I'm feeling some de ja vu from Pelt'z post above and the one three above. However, a full on new edition of DA that quick is, hopefully, a good thing. I hate waiting for years for a game... but at the same time, I hope it doesn't feel rushed. I think they did a lot of planning on this stuff, though... I wouldn't be surprised if it had been in development in parallel with Origins.

Nah, its your age playing tricks on you

It's pretty amazing how retarded business people can be:

link

Basically, it says that they went all "what if we actually designed a GUI optimized for the PC, maybe we could actually sell a lot of games on it too!!" when releasing Dragon Age on PC and the two big consoles. I mean, wow, what marketing genius. Clearly it worked out as DA was a massive success (and a great game), but dude, I COULD HAVE TOLD THEM THAT YEARS AGO. PC gaming isn't freaking dead, but obviously it's not gonna be generating supermassive sales if you release multiplatform titles with obvious console control diseases and problems that haven't been changed in any way.

God. Let's hope they finally get it now. PC games should be made for PC, console game made for console. What a magical idea. /sarcasm

classic example of people ignoring, what, 10 years of examples? 20 years? That's always been the case. Dumbasses.

This is an interesting (short, lazy bastards) article on the role of perspective in DA and how the 'truth' can be very hard to determine - eveyone has an agenda of their own. Some spoilers on the overall stoyline so don't read it if you haven't finished the game yet.

http://greywardens.com/2010/03/the-trut ... the-truth/

I've gotten hold of a *cough* demo version of this game.

Gonna give it a whirl to see if it's any good.

....

First impressions:

The good
- The story and dialog is surprisingly likable and well presented.
- Dialog choices. Sweet and to-the-point. Hopefully they actually influence something though.
- Anti aliasing. Gives a good deal of warmth, especially zoomed out.
- Blood splatter. nice touch indeed. never seen that in another RPG before
- Zoomed in battles. Usually im not too fussed about theatrics / cinematics, but it's worth viewing a battle close-up at times.

The bad
- Fiddly. Camera FOV actually decreases the more you zoom out. Counter intuitive.
- NWN-esque faults with the concept of 3D. Ie, beams and columns that look fugly and block what you can see.
- Consoley-ness. Splashed messages and overtly large logos. Also over-simplified interfaces, e.g. Inventory. Tactics... WTF?!
- Pathfinding still not right after all these years.
- No formations?!
- Inconsequential death and damage post-battle.

The ugly
- Inconsequential environments. No longer are we playing on carefully and brilliantly drawn 2d canvas, where you knew each pixel was carefull painted (ok, not literally), but now we're playing on a something a computer mashed together. A synthetically generated 3d texture. Exploring is almost totally unrewarding.
- Getting dumped out of location of current quest and injected straight into the feet of the next person you need to speak to. Immersion killer. Getting spoon fed, then immediately stripped of characters.
- WTF?! Why did that Grey Warden dude kill that dipshit recruit!? WTF?! *facepalm* Makes absolutely no sense. That made me alt-f4.

Conclusion (so far)
It seems the good points are only skin deep. Much effort has been put into making the game pretty, perhaps mostly for console players, but not much effort has been put into breaking away from the NWN mold. I'll continue to play it for now, but I am finding it hard to adjust to so many inconsequential concepts:
- You go to many locations but theres no option to explore them
- You die or take damage but you respawn and regenerate
- Good story and presentation, but it's spoon-fed

Well i was kinda neutral negative about the game but even i have doubts that you and i played the same game, or you have the attention span of a sparrow .

-I think the graphics were fine, it created a believable atmosphere.
-The recruit was killed to protect the secret ritual of the wardens.
-Dude the tactics option is like a 100% must for the later battles and higher difficulties. The game will anal rape you later on if you don't learn how to use it.
-Pathfinding will never be fixed, ever.

Like Peltz said, the guy was killed because the fact that you drink darkspawn blood to become a Grey Warden isn't exactly something they like to see advertised.

As for the other remarks...I'm not sure what you mean about the console-ness. Dragon Age is by miles the least console-tweaked game I have played in ages. I agree that the inventory could be tweaked some, but by and large it's much better than most recent-ish RPG's. In fact, I think DA was developed specificall and primarily for the PC and then ported to consoles instead of the other way around (which led to for example the console versions of the game being bashed).

The death system is a decent midway between the bother of casting raise dead/resurrection/resting and refreshing spells/recasting/etc. and the whole "Oh look even though we all went down just minutes ago we're in great health again 5 seconds after the battle" systems. There is a consequence to dying: you'll suffer penalties to your stats and skills that will cumulate the more you go down. I've had party members with 13 penalties stacked in certain areas and they became useless. Went down in 10 seconds of a battle's start. So I wouldn't say it's inconsequential, exactly.

The tactics: it's entirely your personal preference to use them or not. Some people dig them (Peltz seems to, I know 11B did), others hate them. I personally turned off all tactics after a while since I hated it that my party members would be doing shit without me telling them to, draining their mana and stamina. I think you're like me in that regard and like the old school BG style better where you control almost everything your characters does. I'd rather spend every 10 seconds pausing and giving directions than seeing the AI fuck my battles up.

Some other notes:

- You'll be forced to make some pretty meaningful choices depending on your perspective/attitude/origin. From Satis' runthroughs to those of a friend and mine, I know that neither of our games ended the exact same way. And not everything is always what it seems in DA.
- Take the time to get to know your party members in camp. Some of them may seem rather bland and unwilling to talk at first, but even the lamest characters are surprisingly deep and complex.
- if you're breezing through the game, try playing on Hard. It's a worthy challenge.
- it's true that many areas don't offer much in terms of exploration. Some are really big and do somewhat fit that mold though.
- The lack of rendered backgrounds isn't ideal bt I though the areas in DA were sufficiently well made to counter that. Like Ostragar, which is really cool. Some places are more generic than others.
- the zoomed out view gives less FOV than then the zoomed in one? I presume you mean in the distance, straight ahead. That's true. But for a general strategic view in battle, zoomed out is the only way to go. I almost always played in zoomed out camera mode.

They're releasing new DLC soon, "Darkspawn Chronicles" where you play in a sort of alternate history in which your character died during the Joining, Allistair becomes the leader of the Grey Wardens and you play as a darkspawn commander bent on destroying the wardens and Ferelden.

Sounds...interesting. Potential for very cool or very sucky things there, I think. But seeing as I'm not big on paid DLC I'm gonna wait and see what the reviews bring first anyway.

I uninstalled DA after my last run through. I doubt I'll be buying the DLC. Though the first expansion was fun, it kinda lacked something. Here you don't even get to play your character from the first... I doubt I'd feel much of a connection. *shrug*

I think I may be looking at a new game purchase soon. I've pretty much played everything I care for to death.

Why is DA making a 2019,5 MB download?

Patch? No idea. Maybe you didn't start steam in a long time and it's now downloading the 'preperation pack' for the Awakening expansion?