Secondly i emphasize that i won't rate this game and i don't like the rating of media, be it music, films or games in general.
Everyone has his/her own set of experiences and prospects and the following are my own.
So feel free to bring in your own opinions.
Even if i don't prepend something like "In my opinion" to every of my sentences you can safely assume that those are solely my personal views on this game and nothing more.
Most of the things i write down here will be negative. That doesn't mean i didn't like DA:O. Quite in the contrary: in my opinion it is one of the greatest RPGs i ever played.
Those things i will point out only show that i concerned myself with this game very much. And most of these complaints are on a very high level.
Most other games are so bad i don't even bother complaining about them, because it could last weeks.
I played the PC-Version.
The World:
Considering that this is the first iteration of a new franchise, the world of Dragon Age is the most impressive fantasy World i ever experienced.
I read every single codex-entry and talked to all NPCs (or at least i tried) and most of it seems extremly well crafted.
Technically i would have liked an open world without transitions better, but i can understand the decision to emphasize on the story-telling instead.
But when you cut the world into small pieces, i think it would have been possible to make those pieces bigger, so that the player can at least explore some more.
As it is, DA:O levels feel like hoses through which the player is piped.
Especially Denerim was a huge letdown for me. I liked the idea that it had its own World-Map like in BG2, but the locations looked very similar and actually most of them WERE the same (and i am not only talking about random encounters).
After i played the Witcher with its beautifully crafted city of Vizima, Denerim felt very boring and generic.
On the other hand there are very beautiful and impressive levels, like the ones in the sacred-urn quest.
Generally i liked the graphics. Especially the lighting was great. It fitted the scenario very well. Also the characters and monsters looked great.
Balancing:
I played through DA:O first as an Arcane Warrior. For my second playthrough i chose to play as an DualWield Warrior.
While reading these forum i realized, that i chose two of the most overpowered builds.
That explains why playing on hard felt so easy.
While i support the argument that class-balance is not so important in single-player games, i think that some of the balancing issues of DA:O actually impact the single player experience.
If a game feels too easy even on hard only because i chose a special class-combination (Mage/AW/BM) by chance, then something went very wrong.
On the other hand it didn't impact my gaming-experience extremely much besides having the feeling that some of the boss-encounters were too easy.
But i can understand everyone playing a rogue archer who complains about his class being too weak.
Another indicator of how overpowered mages are, are some encounters. As long as you only have melee/bow enemies, every fight is easy.
But a single mage can blow your whole party away if you don't focus on him ASAP. When you are facing two or three mages (or emissaries) you can almost kiss your ass goodbye.
As you can see there actually were encounters which were very challenging even as an AW, especially in the beginning. Like the Revenants in the brecilian forest.
Or a fight against three emisseries + some spiders in the deep roads which took me like 10 tries.
It felt a bit uneven. The broodmother was a cakewalk in comparison to the fight against the three emisseries.
classes:
Besides the balancing issues my only complaint here is, that there are only three of them and that's too few.
With the exception of Arcane Warrior, the specializations don't really distinguish them from each other.
Of course you could play a Warrior in four different styles (2H,DW,SnB,Bow) but the playstyle would be similar either way.
That leads to the situation that most of the possible classes are already taken by companions. And i don't like that.
My character doesn't feel special like that.
Story:
The origin-stories rock!
It gave me the possibility to get really connected to my character, because i chose his background-story and it had an impact on the later story in many ways.
The main-plot is not very exciting: demon threatens country. Thats it. Big deal...
You don't need an overly complex story (Lord of the Rings didn't have one either) but DA:O didn't really manage to give me the feeling of a real menace crawling into ferelden (except in Orzammar, where the threat is constant).
Besides that, the game is lacking a real antagonist. The archdemon is just a high dragon with a custom skin. No dialog, no interaction, nothing.
Loghain only has one conversation in the Ostagar camp, a few scenes between the major plot quests and one big appearance during the landsmeet, that's it.
Sometimes during my playthrough i almost forgot who my enemy was. Very disappointing.
On the other hand there are very affecting quests like the whole Redcliffe/sacred ashes questline. They really got me involved and that doesn't happen very often in a video game.
I liked that some of my decisions had a big impact on the story. But while they changed the possible ending, the impact on the actual gameplay wasn't very big.
Besides choosing an origin and later in the game wether you go to jail or not, there are not many decisions which actually branch the gameplay.
You will visit most of the locations in every playthrough. I expected more.
Once again i would like to compare it to "The Witcher". The decisions there really had huge impacts on the gameplay. And it was good that the outcomes were delayed, so you couldn't choose and reload if you didn't like the outcome.
In the Witcher you had to live with the consequences of your actions, and they could be huge.
Also i liked the greyness of decisions in the Witcher better. Even though Bioware said that the moral decisions were not clearly good/evil, in comparison to the Witcher they are.
Of course they ascended from the simple aligning-system of D&D, but most decisions could clearly be considered good or bad nevertheless (although there were some suprising exceptions).
DLC:
Until now there is good DLC and bad DLC. The DLC-items are a very bad idea in my opinion. Starting as an elf in the alienage where you and your people struggle to find anything to eat with a huge, sparkling Blood-Dragon-Armor and other magical jewelry in your inventory really breaks the immersion.
Instead those items should have been dropped by monsters or sold by merchants like some other DLC-stuff.
Another problem with this is, that having some of those items in the beginning felt like cheating. In my first playthrough i had the meteor-random-encounter before level 6, and thus i had starfang by level 7 after beating Warden's Keep.
Having the best Weapon in the game by level 7 doesn't feel right.
Warden's Keep had a nice story, but it was way to short and it didn't really tie in with the rest of the game.
The Stone-Prisoner however was great. It was longer than Warden's Keep (Honleath + Shales Quest in the Deep Roads) and Shale was my favorite companion.
Other:
More info would have been nice. When deciding between two talents it doesn't help if both of them say "high damage attack" or "moderate healing".
It sucks that i have to take parts of my armor of to see how much armor my set-bonus is.
If Bioware didn't want to intimidate new novice-rpg-players with too much info they could have implemented some kind of expert-mode (although a novice-rpg-player would have been more intimidated by the difficulty level and not by some additional numbers in the talent-descriptions).
The memory-leak-bug didn't really bother me. When loading screens began taking to much time it was the sign for me that i was already playing too long.
The length of the game was great. My first playthrough took about 80hours. With future DLCs it will even get longer.
Summary:
Reading this post again, it sounds as if i hated this game.
I'm sorry for that because that isn't the case. I loved every minute.
But it isn't perfect and if some Bioware-employee reads this he/she can hopefully take more information out of constructive criticism than from a post of pure fanboydom.
Although i am a fanboy i must admit
Modifié par balu1982, 14 décembre 2009 - 03:37 .
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