The abilities are awesome, that just has to be said first. I'm not a magey type and I don't generally do dual wield but with a massive two handed weapon chopping down buildings and making widows all over the show I'm happy as a nug in dung. Top quality stuff.
If anyone is questioning buying Awakenings then it is definitely worth it if you enjoyed Dragon Age, it isn't a sequel or the full blown continuation of your story and it never promised to be. It's a solid adventure in the life of your Grey Warden, one of many I hope, and well worth experiencing if you liked the main game and the world. I get the sensation from a number of posts here that people expected a sequel or wanted something far vaster than an expansion can provide. Awakenings was never going to bring that, it keeps the setting ticking along and was a welcome return in short time to a world I had an absolute blast in. Hyperbole, verbosity and extreme opinions aside some of the concerns people had are there for sure, but in my opinion they're concerns that remind me of the horses and cloaks demands from the days of NWN.
That said, and my enjoyment of the expansion as a whole laid out, there were a number of things that could have been improved and really should be held in mind for future expansions and sequels. I don't head into spilers below, but I do kind of skirt the edge where if you start to think about things you can imagine what's happening so if you haven't played and want to go in clean reading on might give you an Imagination Spoiler (I suffer from them a lot, like someone saying "there's a twist in this film", so I wonder what the twist is and ruin it for myself).
THE STORY
The story was entertaining, it was interesting to run into talking Darkspawn but it never really took off until it was too late to really feel invested. I won't give any spoilers here but I believe a number of those who played Awakenings can agree that
the finale was not so much confusing as it was threadbare. I understand an air of mystery was being shot for and that the world needs such mysteries but in an expansion the subject matter was too veiled in secrecy and the lack of any real revelations with regards to the actual plot fell flat.
Take any moment in any medium where you go ahhhh and understand the machinations of an antagonist, that doesn't happen here despite a central part of the main story being about uncovering what is happening. There are lots of clues and lots of moments where you get the sense there is much more to come and something deeper occuring but it goes nowhere and the plot itself could actually have benefitted from having a central antagonist removed as they exist only to muddy the waters (even to those of us who have read the novels). When the opportunity comes for revelation there simply isn't one, rendering the story unsatisfactory as a whole.
It is entertaining, but that has more to do with the world and events you encounter than the narrative. Don't start something only to leave it bare bones, if there were to be no opportunity to grasp the why things are happening then the what is happening needed to be tighter in those final hours.
THE STRUCTURE
Bioware do the Campbellian structure, I don't mind that because it works to kick things off. When games only have one part it works a charmer, we start to see it fall apart a bit when you have games like DA and ME side by side showing the overuse but still ME2 broke away to tell its own style all be it with the same type of structure in smaller chunks.
Where Awakenings stumbles is it does what Origins did in miniature. We have the Dwarf Hold, the Woodland and the Fade leading to a battle with our enemies from which many won't walk away, we already saw this several months ago and we're doing it over again on a cut down scale. I'd say that everything is different enough to stand alone and each has its own sense of individual history, Blackmarsh isn't the Mage Tower just as Kal'Hirol isn't Orzammar. It would be ridicuous to say they are, but the setup is so familiar it makes the world feel less like a place than a stage second time round.
I'd love to see changes put into the formula after the introduction of Origins you don't need to set things up in Expansions. We're already invested, if we have the Expansion we've played the main game and know we're the hero. The story could have been told better with a better structure behind it and for future stories I'd like to see them shape the structure as a whole, journeys and adventures rather than a set play area. For example a journey to Orlais where each area is one step along your travels with terrible enemies on your heels.
COMPANIONS
I read somewhere on here that David Gaider said that less companions would have likely been desirable to give a chance to know them, and in Awakenings this is definitely the case. The way the Expansion is structured leaves you picking up companions and never really getting a chance to spend time with some of them, they're good additions to the experience for sure, but Justice and Velanna needed a grander stage to do them, well, justice. Tales of vengeance don't work when it's possible for them to end within an hour with barely a word spoken. Of course you could have them from the near beginning, but that would also mean less development for another person which is good for multiple playthroughs but means that you're almost always going to end up missing out first time round.
Finding a band to flesh out the Wardens before embarking on the three main sections would likely have helped this, but those three main sections were based around the companions you find there. Definitely something to be looked at, as the tighter your bonds to the companions the better the structure flows.
Romance doesn't bother me, the story doesn't call for it and the people you meet are desperate folk, shoe horning romantic subplots into everything isn't required.
DIALOGUE
I like the in the field dialogue with Companions, I really enjoy how it strikes up but I don't believe it should require you to click on every little thing. If Companions want to talk then they should do so, or there should be some kind of visual aid beyond holding down tab to let you know when you can strike up discussion. I found that a little frustrating just as I found the sudden dialogues on entering the keep to be less immersive than they could have been.
It felt too much like a triggered sequence when it could have been smoothed over by prompts from Companions when they have something to say. When someone else enters the conversation or something occurs at your "camp" it is a moment of going "ooooh I wonder what's coming now", when it's done for every conversation it took something away from the experience.
For an Expansion where dialogue and voice over content needs to be as downsized as it can to facilitate things it works, but I wouldn't like for the ability to strike up a conversation to be removed from a main game. A balance would work best where there are prompts for specific "loyalty" related dialogues and a steady progression of conversation options as you talk over time. It's something that streamlining doesn't so much help make the experience more engaging as put a limit on how connected you are to the people with you.
In short, refining this system with elements of the old would make it gold.
THE SETTING
One of the most endearing things to me about Origins was that the power level wasn't ridiculous in terms of how you looked and the gear you gathered. In Awakenings I got the impression that the art style suffered from power creep and my main character with his fiery Mothers Sword and Sentinel gear looked less like a Commander about his business in the wood and stone built town talking to the Grocer than an avatar of ownage descended from the heavens to rain fire upon his foes.
I never got this impression from any other items I picked up but the Sentinel gear was very much out of place with the setting. I liked the look, don't get me wrong and when I was fighting I looked damn good, but when wandering around town it really didn't fit in with the rest of the world and I hope that future armours are made with the same kind of love but more based around the world they're in. That said I could understand if the armour was discovered in the darkest and most terrible dungeons, but I found most of it from crates in the Blackmarsh.
I think the setting has a lot going for it in many ways, the world is huge and has so much scope that I'm excited to see what comes next. One of my favourite moments was the doling out of justice in Awakenings and it's those times with real characters that built the setting further than I think any other event in the Expansion.
ORFANS
Well, any questline really. I got what was going on with the Orfans quests but the lack of any real resolution was disappointing. This cropped up lot where there was no real satisfactory end to a questline and for the time investment of them and immersion factor some kind of cap needs to be put on the bottle before they get shelved.
I've been pretty thorough here without dropping spoilers, I could go on, especially regarding the finale, but it's already becoming a veritable Ben Nevis of text. In summary, I had a lot of fun and am really looking forward to what comes next but I enjoyed Origins and the Expansion so much I needed to give out what I felt could be improved. I see a lot of negativity on the boards, that happens everywhere when something new comes out, it's almost hysterical in some cases but if you're on the fence and had fun with Origins don't listen to people with extreme opinions.
Cheers for reading.
Modifié par Axis Swordarm, 21 mars 2010 - 01:24 .
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