Hey there! Lately, I've stopped chipping away at the immensity of Assassin's Creed Odyssey and its DLCs and went back to simpler, more interesting times. And multiplayer games.
I went and bought Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition and Dragon Age II as a bundle on Steam, and installed what is considered one of BioWare's greatest achievements...until I didn't. The game has problems running on modern systems, especially on Windows 10 apparently, so after playing with compatibility settings. After that, the DLC was not enabled, so I had to locate a file named AddIns.xml, and replace some lines within it to actually have all the content. After these major setbacks, the game ran quite well, barring the occasional crash, which I've come to expect from older games anyway.
After all that technical troubleshooting, I started the main campaign on the Normal difficulty and made a female human rogue named Kaileena (a name which stuck with me ever since playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within). So far, my character is at home, in her family's fortress, meeting guests and getting the dog out of the kitchen. One of the guests is a Grey Warden, an order of warriors who fight against the darkspawn, an evergrowing army of monstrosities, which, from time to time, is lead against humans by an archdemon, leading to an event called a Blight. This Warden is called Duncan and he's here to find recruits for his order, as they are not very numerous, and he has his eye on a guardsman of the castle and, of course, the main character. Whatever your stance is on this, your father is against it. You do some chores around the castle, talk to people, get your aforementioned dog and can try to shag the son of a noble or their elf slave, a one night stand which is interrupted when the army of another noble storms your castle and kills everyone but you, your dog and Duncan.
After that grim intro, you go with Duncan to Ostagar, the Grey Warden fortress, where you are to become one and help fight against the darkspawn. Every major faction is here, so you can familiarize with them. You go for a quest in the nearby marshes, discover some sidequests, learn how this world works and then the game throws you off into the deep end: your frontline at Ostagar is fighting a losing battle, Loghain, the general, betrays you and the king for his own interests and orders the army to retreat, leaving everyone else for dead. You and your companions in your party are saved by a family of apostates (illegal mages) and then the game tells you to go and try to convince every major faction to unite under the only two remaining Grey Wardens (you and your companion, Alistair), all the while, Loghain took the crown for himself as a reagent and put a bounty on your head. At this point you are free to go to any location on the map and do quests in the hopes of stopping the Blight in its tracks.
That was a summary of the first 2-3 hours of the game, which serves as an intro to the world of the game. Now, let's switch our attention to the rest of the game. Graphically, the game still looks pretty good, ignoring the low resolution textures which stick out from time to time. The animations are a bit stiff, especially in dialogue scenes, but they do the job well enough so you stop noticing them after a while. On the other hand, the combat animations are pretty nice and are helped by the particle effects. There is some jank in the combat itself though, as it is a streamlined version of the real time combat with a pause button to issue orders, based on Baldur's Gate. You will need to micromanage your party wwhen in open conflict, as they are not very bright on their own, even though you can customize their behaviour from your journal.
If you ever get tired of questing, you can return to your camp, which acts as a hub for the game. Here you can enchant your weapons, talk to the various followers and, depending on your choices, influence their standing with you. If you get them to outright hate you, they'll leave the camp and they'll be gone from your current playthrough. You just can't please everyone, so you'll have to pick favourites. This goes for the story too, as there are many decisions which will affect the different factions you are trying to bring to your side in the main conflict of the game.
I have not finished the game yet, but so far it has been a treat, being so well written and thought out, but I've fell off for a while, spending more time in multiplayer games with my friends (gotta get that social life somehow, I guess).
Images: 1, the rest are personal screenshots.
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