Pop

Really? I don't think she was ever meant to be mysterious or aloof. As a sort of pleasant optimist I think she's consistent enough to be considered a pretty good character.

What... here? No! No it can't be! They already have this. The digital deluxe edition has everything. Or at least, most things. A lot of the minor bonus items are specific to preorder or place of purchase or whatever. There's even stuff you get through the flash game, and by uploading a character you made in the character creator. I highly doubt these bonuses are going to be included in the inevitable GOTY edition. They're pretty negligible. If you're waiting until it's cheaper and in physical form, well, more power to you I guess.

It doesn't. Instakill combos like freeze / petrify + stonefist / critical only work on one enemy at a time. That is, you can freeze a whole band of enemies with cone of cold or blizzard, but the whole "shattering" aspect requires a special attack like stonefist or a warrior's slam or shield bash ability, which has to recharge. So at best you can instakill two or three enemies per encounter, and that's only if enemies are below your level. Once you're about halfway through the game the instakill combos stop working altogether on the enemies you really have to pay attention to. Early in the game instakill combos can relieve a lot of pressure, but increasingly you have to find other ways of ending fights quickly (I've found that the AoE elemental weakness curse + blizzard + shale and dwarf guy with elemental weapons is a good combo, especially as it seems Shale seems immune to the freeze and knockdown effects everyone else is suffering from) The system never felt cheesed to me. You have to be wise about your spell usage, and your focus. Right now I've got a pretty badass mage with magic and willpower in the 40+ range and I can still easily lose a fight.

The Stone Prisoner is probably worth the money. Shale was pretty obviously modeled to be a less sadistic version of HK-47 and he's a tremendously powerful tank (decent strength, considerable constitution, your choice of elemental damage, interesting battle stance things) Plus I'm guessing in the dwarven part of the game he's got to have some sort of questline. Soldier's Peak, eh. I didn't find the quest to be that interesting at all. The chest is nice, but it's not worth $7. Basically the nice things about it are the extra blood magic spells you get for free if you go a certain way in the storyline (not sure if you can get these as a non-mage) and a really nice low-requirement suit of armor.

I don't know, that's sort of assuming that the way the game turned out as well as it could under the circumstances, which is plainly false given Bioware's history. The only design choice in Dragon Age that I really don't like is the inventory system. Or rather, the elimination of containers. Bioware obviously knew that inventory space was going to be a problem - there's no other explanation for the inclusion of backpack expansions you can buy. Containers that you can put things in have been a part of Bioware games up until this point (at least I think so - if they weren't, then inventories at least were bottomless) I mean you can tell us that it took a dedicated team a great amount of time to create a functional container similar to those in all other Bioware games (a container that for whatever reason is only in DLC content and not in the rest of the game), but from where I'm sitting it all looks pretty deliberate. How convenient that I get so frustrated by the limited inventory system. How inconvenient for me that Bioware's design philosophy with regard to inventory made a 90 degree turn, and the only way to bring it in line with prior games was to pay money for it. I suppose it was the only way it could work out, despite all evidence to the contrary.

The rest of what you said is probably also wank but I stopped here. DA on full settings is absolutely gorgeous.

Alexander Brandon, who scored Jazz Jackrabbit, Deus Ex, and the first few Unreals, along with many other games, composed much of the music while he was still Audio Director at Obsidian (he has since moved on to less expensive parts of the US) As for licensed music, I know trance schlockmeister BT is contributing a track. The theme music was apparently composed by some famous movie guy. I don't know who it is, I don't know if that's been released yet. There was an AP soundtrack that was leaked / released at some point. Example.

I think the only feedback you can control is the map feedback.

To the first question, pretty sure you can. Second question, I'm pretty sure. Definitely if you avoid ingratiating yourself to the romance NPCs.

So apparently Steam bumped me up to a Deluxe Edition even though I paid for a regular digital release. Too late to fix their mistake now - I redeemed the code they gave me. To celebrate I am going to spend the $15 accidentally saved on alcohol. High fives all around!

What are you all naming your dogs, then?

Right now I've got Leilana (sp?), Sten, Alistair, and myself. I figured I'd leave Morrigan behind due to my own mage abilities, and I wanted to give Sten a spin, so I left Braggart the Pooch behind. I haven't quite gotten the hang of intricate party control down, but then I've never been all that good at it (usually relied on AI in BG)

Yeah, putting in work for the Dalish elves. I think I'm at about the end of the mission and the final battle is kicking my ass so much that I knocked the difficulty down to easy and I'm still dying. I guess I'll have to be a little more selective with my spell usage.

Okay so as with a whole lot of WRPGs, the beginning of the game, which is relatively linear, is pretty dull. Unfortunately for DA the beginning of the game is 5 hours or so long. I'm playing through my first chosen mission in the forest area and I'd say it's pretty vastly improved. Like a mashup of Mask of the Betrayer, Princess Mononoke, Lord of the Rings and Neverwinter Nights. The pace is pretty languid, but that's not necessarily bad. There's a lot of work gone into the lore of the world, and if you pay attention to it, hearing the same legend from different people, it's pretty interesting.

I cleared that up by having a Program Files directory on my D: drive. I tried having a different folder for game data but I found when installing it was just easier to change the drive letter than do anything else.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me that is not true????? If I have to format c: to clear up space.. I'm going to be utterly incensed! It is not true. Like a lot of games, there are two possibilities - express and custom installs. Custom installs allow you to choose your directory. My OS partition is only 40 gigs wide, so I put it in my game partition, which is 500 gigs wide.

I'll play as a mage, earth / ice based although I'm guessing using Cone of Cold and Stonefist together won't be the most efficient combination compared to others.

It's pretty ****in' hard to play a pirated 360 game in comparison to a pirated PC game, at the very least because you don't have to modify PC hardware to exploit leaks. I'd wager the market is not 1/100th of the market for PC gaming. Not even that.

vast improvement?? I looks almost exactly like the original, only with slightly better graphics and it seems the enemies responds a little to being hit now, that really the only difference I see.. Let's use our eyes and watch the video. The first thing you notice, beyond the graphical improvements, is the animation has really become a lot better. Mass Effect 1 had the same problem a lot of RTC RPGs had, which is that it felt like you were playing a game of chess from the viewpoint of a pawn - characters practically slid instead of moved. Strafing and backpedaling looked ridiculous, the slow-motion run of the husks was comical, and everybody stood up straight all the time. The animations here are more fluid and dynamic. The second thing you notice is the reactions of the characters, which you noted. Combat looks much faster-paced. The third thing you notice is that weapons, at least the ones the PC is using, are off of the tiring battery system and actually have ammunition counts now. Gunplay in general just looks more satisfying.

Combat footage. Looks like a vast improvement.

Deconsolify your PC version.

JR Vosovic is the Earth-2 version of JE Sawyer. If you started up a fighting game and chose JE Sawyer as your character, and then the second player also chose JE Sawyer as his / her character, it would be JR Vosovic.

I doubt it's going to just be a speed run thing. I'm sure they can track any number of variables - damage dealt, damage received, XP, etc.