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[e-sonofander]

Back to Bat-sics; Arkham Origins

So apparently my playthrough of Arkham Knight made me want more Arkham universe Batman, so I went back to finish off Origins.  This is a game I picked up via a Steam seasonal sale on the cheap, tossed a couple of hours at, and hung it on the shelf as my attention wandered.  It didn’t grab my attention at the time the way that Asylum and City had, so it sat unplayed for a long while.  I have since changed that.

First and foremost, yes, it is still a Batman: Arkham X game.  The controls, the gadgets, the challenges, everything here is familiar to the initiated player.  The attempt here, however, was to give us a prequel game to carry over some of the time lag between Arkham City and Arkham Knight, but done by a different studio to allow Rocksteady a needed break before plunging back into the world of the Bat.  Unfortunately, it sort of shows.

I did not play Origins at launch, but I remember specifically that the game was plagued by issues at launch.  Fast forward to today where the PC port of Arkham Knight was handled by the same studio that did the PC port of Origins, and find me unsurprised that AK suffered launch issues on PC as well.  That said, things got patched and updated, and most things ran well as I played through.  There were some pretty notable glitches, but each time a quick restart of the game was able to address them.

The story line for Origins is pretty interesting, though I still feel it’s a bit uninspired in its execution.  In many ways, the Arkham trilogy + prequel are as much Joker’s story as they are Batman’s.  Origins was used to introduce the character to us within this universe, and the way it was handled is somewhat interesting, but it’s the surrounding parts of the story that start to fall down on the job.  The main crime boss in Gotham, Black Mask, has hired out a squad of assassins to take down this new upstart vigilante in town, Batman.  Welp, there’s your target list right there, and it plays out pretty much as you’d expect.  (For the record, the Bane fight in any of these games will always be one of my least favorite parts.)

There are some twists and turns as the Joker and his part in the whole thing is revealed, and these are pretty good, but I still feel that the storytelling isn’t quite up to snuff with the primary trilogy games.  I mean, it’s not Episode 1 bad, but it’s not good either.

This brings me to one of my big pet peeves with the game.  Bruce is excessively mean to Alfred.  This is not his first run out into the world; in game lore has him at this for the past two years wearing the cowl.  I feel like the newlywed spats that the two of them get into would have been mostly covered by this point in his career.  Bruce’s immediate and intense disdain for the police feels rushed and a bit out of place, particularly where it concerns a certain police captain.  The introduction of a young Barbara Gordon, however, was a delight.  Especially after having just come off of AK’s less-than-stellar treatment of her, it was really good to see her character introduced in a very positive way.  Also, the fact that she hacks Batman’s comm channel about 30 seconds after meeting him is fan-freaking-tastic.

So all of that said, one of the things that I was apparently too wrapped up in the story lines of Asylum and City to notice was the game’s built in way of showing you where the Riddler’s hidden stuff is around the city.  I first really paid it any mind in AK where I managed the 100% completion and got the extended ending.  (Do not get me started on anybody who calls it the “true” ending; these people are a problem.)  I figured I’d see if I could manage a similar feat with Origins.

Hahahahahahahaha.  No dice.  A 100% marked completion on a save file requires a minimum of two playthroughs, as you have to do both the normal game and the New Game+ mode (which obviously bumps the difficulty).  As if that weren’t enough, in addition to Enigma’s (he wasn’t called the Riddler, yet) hidden stuff around the city, which the game will allow you ways to find, there are at least two additional sets of discoverables that the only way of finding them is exploring every square inch of the city in detective mode, and scanning key items into your database.  This right here is enough for me to say no.  But, this isn’t all!  Oh no.  On top of the normal skill progression / purchase system, Origins has three “challenge” trees that must all be maxed as well.  Let me put it this way - each one goes up to a rank of 15, I believe.  I didn’t hit rank 4 in one of them until damn near the end of the game because of the huge stealth component.  I could have hit this one earlier in the game, if I had known to pay attention to these challenge ladders.  At the end of the day, I’ll take my 48% completion and be happy with it.  Spoiler alert - you don’t get anything additional for making it to 100%.

Soooo ... Arkham Origins is a solid game.  Gameplay is solid, as it’s built on top of the groundwork laid out by Asylum and City.  Story could use a little work, but in the end delivered an enjoyable experience.  A few remaining technical glitches are annoying, but not game shattering.  If you love the Arkham universe, I’d suggest playing it, but do not expect a game on par with the main trilogy.

[e-sonofander]

The Bat Returns: Arkham Knight

I’m not going to lie, this is a game that I’ve been looking forward to for a long time now.  Arkham Asylum was the first game in a long time that just pulled me straight into the narrative and gameplay immediately and with a vengeance.  I played it and City on the X360.  I pre-ordered Arkham City at the time, and when it launched, I played it like it was my job, and tore through that game.  I felt like Rocksteady had presented such a very impressive version of the character and the entire Batman universe.  Needless to say, AK had a lot to live up to, and in short, if the game had come out a year ago or more, I think my opinions would be different, but a lot has happened in that time that have shaped my updated world view, and this game suffers from a bit of lack of self reflection from the developer.

TL;DR version: I enjoyed this game, it was a solid entry in the franchise.  It did not surpass Arkham City for me.  If you enjoyed the first two, play this one.

WARNING: Many of my issues with this game are related to the plot, and as such, there are going to be spoilers in this post.  Sorry, but it is what it is.

To start out with, if you have played the previous entries (and honestly, if you haven’t - you really should at least play Arkham City before you even fire this one up.  Direct sequel here), you will be familiar with the control scheme and mechanics.  This both works as a positive and negative.  Because of the length of time between entries (I’m going to ignore Origins for the sake of argument, and also for it not being part of the actual story trilogy), the lack of consistent callouts in the early game for things like, “Which button was parry again?”, can cause some issues.  Especially for folks that might have jumped consoles like myself - jumped from 360 to PS4.

Anyway, the controls are solid for the main game play.  Oh hey, they added in a complete new entry in the game - the Batmobile!  Cool, right?  Well .... not always.  Whoever decided that the Batmobile should be able to run loop-de-loops through sewer tunnels, and up the side of walls really needs to be sat down next to some new playtesters so that they can hear (and feel) first hand just how BAD these implementations were.  Mostly, the car bits are fine except for when you need to do these things.  Then the controls start to fight you because the camera does not follow the vehicle, and should you get even momentarily turned around, you will immediately lose speed, and you cannot regain it without completely starting over from a much earlier place.  Given that some of these challenges are timing based, this just adds an unnecessary level of frustration to an already difficult thing.

The one completely positive thing I will say is that the graphics are gorgeous and the sounds are spot on.  These are the voice actors (at least for Batman and Joker) that most folks are going to be familiar with, and embody classic interpretations of the characters.  Rocksteady takes full advantage of the current gen hardware to produce some very impressive visuals, and the atmospheric effects in particular are super pretty.

OK, enough of that; let’s get to the meat of this, the story.  Just a secondary warning, from here on in, I will be talking specifics of the game’s plot, so if you don’t want spoilers of this or the trilogy in general, leave now.  You’ve been warned.

The game opens on making you actively be the person that cremates the Joker’s corpse; I was waiting for him to open his eyes when the on screen button prompt to incinerate the body came up.  Yep, that’s a good way to draw me in at the beginning.  (No sarcasm here - player agency is key.)  We get into a solid intro showing how you get to a point where the entirety of Gotham is filled with only criminals, and no real civilians.  Contrived? Maybe a little, but no worse than any other comic book story.

So now we start getting into some issues.  As Batman, one of the early things you have to do is rescue Poison Ivy from Scarecrow.  *sigh* OK, the damsel in distress thing is ancient and unnecessary, but fine, we’ll deal with it and move on.  Next, convince Ivy to play on your side and help out against Scarecrow.  By appealing to her humanity?  By pointing out that you just rescued her when Scarecrow would have undoubtedly done horrible things to her?  No, by using the ages old empty threat of, “I’ll kill all the plants in the city!”  Really?  Seriously?  We’re going to rehash this again?  And she’s going to fall for it? AGAIN?!  Fuck, whatever, move on.

Hey, Oracle is helping out on intel; this is excellent!  I love Babs, and her as Oracle is fantastic.  Sure this means we’re following post-Killing Joke, pre-new Batgirl comics, but there’s a super strong, super awesome character there.  Right up until the point that Scarecrow kidnaps her.  *sigh* Didn’t we already do this?  In THIS GAME?!  Fine, next damsel in distress, time to go rescue her.

Cue Riddler.  Can I just take a moment and say, “Fuck this guy,” in this series?  He has been added as the completionist bullshit entry in the franchise.  He has some stupid number of niggly bits you need to do in order to get the “full” game completion.  Very, very few of his little “challenges” are riddles, which breaks character too much for me, sorry.  I love the character of Riddler, and there are so many cool things you can do with him.  Turning him into what he is, especially in this entry, is disgusting.  Whatever, we can deal with the wife beater wearing idiot claiming to be Riddler and move on.  What?  He somehow kidnapped Catwoman?  We’re going to do this a THIRD TIME ALREADY?!  The damsel in distress bit is getting seriously thick, and causing me some mental disconnect.  Have the developers of this game been living in a cave for the past year?  Knowing what I do of game development, I can say this isn’t entirely implausible, but given the fact that they specifically address and poke fun at the GG idiocy that’s been plaguing the industry in the past year, obviously they haven’t been; they’re just being lazy.  At least Catwoman has a small bit of her own agency as she has to be an active member in her own rescue.  This does not excuse the lazy writing that got us to this point.  At all.

OK, time to go back to Barbara.  Hey, that looks like the same chamber they were holding Ivy in earlier.  Why is there a gun on the table next to her?  Filling the room with fear toxin?  Nonono, they are not about to .... *BAM* .... and they fucking put Barbara. Fucking. Gordon. in the damned fridge.  (If you don’t know this reference - check Google for Women in Refrigerators)  I came --><--- that close to throwing the controller across the room, popping the game disc out of the console, and stopping right then and there.  The only reason I kept playing the game?  Because the devs have done amazing things in this game to put you inside Bruce’s head, and showing how he is gradually going crazy over the course of the game due to exposure to the fear toxin himself.  I have to assume that some amount of what is going on here isn’t what is really happening.

So to bring us back to a positive thing, what the devs have done with making the game environment change WHILE you’re playing the game, and in such a way that you don’t see it happen, is absolutely the most amazing thing I’ve experienced in a game in a very long time.  Making the character you are playing as an unreliable narrator?  I like this.  A lot.

The story continues, and for the most part the rest of the plot is unremarkable as far as anything controversial or innovative.  Solid, good stories intertwining in the classic Arkham style, some things pushing forward while others take a back seat.

I am glad to say that I was right, and while they do not explain (nor do they really need to) what really happened in the scene where you see Barbara Gordon shoot herself, it did not happen, and she returns to continue her role of, as Joker puts it, Batman’s IT department.  They start to build a bit of a romantic interest between her and Tim Drake as this iteration’s Robin, but it doesn’t really go anywhere or get explored at all.  Given the focus of the game on Batman and his own budding schizophrenia, this isn’t entirely surprising, but a little bit disappointing to me.

A final thought on this before concluding.  When you finish the main story mission (the Scarecrow story), you are given an interaction with Alfred where you instruct him to initiate the Knightfall protocol.  If you have not completed enough of the side missions, you will be sent back into Gotham to finish cleaning up in order to see the actual ending of the game.  Unfortunately, they’ve made some poor choices with the UI and text elements that caused me some confusion.  When looking at the quest status, what I saw was, “Capture 4 of Arkham’s Most Wanted to initiate Knightfall protocol.”  Cool - I’ve already captured like 6 or 7 of these jokers, I’m good.  No, really not.  What it should have read was, “Capture 4 MORE ...”, because the real status bar was near the top of the screen and not near where my eyes were focused each time I hit that screen.  Seriously, Rocksteady; hire some fresh eyes to come in and do some UX testing.  This is basic stuff right here.  I did finally get through the rest of the necessary missions, and hit Knightfall.  I haven’t read this story line in the comics, so I don’t know how closely it mirrors it, or how much they pulled from it for the game.  It was a good ending, but didn’t have the same impact that Arkham City’s did.

Ultimately, I feel like this game is a solid ending to a great trilogy of games.  I feel like it falls back on tropes that are tired, and have been getting more and more visibility shone on them.  The developers showed both their willingness to acknowledge things going on in the outside world, and completely disregard them at the same time when it suits them, even when what they’re ignoring is problematic.  As I said, if this game had come out a year or more ago, my personal feelings may have been a bit different here, but I have grown, and had my eyes opened to a larger world that I hadn’t fully seen before now.  I think it is long past time for developers to do the same thing.

At the end of the day, I would probably still put this one over Arkham Asylum, but I think Rocksteady peaked with Arkham City.  Is this a bad game?  Not at all.  Is it perfect, as Polygon’s perfect 10 rating would suggest?  No.  I don’t think there is such a thing as a perfect game, so that 10 might as well not exist as far as I’m concerned.  I enjoyed it; I acknowledge its problems; I hope that Rocksteady recognizes these problems and learn from it to put the necessary effort to improve on whatever they go on to do next.

[e-sonofander]

Nobody expects the Dragon  Age Inquisition

Sometimes the puns just write themselves.  Usually they require someone like me to put them down on paper (either real or virtual).  I am going to break with tradition a little bit, and actually start talking about a game that I am still actively playing in this installment of “What’s Erin Playing Now”.  As you are likely aware, I’ve been moving through BioWare’s most recent big trilogies, and so it is time to talk about Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Anybody that has seen anything about this game knows that it is absolutely gorgeous.  The team has achieved a level of detail not seen in previous games, and the thing that really makes this game stand out visually for me is the environments.  Holy. Damn.  I find myself wanting to pop a VR headset on just to wander around the environments and look around. There is a whole hell of a lot of love that went into the many varied environments that make up the world of Inquisition.

That is another piece that really makes me love this game a lot.  DA2 was a really strong game, with a nice balance of mechanics, but I feel like they focused their budget (and likely rightly so) on the story and mechanics of the game, and so the variety and size of the game world suffered.  You never really leave Kirkwall for the entire game.  DAI is somewhat overwhelmingly huge at times.  As people have said, when playing the early portions of the game - get your ass out of the Hinterlands; you’ll be back, but you’re doing yourself a disservice if you go in with the intention of completely clearing a zone in one go and then moving on.  These zones are meant to be interlocking, and visited and revisited over time with various companions in tow.

And this brings me to the super duper strong part of DAI, and really brings this series up to snuff with the Mass Effect games.  These characters are amazingly detailed, and fully fleshed out with their own interests and pursuits that sometimes line up well with the Inquisition’s, and sometimes they do not, and it’s up to you to figure out which ones you care about and which ones you don’t.  Also, from a pure mechanics standpoint, I feel like there are more viable party combinations than there were in either DAO or DA2.  When I first learned that there were no “healers” as a thing in the game, I had a very befuddled look ingrained into my face.  ‘What do you mean there are no cleric-y type mages?”

What this winds up doing is allowing you to focus on actual combat during encounters, but requires you to be very observant of that stash of health potions that only resupply on visiting a camp.  You want your companions to take as little damage as possible per encounter.  Between guards, and barriers, and other combat abilities, it’s not only possible, but common to walk out of a fight with full health, especially as you get further into the game.

As I’ve mentioned before, I play the BioWare games for their stories, and this one definitely does not fail to deliver.  While I felt a little bit let down with DAO, DA2 started picking up the slack, and DAI keeps walking down the right path.  The Inquisitor has a voice (both literally and figuratively), and has very meaningful interactions with the world.  (As an aside - I will discuss the *ahem* difficulties of the Dragon Age Keep in a different post; I have words, and they are not all kind.)  When the main story ended, I was satisfied with the ending.  There were twists that I did not see coming (which I will NOT be expanding on here - this game is actually still pretty fresh, being only a tad over 6 months old at this point), and ultimately I felt like I got a very fulfilling story.  It did not hit me in the feels the way that Mass Effect 3 did, but that’s ok, too.  If every game managed to destroy me emotionally the way that ME3 did, I would have to stop playing games due to emotion fatigue.

I am still playing the game.  The ending is what I would term a “soft ending.”  The world still exists; there are still problems that need the Inquisition’s help in solving.  I am playing through the recently released Jaws of Hakkon DLC, which is intended to be a post-story line component to the game, with higher powered items and such, and another really amazing looking zone.  (Seriously - I cannot get over how gorgeous these environments are!)  Now that I am here looking back, I am feeling the call to do a replay of the series with a completely different type of characters and world setup.  We shall see when that happens, because it’s definitely a when not an if at this point.  The effects of the ME3 ending are also apparently starting to fade, because I see a replay of those games in my future as well.

[e-sonofander]

Dragon Age 2 - The Delayed Review

So today’s post in “What’s Erin Playing Now” (and honestly, I picked this title of the series because it made a nifty little abbreviation - WEPN; in my head, pronounced weapon.  Unfortunately, most of these tend to be what I ~just~ played, not what I’m actively playing right now.  If you have thoughts on this, let me know!), I talk about DragonAge 2.  I have actually been done with this game for a couple of weeks.  Normally I would post these the weekend after I complete the game, but I dug straight into Inquisition.  (There’s a story that I will post about my initiation into Inquisition later... let’s just say it was less than perfect.)

Anyway, let’s get the unpopular stuff out of the way up front.  I hold a very different opinion of DA2 than the vast majority of the internet - I think Dragon Age 2 was a better game than Dragon Age Origins.  Yes, I said it.  Yes, I believe it.  

I think there are a couple of pretty simple things (well one, really) that would have made a lot of people happier with DA2 than they were.  Don’t call it Dragon Age 2.  it’s not a sequel.  Plot wise, the story starts out very near the beginning of where and when Origins takes place.  Game wise, it’s a very different beast.  I think people saw the 2 on the box, and immediately assumed the game was going to be Dragon Age Origins++ ... just more of what they had in the first game, so when that doesn’t happen, they are disappointed.  It’s basically a broken promise.  So while I really feel like Inquisition is both a direct and spiritual successor to DA2 way more than it is DAO, I don’t blame them for not calling it DA3.  I just wish we had a better name for DA2 (Dragon Age: Hawkening?  I dunno, my cleverness is out of juice apparently.)

So let’s talk about this a bit.  There are a couple of major, major differences in this game compared to Origins.  The first is the voiced vs. silent protagonist.  Yes, your character has a voice for things like combat, but during cut scenes and story moments, your character is silent.  More than that, there is no singular character of the Hero of Ferelden.  He is a complete self insert, and allows the player to draw all of the connective tissue of what this character is from a persona standpoint.  On the other end of the spectrum is Hawke; the Champion of Kirkwall is the Dragon Age answer to Commander Shepard.  Fully voiced and acted cut scenes; customization options and choices to make the character yours, but there is a solid basis of person there that you, the player, are just fleshing out.  I liked it in Mass Effect, and I like it here.

The second major difference is combat, and whoa boy this is a doozy.  Dragon Age Origins is the spiritual successor to older RPG titles like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale.  It’s a very tactical, get your hands dirty with the combat minutiae, you better be looking at this from the top down rather than isometric or you’re about to get your face melted, style of game.  DA2 moves into a more action RPG style, but maintains some of the strategic elements of Origins, including the ability to manually customize your character’s skill and ability trees (but is not as necessary here as it was in DAO), and the control over the AI that performs combat decisions for your companions.  To be fair, I got a different experience from DAO than I expected, so I was a little disappointed, but on a second play through, this could be a different story.  DA2 was a much easier system to jump in and get the hang of, but still left plenty of room for mastery of the systems, which I would not even begin to say that I have done.

Plot wise, I think DA2 had the more interesting plot, because it was more focused.  Sure, DAO had the grand sweeping epic that was saving the world from the next blight, but I feel like it was too high level, too unfocused to really get the nitty gritty that connects you with the story as a whole.  Also, possibly, just a tad too “Generic Fantasy Epic” in spite of the really cool shit that’s part of the world as a whole.  (Mages vs. Templars vs. Chantry; Tevinter vs. Ferelden, the Magisterium, etc)  DA2 reels things back in a little bit, and tells a more personal story, which ultimately feels more “mine” than DAO did.

This isn’t to say that DA2 isn’t without it’s faults.  There was a huge upgrade in graphics fidelity from DAO to DA2, as can be expected, but I think in order to maintain this, the size of the playable world suffered.  Kirkwall is a kind of interesting place, but the vast majority of the game takes place in the city, and I like some of the alternate locations that you go to in DAO and DAI.  I also feel like they made much more usage of the copy/pasta repeated layouts for dungeons / encounter areas in DA2.  In order to make them feel fresh and not completely the same each time, different doors and passages are perma-locked, so you get some variation in which part of the dungeon you are seeing each time.  The repetition gets obvious pretty quickly, though.

I also felt like there were a lot of times that, playing as a mage, my character would wind up sitting there doing nothing because my cursor isn’t on the exact right pixel to be attacking that mob in front of me.  This is something that was addressed in DAI to good effect, though again, not perfect.  I suspect this wouldn’t be quite as much of an issue with a melee class, be it rogue or warrior, but ranged it was definitely an issue, as I noticed this when controlling both my mage Hawke and Varric.

OK, I’ve made it this far and haven’t commented on this yet.  I say there was a graphics upgrade for DA2, and for the most part it is wonderful.  Animations are pretty, characters look more detailed.  There is one thing that doesn’t work.  Necks.  **shudder** Oh, Andraste’s tits, those fucking necks.  The absolute worst offenders are the dwarven characters.  Sandal gives me nightmares in DA2.  I’ve done a bit of amateur character modeling and animation work, myself, so I can see what is happening, and it still makes my skin crawl.  Too bulgy in some places, and bends in all the wrong ways in others.  It’s not good.  The second worst offenders are the elves.  When an elven character tilts their head to the side, in real life we would call that a broken neck!  Yikes.  Maybe elves are like sharks - technically invertebrate because it’s 100% cartilage.  No idea.  And finally, the least offensive (hah!) is the random humans running around town, and worst on the younger ones - more often than not, the seam between the head/neck combo piece of geometry and the body is sitting a few inches apart, so you’re looking right through part of the character.

At the end of the day, Dragon Age 2 is a really great game, with an enjoyable combat system that has a good mix of depth and ease of use that was missing from its predecessor.  The story is tight, and close enough to the character to feel very fulfilling, but with enough options to really make it feel like your own.  There is certainly room for improvement, but there is a lot of game here, and a lot of replayability to be had.  Even more so than DAO, I feel the call to come back and visit Kirkwall again in the future.

[e-sonofander]

Dragon Age Origins: Back to the beginning

Next up on my list apparently fell to Bioware’s other big franchise of the moment, Dragon Age.  So for this entry in “What’s Erin Playing Now” I will take a look at the first entry in the series, Origins.

This is a game that it took me a few tries to really dig in to over the years.  I own it on the PS3, and also on PC.  I wound up playing it on PC for a couple of reasons: 1. It is my gaming platform of choice for most everything, 2. When I did start this up on PS3, there were definite performance issues that broke me right out of the flow of the game.  I’ve played the intro sequence up through Lothering at least four times, and a couple of times I had made it past that a small bit into one of the next areas, where the story starts branching out, but usually that’s where I stopped.

So, why is that? Honestly, this is where the game starts showing its difficulty curve in a big, bad, ugly way if you’re not prepared for it.  Even on this play through, I quickly started running into situations where fights went something like the following:

1. Enter room / clearing 2. Engage in combat 3. Immediately have the entire party melted 4. Reload game 5. Repeat steps 1 through 3 one or two more times to figure out exactly where people needed to be standing, and which enemies were really the important ones to drop first 6. Move forward. 7. Repeat.

Needless to say, this isn’t a fun way to play a game. Eventually I broke down and dropped the difficulty down to easy from normal, and this was a tough decision for me, because I felt like there must have been something semi-obvious that I was missing that was causing me to have this much difficulty with the game.  After doing this, the majority of the game’s encounters became fairly trivial for me, indicating a HUGE disparity between the difficulty levels.

After finishing the game, and in conjunction with some discussion with friends on FB, I ~think~ I can see a better way of dealing with the game’s thinly veiled pen-and-paper D&D-esque game mechanics. DAO isn’t really a game about a single character, but really the party that you play with. As such, relying on the auto-level functionality, even for companions, I think is a mistake, unlike in Mass Effect.  Also, successful combat in this game requires precise control and unfailing use of the tactical camera for every. single. fight. in the game. Ultimately, I think this did not turn out the way Bioware wanted, and is likely to be part of the reason they moved away from it for DA2 and Inquisition.  (It is still there to a lesser extent, but the precision needed to even be somewhat successful is downplayed, particularly at the normal difficulty setting.)  I feel like I want a second play through of this game to experiment, and there are certainly enough side quests, and alternate main characters and party compositions to make the game very replayable.

Speaking of the main character, Mass Effect and DAO take opposite approaches on the spectrum: ME gives you a character that has some customization available to him/her, but is ultimately the same person, vs. DAO allows you to make a wide variety of choices to define a blank slate non-character that the player fills in with their own vision of who and what they are. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches, and ultimately it’s a matter of personal preference which is “better”.  If you’re one who loves to write in your own head canon for your character, the blank slate approach may be more your style, and so the DAO approach may be for you.

At the end of the day, I think I enjoyed the story of Mass Effect better than DAO.  I feel like there was a lot of time and effort put into making a really good fantasy tactical RPG with a lot of great combinations of playable characters, and challenges to run them through their gauntlets.  Unfortunately, the overarching story fell short for me. It wasn’t bad, just not as good as I hoped for and wanted.  There were parts of the game’s story that I really, really enjoyed.  I absolutely loved the party banter between your companion characters, and felt it added a LOT to the engagement with the game.  With so much in game lore, maybe there was a lot of good stuff that I missed from the hundreds of books and scrolls that my character read and added to the codex over time, but to say that it was overwhelming is an understatement.

From an aesthetic perspective, obviously the graphics are starting to show their age a little bit, particularly where the characters are concerned. We’re not talking original Lara Croft Tomb Raider, but you’re not going to look at it the same way as a current gen game. The environments, however, hold up very well.  Especially Orzammar.  I really dug the strong geometric influences in the architecture and art of the dwarves, and found myself just wandering around the city and the deep roads looking at the environment.

At the end of the day, it’s a solid game, and I enjoyed playing it even if I got hit pretty quickly with the frustration stick. I’ve already started in on Dragon Age 2 (which is still strange to me that they decided to number this one entry in the franchise, and that’s it), and so far I am enjoying it as well, and as I alluded to earlier, I feel like they had some lessons learned that went into this game. If you’re looking for a fantasy based RPG, and happen to enjoy some of the older tactical elements, I recommend this one completely.  If you’re less fond of the tactical combat approach of some of yester-years’ games, do as I did and drop the difficulty down to easy; you’ll thank me for it.