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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   1892 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 1, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I’m playing Dragon Age and enjoying it. I don’t really disagree with the criticisms of the game from some reviewers. There is indeed a lot of peak millennial YA woke cringe dialogue…but the same was true of Baldur’s Gate 3 and both God of War reboot games, and many people enjoyed those; this doesn’t seem any worse.

I appreciate that this is an RPG with the filler removed, much needed after both Inquisition and Andromeda were ruined in large part by barren open zones that were unnecessarily created to try to attach the studio to some kind of perceived open world trend.

I quite like the new gameplay. Good RTwP will always be my preferred system, but Inquisition already ruined Dragon Age 2’s sublime and hugely underrated RTwP-action-hybrid combat, and this is definitely better than what we got in 2014.

People complain about facial animations, but they’re much less distracting than in Mass Effect Andromeda or Star Wars Outlaws / AC Valhalla (for non-facial-capture scenes, obviously). You can’t do much better than this without either hand-tuning facial animations like CDPR or capturing them directly like Larian, and it’s clear Bioware didn’t have the budget for that.

Choice and consequence is pretty good so far, better than some recent RPGs. I like the world and level design. The game has a nice, breezy pace. I will keep playing for now. I am more concerned about Obsidian’s Avowed, which looks like it might turn out like the Outer Worlds, which was passable but very dull.

Thinking back on it, I retract my judgment from RTwP. Neverwinter and Dragon Age 1/2 were perfectly playable. The thing that turned me off was the Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment engine, which had low-level casters with few spells per rest and concurrently made resting a pain in the ass. Thus casters were a liability 80%+ of the time. Never finished BG1 because of this (Torment was good enough to suck it up for the duration) and haven’t tried BG2.

Yeah that isn't RTWP, that's D&D caster design. They start out weak and become godlike at high levels. It's a shame you didn't play BG2, because at the levels in that game (especially the expansion) your casters carry the party. You have a ton of spells per day, and also high level spells are absolutely nuts in terms of their effects.

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