Further Dragon Age thinkings

So I've been playing more Dragon Age along with Borderlands and Left 4 Dead 2, which I may blog a bit about later. Not tonight though.

I think I've played enough to come to a conclusion, now.

I don't like it.

Here's the thing:

Almost everything about it is really, really good. Particularly the characters, sub plots and so on. Even the main quest isn't massively horrible, despite my initial misgivings. It's certainly far superior to the one in Oblivion, for instance.

No, my one problem that has persisted with Dragon Age is simply that it takes so fucking long to get anything done. This is mainly down to the dungeon crawling. I really think that if this game didn't have any dungeon crawling at all (and by dungeon crawling, I mean encounters with enemies that aren't strictly relevant to any of the plots) then it would be about half the length it currently is.

This is a major problem because, unlike every other non-bioware RPG I've played, there are no ways to avoid the dungeon crawling. In games like Deus Ex or Bloodlines you could skip most of the incredibly tedious sections with judicious use of certain skills. Not here, though.

This means that half the game is really enjoyable, the other half is exactly like playing an MMO. And I don't like MMOs. I don't like them at-fucking-all.

There is an annoying side line to this problem - the character interaction is quite stop/starty.

I was getting fairly heavilly invested in Morrigan with my mage character. It had gotten to the point where my character and hers were... well. In love isn't quite the right phrase but whatever. They were bumping pelvises.*

Anyway, we were at that stage and... we got stuck. I couldn't proceed. There were no more dialogue options. The only thing I could do was break up with her. After some casting around, I found I had to do a few more massive, main plot grind quests before I could move on with her.

GAH.

Everything in this damn game seems to be tied into the grind quests. There doesn't seem to be a way to enjoy it without the damn things constantly popping up to annoy you.

Having said that, I may just have another play through to try and have a more interesting chat with some of the other characters. I feel I've got all the playtime I can stomach out of my current one.

The problem with that is I really don't fancy investing the 20 or so hours it will take to get the characters into a state where I can have some meaningful conversations with them. I'm torn. On the one hand I want to know what they have to say, on the other hand, I really, really, really don't want to go through those *fucking* opening levels again. Or any of the other grind quests for that matter.

Maybe I should just wiki their stories.

Possibly.

This is why I think people who complain about Portal being too short are idiots. A game being too short is rarely a bad thing. A game being too long can kill it stone dead. In my opinion, that's what's happened here.



*
Entertaining side note:
In the Morrigan/Player sex scene, Morrigan actually wears more underwear than she does for the rest of the game. A bra appears from somewhere. Anyone else think that Bioware have been burnt by the Mass Effect sex "scandal" and are pathetically trying to compensate? Seriously, it was the most ridiculous sex scene I'd ever seen.

Dragon Age: Origins

Dragon Age.

Origins.

I have swayed between loving this game and hating it so many times over the past week that I honestly don't know what to think any more.

Let's go through it.

Marvelous!
Gritty Origin Stories

I've played through three of the six origin stories and they all have a real depth to them. There's real human emotion and the definite feeling that the world of Dragon Age is brutal and unforgiving. The Dwarven Noble origin especially is a world where avarise and honour are ever present and constantly vying for a place in your characters mind.


Shoddy!
Contrived Origin Stories

Sadly, at the end of every origin story, you have to join the Grey Wardens (the jedis) so the main plot can start moving. This can can be fantastic (as in the Dwarven Noble origin) but when I played through as a mage, he just turned up and Deus Ex Machina'd me out of a ridiculously contrived crisis.


Marvelous!
The Combat

The combat is very well done - it's an updated version of KOTOR's system with many more options like swords and shields, seperate skill trees for duel weapons & two handed greatswords. It's also the first RPG I've played where it's the most fun to play as a mage.


Shoddy!
The Grind

So I've liberated a castle from undead creatures and have been sent off to go and get a sacred thing to cure some chap who needs curing. I then found this cure was in a Cathedral. I cleared out the Cathedral, fully expecting the cure to be somewhere therin. It wasn't. It wasn't in the catacombs under the cathedral either. It was in the natural tunnels at the end of the catacombs. Each of these bloody areas was absolutely fucking massive. There is a line between making levels a decent length and game-expanding padding. Dragon Age can't even see this fucking line it's so far past it.


Marvelous!
The Characters

Are all briliantly scripted and acted. You're also given genuine moral dilemas which your NPC mates will help you with.


Shoddy!
The main story

I blogged earlier about how fantasy is usually shite because the villains lack complex motivation. That's especially true in Dragon Age. There's some sort of horde of evil thingies that is coming to kill everyone. Despite the fact that they are wiping entire towns off the map, you have to go around convincing everyone to help you fight them. This is bullshit. These guys know it's unite or perish, so why is it so fucking hard to convince them? Thankfully the sub plots and complex characters you come across during each exercise in painfully slow diplomacy are interesting enough to make you forget the fucking stupid reason why you're there but it keeps popping back up and biting you on the nose like a rake in the grass with a snake attatched to it.




Overall!

I've restarted Dragon Age three times without really getting that far into it. This is because I kept finding that there were much better ways of doing what I was currently doing. The problem was, every time I did this, I had to go through the same bullshit grind quests again. Thinking about having to go through that bloody cathedral level again actually makes me slightly deppressed.

The problem is, Dragon Age is half briliant. And half shit. If it wasn't as grindy, if it wasn't so fucking massive it would be a classic, there's not doubt about that. That said, I will stick with it because when it's good, it's marvelous. Time will tell what side of the fence I fall on.