I got this for a Christmas gift... even got the Collector's Edition. I've been playing it the last two days, and it is an engrossing game... mostly. And now for the criticisms!
The cloth maps they include with these games are CHEAP. The threading is coming loose at the edges, and the general feeling I get is they're just throwing it in for the sake of having one. It's good the tradition goes on, but when the map is already in the game, and the actual map feels like it could fall to pieces if you play with it to much, where's the fun in that?
The first option I messed with in the game is I turned off persistent gore. I mean, wow. Yes, the old swords and sorcery novels had battles where they described the heroes "bathed in blood", especially Conan stories, but there's a world of difference from reading it and SEEING it. The fact your characters keep talking like there's nothing amiss is especially disturbing... even in Hollywood they'd be trying to clean it off a bit!
The incredibly drab color set doesn't help. The game is a colorless world of light tones; why is the place called Redcliffe when the cliffs aren't even RED? Have the artists ever been to the American Southwest? I've also noticed the textures and 3D artwork are similar to Mass Effect. In ME, the glassy and unmoving quality of the textures fit the genre. In DA:O, it breaks my sense of immersion. Clothing seems "painted" on and doesn't move, leather has a plastic look to it, and so forth. The fact you spend a LOT of time staring at these textures because of extensive dialogue doesn't help.
As far as writing and plot goes, I can definitely tell they've been reading George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series. Which isn't necessarily good... I like Martin's writing, but his books are so unbelievably dark and depressing, I wasn't able to continue reading them after awhile. To me, good swords & sorcery is more like the writings of Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard, with the weirdness of Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft.
In particular, they're really beating that "dead horse" theme of betrayal rather hard in the game. Twice in the opening we've had presumably loyal and friendly NPC's turn out to be backstabbing treacherous weasels. If this was the pattern in a D&D tabletop game, the players would start systematically slaughtering every NPC they find, "because they'll just betray us later".
I find combat a total mess. In particular, I agree with Matt that I'm a bit lazy, and I don't like that I have to program tactics for my companions to be any use. I usually just wade in and react only as needed. I'm sure this will get me killed sooner or later. The fast-moving plot sort of makes you "in a hurry" to get to the next part, and the fact you can't do this because combat is so bogged down in heavy tactics is frustrating. And WHY did they not make it turn-based, if they wanted this level of complexity? Being able to pause and issue orders is not enough.
All in all, I'd have to say that while Bioware is still producing the best mass-market CRPG available, it's not all that it could be. I recently picked up an XBox to play around with the XNA platform, and I'm already thinking "I could do a better one than this". Maybe not with the graphics power, but with far better playability. Hm...
I got this for a Christmas gift... even got the Collector's Edition. I've been playing it the last two days, and it is an engrossing game... mostly. And now for the criticisms!
The cloth maps they include with these games are CHEAP. The threading is coming loose at the edges, and the general feeling I get is they're just throwing it in for the sake of having one. It's good the tradition goes on, but when the map is already in the game, and the actual map feels like it could fall to pieces if you play with it to much, where's the fun in that?
The first option I messed with in the game is I turned off persistent gore. I mean, wow. Yes, the old swords and sorcery novels had battles where they described the heroes "bathed in blood", especially Conan stories, but there's a world of difference from reading it and SEEING it. The fact your characters keep talking like there's nothing amiss is especially disturbing... even in Hollywood they'd be trying to clean it off a bit!
The incredibly drab color set doesn't help. The game is a colorless world of light tones; why is the place called Redcliffe when the cliffs aren't even RED? Have the artists ever been to the American Southwest? I've also noticed the textures and 3D artwork are similar to Mass Effect. In ME, the glassy and unmoving quality of the textures fit the genre. In DA:O, it breaks my sense of immersion. Clothing seems "painted" on and doesn't move, leather has a plastic look to it, and so forth. The fact you spend a LOT of time staring at these textures because of extensive dialogue doesn't help.
As far as writing and plot goes, I can definitely tell they've been reading George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series. Which isn't necessarily good... I like Martin's writing, but his books are so unbelievably dark and depressing, I wasn't able to continue reading them after awhile. To me, good swords & sorcery is more like the writings of Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard, with the weirdness of Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft.
In particular, they're really beating that "dead horse" theme of betrayal rather hard in the game. Twice in the opening we've had presumably loyal and friendly NPC's turn out to be backstabbing treacherous weasels. If this was the pattern in a D&D tabletop game, the players would start systematically slaughtering every NPC they find, "because they'll just betray us later".
I find combat a total mess. In particular, I agree with Matt that I'm a bit lazy, and I don't like that I have to program tactics for my companions to be any use. I usually just wade in and react only as needed. I'm sure this will get me killed sooner or later. The fast-moving plot sort of makes you "in a hurry" to get to the next part, and the fact you can't do this because combat is so bogged down in heavy tactics is frustrating. And WHY did they not make it turn-based, if they wanted this level of complexity? Being able to pause and issue orders is not enough.
All in all, I'd have to say that while Bioware is still producing the best mass-market CRPG available, it's not all that it could be. I recently picked up an XBox to play around with the XNA platform, and I'm already thinking "I could do a better one than this". Maybe not with the graphics power, but with far better playability. Hm...