Monte Carlo

Despite my usual Bioware sentiments, I am pleased for them, it's good to see developer's work credited and jobs secured.

^ No that was at my friend Virumor, who kindly corrected the issue. Mods: apologies for my lapse in language. Oh, and can we have a tactics thread please? There is clearly demand and I suspect it will become the main DA thread anyway. Cheers MC

Dude, you are ****ting spoilers, could you tag them please?

Mate, I never lived in Ancient Rome, 17th Century Britain or Depression Era America but I could give you a quick rundown of their economic models. Are you telling me Russia in the 1960's didn't have a command economy?

I'm afraid I do, and you need to go back to economics 101.

Welcome to Russia circa. 1965. Those tractor production figures are looking great this quarter, Sergei.

^ Just to add - look at the 3E rogue. Can take combat feats to move around the battlefield, can use passive sneak attack etc. Rush past a rogue in battle to mob a mage - AoO and sneak attack makes the rogue feel like he's actually doing something.

I'm agreeing with Grom, in that the developers clearly couldn't make their minds up what a rogue is for. Even Vol agrees that a spellcaster / non-spellcaster divide would be OK. What is a rogue? Look to the source material. The Grey Mouser, Robin Hood, the weaselly little bloke who hangs out with Conan? All of them share the same attributes - guile, cunning, an aversion to wearing much armour, a reliance on agility and wit, archery, small weapons, stealth... the classic RPG rogue took this on board and added a discrete skill set suitable for gaming mechanics. From that you could build different rogues - the tech monkey with traps and locks, the light fighter a la Errol Flynn, the stealth-master assassin etc. But none of these things seem to transfer successfully across into the Dragon Age rogue. Dragon Age is still fairly vanilla fantasy, sort of late R/W Dark Ages / early Medieval with a sprinkling of Byzantine politics. I can't build the genuinely useful support character Volourn describes, nor the stealthy light fighter I'd actually like to play. The combat doesn't lend itself to rogues, either. A lot of it is mob / melee slogging, ideal for tanks and artillery but not skirmishing. In the scrum, the rogue is mediocre at best, like I say best placed to mop up mage-inflicted walking wounded. And as we've pointed out, as a challenge I'm sure the rogue will be fun. But I'm certain that this is an unintended consequence... the designers didn't want that seeing as a lot of players will be making a rogue with certain (perfectly reasonable) preconceptions then hitting the big red WTF button as, yet again, their character is slaughtered for daring entering the fray. Cheers MC

For the love of god Vol, think about what your saying with this "some classes should be crap it's just the way things are" schtick. Why would anyone play the class? Just think about it... imagine the character generation screen rubric: Warrior - Mighty champion of arms who launches himself into the enemy horde, a whirlwind of steel! Mage - Arcane master, besting armies with spells of fire and ice! Rogue - Well, someone's gotta be the gimp, go wake him up we need that barrel searched. Hmmm.

Vol, take your fanboy hat off for a second, the class balance is badly out of kilter. Your perceptions of what archetypical class should and shouldn't be able to do is fine, but it can't be applied to a game where you choose a class as a protagonist. All should have potent abilities. I've tinkered with all of them and the mage class is over-powered (OK, in a fun way) by comparison. The warrior is great. The rogue is... meh. I think the developers know this. As I've written previously, underpowered backstab, the ability to throw bombs and open containers full of old boots is trifling compared to the mobile artillery piece that is the Dragon Age mage class. I honestly expect a re-balancing patch, re-calibrating the stat requirements for rogue skills would be a start. Rogues need high STR (to wear armour, wield weapons... their most potent DW skills involve full size melee weapons), CUNNING and DEX. It's tough. Plus if they want to enjoy the bread and butter rogue skills they'll never have enough points for anything else, they'll only be average at everything (answer? Give rogues one point in stealing, traps / locks and poison at level 2 or 3 as a bonus. Warrior? point dump into STR and CON. Mage? point dump into MAGIC and WILL. Then race up the appropriate skill / spell tree. Rogue? Er... bit of this, bit of that unless you want to uber-specialise and still be a second rate melee fighter or gimpy archer. DA shows that making your own ruleset is tough, especially balancing. There are only three classes, there should have been none. Why, during the testing phase, didn't someone say to the lead designer, "look, this class is OK but compared to the other two it's.... crap." Or was there a bit of Emperor's New Clothes going on? Cheers MC

^ I think we can agree on something for a change, I hope so. Sadly, I think the five year development cycle might put a lot of people off! Personally, with the potential of DLC, I can see companies investing in game 'carcasses' you buy and add to as you wish, a sort of proto-MMORPG model applied to SP games. But to get there I think you need the fan base that a company like Bioware enjoys.

Money talks, bullsh*t walks... according to thison the Bio forums DA sold 450,000 console copies alone in D-Day +1 week. Blimey. Cheers MC

Actually, now I have the burning man form it's a little less irritating, still can't wait to get out. +1 to prime stats is the least compensation I deserve for enduring it.

^ Thank you both very much.

Can anybody link me a walkthru with a map please? I'm in something called Templar's Nightmare, which is aptly named. I utterly, utterly hate random holes, glowing doors, portals and other nonsense where I have to guess which one goes where. It's not a puzzle, it's a freakin chore.

^ It's really not my thing, it's making me feel like I'm long-sighted or something, where's the get me outta here button?

Am now trapped in the fade, the sort of multi-area puzzle / mini-game / maze that game designers lurve and Monte despises. Someone, please, spoil me the hell outta there ASAP. Cheers MC

Hmm, I'm not having any problems with the tactics slots, unless you counting me not getting < and > the right way round when it comes to glugging potions of course. Sometimes a character will do something irritating, but I'm glad I'm not playing a game on autopilot for a change. I'll reiterate - after NWN2 I seriously forgot what it was like to control a full party. Having said that, you do have to sit down and figure out tactics slots, it isn't particularly intuitive. Cheers MC

Please list Achievements Bioware Would Never Put In The Game: No. 1 - Never Read A Codex Entry - You completely ignore the plethora of FANTASAE INFURMASHUN that constantly spams the GUI.

Do the dwarves have plastic lobsters glued to the front of their heads too?

Ah, but Fighter, BG1 had that brilliant theft dynamic where you could get spotted, thus alerting the Flaming Fist and either getting a reputation hit or a ruck with the guard. This made burglary missions around Baldur's Gate (remember the museum) brilliant fun, using stealth, invisibility potions etc. And getting loot. They got rid of it for BG2 because of forum whining. Which was a shame. Cheers MC

I'm slowly working out how the rogue works in this game using Imoen Chick, mainly because I've not found Exotic Elf Bloke yet. The way Imoen Chick is configured is classic support role: very minor buffing, second rate archery and a bit of a backstab. Up to level 9 or 10 in fact all she's done for me is open locked containers, thus increasing my stock of first aid equipment. Thanks, love. However, and yes, there is a however... there are some uses. 1. She seems to level quite quickly. Why I'm not sure, am assuming XP is shared but mebbe she gets more for all the traps'n'locks she deals with. Anyhow, that's my perception. 2. Poison. With poison and the skill that allows you to increase your backstab arc she's pretty good at finishing off the critters already at low health through AoE spell damage, a bit fiddly but not un-useful. 3. Bombs. I have discovered firebombs and soulrot bombs. Imoen Chick is very good at stealthing over to that pesky bank of archers and / or mages and lobbing a bomb at them. So Imoen chick lobs bombs like an amateur 19th century anarchist, unlocks things and puts dying creatures out of their misery for my mage. Well, someone's gotta do it. Cheers MC

^ I see where the guy is coming from, to an extent. But this is a game. Some folks seem to want a fantasy-medieval life simulator. I don't. Hey why have those refugees got teeth? There's no dentists in Ferelden, right? I can't find one (etc). Cheers MC

Yeah, for the first time in a game, what I imagined a fireball should be has been realised. A big, angry blast of napalm that fubars everyone in it.

^ Meh, the Darkspawn don't exactly strike me as the disciplined, Blitzkrieg types. More like maraud, torture, feed, sleep, probably fight among themselves for a bit. Go backwards, torture a squirrel... they're like zombies with a bit of army training. Mages own this game, it's very mage-centric. My main character taunts, everyone attacks him, he uses the fortress shield ability (I am a one-warrior Roman army tortoise formation) and Morrigan dances around freezing, smashing, burning with glee. I am just the bait. Still enjoying it, very good game. It could have been truly great, but...