Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Dragon Age Dragon Age: Origins is ten years old today

Theldaran

Liturgist
Joined
Oct 10, 2015
Messages
1,772
I still think her being a girl is a possibility, I know about the famous internet rule but I know girls also are geeks from time to time.

Probably nobody's gonna agree in this godforsaken sausage cave, but it's sad that girls here have to change their avatar in order not to be singled out.
 

Theldaran

Liturgist
Joined
Oct 10, 2015
Messages
1,772
I wouldn't trust profiles though. However, if fanta says there's proof of his antics, then I guess it's true.
 

Beastro

Arcane
Joined
May 11, 2015
Messages
7,938
Now I understand why you are such a womyn's advocate. Should get your T levels checked.

So blights are limited, right? since the Gray Wardens know where all the old gods are imprisoned, does that mean if all of the old gods imprisoned get corrupted then there will be no more blights? or new ones are created or something?

In DAI, there was a Deep Road DLC iirc, it was pretty good, there were Titans or something that were huge golems like, much bigger than Shale.

TBH in a fantasy setting like this I wouldn't be surprised if the Blights are some precursor events to a major end of the world scenario. Like when all the dragons are dead a barrier finally fails and everything in the Fade is free to move into the world at will or something, so killing them all of would just hasten the end without finding the thing that would prevent the end of the world event.

The Grey Warden leadership knows this and is spending their time trying to find the solution while keeping a lid on this fact, which would explain their end of allowing their decline between Blights. Their numbers don't matter much inbetween them and are ultimately useless in the big picture.
 
Last edited:

Theldaran

Liturgist
Joined
Oct 10, 2015
Messages
1,772
All of this time, and fantasy is still firmly rooted in Tolkien. Experiments haven't gone well, maybe Song of Ice and Fire.

I believe this has to be due to fantasy being rooted in, like, Celtic-Norse folklore. That limits the themes A LOT. And of course, you can't expect from modern writers to have the same care and amount of work as Tolkien. He practically devoted a part of his life to build his world.

I've seen people expressing their wish that someone made a game based off Fritz Leiber's novellas. That's beyond wishful thinking, but would add a nice variety.
 

Jezek

Novice
Joined
Sep 8, 2018
Messages
4
This thread brings back a lot of suppressed memories about this game.. I want to go back and actually finish it but the amount of combat is too much I think. I must've completed 60% from what I'm allowing myself to remember..

I remember always telling myself that it was a really good game - maybe not as refined and polished as Baldur's gate but good in it's own right.

I even got passed the dark road part and somewhat enjoyed it or so I thought. But then I got to that mage tower place after completing the long road and a few other places and then it just broke me.. After a few encounters and reloads I just quit and never looked back. I've never experienced that in a game before. I now realize my desire to like it was more powerful than my rational senses that were accumulating so much frustration and boredom with the combat and enemy design.

Morrigan was cool though like others said :D
 

Beastro

Arcane
Joined
May 11, 2015
Messages
7,938
All of this time, and fantasy is still firmly rooted in Tolkien. Experiments haven't gone well, maybe Song of Ice and Fire.

ASoIaF is a soap opera with little underlying it. It's all twists and dramatic turns over a deeply cynical and nihilistic outlook that sneers at any idea of a happy ending.

IMO, a reason why Martin petered out finishing it is because he can't find a resolution. Either he owns up to the series' outlook and it ends in a way everyone hates, or he betrays his outlook and ends it in a good ending that he doesn't believe in. I think the GoT ending tried to strike a middle ground and wound up pissing everyone off by being both and neither.
 
Last edited:

Theldaran

Liturgist
Joined
Oct 10, 2015
Messages
1,772
He stated that the books were very difficult to write. With that number of subplots, vast expanses of land, and sheer roster of characters, it's small wonder.

He wanted to create something great, but he hasn't been up to par.

The best example is Arya Stark. Apparently she should have been legally dead some time ago (probably when she parted ways with Sandor or something). Allegedly she's his wife's fav character, so Martin cucked out.

Myself I've pretty much given up on it. I started reading it like 15 years ago and that's a lot of time. I can't be made to literally wait a lifetime.

The noble houses thing is very well done, but I could get something similar reading about English history, I guess.
 

J_C

One Bit Studio
Patron
Developer
Joined
Dec 28, 2010
Messages
16,947
Location
Pannonia
Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
He stated that the books were very difficult to write. With that number of subplots, vast expanses of land, and sheer roster of characters, it's small wonder.

He wanted to create something great, but he hasn't been up to par.

The best example is Arya Stark. Apparently she should have been legally dead some time ago (probably when she parted ways with Sandor or something). Allegedly she's his wife's fav character, so Martin cucked out.

Myself I've pretty much given up on it. I started reading it like 15 years ago and that's a lot of time. I can't be made to literally wait a lifetime.

The noble houses thing is very well done, but I could get something similar reading about English history, I guess.
The sad thing is that because he will never finish his opus, this series will go down in literature as a sidenote, people won't remember it like they do to Lord of the Rings.
 

Theldaran

Liturgist
Joined
Oct 10, 2015
Messages
1,772
He stated that the books were very difficult to write. With that number of subplots, vast expanses of land, and sheer roster of characters, it's small wonder.

He wanted to create something great, but he hasn't been up to par.

The best example is Arya Stark. Apparently she should have been legally dead some time ago (probably when she parted ways with Sandor or something). Allegedly she's his wife's fav character, so Martin cucked out.

Myself I've pretty much given up on it. I started reading it like 15 years ago and that's a lot of time. I can't be made to literally wait a lifetime.

The noble houses thing is very well done, but I could get something similar reading about English history, I guess.
The sad thing is that because he will never finish his opus, this series will go down in literature as a sidenote, people won't remember it like they do to Lord of the Rings.

I'm sure Beastro here would say he had it coming.

Possibly, no, surely, when Martin set out to write the first book he couldn't anticipate the impact. Sapkowski effect.

IMO he should have done away with a lot of the fluff, not expand the world so much, and cut out a lot of characters that were interesting but they died anyway. Like Renly. Renly was also gay.

The Dothraki voyage -Daenerys'- should also have been overly simplified, just jump the story to the point when Daenerys is finally gonna land in Westeros.

Cersei's antics were more interesting and she was a star of the books and show.

Also all we have to do is hire Brandon Sanderson AGAIN to do the dirty, dirty work.

Much like ASOIAF itself from which it borrows, Dragon Age hit a dead end.
 
Last edited:

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
Texture mods almost always look like ass, and the game holds up fine unless you're a graphics whore. If you think mods are required for it to look "passable" then I'd like to see you try playing anything made before 2005.
Theta HD and Some Dalish Textures are redrawn textures, not bullshit high res + filters slapped on low res textures. And DAO looked dated even on launch. I swear, people now act like DAO's graphics were just a product of its time. That's BS. Crysis came out 2 years before DAO. Loads of better looking games had been released before DAO. But Bioware was never good at engine work or graphics shit. Game doesn't look atrocious, but it always looked like a bland mess. Some of it unnecessarily so, like subpar model work. I won't pretend being a graphics whore is a necessity, but I think it's BS to pretend DAO looked good. It was tolerable to okay for the most part, with some of it looking worse.

I think my main problem with the Dalish is that they still feel a bit too classic fantasy to fit into the grimdark thing of DA. Even though there's a pretty nice backstory and all that, you're still dealing with the woodsy, fairy folk to some degree. And in their quest, you run into what is basically an Ent (that rhymes) and you run into a Lady of the Forest.
I think they were trying to be a darker spin on standard fantasy for the most part and in that classic Biowarean way, ended up shallow and derivative for the most part. Witcher did downtrodden guerilla elf societies much better, but on the whole DAO just really underdeveloped Dalish societies and basically did bland wood elves again.

Say what you want about DA:O, it had a good start to a series, the trouble was no one wanted to bother continuing where it left off.
They started fucking with concepts as early as Awakening, when they introduced intelligent darkspawn society as a thing instead of having darkspawn serve as the always-evil enemy race. And I think part of the reason why they did that is because the writers were shit at figuring out a way to handle a darkspawn conflict and you can't do your usual bullshit villainous character development, "complex" motive, twist bullshit, stock token attempt at moral grayness, and dialogue/monologue dumping when your darkspawn are unreasonable murder hordes and that's about the size of it. There are ways you can work with that well by turning it into a story of Fereldan society in the face of war as you try to handle the war, but it was too far removed from Bioware's stock writing to be manageable for them. Bioware in general is not good at doing large scope stories. It's always very adventurer-hero focused for them. Same reason why DAO mostly focuses on Loghain as the villain and completely underperforms in selling darkspawn as being the real threat.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
14,118
Location
New Vegas
Theta HD and Some Dalish Textures are redrawn textures, not bullshit high res + filters slapped on low res textures. And DAO looked dated even on launch. I swear, people now act like DAO's graphics were just a product of its time. That's BS. Crysis came out 2 years before DAO. Loads of better looking games had been released before DAO. But Bioware was never good at engine work or graphics shit. Game doesn't look atrocious, but it always looked like a bland mess. Some of it unnecessarily so, like subpar model work. I won't pretend being a graphics whore is a necessity, but I think it's BS to pretend DAO looked good. It was tolerable to okay for the most part, with some of it looking worse.

I don't want some random dude's redrawn textures. Even if they look good, which is rare, they still don't look like the game is supposed to. As for its graphics at release, no they weren't a highlight. Some areas were made long before like the swamp and looked worse, other areas like the big city looked nice, but it wasn't a showcase that's for sure. I didn't say it was though, I said him using the word "necessity" was silly, especially on a forum that reveres much older games that technically look far worse.
 

Theldaran

Liturgist
Joined
Oct 10, 2015
Messages
1,772
Well, comparing Crysis to DA:O is... I dunno. Crysis was famous as that game that was hardly playable at launch with anything but the upper tier of hardware, I think.

I mean, it's obvious that DA:O isn't an aesthetical masterpiece, but NWN also wasn't. That falls a bit on graphics whore territory. I prefer an RPG that does its things well and it hasn't got to be a graphics behemoth. That's why I keep playing BGs every now and then.

Loghain was Sarevok done better, in short.
 

Stefmob

Novice
Joined
Jun 17, 2016
Messages
20
I couldn't get in to da:o i tried different races and backgrounds, but every time i think: why can't i be a human from the woods that is raised by elves?
 

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
I don't want some random dude's redrawn textures. Even if they look good, which is rare, they still don't look like the game is supposed to. As for its graphics at release, no they weren't a highlight. Some areas were made long before like the swamp and looked worse, other areas like the big city looked nice, but it wasn't a showcase that's for sure. I didn't say it was though, I said him using the word "necessity" was silly, especially on a forum that reveres much older games that technically look far worse.
I'm not a fan of the redesign mods for this exact reason, but the texture mods I mentioned are fine, and your categorical rejection of texture mods as trash is just stupid. That's what I took issue with. Whether or not you regard better graphics to be a necessity is a matter of taste, sure, but just because we largely favor older games on this board doesn't mean we're married to shit graphics either.

Well, comparing Crysis to DA:O is... I dunno. Crysis was famous as that game that was hardly playable at launch with anything but the upper tier of hardware, I think.
Crysis came out two years before DAO. Half Life 2 came out five years before DAO. Uncharted came out two years before DAO too. And over the course of time, the state of graphics cards, processing power, and rendering technology does improve. The issue isn't that DAO needed to look like Crysis. It didn't. I'm simply pointing out that DAO was just behind the curve on graphics. It looked dated at the time of its launch, which isn't very surprising when you're using an upgraded version of the NWN engine (it went NWN "Aurora" Engine -> KotOR "Odyssey" Engine -> DAO "Eclipse" Engine, but basically same tech with a few overhauls and iterative improvements) all the way in 2009. BioWare's engine was lousy, but it also went beyond that: a lot of the models and textures could have been better even with the DAO engine.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,653
3D RPGs have always been behind the curve of ~other genres~ unless the artists are paid in potatoes.
 

Nano

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,647
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
It looked dated at the time of its launch, which isn't very surprising when you're using an upgraded version of the NWN engine (it went NWN "Aurora" Engine -> KotOR "Odyssey" Engine -> DAO "Eclipse" Engine, but basically same tech with a few overhauls and iterative improvements) all the way in 2009. BioWare's engine was just shitty.
You're thinking like a graphics whore. The main purpose of the Eclipse engine was to allow easy creation of CRPG content. Dragon Age: Inquisition used Frostbite instead, which was good graphics-wise, but also disastrous because Frostbite is a terrible engine choice for RPGs.

3D RPGs have always been behind the curve of ~other genres~ unless the artists are paid in potatoes.
Ultima Underworld is the exception.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
DAO looked fine for its time period. Not amazing, but it was OK.
NWN was an abomination even for 2002. Kotor came out a year later and looked far better.
 

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
You're thinking like a graphics whore.
Look, I'm a practical guy and I put gameplay over eye candy, by far, but that doesn't mean I'll automatically give shit graphics a pass and pretend it's beyond criticism lest I lose some bullshit retro hipster cred by appearing concerned about graphics. That's not how we operate around here.

The main purpose of the Eclipse engine was to allow easy creation of CRPG content.
If that was the purpose, it failed. There's a reason the module makers stayed on NWN instead of suddenly making a bunch of DAO campaigns even though the toolset supported it. Everything takes twice as long to make in DAO's engine, has a much bigger learning curve, and it still looks like shit in the end. DAO's engine existed to look slightly more modern and support a bunch of extra doodads. In no way did Eclipse make the actual work of development easier than the Aurora engine it's supposed to be an upgrade of. The opposite happened instead.

Dragon Age: Inquisition used Frostbite instead, which was good graphics-wise, but also disastrous because Frostbite is a terrible engine choice for RPGs.
No, the problems go beyond that. Frostbite, as an internal engine, has shit documentation for instance. And the Frostbite guys aren't anywhere near the Bioware guys, so coordinating was a pain in the ass. You add to that the fact that Bioware's engine guys were always mediocre at the technical shit and you had a mess that took a long time to get off the ground. But I don't really blame the BioWare guys in this case. Dealing with a poorly documented codebase that is unsuited for the purpose you have to put it towards while coordinating with guys who are busy with a ton of other shit and not physically available is a painful fucking experience.

DAO looked fine for its time period. Not amazing, but it was OK.
DAO was tolerable, but it looked dated even at the time of its release. The whole brown color tone as "realism" thing got ridiculed all the way back in 2007.
 
Last edited:

jf8350143

Liturgist
Joined
Apr 14, 2018
Messages
1,277
So blights are limited, right? since the Gray Wardens know where all the old gods are imprisoned, does that mean if all of the old gods imprisoned get corrupted then there will be no more blights? or new ones are created or something?

In DAI, there was a Deep Road DLC iirc, it was pretty good, there were Titans or something that were huge golems like, much bigger than Shale.

According to Solas, an elf god, killing all the archdemon(I think there was only one left now) would cause something really awful happen, and the Grey Wardens who try to kill the archdemon has no idea what they are doing. But since he is still pretending to be a normal mage when he says that, he didn't really explain what would happen.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
14,118
Location
New Vegas
I'm not a fan of the redesign mods for this exact reason, but the texture mods I mentioned are fine, and your categorical rejection of texture mods as trash is just stupid. That's what I took issue with. Whether or not you regard better graphics to be a necessity is a matter of taste, sure, but just because we largely favor older games on this board doesn't mean we're married to shit graphics either.

Texture mods usually being shit is my opinion. Do you want me to pretend it's not? The only one I think I've ever liked was Deus Ex's "New Vision." However that's mostly irrelevant, since the point of my post was that saying modding the game's graphics is "necessary" is a retardo statement, and it is.
 

jf8350143

Liturgist
Joined
Apr 14, 2018
Messages
1,277
I actually still has some hope left for the DA series. The winter palace quest in DA:I was pretty decent, if they could make half of the quests in the next game like that it might have a chance to be good.

The lore is still somewhat interesting as well, but it seems to have a nasty habit of posing more questions everytime they give answers to anything.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom