Dragon Age

[Moelman]

I've had recent crash problems with Awakenings as well. There is a certain problem with the Nvidia Geforce 8 series.

Yeah I had plenty of crashes while playing this on an 8600M GT. Not gonna touch Awakening till I get a new rig.

[miffy495]

I love that they put out a huge bug-fix patch less than a week after I finish Awakenings. Especially since it specifically corrects the "LEGACY TATTOO ASSET: DO NOT USE!!" thing.

[lobotomy42]

So I *finally* finished this game, after six months. (Origins, not Awakening) A few weeks ago I decided to pour myself into this game nearly full-time just to get through it. Christ, this game is LONG.

I'm still not sure it's a particularly good game, though. The game's design opts for quantity over quality - bombarding the player with hours and hours of dialogue, dozens more hours of quests, hundreds of lore entries, items, skills, etc. With so much material to draw from, almost any player is bound to find *something* to draw them in, but I can't help but wonder if slogging through all those levels of all those dungeons was really necessary for me to enjoy the bits that were truly memorable. Must every game completely consume the player's life for weeks or months in order to be considered "epic?"

My relationship with the game was rather love-hate. I would get addicted to it for several consecutive days, staying up as late as possible to play it -- until I stumbled into an insane difficulty spike because I'd wandered into an area designed for higher-level players than me, had my ass handed to me several times in a row, and then I'd shut off the Xbox in frustration and abandon the game for a month. (This happened at least twice.) The game's message to me seemed to alternate between "Come and get lost in our overly-detailed and fleshed out fantasy world!" and "Haha you're addicted to our emotionally manipulative digital drug! Go suffer from withdrawal!" The latter is not a particularly pleasant feeling to get from a game.

[F4T C4T]

So, I've been trying to finish this game over the past year and I've finally given up. I was enjoying it at first but since the Dwarven city (which I did after the Mage's and the Elves), I think I've had my fill. I cannot be bothered to finish it. That's still almost 80 hours I've put in though so I'm not bothered about abandoning it. I realised I was just trying to get to the end without enjoying anything I was doing.

The combat was too easy on medium and far too much for me on hard and I think that has been a big factor throughout, I swapped constantly to start with, wanting a bit more challenge but then settled on the easier option just to make progress. It just wasn't satisfying though. I got fed up of the encounters and I wasn't really into the story anymore or any of the characters because of the protracted amount of time it's taken me to get through it. That's a hard one as partly it's me not having the time or making the time for it but I also feel the pacing is far too slow. Another thing that got to me was all the weapons/armour and loot in general I was finding. As a Dalish Elven Rogue I hadn't found anything better that the armour I started with due to the set bonus and and pieces of armour I saved up took valuable space in the inventory forcing me to purge them on occasion (especially as I was saving some for other characters not with me as well) and the daggers I had from a few hours in hadn't been surpassed either (one was from some bonus content I believe). Not much changed for the other characters either.

I'd not long bought Awakenings as it was on sale and recommended by RPS a while back but I don't think I'll bother now. Instead, I had The Witcher sitting dormant for ages (again, it was on sale!) so I decided to install it and see if it's just RPG's in general I'm fed up of. After a pretty silly intro cutscene, the start already has far better characterisation and dialog in my opinion. The conversations feel a bit more natural than what I've experienced in DA so far. Having said that I felt pretty good about everything in Dragon Age at the beginning so it might be the length of these things that are killing me.

Maybe I just have to accept that I just can't devote the time to get through them while the excitement remains.

[Gwardinen]

I recommend at least giving Awakening a go, since you already own it and it is different in some of the ways you mention you'd like DA to be different. Specifically, it's totally differently balanced (whether you find it better or worse remains to be seen, but the difficulty levels equate out to a very different experience) and it's much shorter.

[F4T C4T]

I'll keep awakenings on my "to play" list in that case as I have heard good things. I'm just a bit burnt out on DA at the moment.