Saturday!
The original Dragon Age was awesome. You could have one of six distinct backgrounds (each of which gave you significantly different attitudes toward the universe in which you lived), you had a ton of different characters with whom to interact, and you didn’t really have a morality scale as much as actions that made some of your companions like you more and some actions that made them like you less… and your companions were such that they didn’t necessarily agree with each other (so you could please one by doing something nice and offend the other for being a pushover). On top of that, the story was downright epic. There was a betrayal that makes you say “THIS MUST BE AVENGED!” and, by the end of the game, you have the choice of avenging it or… not. Because, honestly, the dude had a point (even if it was horribly executed).
Anyway, the RPG had it all. An awesome protagonist, an awesome supporting cast, an awesome plot, and any one of four significantly different finishes. You were left spent on the couch, putting your controller down, and saying “Wow. Stuff like that is why I play.”
Dragon Age 2 was… um… well, if I were to defend it, I’d say that I see what they were going for and what they were going for was interesting. Now, the other side of that is that the game did not exactly achieve what they were going for. (For example, if I were to try to explain the plot to you, I’m not sure I’d be able to do so. I could tell you that the game was telling a story about a city, or about an unsustainable balance, or about power being corrupted… but, for the first game, I could give you a play by play of the major plot points even years after I touched it. For the 2nd? Not so much.)
So now we’re dealing with Dragon Age: Inquisition after not only the Dragon Age 2 game (which, even its most ardent defenders agree felt rushed) but the Mass Effect 3 debacle where the audience and the artists disagreed.
This is the first Bioware game that I am not pre-ordering (yep, still mad about ME3).
I hope it’s good, though. I do.
So… what are you playing?
(Photo is “The Game” taken by Mo Riza, used under a creative commons license.)
When you wear slacks
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miranda lambert weight lossMach 5 the Dream Car
Spent the day at the conference swim meet. Yesterday #1 daughter set a personal best and made the final (hooray for fastskins!), and today she came in 5th in the final, just 1/4 second off yesterday’s time. One more chance, next weekend, to drop another second and make a state qualifying time. But her medley relay team did makes states, as did a number of other girls on the team who’ve been chasing that time all season (hooray for fastskins!). I got a good amount of writing done when other kids were swimming–swim meets aren’t hockey or football, that’s for sure.Report
Dragon Age: Awakenings, believe it or not. I was very close to the end of Awakenings when a backup failure on the eve of an upgrade cost me my save game, and the most current save file I could find put me at about mid-game in Origins, so I had to beat the Archdemon again and slog through all the fetch-and-carry quests in Denerim and at the beginning of Awakenings again and all of it just made me set aside the game for a really long time. There was also one particularly tough fight in Awakenings that, after beating it the first time, I swore I would never ever put myself through again. Well, I got to that fight last night and I think today might just have to be dedicated to winning that fight.
So even more than Inquisition, I’m looking forward to beating Awakenings and maybe playing through the rest of the DLC for Origins and maybe installing Dragon Age II just to see what all the fuss is about.Report
UPDATE: Happily, I beat that Particularly Tough Fight in Awakenings on my second attempt today, so yay!Report