Monte Carlo

Too late!

Oh no, looking at the bottom of the thread I can see 'Volourn' in italics... he's about to post and tell us how wrong we all are. Again.

You should be able to manage this using the tactics slots, but because I tend to manage mage AoE spells personally I'm not sure how you manage the friendly fire issue. Hold on... (boots up DA to look at tactics slots...) Right, the simple answer appears to be the range variable - setting it to medium / long range for AoE spells should do the trick, depending on what you want the trigger for (i.e. large groups or spellcasters). Just remember that when combat kicks off that the character's tactics will be doing that and move the rest of the team accordingly. I have Morrigan configured to auto fireball all enemy groups larger than 3 at medium / long range and I don't have a big problem but I do have to remember to keep my melee fighters back when I see a mob. I can see why the frost cone spell might be a problem - personally for that part of the battle I'd pause and control the caster - melee characters are much easier to configure in the tactics slots.

Yorkshire, is that anywhere near Holland?

Deganawida makes a good point: I don't think it's beyond the pale to think, hmmmm I'm making a greatsword-wielding warrior... I know, I'll pump CON so he has loads of hit points! PHNAARRRRPPPP!!! Goes the fail buzzer. 2H warriors are frail precision weapons, only the sword and board guy or high dex acrobat rogue can move around in combat with relative impunity. This is why the class structure is so gimpy - why can't I make a 2H weapon rogue who gives up some specialist skills in favour of high dex combat movement and can dish out 2H damage? The answer is obtuse design. As it is the optimal 2H warrior within the ruleset is still pretty frail in what is a melee-intense game. A high dex naked rogue can zip about OTOH, with hardly any problems... I should know because I'm playing a high level DW rogue at the moment. The set-up appears to be this - you have two fighters - sword and board dude drawws aggro. 2H guy steps in and puts down a massive smackdown. Mage zaps / freezes / napalms mobs and rogue either (a) stands back and goes flak-cannnon with archery thief or (b) ninjas in and out of the mob crit hitting using tier 3/4 stealth. I've worked on this variation (two sword and board warriors my first playthrough, a very potent combination - they were very difficult to take down) and it boils down to one sword and board tank dawing aggro - he is the tactical lynchpin of Dragon Age. Some of the Bio shills on the official forums mock noobs --- shame on them, they obviously got the luxury of spending five years studying the rules. Cheers MC

I don't know, I just suspect that it's time for a game where you choose a gender, appearance and a background that fits into the the game and... go. Your character develops within the game. Stuck in a forest surrounded by wolves? Try and sneak and you become a bit better at sneaking. Attack a wolf and perhaps get a bit better at fighting. Pet and feed the wolves and become a bit more attuned to nature. I dunno. Later on you bump into a druid. Want to spend a load of time and resources learning about that? You can. Now or later. Learn enough to heal an injury and move on or put more effort into it and learn to summon a bloody great thunderstorm. Perhaps you won't have as much time to learn Cool Sword Moves but, hey, that's life. I think people are more than ready for such a game, if the core purpose of that game (as J.E. describes it) is to build a cool character in a fantasy game world and Do Stuff. I too had my best pen & paper experiences with class-free rulesets - your character could be good at a couple of things or a jack-of-all-trades. Just like in reality, you could pick up skills along the way as you need them, some of them being contradictory (a priest who learns to steal, a barbarian who learns art appreciaton). Why not? It anchors you so much more into the game and increases immersion. Rather than win a pretty 'achievement' pin on a website for stealing fifty items why not get a real in-game skill, consequence, nickname? As long as you aren't guessing all the time then it would be fun, rather than choosing to be a rogue on day 1. look at Dragon Age and it's much-vaunted origins. My character is a noble in a castle... why is he a rogue? How did he learn to pick locks rather than fighting with Big Swords? Why doesn't anybody mention my ignoble class decision? You see, it's just odd. It's a set of mechanics, not a story. At least FO3 tried to do it differently - it didn't bother me because I only played it once.

I have at last found a helmet that looks half-decent. The Executioner's Helm

^ Dammit, I did Shale first, have had the helm all game. And now had to give it to Alistair for the +2 STR so he could wear the warden's armour. Drat. Luckily, my rogue is a handsome devil and looks rather dapper sans headgear for now. All the rogue helmets look especially silly.

Strange, for the first time in this game (Level 15 Human Rogue, only Orzammar and Sacred Ashes of the major quests left to do) I'm short of cash. I have Tier 4 locks and Imoen-Chick has Tier 4 stealing. We have embarked on crimewave across Ferelden, no container unlocked and no pocket unpicked - plus I've done all the rogue quests (i.e. the barman and Slim) I can up to this point in the game. And I'm still short of dough - possibly because I'm trying to fit every NPC out in half decent gear (more difficult than it looks). Mind you I do have a humungously massive stock of poisons, bombs and poultices. It's absolutely true about the Warden Armour by the way - it scales. Five levels ago I flogged it to Mikhail Dryden and poor old Alistair had to suffer the comedy Juggernaut armour, which looks like a suit of armour you might see decorating a castle corridor in an old episode of Scooby Doo. Anyhoo, just bought it back (for 27 gold for the lot - ouch!) and it's now Tier 7 Dragonbone Nutter Turbo B*stard armour, the boots give +50 stamina still. That will probably see him through to the end of the game. Still worried about cash - pickpocketing is sort of worth it, but you really do nick as much crap as you do decent stuff. There are a couple of Tier 4 locks in the Templar's Quarters of the mage tower with half-decent stuff in and the lockbox behind the bar in the Gnawed Noble is like . Cheers MC

LOL! Redcliffe is a saturday night pub fight in comparison to the rest of the game!

^ I see what you're getting at, but personally I wasn't expecting much more than EPIC DRAGON BATTLE followed by cutscene. So the epilogue thing was for me a really cool bonus, I loved it to bits. But, yeah, the combat was a grind... I mean Dave Gaider is the man who wrote the end battles for BG2, right? Those were The Business. DA isn't a patch on those. Not by a long chalk. Hey, Dave, you gonna write an alt.ending mod like you did for BG2?

Hmmm, taking out revenants at low-level just went out of the window, they nerfed rebalanced the duration of frost spells. Yikes!

^ I will admit to making a special "Escape" save where I tried out every NPC combo to spring me from prison. All of them are amusing, but being rescued by a dog is especially funny. In the end I finished it with Morrigan and Zevran, they were funny too (especially Zev charming the pants off the female guard).

I hope there are tunnels under Denerim. You could have fights down there.

I once drove across Iowa. I have to say there wasn't much to see (Oooooh! A rock!) and my meatloaf cassette (it was a while back) got stuck in the car stereo so I'm Gonna Love Her for Both of Us will forever remind me of Des Moines. Which I think is in Iowa. All I remember was the cold (it was late November), excellent pancakes and friendly people who genuinely couldn't understand my English accent. Cheers MC

^ World Cities do that, they draw people to them. Just view London as a necessary evil, it's easy to ignore. I know I did when I lived outside it. And moving the BBC to Manchester was the worst sort of pork-barrel politiking by Zanu NuLabour, a complete waste of our tax pounds. Did you see the re-location packages? Unbelievable, meanwhile the armed forces want for helicopters, but the BBC sports department is lavishly funded to move to a comfy Labour safe seat. It's like ploughing the earth and salting the fields by this government, who know they're going to be out of office in six months.

^ Ah, I see, so far into the future it can Morph into Mass Effect 6 - Space Blight!

Thanks for your thoughts Josh. Briefly, would that perspective influence the way you guys look at design in the future? For example, I know it's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. but I liked the origin route in FO3 where you made decisions as you grew up in the Vault, i.e. the character generation felt more organic to the gameplay. TES did this too, but not as well. And, hey, the Dragon Age origins would have been fantastic had you designed the character in the tutorial. Cheers MC

And oranges contain citrus, apples don't. Fascinating.

As long as there is lots of fighting, in tunnels, I could care less. Big thumbs up for barbarian (Chasind / Ash Warrior) origin. Fighting in tunnels, savagely, is even better. Think about it, a post-blight Korcari wilds, like a PA fantasy game with tribes struggling to survive. Cool.

Walking Bomb and Virulent Walking Bomb are acquired tastes. As I posted in the other thread they are a hilarious, if somewhat fussy, method of crowd control. Personally I had loads of fun: Waking Nightmare > Virulent Walking Bomb > Archery = gooey, explosive hilarity.

^ No, keep whatever weapons you like in the spare slot. In the combat tabs you'll see actions. The ones on the left give you the situation (i.e. See Enemy) and the ones on the right let you tell the character what to do with that situation (i.e. use scatter-shot, use health poultice etc.) When I made her a melee archer, with the appropriate talent, I configured the tabs that whatever happened she used Ranged Weapons unless health > 20% where I got her to chug a potion and go melee weapons. I also made Sten her bodyguard: look in the options and you'll see character attacked... for Sten I put in weapon sweep when she was hurting - that took out lots of baddies around her / stunned them etc. My advice is take a bit of time looking at the tactics tabs - they are a bit of effort to learn but you can do some astonishingly cool things with them. Cheers MC

^ I was wondering about Oghren, is his dialogue fun? Personally I find Sten the best NPC in the game, but that's just me.

^ Sorry, forgot English was your second language. My point was that of course the stereotype about Amsterdam was stupid. That was my point. The same principle applies to London. @ Walsingham. London is no different from Tokyo or New York. A gazillion people from myriad cultures, most of whom focussed on making a living, in a confined physical space. Niceness is not part of the deal. Not perfect, but completely understandable. Where London is different is that it is a city of villages. As soon as you get out of the Zone One hub (i.e. the London version of Manhattan Island) it becomes rather different.

Now I know better, and realise that the game sort of scales to level, I go: * Shale * Warden's Keep * Mage Tower * Redcliffe Yes, I know my twinky DLC gives me all sorts of Gucci kit and an XP boost. Bite me.