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Dragon Age: Origins Expansion Coming In March
ishanjain tipped news that BioWare has announced an expansion for Dragon Age: Origins, called Awakening, that is due out on March 16th. Awakening "is supposed to run about 15 hours and will allow for players to import and edit characters they've broken in from the core game," and it will take place "in the in the role of a Grey Warden Commander who's been tasked with rebuilding the order of Grey Wardens and finding out how the darkspawn survived following the death of the Archdemon dragon." A trailer is available at the official site, as well as some information on a new bit of DLC that will be out shortly, entitled Return to Ostagar. (It was originally due for release on January 5th, but was delayed.)
Because your life wasn't short enough.
I am amazed at the resilience of the game industry in this time of massive unemployment and layoffs.
In hard times when most of the economy is tanking, there are some products which see a heyday. Bologna, for example, seems a dramatic rise in sales during economic slowdowns. Now too, I think it might be possible to say that the game industry is a contra indicator of economic success. Not only does it hold that game sales goes up during downturns, but that the people who play them are more likely to be affected negatively by the economic environment.
It'd be an interesting phenomenon to research, I think.
It's an escape from reality. Movies were hugely popular during the Great Depression even though nobody had money. And, nowadays $50 isn't that much for days of entertainment. Especially when I could easily blow that much in a night...hell, in just a couple of hours out on the town.
They should have just made the camera control like the same as what was used in Neverwinter Nights.
Give me top-down isometric view, 6 characters and real clerics, and get off my lawn!
>>From what I have read its around 45-60 hours for most people, decent value for the money IMHO
It took me about 80 to 90 in-game hours to beat it, with about 120 total spent in the game (I restarted and played through every pathway twice so I could see all the dialogue options and combats). Hours isn't an especially good way of measuring how fun a game is, and it did manage to keep my interest through the first three quarters of the game. But by the end, it was so easy that the combats went from being tactically interesting to trivially easy. (Two mages loaded up on crowd control spells will do that.) But the end of the game went by fast enough that it wasn't too bad.
I even decided to challenge myself by not using any of the army units you recruit throughout the game, and the final set of battles still were pretty easy.
I'm not sure if I'll get the expansion. They made similar claims "hours of extra gameplay" for the existing DLC, but both the Stone Prisoner and the Warden's Keep are less than an hour of gameplay each. A bit more if you play through all the different paths, and maybe a lot more if you want to solve the puzzle in the Stone Prisoner, but even still, not a lot of additional gameplay for the cost involved.
I'm holding off on uninstalling it because I want to see what sort of player generated campaigns people come up with. I sort of feel bad for the people that bought it for the console.
"the darkspawn survived following the death of the Archdemon dragon."
Thanks a lot for the spoiler, you insensitive clod.
...is a Hot Coffee mod.
Scenes like this, this and this aren't doing the game justice without a Hot Coffee mod.
Dragon Age is another live-action roleplaying game where you have no choices, and the options you're given are all in dialogue trees that all lead to the same results to give an illusion of freedom. Why people keep buying these heavily scripted rollercoaster games, from Dragon Age to the hugely overrated BioShock, is beyond me.
Having actually *played* DAO, this comes as no surprise to me.
I guess maybe it's because everytime I wandered into a tavern, there would always be a sneaky NPC who came up to me and tried to make me pre-order it!
Man, this one time, I slew a huge dragon after an epic battle; then after he died, while I was plundering the gold, he popped back up to life, did a little song and dance about this expansion and tried to sell me a magic weapon if I would pre-order it. To add salt to the wound my browser launches sending me to their website and I got some popups.
Liberty.
Wow. There was a time people couldn't let go of a game and it was only top down, with 3 squares moving about. Now it's whine whine whine about stupid little things that don't really take anything away from a great story, great action and a chance to get into Claudia Blacks pants.
That's not fair. Dragon Age had a frustrating camera that you occasionally had to fight with (I found), particularly when trying to use magic or otherwise plan around enemies not in your immediate vicinity. This is quite unlike a fixed-perspective game which will generally not have camera issues because they are trivially solved.
First they make DLC that can be covered in 30 minutes for 5$, then they make an expansion that is said to take 15-20% of the time it took to complete the original game and sell it almost full price (for a PC game). I preferred the not so old days where an expansion meant something as good, as long, as awesome as the original game (or better). Now it seems that they are just throwing bits and pieces and charging the big price for it. And don't get me started on DLC which is an even bigger joke, very small feature for 5$ most of the time. I bought the original game as part of a special, so I had both the DLC of the launch for the price of the game alone. But I doubt I will be getting the DLC this time unless the reviews are pretty damn good. Same with the expansion because it's hard justifying 40$ for something that's a fraction of the original game.
Anyway, I am currently going through my games I bought during the holiday sells and hopefully, by the time I'm done with them, the expansion will have gone down in price or someone will inform me that it's worth the price and I need to stop crying.
It does have isometric view. Indirectly this is what the grand-parent is complaining about. When you zoom-out the camera zooms up and changes perspective to finally end up in top-down isometric view.
So get back on the lawn young man!
The camera in this game often made it difficult to see what was going on. From the top down 3rd person view, You can't see far. You also can't control all your characters if they are spread out very easily.
From the first person view, you can't see all directions.
I rarely see all the cool graphics, because it's usually tactically better to watch the situation top-down.
I had occasionally problems with the Neverwinter Nights 2 graphics engine, but not as often as with Dragon Age.
I occasionally had problems with not seeing far enough in the games based on the Baldur's Gate engine(and that style of graphics, with no true 3d), but none of the other problems. As an RPG, I only see two benefits of a movable camera. One benefit is it looks nicer. The other is the rare large boss, like the Dragon. That dragon would not have fit on the screen with all the characters. But, I had problems with that, too.
Overall, I've seen more problems come out of the 3d engines than benefits.
You can have it. Dragon Age is highly moddable and has a very active modding community. No surprise nudity mods are among them. Have a look at http://www.dragonagenexus.com/ that is one of the biggest mod pages.
PC version only, of course.