joiedecombat: (Dragon Age)
joiedecombat ([personal profile] joiedecombat) wrote2009-11-16 01:48 pm

now that I've calmed down again...

As my previous posts suggests, I finished a play through Dragon Age. And had an OMG WAIT THAT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN reaction to the consequences of one of my decisions.

I can't yet give an overall verdict on the game yet, though. Partly that's because there's still a lot of stuff I haven't tried out yet - four other origins and a bunch of sidequests and different choices and all - and partly because my D: D: D: reaction to the aforementioned spoiler is coloring my opinions and the part of me that reacts to how it works as a story (which is very well, really) is running up against how I intended it to play out in a kind of silly way.

Also, the fact that for some reason the choice that I made was not accounted for in subsequent dialogue - even though it was an unavoidable choice and I didn't have to go out of my way or do anything special to take the option that I did - struck me as a bit sloppy. In a game with so much depth and so many different choices, I could understand if bits were unaccounted for in some sidequest or optional extra bit someplace, but why on earth wouldn't you cover all the bases of the main, plot-critical decisions?

Of course, it's no skin off me to go back through and rearrange my choices a little, but the sudden, unexpected dissonance made me uncomfortable.

ALL OF THAT SAID, it's a great game, and I do not have enough things to say about how much I love how the party interactions. My biggest complaint right now has nothing to do with the ending at all, it's that, having gone all the way through the game with a human noble, when I try starting another origin it feels somehow wrong to play a different character type... my brain has latched onto the character I played first, which is also a problem I had a bit of with Mass Effect, but the wider variation of character backstories and the fact that the Dragon Age PC, unlike Commander Shepard, isn't fully-voiced makes things much worse this time.

I expect I will get over it. At the very least I want to play a male Dalish elf so that I can romance Zevran free from the temptation of Alistair's presence. /shallow.

I will probably write some fanfic. So much of the stuff that would ordinarily be between-the-scenes in a different game is actually played out in Dragon Age, so I don't know how much fic I will write, but the impulse is there all the same. Alistair will probably feature heavily, to no one's surprise.

[identity profile] fiddlersgreen.livejournal.com 2009-11-17 12:34 am (UTC)(link)
I am only just starting to get into the game, but I'm just playing through all the origins first thing before I decide to take forward, and I may even (in a move unprecedented) try to maintain several simultaneous games so I can explore different approaches and such.

I tend to have the same problem you do, where I get attached to a specific personality, and hence, set of choices, for a given game, but I think the wildly divergent origins will help me get around that. I hope so, anyway :)

[identity profile] joiedecombat.livejournal.com 2009-11-17 05:30 am (UTC)(link)
One of the many things that's impressed me is the way the main plotline of the game inevitably calls back to the origin - and for the origins you didn't play, there's a definite sense of for-want-of-a-nail when you brush up against another origin's storyline and hear how things played out a little differently.