Monte Carlo

Am having fun making butt-ugly characters (grotesque dwarfs - huzzah!), but not a lot else to do but gaze at the skill trees.

Maybe it's my fairly new and insanely powerful Cray supercomputer, but "Updating DirectX November 2007 (this may take a while)" really is... taking a while. Am wondering it is in fact a cutscene designed as a developer in-joke.

^ Good idea Let's live blog our fun with the CC! 85% downloaded, wait out for exciting field reports regarding our progress.

Yeah, I'm downloading it from Bio... am getting 229KB / Second. That's about twenty minutes for me. Am going to try to make a face that looks like me but handsome.

^ Yeah Maria is employing a bit of a la Monte style hyperbole there. The PC dumb-ass sword-toting hero gently taps the dragon on the side of it's swede once in the entire combat. It's quite clear that snarky mage chick decides to end the boy's play-time using magic, an inversion of what Maria describes. Now it's finished, I see shades of 300 (looking over the rim of his shield at the horde.... "steady") and yeah, the muzak is a bit meh. Then again it is punctuated by BG-1 homage type choral stuff. Which is cool. Lastly, Morrigan in that, for some reason reminds me of Miranda Richardson. Cheers MC

Yeah, I take the point and can see why Oner thinks it's a bit cliched, but then again it's a difficult genre in which to be genuinely original. It's vanilla sub-Tolkein fantasy guys, what else do they have to work with? Characters armed with senitent pieces of tropical fruit? A trailer that concentrates on the inventory system? Personally, I don't think a spell whereby you turn an enemy into a walking IED is a cliche, I think it's pretty darn cool. Yeah, the red-haired chick = Legolas with a bit of Crouching Tiger... about it, but hey those are cool character tropes - who wouldn't want to be like them in a game character? Stenn is the Terminator with dreadlocks - er, that's pretty cool from where I'm sat too. I find myself in the deeply ironic position of defending Bioware marketing, but sometimes you can be a bit too clever with this stuff for your own good. This trailer was polished, with high production values and exciting combat... it sends a deeply positive message about the development goals of the people who made the game. Whether the reality of those goals are met remains to be seen, but for me that trailer was pretty much on the money. Cheers MC

What's so bad about it? For starters, it doesn't have Marilyn whatisname caterwauling in the background mixed with scenes of pixellated boobies and unconvincing blood fountains.

The 'Ashes' trailer looks great, there's no getting away from that. I don't think it's meant to do anything more than show off that it's an epic, vanilla fantasy party-based game with lots of fighting in it*. In that respect it's very efficacious. Cheers MC * The Urk Hai dude looking extremely buff but taken out by one arrow - it's a bit Indiana Jones and the guy with the scimitar if you remember the scene.

Still confused about this 'mandatory character', being old-fashioned I took mandatory to mean, well, mandatory. How can you have three NPCs you've chosen in your party of four plus a 'mandatory' NPC?

For the record, I don't know where you got this. I thought it was quite clear at this stage that you're more than able to attempt to solo the game (save a few points here and there). When people say "mandatory NPC" they are not talking about that NPC taking up one of your 4 party slots. In which case I'm confused.

^ Oh, and my guess for annoying mandatory NPC is either Alistair or the Imoen-Exposition chick. Why? 'Cuz they both appear in most gameplay vids I've seen and because I already can't bear either of them (such is my luck).

^ You just don't get it, Al, do you? One mandatory NPC (in a party, it will be remembered, of only four) is a mandatory NPC too many. Hell, I played BG2 first time around with *gasp* no Imoen. It was a great game, I actually survived missing all the extra dialogue and plot stuff. It wasn't as if I didn't know she wasn't important as the plot forced me to rescue her (I love how they handled that, remember the dialogue that went 'I've rescued you but there's no room in my party right now,' and you abandon her to Spellhold). If a game needs a 'plot critical' NPC who's with you for the entire bloody game, then the plot needs editing, probably with an axe. A join-a-long NPC for an adventure or two for plot critical reasons... sure. One that radically alters my party composition and who I might utterly hate and have to suffer for 80 hours? Bad call. Cheers MC

OK, death as a game mechanic (what a strange thing to be typing!). Death is there for a number of reasons = 1. Immersion. Death is a logical consequence of being battered, stabbed, fried, shot, immolated, skewered (etc). 2. Punishment. For not winning. 3. Learning / reward. "Hum, I died that last time, better try a new approach. If I don't die then I don't have to schlep back to a temple / use a precious scroll or spell." 4. Managing the problem. That is to say, "Bob The Barbarian is full of arrows... and he weighs 300 lbs without armour.... hmmmm." I like managing problems. Of all of these, 3. is easily the most important. How you manage death is a matter for the game designer. But it should be an option on the difficulty slider. Lose an NPC? Tough. Problem is, Bio is so attached to it's marvellous NPCs they're worried that we'll miss a nugget of dialogue. And herein lies the rub. You see, some of the developers would rather be novelists. They don't want you to miss any of the amazing plot, characters and dialogue they've created, even if you don't really want it. A game isn't a novel, you should be able to miss stuff, die, wander around, die again, dip in and out of plot A, Quest B and Story Arc C. At it's worst, a game like Dragon Age might turn into a PC gaming version of HAL. "You don't want to die in this quest, Dave." Or, "You really should take this NPC, Dave." It all comes back to the eternal issue on this forum - what I like you very well might not. Which is cool, it's the way of the world. The developer needs to try to please both without ruining the end product, and to that end I don't see why dynamic, custom difficulty sliders are too much of a problem. If one player wants a NO DEATH EVER! option, I couldn't care less. They should be able to play it that way, it's hardly a difficult piece of coding and heck most recent Bio games have it anyhow as a default. Cheers MC

^ Nah, that's for ligthweights. Instead, if you die, a piece of malware deletes your operating system and empties your bank account. Or something. As for Maria, it was inevitable that one day we would have something in common. It's worrying. What next?

I don't mean to dredge this up but it really caught my interest. I found this while I was looking for threads on New Vegas. I love COH. Its the only game I really play any more. I'd definitely be up for a game man, my username is: Testprofile001 Look forward to playing a game with ya. I'm on two or three evenings a week for an hour here and an hour there so I'll keep an eye out.

P.S. Why is the addition of a dynamic, meaningful difficulty slider so difficult for developers? There are a gazillion options for camera / gore / graphics / etc. Why not the same for difficulty as opposed to EASY / CORE / TOUGH / SILLY?

^ That's how they manage it in DA - if you get killed you suffer a passive penalty to a stat from a significant injury, a bit like a spell effect from D&D like disease (etc). I sort of mitigates against the crappy no-death system. Like the man said, Bioware combat for the past few games has been like it's cutscenes - a given. Having said that, if there's no resurrection or raise dead in DA it's the least worst solution - I'm expecting modders to rectify all the console twitch-boy compromises pretty soon, like they do with almost every other PC game out there. By early New Year there will be total conversions, perma-death patches, make-it-more-like-D&D mods and all the rest of it. This is one of the exciting things about the game. I've pre-ordered it, I'll be getting it a few days after the US forumites so I'll be going dark from release date Cheers MC

Sure, and hey, why not do away with hit points and armour and like... every combat mechanic? They just get in the way of my progression to the final cutscene. Just have a quick slot marked WIN. I just think it should be an option.

The combat, to me, looked like it had plenty of options and properly implemented pause and play. I take the point that the guys were playing like complete tools, but nonetheless it was a very early part of the game. I'm cranking up the difficulty slider anyway. I also liked the shield bash options, dirty fighting, hey even the combat magic looked like fun (friendly fire = ON). I strongly suspect that the patient, more experienced gamer will have a lot of fun solo-ing or PC +1 NPC'ing the game. Criticism seems to be too tactical, not tactical enough, too console-ish... like the three bears, to me it's the last bowl of porridge that feels just about right. Mana doesn't trouble me in the slightest, either, in fact the mages look like even at low-level they are bringing something to the party which is a common criticism of D&D. Lasty, the death-as-a-minor inconvenience style Bio has brought in is rubbish. I hate it in NWN2 and I hate it in DA. It should be a simple option to switch on perma-death until raised in a temple. Cheers MC

The two slackers narrating the video might be annoying, but they do come up with some gems... Slacker one: Whoah, traps. Evetyone's on fire. Slacker two: Hey, we've got Mordeicai the Mage. Slacker two (deadpan): Yeah, but he's on f*****g fire. I will happily concede from that video that the combat system is BG + Diablo x tactics = pretty cool.

The Giant Bomb video is the first time I've seen the party inventory system, which I have to say I like a lot. As for the big yellow circles at the feet of your party members, can you turn them off?

Actually, it was a turning point for poor Maria, who finally realised that quite a few of us are interested in stuff that she didn't dream that any normal, sentient human being might be interested in. Like nerdy AI / gaming mechanics around combat.

I don't have 'turning points', rather the game BENDS TO MY WILL. There will be a +5 Panzer in this game, mark my words.

Ah! The power of beer! I've been thinking about it. Presumably you can't post any old stats (i.e. I killed fifteen dragons... WITH A SPOON!). No, there will be a connection to some sort of little programme in your game that uploads these stats directly onto the site, I presume. You are allowing Bioware INTO YOUR COMPUTER. So it's a marketing / data harvesting opportunity with a five-dollar's worth of development flash game attached. Honestly, these games people are evil, twisted geniuses of the highest order. Cheers MC

:: sigh :: I'm not making any pun whatsoever. "When 'X' is at home" is an English (as in the country, not the language) colloquial expression for when you don't know what / who something / someone is. For example, "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Who's he when he's at home?" I apologise for using a colloquialism on an international forum, OTOH now you know a common English expression in case you ever visit. I don't know if you've noticed, but I've actually been extraordinarily enthusiastic about elements of DA recently. I do try to be fair (ish). None of this detracts from my genuine confusion as to what that website is all about and how it adds value to the game. It's a crappy beta site where you post stats about your game and endure what looks like the South Park version of Dragon Age. My question is, quite simply, why? Why is anyone interested in how many monsters Bob Smith from Little Rock, Arkansas (when he's at home) killed? Or who was in his party? Remain genuinely baffled. Really. Cheers MC