Narrative Flood

Yes, I know that this isn’t technically a post about story or writing, but I’m going to say that the world-saving heroine accidentally showing up for battle in her pants isn’t quite the heroic opening Bioware wanted.

Luckily, in games, nobody ever notices stuff like that.

Although if I ever get to design an RPG, they will…

(I should point out that while any imported character wearing DLC gear will be auto-stripped in Awakening, you still keep any other armour you have in your inventory and can don it immediately after the intro. You still have to watch the cut-scene where they saunter into battle in the not-quite-altogether though – there’s no way to dress them properly during the import process)

Posted by Richard on March 16, 2010

NPCs really should notice if you’re walking around starkers. Every now and then in Oblivion, I’d sell some armor in a shop and not realize I was selling the armor I was wearing. A while later I’d switch to third-person view and notice I was nude except for some underpants and boots. Someone could have told me!

Posted by Chris on March 16, 2010

A very few games have. Morrowind I think did. Arcanum had lots of different responses (“Were you trying an invisibility spell but it only worked on your clothes?” was a favourite). More should, though.

The funniest nudity-failure (I often experiment just to see if characters notice) is probably Hard To Be A God, which made clothing choice a core part of the game. If you dressed up like a bandit, people assumed you were a bandit, so, say, guards would attack you and old ladies wouldn’t talk to you. Dress up like a guard and that might be reversed. Strip off and walk around in your pants… nobody even noticed.

Of all the games to not code in a response…

Posted by Richard on March 16, 2010

Hi Richard! Just discovered this blog. As for this post… Hah! Hysterical. I’ve been debating whether or not to shell out the 40 bucks for “Awakenings”. Waiting to see what other folks say.

Posted by Dave Gilbert on March 16, 2010

Hey, Dave. Great to see you

So far, I’ve only seen Eurogamer’s review. From what I hear though, it’s basically “More Dragon Age”, which is fine with me. Just as long as they haven’t nerfed mages too much. Balance-schmalance, I like being hideously overpowered. I always play a mage. I get bored being beaten up all the time.

Posted by Richard on March 16, 2010

Hey Richard, since my writing is not of stellar quality, how about you write that essay on how awesome the character interactions (i.e. your companions) make DA:O?

Posted by zipdrive on March 17, 2010

“I’m straight, but I still felt awful when Alistair dumped me.”

Posted by Richard on March 17, 2010

Phew, good thing I don’t wear the Blood Dragon armour then.

The mages have already been nerfed in some of the latest patches, don’t know if they weakened them further in Awakening though.
I didn’t get it anyway my dual-dagger rogue was far more powerful then my mage and the fights were always harder with the latter.

Posted by Rain on March 17, 2010

My mage is pretty much unstoppable. There’s an early subplot about a conspiracy to assassinate the Warden, to which the only real answer I have is “Look, I can cast three types of magic storm AT ONCE and still have plenty of mana left for fireballs and lightning to mop up the survivors. I think I can take ‘em.”

(Okay, so they could pull a Ser Cauthrien, but so far, I’m stomping everything in the expansion. I think I’ve used one poultice so far and that only because I wasn’t paying attention)

Posted by Richard on March 17, 2010

I never found out where to get the Arcane Warrior sub-class. Instead I contented myself teaching Wynne to be a Blood Mage, which is really something they should have put in a response for.

Posted by skizelo on March 17, 2010

The Arcane Warrior upgrade is hidden in the Werewolves’ temple during the Dalish Elves quest. The spells that go with it are a bit meh, but the ability to tool up with proper equipment makes up for it. Mages. In. Plate. Armour. Yes. I don’t care how much more effective magic shields might be. No more light cloth!

You can actually teach Wynne to be a Blood Mage? That’s madness.

Posted by Richard on March 17, 2010

@richard: Hey, remember that OTHER column you just wrote… regarding spoilers? Not that it damaged my game to learn where one could unlock the Arcane Warrior bit.
BTW, I didn’t notice that option. Is that still available after completing that quest and/or for Wynne to learn?

Personally, I’m also playing a dual-wielding rogue, but I can’t decide on which specialty to take.
Ranger looks awesome, but I fear for my poor stamina.

…which reminds me – DA: Journeys was full of stamina – replenishing potions but I’ve yet to encounter a single one in DA:O. Do I just have a giant blind spot?

oh, look what I’ve done to this poor comments thread.

Posted by zipdrive on March 17, 2010

There’s a difference between spoilers and ’saying anything about stuff that’s in a game’.

I don’t think there are stamina potions in the game though. Don’t you use mushrooms/healing for that? Awakening adds Stamina Draughts that work in the same way as Health NOT POULTICES and Lyrium potions.

Posted by Richard on March 17, 2010

Heh.. whoops. I’m just sad the only returning NPC is that dwarf, my least favourite of the lot. Also it somewhat goes against what was said in my ending too. Hmm.

Posted by Nick on March 17, 2010

The worst leap in mine is that the game still seems to expect me to back the whole ‘mages should be locked up by the Chantry’ thing. Er, no. I specifically had my people freed in the last game.

Oghren isn’t much more interesting in this one, but there’s much less party dialogue. Even in the ‘camp’, you can’t kick off discussions, just get one-liners that mostly go “Why are we just standing around here?”. There are still proper dialogue trees, but they’re much less common.

(Best line so far, from Anders, if only because it absolutely sums up magic: “All I want is a pretty girl, a decent meal, and the right to shoot lightning at fools.” He may be a complete Alistair clone, but I whole-heartedly agree with his very intelligent philosophy.)

Posted by Richard on March 17, 2010

Well, I finished it. Turned out around ten hours long. Longer if you poke and prod, but I took my time and did more or less everything that interested me.

Capsule synopsis: It’s more Dragon Age. More Dragon Age is good. The advantage of being relatively short (but satisfyingly long at the same time) is that there’s no time for endless bits like the Deep Roads or the Fade. The downside is that you lose out on much of the character stuff, and the plot is very, very back-loaded. For instance, there’s no camp any more, and outside of plot sequences, you can’t just chat with your party. There aren’t any romances. There are character quests, of which I did a couple. The new characters are fun. Anders the mage is an absolutely shameless copy-and-paste of Alistair, Sigrid is a great perky Legion of the Dead member, and I generally like the others. It’d have been good to spend more time with most of them with proper dialogue-tree based conversations instead of just the odd chat and frequent one-liners. None of them, to my knowledge, sing. You absolutely must find Anders a pet cat. This is the Law.

Amusingly, after Dragon Age: Origins was so phenomenally cheap with quest rewards, this one bends over backwards to throw cash at you. When one character asks for fifty gold to do something, it’s more or less chump change. It’s a bit silly though, since there’s not much to really buy and it makes it feel like the most notable effect of the Blight was to hit Ferelden with hyper-inflation. Still, no matter.

A lot of bits and pieces seem to have been scaled back during development. The ending is… bluntly… crap, almost entirely played out with “What Happened Next…” text, and while you get loads of important decisions in your newly-awarded castle and elsewhere, not many of them seem to have much impact on the story. Several other story bits just fizzle out instead of really going anywhere too, including a couple of really neat ones. Still, the big action set-pieces are pretty good, and the I’m-guessing-correct ending of the story rounds off the Blight plotline pretty well. I’m really hoping the next game goes to Orlais. Politics. Mmm.

Mages remain astonishingly awesome. Do not cross a Spirit Healer Arcane Warrior Battlemage.

In short though, it’s more Dragon Age. I liked it, didn’t love it, but it was exactly what I was expecting – a very solid Bioware game, but not a revolutionary switch to the formula. It suffers from a few things, not least the characters being far, far too powerful by the end of the game (there’s maybe two genuinely tough fights in the whole game, and one of them is the final boss – when you’re warned of an assassination attempt being planned, really, the only thing to do is laugh and say “Bring it on…”) but it’s a worthwhile expansion – a little more streamlined than the original, if a little less punchy. It is probably £5 too expensive, but you do get a proper game’s worth of content out of it, which is more than you can say for most DLC out there.

Proper sequel now though, please. Also, Mass Effect 3. Actually, that one first.

Posted by Richard on March 18, 2010

@Richard:
“If you dressed up like a bandit, people assumed you were a bandit, so, say, guards would attack you and old ladies wouldn’t talk to you. Dress up like a guard and that might be reversed.”

Guards wouldn’t talk to you and old ladies would attack you?

(Couldn’t resist!)

Posted by Fraser on March 18, 2010

I would not put it past them…

(Likewise!)

Posted by Richard on March 18, 2010

Great write-up! Out of curiousity, Richard, how important do the choices you make in the first game come into play in the expansion? Alistair died at the end of my play-through, and I was wondering if it was worth it to go back and let him live before going through Awakenings.

Posted by Dave Gilbert on March 19, 2010

There’s almost no carry-over. At the start, a visitor from Ferelden comes visiting. I got Anora, but presumably it could be Alistair as well (I don’t have a save to check). After that, it ignores almost everything that happened. There might be a few micro-level changes, like Wynne not showing up for her cameo if she died in the first game, but nothing important in the main story. In my playthrough, nobody even mentioned Alistair or Morrigan, and most bizarrely of all, I apparently left my loyal dog behind. That’s especially odd, since it’s not as if they’d have had to record new dialogue for him…

(EDIT: I think someone mentioned that if you had a surviving love interest, they might be mentioned in some of the text at end: “The Warden Commander returned to Leilani” or similar. But my mage was with Alistair and that… that didn’t go so well for either of them. Sigh.)

Posted by Richard on March 19, 2010

Ah! Good to know. In that case I probably won’t bother going back and replaying the ending so Alistair lives. I’ve got too many games to get through as it is (curse you Bayonetta)!

Posted by Dave Gilbert on March 19, 2010

Ah, Bayonetta. Started off as a guilty pleasure, quickly advanced to just being regular great fun. One of the very, very few God of War games I’ve actually bothered finishing.

(Glad I didn’t have anyone watching while I played it though…)

Posted by Richard on March 19, 2010

Hah. My wife is watching me play. She finds it just as amazing as I do. It’s so gorgeously over the top.

Posted by Dave Gilbert on March 19, 2010

you know what? I don’t want to be told if characters die in DA:O and so don’t appear in Awakening.

I’m about 57 hours into Origins and I have yet to visit Orzammar. In fact, this thread is the first place I saw Oghren mentioned. It’s definitely not a big spoiler, but I may be less surprised by the game.

Then again, what am I doing reading comments on an Awakening article, anyway?

Posted by zipdrive on March 23, 2010

Characters can die. They don’t necessarily. DA:O has lots of variations.

Posted by Richard on March 23, 2010

I’m pretty disappointed with what I’ve read about this expansion. After my dismal experience in Mass Effect 2 I was looking for some confirmation that Bioware hadn’t lost its marbles, but nothing I’ve read about Awakening bears this out. No voluntary party interactions? That was the best part of Dragon Age! To say nothing of the fact that I made some serious sacrifices (Morrigan, foremost) to become king by the end of the game and apparently that figures into this expansion not at all. Bioware, what happened to you?

Posted by Adam on March 23, 2010

It’s no Throne of Bhaal, that’s for sure. I’m also told that the plot largely requires you to read one of the spin-off books, The Calling, to really understand what’s going on and what the actual stakes and ramifications of your decisions are. Certainly as it relates to one very, very important character.

Posted by Richard on March 23, 2010

Richard, If true, that’s very, very annoying.

Also, Adam: until this second I wasn’t aware you could become king in DA- thanks for spoiling that for me.

I truly am stupid for coming back to reading this thread.

Posted by zipdrive on March 25, 2010

I think this is one of those cases where spoilers for the main game are kinda to be expected, what with it being the next part of the plotline. Especially on a site about discussing story.

Posted by Richard on March 25, 2010

Also, Kevin Spacey was Keyser Soze all along.

Posted by Adam on March 26, 2010

Kevin..Spacey…was…aaarrrrggggghhhhh….!!
…
…
…
Na, I knew that.

Posted by zipdrive on March 27, 2010