Dragon Age 4 is a mess

The Plug

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Dragon Age Origins is better than every Mass Effect game.
You should replay Dragon Age: Origins again on the hardest mode this time. DA:O isn't better than Mass Effect 2 and it's scant better than Mass Effect.
playing battleship by launching probes at planets isn't ambitious enough for you? :ld: make sure you spend x hours collecting enough materials or party members will die in a scripted event leading into the last scenario btw. can't forget the riveting walking simulator loyalty mission for the fish breh or the daddy issues in space episode. last mission was great but lets just literally never talk about how dumb the collectors are

wild how folk just regurgitate arguments and don't even bother to understand where the emphasis is supposed to be:dead:

Suicide mission is a better showing of Choices and Consequences than anything Bioware ever did before and after that, because it was a culmination of all those actions you mentioned throughout the game, not just last-minute decisions that didn't really pan out to anything like all of Mass Effect 1. Launching probes was far shorter and less tedious than driving over the repeated planets of Mass Effect 1 with the poorly controlled Mako.
 

Legal

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Thread is hilarious. :mjlol:

While Mass Effect 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, we gotta pump the brakes on calling it one of the most ambitious games. I think people are conflating the math the game does in the background on who lives or dies in the final mission with the rest of the game being some sort of revolutionary collection of game design. The rest of the game, while incredibly fun to play, really is just a third person shooter with abilities. Doesn't make it any less of a great game, though.

Regarding Dragon Age, I'm not concerned about the game until we start seeing something other than concept art. As much as I've enjoyed the series, it really doesn't have a singular identity gameplay wise, and the decision to feature three different protagonists that are all crucial figures in the overall story has probably made actually writing a fourth game difficult as shyt, since at some point, some of these loose ends gotta get tied up. Doom 2016 went through what seemed like a billion different iterations, and it ended up being just fine, so I'm willing to wait.
 

The Plug

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I'll agree with Mass Effect having better characters. Better combat? He'll no. And ME2's combat was the worst in the series.
Mass Effect 2's combat is better than ME1, ME3 had better combat because it was a direct improvement. ME2 & ME3 both had better combat than Origins though.
 

xXMASHERXx

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Facts.

Not even trying to shyt on BioWare like that, I grew up on Baldur's gate and neverwinter, played KoToR and I don't even like Star Wars :mjlol:...them nikkas had next for real, but they fukked it up. I even repped Anthem until I couldn't stand that garbage anymore :gucci:

Bethesda's next. Morrowind was the truth :whew:...but they been dumbed downed doo doo shyt ever since. We'll see what they do with Starfield buuuuut.... :usure::manny:
:salute:
If there was ever a perfect example of going backwards, it's what Bethesda has done with the Elder Scroll series.
 

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You should replay Dragon Age: Origins again on the hardest mode this time. DA:O isn't better than Mass Effect 2 and it's scant better than Mass Effect.


Suicide mission is a better showing of Choices and Consequences than anything Bioware ever did before and after that, because it was a culmination of all those actions you mentioned throughout the game, not just last-minute decisions that didn't really pan out to anything like all of Mass Effect 1. Launching probes was far shorter and less tedious than driving over the repeated planets of Mass Effect 1 with the poorly controlled Mako.
Its a single player raid, which is dope. i think yal really letting points get blurred for the sake of defending what ME2 did well

choice, as ME presents it, has never been ambitious either. hell, jade empire was more ambitious in that regard :dead: nobody ever brings that game up tho
 

The Plug

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Its a single player raid, which is dope. i think yal really letting points get blurred for the sake of defending what ME2 did well

choice, as ME presents it, has never been ambitious either. hell, jade empire was more ambitious in that regard :dead: nobody ever brings that game up tho
Don't know what you mean by a raid.

Nobody brings up Jade Empire because it was KOTOR in Chinese mythology but was never as critically or commercially successful for Bioware to make sequels for it, and I'm typing that as someone that liked and beat Jade Empire twice bacc to bacc.
 

CarltonJunior

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Mass Effect 2's combat is better than ME1, ME3 had better combat because it was a direct improvement. ME2 & ME3 both had better combat than Origins though.

This is kind of a stylistic thing, DA: O has way deeper combat than both ME2 and 3, but it's a true cRPG system and it takes a bit of research and work to fully understand it and use it. A lot more tactical.

ME2 and 3 are straight up shooters, and most people would rather shoot shoot shoot instead of reading walls upon walls of text to find out what abilities they should get and figuring out what gear they should have.
 

The Plug

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This is kind of a stylistic thing, DA: O has way deeper combat than both ME2 and 3, but it's a true cRPG system and it takes a bit of research and work to fully understand it and use it. A lot more tactical.

ME2 and 3 are straight up shooters, and most people would rather shoot shoot shoot instead of reading walls upon walls of text to find out what abilities they should get and figuring out what gear they should have.
Generally speaking these were my thoughts in my final playthrough of Origins back in 2018:

I've already beat Origins like 3 or 4 times on the Xbox 360 years ago so most of this will be about DLC that I didn't play like Awakening, Witch Hunt, Leliana's Song & Golems of Amgarrak.

One thing I do notice after playing Baldur's Gate and quickly jumping back into Origins is how "tactics" work. There is less use of positioning in Origins since you can't necesarilly pick the formations of your party like you can in BG. Since you have many fights in the game that start right after you enter dialogue, you party gets teleported to where dialogue/cutscene happens and then a fight breaks out right in front of the enemy, many times leaving your party members with lower constitution or lower stats at a disadvantage.

Nightmare is kinda easy in the base game especially when you have mages. In the beginning there is a challenge and if you fight enemies you shouldn't for your level, they will spank you, but other than that, it's far too easy. The game just buffs the hell out of the health of enemies but it is still too easy. I also started using mana clash this playthrough, something I didn't in previous playthroughs and it was outright killing the more powerful mages, demons and mana users.
The first Cauthrien fight is pretty much impossible on Nightmare. She killed everyone in my party in one or two hits each and can resist or is immune to every attack.
I remember when I played this portion on Normal years ago, it was a tough battle but manageable, here the health buff is so ridiculous that it's near impossible to take her down.
It is admittedly worse, that if you do fight her the 2nd time, she is not this overpowered.

DLC is easy on Nightmare too until you fight The Harvester in Golems of Amgarrak. That fight just sucks ass, the Harvester is slow but hits hard as hell and somehow your weapons constantly miss it. He will spawn more helpers by doing an AOE attack that can take out nearly half of all your allies health in one hit. You are also given some of the worst allies in the entire game. One Golem, one rogue, and one warrior but you are not allowed to respec or choose any of their skills because they're fully leveled up.
These minions that he summons can outright one shot I and my companions on nightmare. The boss stops taking damage when the screen turns red and you have to press a switch to make him take damage again.
The entire fight is quite boring with the main strategy I used being constant healing and kiting with my main character mage. I can't fathom how this fight would've turned out if I wasn't playing a mage.

Worst of all there is a 2nd phase for this boss fight. The boss is smaller and moves around more, and now you can't turn off the switch, it turns off on its own after a time. Now more mobs consantly respawn and they're even faster before and do enough damage to kill you & your allies in two hits.

Awakening is the best DLC, I actually quite like it and feel that it has far less fluff than the main game and Amaranthine is quite a cool city to explore compared to the rest of the game.
Awakening introduces a bunch of talents for the main classes and new specializations. The Rogue Legionnaire is Overpowered as hell, being able to ignore all magical attacks and take no damage at all to your health is OP as fukk.

I used a few mods (credit to lilura):
Advanced tactics
Extra dog slot
Make console commands visible
DA2 Mabari
DA2 Qunari
Faster Combat
GT Core Rules Pack

Back when I played origins years ago, the only mod I used we're armor mods and a mod that allowed you to break chests because I didn't want to constantly carry a rogue around.

I also ran into an annoying bug in this Ultimate Edition that I didn't before. A memory leak bug that made the game keep crashing which is annoying as hell.

DA:O was an enjoyable experience in total. The middle really is a slog. I don't like the Fade anymore, I don't like the dungeon crawling in the Dwarven Thaigs, they look far too similar. I probably won't be playing the game again anytime soon, but I have played it a lot so that's good enough.

Playthrough over a span of two months.

DA: Origins - 50 hours
DA: Awakening - 14:13:19
Leliana's Song - 1:21:58
Witch Hunt - 1:41:50
Golems of Amgarrak - 1:35:53
 

CarltonJunior

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Generally speaking these were my thoughts in my final playthrough of Origins back in 2018:

I've already beat Origins like 3 or 4 times on the Xbox 360 years ago so most of this will be about DLC that I didn't play like Awakening, Witch Hunt, Leliana's Song & Golems of Amgarrak.

One thing I do notice after playing Baldur's Gate and quickly jumping back into Origins is how "tactics" work. There is less use of positioning in Origins since you can't necesarilly pick the formations of your party like you can in BG. Since you have many fights in the game that start right after you enter dialogue, you party gets teleported to where dialogue/cutscene happens and then a fight breaks out right in front of the enemy, many times leaving your party members with lower constitution or lower stats at a disadvantage.

Nightmare is kinda easy in the base game especially when you have mages. In the beginning there is a challenge and if you fight enemies you shouldn't for your level, they will spank you, but other than that, it's far too easy. The game just buffs the hell out of the health of enemies but it is still too easy. I also started using mana clash this playthrough, something I didn't in previous playthroughs and it was outright killing the more powerful mages, demons and mana users.
The first Cauthrien fight is pretty much impossible on Nightmare. She killed everyone in my party in one or two hits each and can resist or is immune to every attack.
I remember when I played this portion on Normal years ago, it was a tough battle but manageable, here the health buff is so ridiculous that it's near impossible to take her down.
It is admittedly worse, that if you do fight her the 2nd time, she is not this overpowered.

DLC is easy on Nightmare too until you fight The Harvester in Golems of Amgarrak. That fight just sucks ass, the Harvester is slow but hits hard as hell and somehow your weapons constantly miss it. He will spawn more helpers by doing an AOE attack that can take out nearly half of all your allies health in one hit. You are also given some of the worst allies in the entire game. One Golem, one rogue, and one warrior but you are not allowed to respec or choose any of their skills because they're fully leveled up.
These minions that he summons can outright one shot I and my companions on nightmare. The boss stops taking damage when the screen turns red and you have to press a switch to make him take damage again.
The entire fight is quite boring with the main strategy I used being constant healing and kiting with my main character mage. I can't fathom how this fight would've turned out if I wasn't playing a mage.

Worst of all there is a 2nd phase for this boss fight. The boss is smaller and moves around more, and now you can't turn off the switch, it turns off on its own after a time. Now more mobs consantly respawn and they're even faster before and do enough damage to kill you & your allies in two hits.

Awakening is the best DLC, I actually quite like it and feel that it has far less fluff than the main game and Amaranthine is quite a cool city to explore compared to the rest of the game.
Awakening introduces a bunch of talents for the main classes and new specializations. The Rogue Legionnaire is Overpowered as hell, being able to ignore all magical attacks and take no damage at all to your health is OP as fukk.

I used a few mods (credit to lilura):
Advanced tactics
Extra dog slot
Make console commands visible
DA2 Mabari
DA2 Qunari
Faster Combat
GT Core Rules Pack

Back when I played origins years ago, the only mod I used we're armor mods and a mod that allowed you to break chests because I didn't want to constantly carry a rogue around.

I also ran into an annoying bug in this Ultimate Edition that I didn't before. A memory leak bug that made the game keep crashing which is annoying as hell.

DA:O was an enjoyable experience in total. The middle really is a slog. I don't like the Fade anymore, I don't like the dungeon crawling in the Dwarven Thaigs, they look far too similar. I probably won't be playing the game again anytime soon, but I have played it a lot so that's good enough.

Playthrough over a span of two months.

DA: Origins - 50 hours
DA: Awakening - 14:13:19
Leliana's Song - 1:21:58
Witch Hunt - 1:41:50
Golems of Amgarrak - 1:35:53

Even with some of the balancing issues and complaints in this post it details what I mean about how deep DA: O is. The combat of ME2 or 3 has nowhere near the amount of depth, but it is fun and simple
 

The Plug

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Even with some of the balancing issues and complaints in this post it details what I mean about how deep DA: O is. The combat of ME2 or 3 has nowhere near the amount of depth, but it is fun and simple
I don't see that as deep at all, it has breadth. Origins was just as simple, as a matter of fact, the type of combat is mostly automated.
 

CarltonJunior

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I don't see that as deep at all, it has breadth. Origins was just as simple, as a matter of fact, the type of combat is mostly automated.

It's automated if you set up the strategies you want your party members to take, which is inherently deep. You are thinking of and addressing situations before they even happen. Plus there's a ridiculous amount of abilities and builds.

There's no much to ME other than shoot the target, take cover and use an ability.
 
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