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#I do not expect everyone to be an expert on a chara that’s unrealistic I am not myself but
userwithnoname · 7 years
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ive played skyrim before and liked it an a friend recommended dragon age but i dont know which one i should pick
Hm… this is still a little bit complicated, so I’m going to put another cut here just because it gets a little long.
tl;dr Your friend was probably talking about Inquisition, and while I recommend you start with Origins, Inquisition’s not a bad game to jump in with.
If Skyrim is your only basis for comparison, then I think your friend was recommending for you Dragon Age: Inquisition. I was in a very similar place when I started playing Dragon Age: had just beat Skyrim for the thousandth time, was getting bored and didn’t know how to mod my game, so I started looking at Steam recommendations. However, I had a bit of a buffer. Steam recommended me Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which is a pretty good game, but not quite what I was looking for.
What Skyrim lacked to me was character involvement. That isn’t to say there aren’t good characters, but they are limited and of the companions you’re given, they have little to do with the actual story and almost no involvement other than one quest here or there. Kingdoms of Amalur is similar to Skyrim in terms of story and gameplay, and if you liked Skyrim’s open-world and hack’n’slash combat, you’ll like Kingdoms.
To that end, Dragon Age is a pretty logical leap from either of those. But I can see where it would get confusing. The games are both reliant upon each other, yet can contradict each other horribly. When most people talk about Dragon Age. they’re referring to Inquisition because it’s the newest game to come out in the series. But as I mentioned, there are three games in total, not counting Awakening or Heroes of Dragon Age.
There’s no easy way to do this, so I’ll do a brief description then a (personal) pros and cons to each game before talking about the flaws the series has on a whole.
(Disclaimer: I am not a games reviewer or expert in any sense, these are personal opinions so take them with a grain of salt.)
(Also: SPOILERS)
Dragon Age: Origins (DA:O):
The first game in the series, DA:O focuses on the Warden or Hero of Ferelden. Without getting too much into the story, it heavily focuses on the arc of your character and the story that unfolds, allowing you a range of choices and quests that help keep replaying the game from getting boring.
   Pros:
Personalized character backstory.
Character creation is interesting.
Pretty backgrounds (for the time).
Pausing combat doesn’t interrupt the flow of combat too much.
Gameplay is pretty straightforward and intuitive (at least on PC).
A lot of dialogue options.
Just enough side quests to pad out the story without distracting from the main quests.
Quest timing options.
Gifts to fix things if you mess up the dialogue options and can’t reload a save (they have diminishing returns, so be wary).
Companion options–don’t like someone? Kick them out of the party!
Weapon and armor options–spell casting doesn’t work well for this, but most weapons and armor aren’t class restricted.
DOG. PUPPY. WHO NEEDS ROMANCE, I HAVE A DOG.
   Cons:
Main character has no voice acting.
Clunky animations. Like… mages in particular just stand there and point a staff in the air and sometimes wave their hand.
Sometimes confusing leveling mechanics.
Too much Codex stuff too fast.
Focuses a little too much on Alistair romance (even if I love him) and not much on the other characters.
Dialogue options can be hard to understand–this was before Bioware got their choice menu properly sorted out.
Will probably never see the Warden/Hero ever again no matter what they accomplish.
No armor modifications, only giving runes to some weapons.
Repetitive environments.
Limited romance options.
Hats.
Dragon Age II (DA II):
As the name implies it is second in the series, focusing on Hawke, the eventual Champion of Kirkwall, and has only a little to do with Origins. Not a direct sequel, DA II is very disputed across the fandom, and could have been handled better in general. Bioware changed their story-telling rhythm in this, instead breaking it up into 3 acts rather than major quests you can pick and choose the order of.
   Pros:
New main quest each Act that focuses on Hawke as a person.
Varric.
Combat animation feels involved and fluid–you’ve upgraded from a person standing to actual fighting.
Hide hats option in menu.
Main character is voice acted now–yay!
Fixed the dialogue options so it’s not as confusing.
Dog is no longer a party member, so you have a back up you can summon if shit hits the fan.
Gives you a junk slot in your inventory so you know what you can sell.
Rival and Friendship system make it so you can hate someone you need and still keep them in your party.
Rival and Friendship system make it so you can romance someone even if you don’t particularly like them.
   Cons:
Rival and Friendship system also, unfortunately, can lead to weird things happening in the story unless you go all out one way or another.
Cannot have a set team you use all the time unless you’re willing to possibly lose a few companions *coughs*Isabela*coughs*. Characters must be rotated out on quests if you want to get Friendship/Rivalry where it needs to be.
Specific, limited gifts that are easy to miss.
Confusing leveling mechanics.
The fuck did they do to the elves in this one?
Almost no interaction from anything in DA:O.
The screen layout got worse.
Facial animations (specifically eyebrows and mouth) are sometimes horrifying.
Character relationships are harder to manage.
Spend more time thinking about who you want on what quest than you probably should.
Romances are weirdly broken up in this one.
Armor picked up can only be worn by Hawke.
Please. Just let me romance Varric.
Combat animations are a little over the top and unrealistic.
Story makes it feel like your actions only effect Kirkwall, but actually end up effecting the whole world.
Race options–it forces you to play as a human.
Very repetitive environments.
Background is glanced over and explained away with no interaction.
Sibling death.
Dragon Age: Inquisition (DA:I):
The baby of the series, the most recent game and prettiest overall. DA:I has way more options in just about everything in comparison to the previous two games. You play as the Herald of Andraste, eventually becoming Inquisitor.
   Pros:
That character creation tho.
Armor and weapon creation and customization.
Fixed elves appearances–no longer aliens.
Races now have different body types.
Fixed the combat ratio of fluidity to excessive.
Open world.
Actually get a horse/hart/dracolisk/freakishly large nug to ride this time.
Voice options (only two, but that’s one more than DA II and two more than DA:O).
Way more companion options.
Can play as a qunari.
Interesting cameos from companions in DA:O and DA II.
Cool search mechanic.
Cole.
HUGE map.
More romance options.
DRAGON MASTER.
Don’t have to play Origins or II to get the story-type you want, just log in to Dragon’s Keep and fill out some stuff.
Screw attributes completely.
   Cons:
The hair. For everyone, but mostly qunari.
Undermines other choices in previous games.
Ooh… you might wanna get that hand looked at, buddy.
Hardens companion from DA:O regardless of actual choices in game.
Cut scene animation is a little weird sometimes.
Save files corrupt so quickly.
Sudden retconning of Dalish facts and changes the way mages are handled by the Dalish.
Main character disappearances.
Needs DLC in order to get the “real” ending.
Does not mod easily.
Bugs with animation and placement.
WHERE IS MY DOG, BIOWARE??????
THE MOUNT IS NOT A REPLACEMENT, IT CANNOT FIGHT OR FOLLOW YOU.
Doesn’t feel like a solid story ending, regardless of DLC.
You know those helpful numbers and bars we had to measure friendship in DA II and DA:O? Fuck ‘em. Don’t need ‘em. Oh, but likability is still being measured by the game, just not visibly.
Fuck gifts, too.
No more healing spells.
Oh, and let’s limit the number of healing items you can carry at once.
And we can’t make it too easy to make money, either.
Random loot is incredibly buggy.
Weapons/armor now class coded.
Gameplay takes some getting used to on the PC.
Screw attributes completely.
And that’s not including Awakening and Heroes of Dragon Age, which I am not discussing in this post.
Now, despite what you might think after that, I love these games.
They just… have their issues.
They pull a “Supernatural” on us, if you will. Each game, the enemy somehow gets bigger and badder. In the first one, you’re trying to stop the Blight and save your home, which is already a big feat. In the second one, you end up causing a civil war across multiple countries (even if it doesn’t feel so big at the time). In Inquisition, you have to save at least three countries at once, and in the fourth it looks like you’re going to have to save the world.
Each game focuses on a new protagonist, which is great in that it means a fresh new take on each challenge and new characters, but it really, really sucks in that it feels like you’re leaving a story unfinished. I mentioned we’ll probably never see the Warden in-game again and it’s been confirmed by Patrick Weekes, the lead writer for DA (I’d put a link here, but I can’t find it right now). This is mainly because the story has moved on from the Warden, but also because importing a Warden from DA:O to any new DA game would be almost impossible from a technical standpoint. While this is sad, it’s understandable from a story standpoint. But this method wasn’t what fans were expecting when DA II came out.
Which is probably the biggest reason for all the hatred towards DA II. It was marketed as a sequel to DA:O, and people kind of automatically thought of it as a direct sequel, mostly because the only other RPG series Bioware had running was Mass Effect and that’s what happened there. But it didn’t happen with DA II. Instead, we were given a new hero with new goals, no familiar companions and in a place DA:O didn’t even mention. Other than a few cameos, a couple characters, and a mention every now and then, there was nothing from DA:O in DA II.
And that’s really Dragon Age’s biggest problem. Playing DA II, it makes it feel like all those choices you made in Origins were insignificant (which on a scale they were). And Inquisition didn’t fix this. In fact, in some ways, it made it worse. It gave Hawke and the Warden more stories, which isn’t a bad thing, but it took your characters and tried to generalize your Warden and your Hawke into The Warden and The Hawke. Imagine you’d been given a choose-your-own-adventure book and the first two chapters are about one character, and then the next two about another, and so on and so forth. But in each of these chapters, you get glimpses of the previous characters doing other things in the same world. No interaction, no conclusiveness, just your character doing things that your character might not do. You have no control of the character whose choices are supposed to be yours after those two chapters are done.
Basically: for the story, with the way they’ve set it up, it forces you to bond to a character that you create but only briefly glimpse into their lives before someone else takes over. Yet instead of divorcing entirely from said character, the shorter timeline forces the heroes to interact in some capacity that we’ll never get to see. Varric is the perfect example of this. DA II is set up in a way that you know Varric will have to be involved in Inquisition. But after people started really liking him and the general backlash of DA II, Bioware couldn’t kill him off and couldn’t send him away. So they gave him a minor role in Inquisition and then retired him.
They do this again with the Inquisitor. The way DA:I ends left many fans to believe DA4 had to continue as the Inquisitor; after all it didn’t feel like the Inquisitor’s story was finished and the next Big Bad had been hinted at being kind-of their fault. But we’ve already been told that DA4 will not star the Inquisitor–instead, their story is supposedly done and the only chance we have of their involvement is probably a letter, a cameo, or as an advisor. That’s if Bioware doesn’t kill them.
Once again, they put away another character when it feels like they should still be involved, thus reducing the choices made in the previous games by an even smaller margin. Bioware takes a character you made, tells you their story is over when it feel like it’s just starting, then takes control of them.
The solution?
The Elder Scrolls series actually does a pretty good job at doing the same thing–by spreading the events out. I get that the whole name of the series is focused on a hundred year margin, but that’s still a hundred years for you to spread events out. Over the course of three games, only about 10-20 years have passed. DA:O takes place over the course of 1-2 years, maximum. DA II takes place over 7. And DA:I is about 2-5 (depending on if you count Trespasser), with a short gap between II and Inquisition.. That’s a lot of shit to happen over such a short time.
Give the games space. Let them breathe. Let the actions of the Warden fade as time passes, not lie ignored by NPCs just because it’s hard to account for all the choices. Let the stories have their own weight before you stack the other on, and maybe don’t rely to much on rapid storytelling.
And that really went off on a tangent, sorry.
Simply put, the games have their own flaws. If you have the money and prefer a newer-looking game and have the system to handle it, I recommend Dragon Age: Inquisition to start off. Being able to control the world through your choices in Dragon’s Keep gives you a good idea of previous stories without having to play them, while still preserving the themes from the series.
(But oh my god save frequently. Save every few minutes. And stagger save, too, don’t just save over old files because that shit corrupts EASY.)
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heavenlysphere · 3 years
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#shut up maverick#me: I love people’s interpretations of characters#also me: that is. they’ve never rudely interacted before????#I don’t want to be mean but this is driving me up the wall because I am weird.#I love roleplay.#I do not expect everyone to be an expert on a chara that’s unrealistic I am not myself but#these characters have never rudely interacted. there’s like. one ‘you think I’m hot don’t you.’ ‘admittedly.’ and that’s. all I can think of#it’s so obvious when ppls ooc biases bleed into a character sometime.#but I don’t want to be mean and say. mean things.#I think you should just.... consent about this.#I’m the host of the rp but that was like. thrown onto me. I did not make it. so I do not feel like I should be word of god it should be a#collab effort???#I hate vaguing but I don’t know wtf to say to this person. how do I say cool it. they’re not breaking the rules that were set.#consent your ic fighting my god don’t punch him?????#I hate conflict why#and ppl have been repeatedly uncomfortable with them but I don’t want to like. vague in the other chat either like everybody else has?? bc#that’s mean and clearly they’re very new. and that’s fine. that’s not the issue it’s just they don’t. listen. but I don’t knowww what to doo#because technically it’s not against the rules. but they’re pissing others off. but they’re trying their best I think. and this ppl pleaser#is the host so my dumbass is like conflict I’ve never met her
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