As someone that grew up with Atari, then got a Nintendo, SNES, N64, PS1, Game Cube, PS2,
and then forced to play Everquest 1 as my sister's boyfriend's "healer bot", DAoC on my own,
and WoW as a heal-bot Priest again I really have an admittedly odd opinion of games. Partly
I blame this on living somewhere well away from technological-marvel land.
The things people do where I live is entirely seasonal and much to do with the outdoors. In the
summer we go mountain climbing, camping, biking and kayaking. When a game tries to make
a world like Skyrim I don't simply hate the game. I can't understand it. I've been to the regions
it tried to represent. It failed and failed miserably.
This was a breath of fresh air. It was lot like being out of doors. When hiking and backpacking
in real life conversations are pretty much to do with the immediate. What you care about is the
view of Ava falling impossibly into a centimeter deep pool of water and spending the rest of
day a complete bear because of it. So, the ever so brief dialogues with the Dwarf woman at
the start of each region was perfect. Coming into Skyhold and finding it utterly stifling and
unappealing was like the mini-culture shock that always hits after a week in the mountains. I
genuinely could not care less for the petty strife and absurd beliefs of everyone in that game.
I don't think many people have had this sort of experience. The experience, in real life, of
having been far enough outside of civilization that certain formerly absolute concerns become
increasingly 'silly'. Nudity and/or concerns about being 'seen' during 'necessary activities'
drastically drop off. A lot of things we do and care about are entirely based on how persistently
they are available. It's very hard to find a tree to hide behind in the middle of tundra fields, for
instance.
Now, take all that into account and try to imagine being your character. Your life is about 80%
"in the field" and 20% coming back to this isolation-tanks called "civilization" where everyone
has imagined this or that as to be the next thing to Andraste. More frequently Andraste is who
the bill gets passed on to when, as Sera says, "It all goes ****** up."
Your character is not going to give a rats arse about anything more profound than where the
steak is at when she gets in from a mission. Especially after places like that marsh or the Storm
Coast. Especially after those. Most of the people you would be intimately invested in are your
travel companions. For me that was Solas, Dorian, Blackwall, Sera, Varric, and Cole. Cole
mostly because I appreciated the dialogue him, Blackwall, and Sera would get in.
As far as what was going on in the main story... I don't know that the writing was bad so much
as human beings are naturally uninteresting or painfully stupid. If you've ever sat through a
corporate executive meeting you'll probably find yourself reflecting on having sat at similar
situation in pre-school lunchings. Everyone's physically there, but beyond that it's sketchy.
The quest design wasn't bland imo because you could wander off on the far edge of forever
with it. Post Redcliffe it was not "Go talk to this person over here. Okay, now run across the
map and talk to this person on the opposite side of the world to hand it in. I got out of Redcliffe
as soon as possible and I will only go back in extreme necessity. And just as a point of fact,
World of Warcraft created this 'quest' style gaming. Previous to World of Warcraft this is how
games were.
The combat was... mediocre, but vastly better than Skyrim. I genuinely thought Skyrim
should not have been released. The story was terrible. The dialogue absolutely abysmal.
Combat might as well have come from Atari during the 80s or some experiment with
Pong. I'm a little disappointed with the overall damage my characters did... I'm not even going
to go into how hard it was to solo some of the bosses. But this game had a very thorough and
coherent lore. The art was great. Most everything offended me at some level without trying to
force me to accept anything.
Also, the crafting system was spectacular. I mean, I actually started memorizing creatures,
plants, and where to find them pretty early on because I realized "I need that stuff!". This was a
game and whoever put it all together was very conscious of how to coordinate it into a single
entity that could define a genre.
Do I have complaints? Sure. Mostly, hair. My hair looks like it came from a play-doh machine
whose doh was obtained from grinding used cat-litter. Eyebrows (another kind of hair) were
painted on, didn't have a color feature, and black hair isn't black. Helmets are also laughably
terrible. So as long as I never looked at my character's head I...
Schematics are few and far between. I was usually always under-equipped for the region I
was in. That was down right frustrating. It made up for it because I figured out how to make
some very devastating group builds. Particularly so with Cole, Blackwall, and Solas. I played an
archer.
Archers seem to be a very love/hate thing with my friends. Either they love them or they think
they are beyond playable. For myself, I felt the same way about the everything. This remained
the case until I got out of Redcliffe and had a few schematics to begin crafting what I needed.
Once I could craft for my needs my classes and love of those classes improved dramatically. I
pretty much play my archer solo unless I'm going up against a fade rift.
I don't know. I really enjoyed this game. I doubt I will play the others, because Bioware does have a
history. Mass Effect 3. So, if they did it right once never ever give them the chance to do it twice.
Mass Effect 2 was amazing until we changed from beyond-human-understanding space robots to
"Look, the last boss is a copy and pasted Terminator". Star-Child ... I can't deal with it. I will forever
believe in the Indoctrination theory because Star-Child. Shepard was just having a hallucination
because of bleeding to death. Everything that happened after that "confirm, do you really wish to
push the red button?" *presses it so hard she breaks her hand!*
Retour en haut
. Only you know what you enjoyed. If you have positive thoughts about the game you might want to post in on the dragon age reddit or some other forum though. The game is getting criticism everywhere, but at least on other sites they will admit that the game was awesome outside of the bugs/issues they had with it.
