Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening

While I obviously already knew of the influence A Song of Ice and Fire had had to Dragon Age: Origins, I didn't fully realize how much until playing its expansion, Awakening. Having just read A Game of Thrones might have had something to do with that as well.

Similar to the book series, knights are Sers, the Mabari hounds probably inspired by the direwolves, and the Grey Wardens are very much like the Night Watch in protecting the realms from evil things and sacrificing their lives for it (the former sometimes before they even get to the protecting part).

Awakening sets off a few years after the incidents of the original story. Your imported character (or a newly created one) arrives to take the rebuilding of Vigil's Keep in his/her command. However, things don't go as smoothly as they could have; the darkspawn have not scattered as they were s'posed to. And there seem to be darkspawn capable of speaking, too. Your duty is to find out what's going on.

I liked the expansion's story more than the one of Origins simply because it wasn't told you beforehand. It wasn't anything amazing, though -- I don't expect BioWare to come up with such stories anymore -- but it worked well enough. The choices you made in the original game are carried over. The NPCs, however, are not. Well, except for the dwarf.

I guess Oghren was the only one who couldn't die or otherwise get involved in things (such as being the king) by your choices. And thus they were able to write in the dwarf who I had previously told to get lost after his presence was no longer required for the story to continue.

And with Oghren I was stuck for the longest of times since I didn't find a proper tank NPC until in the last place I visited. And Oghren wasn't even build for tanking since he has his skills spent on two-handed combat. Luckily, Awakening isn't hard and I was doing just fine with a healer and three damage dealers.

After I found Justice, the weapon-shield warrior, I turned the difficulty to Hard to get some challenge out of the rest of the game -- but didn't notice much difference. When I reached the final boss, however, I had to turn the setting back down, all the way to Easy in fact. The last showdown happens in such a cramped and tight place, and your characters are constantly stunned and/or knocked back that it's not even funny.

And as you're not able to get behind the boss, rogues are pretty useless in the fight. Too bad I had two of them since I had taken Sigrun as one of the party members as per her request. Velanna would've probably made the fight easier with her ranged spells and AoE. As it were, even on Easy the battle was challenging. Maybe it was just my lack of skill but I didn't like it at all. I think the best fight in the game was definitely the ghostly dragon in the marsh. Its MMO style phases were much more to my liking compared to the clusterfuck of the final boss.

Even though the expansion doesn't have romances, BioWare decided to keep the approval system. And with approval comes all the hundred different gifts to take space in your inventory. But even worse inventory fillers are all the crafting materials. In addition to the Herbalism, Poison- and Trap-Making, Awakening has Runecrafting to fill your inventory with different things. And it cannot be really ignored since the expansion's body armor have runeslots as well.

But oh boy if the skill is cumbersome to use. Almost each rune requires two lower tier runes of the same type to craft, and most of the runes have seven different tiers, thus requiring a whole score of runes occupying your inventory (each takes one slot) if you intend to craft a paragon rune all the way from novice ones. And because the rune trader happens to be inside your keep where the party members are not in your party and you can't use their skills, you need to constantly go through a loading screen when crafting runes since inventory space is very limited (unless your character has runecrafting -- mine didn't). What on Earth were they thinking. But at least runeglows started finally working.

Also, there were couple nasty bugs in the game. I recommend taking all your Warden's equipment off before entering the Silverite Mines in Wending Wood to avoid the possible permanent loss of all your gear. This happened to me and when I found all my stuff was gone, my quick and auto saves had already been overwritten. My previous proper save was three hours back. So add that to the 15 hours it took me to play through Awakening. A less fatal bug was looping final cutscene after the credits had rolled. Luckily, repeatedly pressing Esc ended it.

Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening is more of the same. It was enjoyable but towards the end I was starting to feel I had had enough of this type of game; controlling a whole party in MMORPG style combat. And the mechanics haven't even been properly copied; the AI should be able to tank better on its own and healing spells shouldn't have cooldowns. The ability system also scales pretty badly in higher levels as all your characters start to have all the abilities, which overlap each other.

I wonder how Dragon Age 2 is like. People don't seem to like it but from what I've seen of its feature list, it seems like a more polished game.

And one more thing; the game should totally disable buff effects in dialogues in addition to removing helmets. It's pretty hard to see your character through all the smoke and glows of Song of Courage, Momentum, and Shadow Form.