the members of my party to join his side, one by one. I actually went through this scene twice, because I wiped on the first attempt. The first time, he succeeded with Sand and Bishop (though Bishop had defected to his side earlier than in this scene), but the second time, he succeeded only with Sand. Although my influence with Bishop was predictably very low or nonexistent, considering I never included him in the party and didn't like him, and I hadn't said anything to try to convince him not to fight us, for some reason he decided to abandon both sides the second time through.

Neeshka was able to resist Garius' demon-binding on her through the power of friendship, since I liked her a lot and had a very high influence with her. I had high influence with everyone, really, except for Sand, who I neglected as much as Bishop, and much for the same reasons. So, with Khelgar, Neeshka, Grobnar, the Construct, Elanee, Qara, Casavir, Ammon Jerro, and Zhjaeve, we beat the stuffing out of Black Garius, at last, in a long battle with barriers, multiple add spawns, and several full heals on Garius' part. The rod of resurrection I was given earlier saw numerous uses during this fight. This battle also incidentally showed that it's possible to have a party of 10 fully-controllable characters, and that the previous party number limit had not been hard-coded.

After that mini-boss, it was time to face the King of Shadows himself, after a rest to heal and refresh our spells. It was nice of him to delay his passing through the portal until my party had rested from the Garius fight. This was a major fight, and with 10 party members, it resembled a raid boss. There were several phases to the fight, involving several strategies and objectives, and this made it particularly fun. It turned out that the Silver Sword of Gith was actually necessary after all to beat the KoS, but only because it was the only weapon that could damage the portal to the shadow weave, which is apparently the direct link KoS was relying on to stay alive (even though he had managed to forge a link to it out of nothing in years past, when he was dying, so it shouldn't have been any big deal for him to just make another one). Really, this whole climax was fantastic, right up until the slide show ending.

Obsidian bit off more than they could chew, but I prefer it that way. It was already a huge campaign with a massive amount of content, and I for one am glad that they aimed high, even if they ultimately had to abandon some of their plans.

And now that I've finally gotten the last part of this review posted, I can get started on my module.

Trouble in Rainesfere, my first quest mod

Making a mod for Dragon Age: Origins was a very spur-of-the-moment decision -- a decision which I made shortly after successfully building a pleasant landscape in the toolset after following one of Mikemike37's video tutorials on Youtube. I documented the whole process over two weeks on the Nexus forum and the Bioware Social Network, so there's no need to retread that ground here, but if you're interested in a behind the scenes look at the process of making a mod in the Dragon Age toolset, you might enjoy the read. There are plenty of screenshots there, too.

Download either on Nexus or BSN.

I'm generally satisfied with how it came out, with the adage in mind that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." Users can expect a relatively small download and a short questline that doesn't take itself too seriously, in brand-new locales.

I imposed time restrictions upon myself for it, to ensure I would get it finished and available for people to play while I still had the free time to spend on it. I know that if I left it as an open, unplanned schedule, it could have become one of the countless abandoned entries littering the "Projects" section of BSN with high hopes and broken promises.

Early on in this process, I was taken by how easy it was to create new landscapes (much like in Oblivion), with the sculpting and texturing of land. The placement of vegetation was also fairly simple, though it wasn't very intelligent about the height at which the scatter tool placed them. I had to adjust the height of every shrub, grass, and tree so it wouldn't be floating above the land (and then of course there was a strange export problem right at the end that resulted in extra floating trees anyway).

I thought the ease of new landscape creation was a strong argument against the reuse of areas in the Dragon Age games (especially in the second game), and in some senses it still is, despite my troubles with other aspects of it -- namely the light mapping. Since we modders didn't get the same lighting software Bioware used, one would expect that Bioware employees didn't have quite the same problems as I did with the rendering of the light maps after the design of the land was done.

The necessity of rendering baked lighting with EclipseRay made the experience excruciatingly slow and full of problems I didn't understand. It's enough to make me want to avoid any future mod that would involve that process. So I could probably fill my new lands up with new side quests and characters, but not make more lands, unless I could pass them off to someone else to render the light maps. The dialogue and quest/plot system is actually very nice, and a positive first experience for me in quest modding.

Anyone examining the code and dialogue trees in my mod (if they can do such a thing with the files I released) might find numerous tangential story elements that did not make it into the mod as released. I "commented out" those elements (by setting conditions that couldn't be fulfilled) because of problems getting them to work correctly or because it would have required too much more alternate story development for too little justification. There are still some unresolved bugs in conversations which I can't figure out, in regard to party members, but since they didn't interfere with the gameplay, I considered it an acceptable flaw for the sake of people having something to to play. There's also some "ghost" code in various scripts where I wanted something to happen, but nothing did, and I just left the code in without even commenting it out.

When faced with such problems in the code, I devised workarounds so that I essentially got the desired effect, albeit through different means.

A good taste, but an appetiser for something more?

"The depth of the Dragon Age toolset, with Bioware's long history of community innovation, will ensure that the Dragon Age community is a thriving centre of creativity and content for years to come."

--Jay Watamaniuk, Bioware Community Manager

I wasn't aware until I started this mod that the toolset was no longer receiving support from Bioware, but I suppose that should have been obvious by the fact that they ceased further DLC or expansions of DA:O long before the time that they promised at the outset that they'd do so. I pre-ordered the game partially due to their promotion of it as a platform for gaming, with its powerful toolset and the promise of expansions for years to come, as it was promoted in the beginning. "The future of gaming mods", they called it in their promotional video. While perhaps true, that future didn't last long before the company moved on. The abrupt abandonment of that "platform" and the quick release of a sequel shifted it away from that concept, and the cessation of expansions means that it will not receive any new official assets that can be used in modding.

In my catch-up feast of old forum posts on the topic of Neverwinter Nights 2 (a game which I had previously overlooked due to my dislike of its forerunner), I've recently seen that many of the names I got to know from Dragon Age modding had originally been prolific or otherwise well-respected modders for NWN2, and I see that they moved to Dragon Age with the understanding that it would be as long-supported and expanded-upon as the NWN games had been. With that promise broken, and compared to NWN2's sheer variety of creatures, spells, placeables, and the rich and detailed lore to draw upon, I can see now that the paucity of Dragon Age's bestiary and sundries makes it a far more restrictive system to work with for telling the variety of stories one can tell in NWN2. Perhaps, like me, others might notice this, and take another look at Neverwinter Nights 2 as a modding platform, as these experiences (and my subsequent playing of NWN2) have led me to revise my previous opinion that Dragon Age: Origins is the best modern game engine to create Baldur's Gate-style adventures.

My next post will be about Neverwinter Nights 2.

More Dragon Age: Origins

I mentioned earlier that I was planning on going through the rest of the origins in Dragon Age: Origins that I hadn't played through yet, as well as trying out some quest mods. I started up a Dalish elf rogue, and enjoyed the origin story very much. And it makes me realise how much more depth this game has than DA2. Each origin that I play reveals more about the world and how it all fits together. I had no idea until now, for instance, that Merrill from Dragon Age 2 was also in DA:O. The focus of the origin was the discovery of some ruins which contained some kind of portal/communication device in the form of a large mirror. Is this the same kind of mirror that I've heard is involved in the Witch Hunt DLC?

The only origin left for me to play is the dwarf commoner, and I wonder what new perspective I might gain from that one.

But in the meantime, I've discovered I really like playing as a rogue, and ended up playing beyond the end of the origin at Ostagar, and have actually gone through Redcliffe, stopping after fending off the undead attacks. From there I headed to Denerim, because that's where the Community Contest 7 quest mods begin. But before I began those, I found an NPC I'd never seen before, named Slim Couldry, offering rogue-specific quests! As a mage in my first playthrough, I had never encountered this character, and I'm not sure if it's because I was a mage, or because I hadn't had Leliana pick any pockets until after getting to Denerim. In this playthrough, I had picked some pockets in Lothering, so it could have been either that or just the fact that I'm a rogue that triggered his quests.

His quests were pretty simple for the most part. Pay him increasing amounts of money for increasingly lucrative thieving opportunities that simply don't exist unless you have the quest. I went through all that he had available, though he said he was planning on getting more. I don't know if he'll really have any more in the future, but I'll check. They may be related to my level, since the last one was actually very tough -- fighting a warehouse full of Arl Howe's men to get the cargo they were guarding. It's the first of the thieft quests that actually involved violent crime, but it is Arl Howe's crowd we're talking about. When I say this one was tough, I mean it took me 4 or 5 tries to do it successfully (without being wiped). This was the toughest fight I've experienced yet in this playthrough, and I'm playing on Hard with two dual-wielding dagger rogues (Leliana and myself, with Leliana specialised as Ranger for the animal summoning), Morrigan respecced to mostly entropy plus the ice line, and Alistair on sword and board. The first time around, I used Sten as the tank, and had 2 mages (myself and Morrigan), and Leliana using bow and arrow.

Not all roses

Despite how much I like DA:O compared to its limited competition in the current market, there are still some issues which are very annoying. I mentioned the frequent crashing in my last Dragon Age post, which had not been a problem during my first playthrough. That's a strange development that I don't understand, but I have found a couple of workarounds that dramatically reduce the number of crashes.

First thing is to add a command switch to the game shortcut to force it to use DirectX 9. The switch is "-dx9". I'm not sure how much this helps, but it doesn't seem to hurt, and I use it combined with the second fix. The second fix apparently must be done while the game is running, each time you run it. Start the game, then switch to Windows task manager, find the "daorigins.exe" process under the Processes tab, right-click it, choose "Set affinity", and set it to use only one core (like "CPU 0"). It doesn't seem to reduce the performance of the game (most processing is probably in the GPU anyway), but the game's stability is markedly increased.

On my last session, I forgot about doing this, and I loaded up a game as normal. When it loaded, the first thing I did was to check the inventory to see what I had equipped, and it crashed immediately on trying to show the inventory. Starting the game again, and doing the same thing resulted in another instant crash. Then I remembered to set the CPU affinity to a single core, and it worked without crashing again.

I'd love to know of a way to force it to always run like this without having to manually change it each time while it's running.

The other, non-technical issue with the game is perhaps a design choice. There are many combat encounters that force you into dialogue before the hostilities begin, once you get close enough. This happens regardless of whether you're in stealth mode, and/or have the rest of your party waiting back down the hall in another room. Suddenly, the game teleports everyone right into the middle of the ambush, kicks your rogue(s) out of stealth, cancels any spells that were in progress, and shows you walking casually up to talk to the clearly dangerous, threatening NPC and his army (or showing you and your party charging in recklessly and stopping short in apparent surprise at the enemy, as if you hadn't been scouting ahead in stealth mode). Forget positioning! Forget preemptive tactical strikes! Forget even having your weapons out and ready! If the game decides you should have a little chat first, there's nothing you can do about it. You can't even use a preemptive ranged AoE attack against the group, because they're immortal until you talk to them!

Contrast that to the Baldur's Gate games, which don't restrict your attacks in this way. If you're sneaking around in a dungeon, and you find the boss, and the default action when you click on him is to initiate conversation, you don't have to. You can instead sneak up behind him, click the "attack" button, and make a preemptive strike. You might miss out on interesting information or even a quest if you do that, but so be it! It should be your choice.

Not having looked into the settings in the toolset, I don't know if this is hard-coded into the game engine, or if there's a flag the quest designer can set to prevent forced dialogue from happening if the player is invisible, or prevent it from teleporting everyone else into the room, etc. Seeing how well some mod quest designers have been able to script encounters, though, I'm pretty certain there must be a way around it, even if it is hard-coded.

Combat issues

Speaking of problems with stealth, I'm also not happy with the mechanic that rogues can't enter stealth if the game thinks they're in combat, unless you get the "combat stealth" talent. I'm not talking about situations in the heat of battle, where you'd just vanish in front of an enemy's eyes, but a situation where you've cleared out a whole room full of enemies, but you find you're still "in combat", because there are some enemies in another room behind a closed door that's never been opened, who can't see you and do not suggest they're alert to your presence! (This is possibly caused by the enemies in both rooms being defined as part of the same "team", which all aggro at once.) I think you should be able to enter stealth mode whenever you're out of view of enemies, like in Baldur's Gate, where if you could just get around a corner, you could lose a pursuing attacker.

But perhaps it wouldn't be a problem if we could just tell the game that we're not in combat anymore, in those situations. Or, it would cancel combat mode if you got far enough away from the enemies. It's especially annoying since the game doesn't let you save if you're "in combat" either.

Summons

Rangers can summon animal minions, and mages can summon skeletal warriors, but these summons disappear on any area transition. This ranges from entering or exiting a building, to simply walking from one section of a forest into another. This shouldn't happen (especially in the latter case).

Even worse, the forced unsummoning causes the summon ability to trigger a cooldown period. Ridiculous! Not only has my minion been taken away for no reason, but now I have to sit around waiting for the cooldown to expire so I can summon it again! Either that, or I have to look out for area transitions coming up, and unsummon my minion ahead of time so it'll be off its cooldown by the time I cross the threshold.

This works all right for the ranger, but the mage can only raise a skeleton from the remains of a recently killed enemy, so it really screws the mage.

Dungeon design

Did they hire the ghost of Sarah Winchester as house designer?

In general, Dragon Age dungeons seem rather uninspired, at least in the vanilla game without DLC. Instead of being unique spaces with personality and purpose, they rather seem to be just a jumble of tileset corridors with an occasional large room for bosses. No regard for architecture, no logic in design, and almost no spaces that make you stop and simply admire the place. Not having seen any of the DLC aside from the Stone Prisoner, I can't say whether this is improved elsewhere.

I'll highlight a typical example, as shown in this screenshot. This isn't a cave or a mine, which could have such a rambling structure, but a supposedly abandoned house, with a badly-hidden secret door leading to this random sequence of rooms and hallways. Imagine how much real estate this building must occupy! Is land that cheap in the heart of Denerim?

Bioware used to be pretty good at making unique, interesting interiors which had believeable floor plans, as I highlighted in some of my Baldur's Gate posts. When I say "unique", I mean that each "dungeon" should be a noticeably different experience from another, with its own special flavour, to make these places appeal to the players' sense of exploration and discovery.

Nevertheless, despite all of these various criticisms, I still consider DA:O to be the best overall choice for designing a Baldur's Gate-style quest/adventure mod in a modern engine. I must say, though, that I've very recently become aware that Neverwinter Nights 2 has the elements that I found missing in Neverwinter Nights 1, and I understand it has a very large set of resources to build with, so I'll be investigating that soon, as well.

Quest mods

Speaking of which, I'm also enjoying some excellent quest mods, including the two quest mods from Community Contest 7. Spiders and Knives is a good one to start with, since it's pretty short and straightforward, adding a couple of new quests and locations and an NPC with a fun personality to Lothering. Eye and Shadow is good for Mengtzu's creatively orchestrated and challenging boss fights, set in a beautiful new location from one of the previous community contests.

Now I'm playing an even bigger treat: Dark Times: The Confederacy of Malkuth, Act 1. I'm not sure exactly how large this mod is, but if I take the new world map as an indication, I should call this an unofficial expansion pack, or even a sequel! I had many hours of play time racked up doing quests around the first town before the world map was unlocked, and when I saw it for the first time, a huge smile came to my face at the prospect of more hours of enjoyable gaming to come.

I don't think I can adequately communicate how enthusiastic I am about this mod. It has everything you could possibly want in a Dragon Age expansion. 32 new locations, many new NPCs and 3 new party members, lots of personal stories and side quests, new factions to join or fight, new loot and artifacts with background stories, new unlockable character specialisations, possible new romance(s), and some really heavy-duty moral choices to make.

Some areas need some polish -- mostly in spelling, a missing mesh or two, and some various bugs, but this in no way casts a shadow over the incredible overall job this team did with what I've seen of it so far. They've accomplished a great deal, and I'm very happy to know that they're working on a second act.

One very interesting thing here is that they seem to have cracked the 4-member party limit. Multiple times I've been joined by one or more NPCs, and although they don't get their own portraits on the side of the screen like other party members, I am nevertheless able to access their character screens, level them up as I like, add and remove equipment, adjust their tactics, and even directly control them. I wonder if the Baldur's Gate Redux team could use this kind of system to allow a full Baldur's Gate 6-member party in their mod.

There are numerous other quest mods that I've saved and I'm eager to try out, from some well-respected names in the modding field. It's also been somewhat inspiring to try my own hand at it.

Dragon Age 2 demo impressions

Here's a rather stream-of-consciousness review of the demo for Dragon Age 2.

The darkspawn are...hmm...not as well designed as the Origins versions. I hope this won't matter, since the game is not about a Grey Warden, so hopefully darkspawn won't play much of a role in this game.

The beginning area is a turn-off. I don't know why I keep seeing this sort of thing so often in games. Why start players out in an ugly, barren starting area? Is it just extreme confidence that we'll be inspired enough to push on ahead to hopefully end up in a much better-looking area? Are they underestimating the importance of first impressions? I have to say, the beginning was extremely dull, boring, and repetitive, with the narrow, winding pathway and yet another wave of indistinguishable darkspawn every few meters. I got very tired of hearing "Another wave!" This is what they chose to show me as an example of what the game will be like?

As it happens, once you get past the miniboss at the end of the annoying blightland corridor gauntlet, the story fast-forwards to give you a taste of a questline with Isabela in the city (of Kirkwall?) Things look much, much better here. This city seems to be the polar opposite of the cities in DA:O. No more muddy streets at all. This place goes all out and has every courseway paved in stone. The colours are rich, and the textures are lovely.

The cart looks better, for sure. People from the forums shortly after the release of DA:O should remember the cart/wagon, which was brought up as a frequent example of some of the surprisingly low-rez and ugly textures in the game. Another thing I noticed, but which I never saw anyone comment on, was that DA:O's textures were often inappropriately specular, giving things a dull plastic sheen (like the piles of rubble). By contrast, this new cart serves as an example of the very nice textures in DA2. There are still some textures that are lower resolution than they should be (especially clothing and armour when seen in cutscenes), but it's largely an improvement, and the specularity issues seem to have been corrected. Only things that looked like they should be shiny (like polished metals) were shiny.

The interior of the Chantry was very nice, with the stucco-like walls with tiny cracks along the seams. They may have gone a bit overboard with the giant clusters of candles, but all in all this city area was a very positive impression for me.

Unfortunately, the graphics are the only thing I can praise. The rest is either "good enough" compared to DA:O, or an annoyance.

I hated the restrictiveness of the camera. Can't zoom far enough out anymore.

They've remapped or removed the party selection keys. I'm used to hitting the = key to select my whole party, like it was in DA:O and in all the Infinity Engine games. Now, it causes the currently selected party member to chug a potion. There may be a way to remap these keys, but it's hard to tell since so much of this demo was locked from edits. Like the character creation process. Locked, locked, locked, along with the entire inventory and many of the skill/spell trees. Why the hell? Were they afraid we wouldn't like what they did with it? The first game had a free downloadable standalone character creator to let people play around with it and create their character(s) before the game was released. This is the exact opposite!

The quick bar/toolbar is way too big. There's no reason for it to be taking up that much space, especially at 1920x1080 resolution.

The spell and talent trees are now split up into separate screens for each discipline. Many of these trees were locked for the demo, and could not be explored. What was there showed that most mage spells appear to be nerfed, and require "upgrades" to make them almost as good as the original spells were in DA:O. Perhaps this might make mages more challenging to play? It's impossible to tell from the demo, since it was locked in easy mode (regardless of what they called it, it was easy mode), impossible to play in any challenging difficulty. Hard to really judge tactics when fireballs are wimpy little things that do no knockdowns and have no friendly fire.

They've dispensed with the numbered dialogue choices. Some can still be selected by hitting a number key, but not ones that have options on either side of the circle. I prefer selecting by number key, as I did in DA:O and pretty much every other Bioware game I've played yet (except for Mass Effect, which pioneered this completely superfluous "wheel" interface that has no advantage at all with a mouse and keyboard setup). And the wheel, with its superbrief paraphrasing of your dialogue response choices, along with the voiced protagonist, has brought with it exactly what I did not want to see. An unsatisfying dialogue experience, which amounts to clicking on statements not because they're what you would really have your character say, but to see what the character on screen (who is less than my own) will actually say, and how. I'm especially displeased with the "joking" responses, as they are delivered in a class-clown manner, whereas if they were not voiced, I could at least imagine them said as I would have said them -- in a dry, mildly ironic tone. In other words, the dialogue sequences are no longer a welcome bit of interactive story, but are now more like a movie which requires me to keep clicking something to advance.

As expected, I've seen many people knee-jerking the fallacious "people who don't like the changes must fear/hate change as a rule." Again I must point out that even within the span of this very blog, a reader can observe that I embrace change. I've completely changed my gaming preferences, after all, and it's a shame that my preferences have evolved toward what Bioware and other companies are trying to evolve their games away from. A shame that they're doing that, that is -- not a shame that my preferences have become what they are. Because, while I do embrace change, I do not embrace any random change simply for the sake of change. That's what we call chaos. Rather, I embrace change when that change is superior to the old ways.

Dragon Age: Origins was a preorder for me. This is not. In fact, the demo has convinced me to wait until I see an excellent, Steam-crazy discount before buying this game. They've "streamlined" almost all the Dragon Age out of it, really (at least the parts I liked). Marketing Director David Silverman was certainly telling the truth when he said, "It's a different game." That's correct. It's a different game. There are a lot of "different games" out there, which I never bothered to play, because they didn't look like what I was looking for, and this appears to be one like that. Let me know when they make another game like the ones I did like, or at least when it drops in price to what I would be willing to pay for an action shooter with RPG elements. In the meantime, I have other, more appealing games to play (not to mention a good number of quest mods for DA:O).

Ruminations on Dragon Age: Origins vs Baldur's Gate

This first section contains a few spoilers for the end of Dragon Age: Origins. Skip to the next section header, where I get into the comparisons, to avoid them.

Much belatedly (a year late, by my reckoning), I decided to go on and finish Dragon Age: Origins (I can't keep just calling it "Dragon Age" without the "Origins" anymore, since there's the expansion Awakening, and Dragon Age 2 coming out shortly).

I had left it just after the Landsmeet, with several unfinished side quests. I wasn't happy with the way the Landsmeet went, since I hadn't managed to "harden" Alistair. If I had, I would have been able to convince him to leave Logain alive. Now, I wanted to see that bastard dead just as well as he did, but I really liked the alternative Riorden presented, in making him a Grey Warden. That way, we'd have had someone to sacrifice against the Archdemon, if he even survived the joining ritual. Really, I couldn't understand why we weren't recruiting a whole army of Grey Wardens, since we were down to 3 in total, and we knew we had to have at least one left alive to kill the Archdemon. Those are not very good odds!

I also disagreed with the whole conceit of keeping the ritual secret for the reason of "Well, who would go through the ritual if they knew it might kill them, and it would shorten their lives?" Come on. Patriotism and honour alone would ensure people lining up around the block to go through the ritual.

Well, in any case, I think Riorden gave a slightly better excuse -- that they didn't have enough archdemon blood to recruit more Grey Wardens en masse, since either Howe or Logain had confiscated their supply, and perhaps destroyed it.

So, because he wasn't hardened, Alistair ignored my protests and chopped off Logain's head in front of his daughter. There went the marriage plans.

To harden Alistair, you have to go through his companion quest, which involves finding his sister in Denerim, and I hadn't been able to find her house, despite tediously running around the Market District many times. I don't know why, but it finally triggered when it was too late. A previous save made just before going to the Landsmeet allowed me to fulfil his quest, but unfortunately I still wasn't able to harden him, because you have to wait for him to strike up a followup conversation in camp afterwards, and if you've progressed to just before the Landsmeet, Alistair won't engage in normal conversation -- he'll just say something about the upcoming meeting without allowing you to say anything to him.

So, the thing that kept me from finishing the game all this time was that I wanted to try to get my preferred situation. So I went back even further to a much older save, all the way back to the brilliant side quest where you have to escape Fort Drakon (a refreshing and occasionally humourous quest, depending on who you select to handle it). After that, I succeeded in hardening Alistair, and thus I would be able to convince him to set aside his lust for revenge for the greater good with Logain.

I probably would have played it the rest of the way through like that, except shortly after I took care of Alistair, the game started crashing -- a lot. It crashed upon opening doors, passing by certain areas of the marketplace, or even opening my inventory. It became unplayable. I tried many things -- updating my graphics drivers, removing all mods, using low resolution settings, and even ultimately uninstalling and reinstalling, and only patching up to 1.02, instead of 1.04. But nothing worked.

The problem must have resided somewhere in that particular earlier save file, because the other one from after the Landsmeet worked fine. So, regrettably, I gave up my perfectionist plans and decided to just continue on without Alistair marrying Anora and with Logain dead. There were still some occasional crashes between then and the end, but those problematic segments of the game (such as the part where Riorden tells you to select the party you plan to take to fight the Archdemon) were able to get through when I lowered the graphics settings (returning them to normal after those glitchy points).

Luckily, even without Loghain, there was an option given to allow you to avoid any Grey Wardens having to sacrifice themselves to kill the Archdemon, and that was thanks to Morrigan's Sexy Ritual, which Alistair appeared to enjoy greatly.

Time played for my main character's save (not counting reloads and backtracking): 145 hours, 48 minutes.

The end game sequence was well done, I think. There were several places where all your companions file past you one at a time to deliver last-minute interactions, before the battle and before the end of the game, and it made for some much nicer resolutions than BG's "okay, you killed the bad guy -- the end!" approach. That's one place where I think DA:O was a clear improvement over Baldur's Gate 1.

Dragon Age: Origins as it compared to Baldur's Gate 1

These two games were made 11 years apart, but it is fair to compare the two, since DA:O was hyped by its creators as the "spiritual successor" to Baldur's Gate.

The biggest advantages DA:O has over the Infinity Engine games are its full 3D graphics (which, though they have their faults, are masterpieces compared to the 3D models in Planescape: Torment), and the fact that it has a developer-made modding toolset, whereas the Infinity Engine modding toolsets had to be made by fans reverse-engineering the formats.

The graphics come at a price, though, and that is in large size and slowness. The loading times are often terrible, perhaps worse the further you progress in the game. Combined with DA:O's tendency to often begin some important cutscene or plot-important dialogue setup directly after loading screens meant that I couldn't just get up to go do something else while it loaded, even though there was usually plenty of time to do so.

Moving around in the game is at a fixed speed, with no way to speed it up to eliminate the tedium of walking around as the Infinity games had. Even the simple act of pulling up the inventory screen has a noticeable delay, whereas with BG it was instantaneous. The graphics also may be to blame for the reduced number of NPCs in the game, to avoid overtaxing the CPU with too many NPCs walking around. Oh, it's better than Oblivion, which had ghost towns that they called "cities", but Baldur's Gate was brimming with NPCs walking around, giving little comments, and making the place feel alive. Taverns were packed with people walking around or sitting at tables, making drunken comments. By contrast, at the Gnawed Noble Tavern in DA:O, I counted a total of 3 occupied tables (and an overkill of 3 waitresses to serve them).

I'll try putting some of the pros and cons in bullet points.

Cons:

• Slower than BG (in gameplay and loading times)
• Bigger (in hard drive space/RAM terms, not scope of story)
• Obsessed with blood
• Humour is too...restrained. Most of the comedy seems more like gallows humour rather than comic relief. There are some exceptions.
• Fewer races to choose from (7 race options in BG, three in DA:O, and soon to be one in DA2!) I have a whole post in progress about the evils of "metrics" in "streamlining" games.
• Fewer spells
• Too much automation for rogues (automatic lockpicking, no careful selection of where to put skill points for rogue skills, etc.)
• Reduced dialogue options
• Lower population in towns
• Auto-resurrecting party members. This is a con because it takes away from a lot of gameplay and world richness. In BG, you would have to either be a powerful priest, or have a resurrection scroll, or go to a temple and pay a priest to resurrect your party member. It made fights much more intense and challenging than in DA:O, where if even just a single party member survives the fight, the rest will stand up again and just need to use an injury kit.
• Following from that, along with making health auto-refill, this made the temples pretty much useless window dressing, since this alleged Maker didn't seem to grant the priests any actual powers (I noticed this the first time I accepted a "blessing" from a Chantry priest, and nothing happened), and they didn't need to offer any healing services or resurrection services, nor even identification of magic items (all of which they did in BG), since there were no unknown magic items that needed identifying.
• The fact that there was only one organised religious group (those following the Maker and Andraste) further detracted from the richness of the world, where BG had dozens of distinct temples.

Other criticisms, such as the ugly hats and poor selection of clothing for mages, don't really belong in this list, because I'm only comparing it to BG here, and you can barely even see the gear on your characters in BG.

[As an aside, I hear that in Dragon Age 2, you're not even going to have a selection of gear for your companions. They say they want to make each one unique as a character. Never mind that usually, characters even in TV series (which may make use of the "limited wardrobe" trope), tend to indicate their progression and rising competence with a change in their personal appearance. (See Growing The Beard and Important Haircut.) I'm glad they're releasing a demo to try, because what I've heard about the changes sounds like they've removed almost everything that attracted me to DA:O in the first place, and which made DA:O my first ever preorder game.]

Pros:

• Full 3D, mostly good looking (and what is not good looking can be improved)
• Excellent expandable toolbars. Put whatever talents, abilities, spells, or consumables you want on the bar, in any order.
• Superior spell and talent system, with indicators letting you always know who's doing what, what's still in progress, and what the cooldowns are
• Preparing to use Area of Effect attacks (such as certain spells, or grenades) shows a circle indicating range of the blast, who will be affected, and whether you will have to move to hit that spot
• Many more active warrior actions (in BG, warriors basically just hit, hit, hit, or used the same kind of items anyone else could also use)
• More active thief/rogue actions, too
• The mana system with mana potions may be a pro or a con -- a con since it makes the game much easier than BG's Vancian magic system, and makes mages even more powerful and useful than in BG, but I'm calling it a "pro" just because it eliminates some of the tedium.

Overall, despite the darker overall colour scheme and the predominance of mud in Ferelden, as well as the more limited spell and playable race selections, Dragon Age: Origins seems to be the best modern game that I know of which can be modded to have more Baldur's Gate-style adventures. Modding can also take care of the lighting and colour schemes, and as we see from excellent quest mods such as Mengtzu's Classic Week, modding can also revive the feeling of fun and humour that were so prevalent in Baldur's Gate, but much muted in DA:O.

Personally, I find the pros and the cons to almost evenly weigh each other out, despite me finding more of one than another, and I'd like to think that some of the shortcomings will be remedied by modders. (All of the story, humour, and graphical critiques can be modified by modders, at the very least.) Additionally, based on what I've seen, DA2 may be sufficiently different that a large number of modders will stick with DA:O for modding, and continue the community projects that have been showing much promise (especially if DA2 does not include a toolset). In the meantime, there are still hundreds of hours of Infinity Engine games for me to enjoy: Baldur's Gate 2 and its expansion, The Icewind Dale series and its expansions (which I've been playing), and Planescape: Torment (which I've also been playing).