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.