Santa brought me DAO. It is an intriguing, fun game. At least that is what i can say from the first few hours of gameplay. What i know for sure is that i won't depart from Oblivion because of it. I'll probably beat it once. And again in the future, if there won't be anything to play, and i'll feel like. It just isn't open enough for me to really love it enough to mod it. I mean, if i am about to spend hours modding a game, i know i have to be really passionate about it. Actually, i got some really interesting ideas for my mod playing DAO.

And i did play a demo of The Withcher ... just didn't like it that much.

I got DAO for Christmas too, so far it seems good.. only problem is my crappy Computer runs it worse than Oblivion. Personally I like games that truly give you a reason to beatt he game over and over again so that you can:
go different paths
get different dialogue
find hidden areas/secrets/caches

stuff like that. Deus Ex does those last two really well, and Bioware/Obsidian/The Witcher type games do the first one well. With Oblivion it is largely just:
complete the quests once, and enjoy them but...... be forced to trudge through them with later characters just for roleplay/rewards. Nothing really changes in Oblivion's story, no options, cool solutions, or paths really.*

In regards to "The Witcher Demo" From what I heard that only covers the first town/village, it gets much better in the next towns you should really give it a try.

*EDIT: That being said: "Oblivion has its own merits", "they're different types of games", "blahblahblah".

I was hoping for DAO to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I've pretty much seen what there is to see and am coming back to Oblivion and FO3 now. I'll probably try new playthroughs of DAO (and Mass Effect) with new characters/choices after I build a new PC next year. Bethesda could learn a lot from Bioware about how to write interesting characters, dialog, and multipath quests, but BioWare games simply aren't the neverending open worlds that Bethesda makes.

I don't see why or how it would. One might as well say, "You baseball lovers out there: now that there's a new football team in XYZ city, don't you think people everywhere will be losing interest in baseball?"

If DA:O was of the same genre as Morrowind and Oblivion, I'd say you have a point. But it isn't. Though nominally all RPGs, DA:O is a very different animal from the Elder Scrolls series. DA:O won't find much traction among lovers of a go-anywhere, build your own character type, who can proceed through the world either following the plot or telling it where to stick it.

There is a slight problem here. Dragon Age: Origins is a Bioware game, and as such unfortunately only offers "Bioware choices".

Just to see how much actual changes in game, I've played through it twice with completely opposite characters. The results weren't pretty. There is only one in game choice with an actual consequence on the gaming path. All other choices merely affect which text in the ending slideshow you get (if at all), or are similar to Andel Indarys' "Do you want the sword, or the staff?"

In RPGs there's something which I would call "plot points". Example given in the Witcher fighting the Beast, or aquiring a certain spell book, etc. And then there is the road between those plot points. In Witcher the actual road between the plot points is altered a bit depending on your choices. In Dragon Age: Origins however this never happens, with one single exception. The plot points itself rarely change, and then only as questions if you like to fight Dude A, or Dude B (which just happen to have exactly the same strength whatsoever). And the road to them is pretty much (with one exception) always the same. The only thing that will actually change is the text in the end slideshow.

What's Dragon Age: Origin is good at is offering the illusion of choice, this however does not translate into different paths. "Bioware choices" .

Best hope you could have, however unlikely it is, would be that Obsidian will be making the sequel or expansion. I kind of doubt this will happen.

I played Dragon Age through twice, once with a warrior tank-type character, the second with a mage. On the second play through I added some mods that had shown up, but they were relatively minor (texture enhancers, mostly). I feel like there is a rather heavy bias in favor of magic in Dragon Age so my second play through was a lot more interesting, especially when I managed to unlock my mage's Arcane Warrior specialization. I will say that combat in Dragon Age can be a furious, fun, but also frustrating experience. It seems like you simply can't run an effective group without a mage for crowd control and unless you blow all your money on components for health poultices, you're kind of stuck keeping a mage with you for healing anyway. Ranged combat also seems under-developed, but so far the archery mods I've tried are double-edged swords because apparently the game engine limits you to "what you do to the player characters applies to NPC's as well". So if you boost the player character's bow damage by 50%, enemy damage also goes up accordingly and enemy archers in Dragon Age do waaaaay too much damage the way it is. :swear:

I agree it's tough to compare Bioware and Bethesda games, they both produce excellent titles, but their strengths lie in different aspects of game design. I have been playing Oblivion since release and the only other RPG I've played since then is Dragon Age (and I don't think Borderlands counts...). I enjoyed it very much, especially the banter among the characters in my party, but I found myself constricted by the limited game world. Every time I opened my world map I kept thinking about all that empty space between the various towns and landmarks and how in Oblivion you could explore all of that... I was so spoiled on open-world, sandbox style gameplay that a more linear game like Dragon Age felt sort of static by comparison. I just love the idea that you can start up a new character in Oblivion and literally go anywhere in the playable game world. Some people find it overwhelming to not have a "path" but I find it liberating.

I've played through Oblivion more times than I can remember so I know the places, characters, and quests like the back of my hand, so having the original IP of Dragon Age to explore was a welcome change. The world Bioware created is pretty well-layered and if you actually listen to every cut scene and read all the codex entries the game world is very rich and detailed indeed. To be honest I'd probably still be playing Dragon Age as my primary RPG fix if it weren't for the Oblivion mod community. I do a lot of lurking on these forums and rarely speak up, but this community of modders deserves a lot of praise and acclamation. I don't know what I'd do without mods like Deadly Reflex, FCOM, LAME, Unique Landscapes and Cobl. Even smaller, less world-changing mods like Alive Waters, Tamriel Travelers, Bank of Cyrodiil, and the texture replacer mods keeps Oblivion feeling like a fresh, evolving world. I have a long list of mods that I love and another list just as long of mods that I still want to try. The fact that new, innovative mods keep coming at a fairly regular pace means that there are still players out there willing to give a new mod a test drive.

So okay, this post doesn't really answer the original question, but whatever. I wanted to get my $0.02 out there. I wouldn't worry about losing people to the Dragon Age club, I'd spend my time wondering about what fantastic new creations this community is going to put out next!

But then, with respect, Bethesda wouldn't be producing free form, more or less open-ended games. It's precisely because they have several thousand NPCs in Morrowind that the good LGNPC folks were able to spiff up NPCs in various towns. (I helped out on two of 'em, myself.) As for multipath quests: Bioware, seriously? Bioware does fake-multipath quests very well, where an apparent separate path leaves for a chapter than circles back into where you would have been with another path, but they don't do it often, and they don't use a lot of party abilities (such as bribery, threats, diplomacy, etc) to impact choice.

I'm not arguing that gamesas is perfect--far, far from it. I really dislike several major development choices in Oblivion, but overall, I think they did a pretty good job of it, given the limitations of a very different RPG sub-genre than Bioware's games.

All very recognizable, I too play alot of games (once or twice depending on the replay factor) and then uninstall it again. Although I'm not so sure I'll be coming back to DA:O after a few playthroughs, the story (so far) is nice but very predictable. More than half of the shrouded in secrecy things weren't really that hard to figure out, yet the dialogue and plot suggests you aren't ment to know such things at such an early stage. :wacko:

Still, so far I'm enjoying it. But I haven't dropped Oblivion all together just for DA:O, I still take breaks to help the needy (*hint* TheNiceOne *hint* ) and to mod. I don't expect to be modding for it either, simply because I can't afford yet another source of time loss.

Overall the game reminds me of Baldur's Gate and NWN, the former of which I played till my computer and CDs broke. Saying I played the entire game more than two dozen times (some of which with large expansions/mods like BigPicture) would be an understatement. NWN I didn't really like, dunno why, at the time it just seemed like a poor clone of Baldur's Gate (to me ofcourse) and I found other games that were more to my liking. I guess I should try playing it again in the future, just to experience it. There's also Icewind Dales but I found it incredible short and a stripped down version of Baldur's Gate (with the lack of companions found, not created at the start).

One last thing that came to mind, something I found rather annoying on the long run. It seems you cannot skip dialogue on a sentence base, or rather, if you skip part of a dialogue you often skip more than the current subtitles show. I know I probably shouldn't be skipping it but everything just seems to go so slow, I can't imagine how it will be once I finished the game. True, a different character will have different dialogue but most stuff will still be the same. :shrug:

-kyoma

I got DA:O myself for Christmas, tried it and Im kinda finding it hard to play really. Combats great, but after 10-20 minutes of running around to talk to someone for 5 mins then running back again... starts to get boring. Too much talking, well I've only played the first few bits but /sigh.

Perhaps multipath was not the right word, but Bioware's quests are certainly multi-solution. Almost any villain given a name in DAO you can either side with them or talk them out of opposing you - and its not just a single speech skill check in many cases, but a multi-step negotiation. In contrast, Oblivion is much more open as a world, but once you start down a quest there is really only one way to complete it and only one side of any given conflict that you can align yourself with. Bioware also has the most refined romance subplots in mainstream gaming.

So what you're saying, if I understand you correctly, is that combat is a solution you can't get around in gamesas's titles, while you can in Bioware's, provided it's a boss? I can't speak to DA:O--I'm still working my way through it--though in earlier Bioware titles, such as the BG series and KotoR, you couldn't work around the bosses. Perhaps that has changed with DA:O. Though I agree, if combat's on the boards for a gamesas game, you don't usually have an option to get out of it. On the other hand, the most subtle application of this was in BIS' Planescape: Torment, where if you were intelligent or wise enough, you could get around quite a few battles in the first two-thirds of the game. Ironically, some players have complained that PS:T had "no combat," when it certainly had plenty--if you simply chose to configure a dumb jock.

As for romance subplots...well, Bioware was the first to use them, and they're welcome to keep them, as far as I'm concerned. I find them freakishly funny, a few lines strung together out of a cliched situation or two. Good for a laugh, but about as deep as a comic book compared to War and Peace.

That said, I've been a big fan of Bioware's BG and BG2 since they first came out. I actually saw BG in its alpha stages at the Virgin Games office outside LA, before VG International closed the US offices, and Bioware found a partner in Interplay. The visuals at the time consisted of Minsc running through an empty town, screaming one line over and over, until he entered an inn. That was it. But for character development, plot growth (so with some fantasy tropes), a good combat and magic system and well tailored world, BG2 was a great experience. And mods have kept it fresh over the years.

I'm only about halfway through the game but already I've run into a number of named villains I had to fight: Based on this, I wouldn't be surprised if there were quite a few more later on in the game too.

It's funny, I'm the opposite. Too many battles against lots of enemies, all of which are the same. Not enough talking, too much killing. I'm more of a Planescape Torment type of RPGer, I have still yet to find a game which I became so involved with the characters. I like to talk to just about everyone and manipulate them if possible, even the random thug in the alley. Not that I didn't enjoy the game, I did, but I found the junk mob fights to be tedious. I could win them all without cheating, but the "enter room, get sacked by a pile of junk mobs, kill them, enter next room, repeat..." got boring after a while. I ended up binding the kill cheat to a mouse button so I could just slay all the boring mobs instantly and get on with the plot. Again not because I couldn't win the fight, I found every battle to be winable, and fought all of the bosses legit. It's just the hoards of stupid minions that got on my nerves.

Having read all of this thread I don't actually think I'll bother with DA:O now, even though its only ?16.95 on Amazon. Seems a bit cheap for a relatively new game, perhaps thats because its not as good as its cracked up to be. So thanks everybody for the constructive critique of this game (man, I love this community) but I don't think its going to be for me, although I did REALLY love BG.
I'll continue with Oblivion (4 years on and still haven't done the Thieves Guild Quest - what's wrong with me?!)

I may try The Witcher tho...

In order for oblivions quests to become anything meaningful, the same perspective is required that is needed to play sandbox games in the first place. Self guided sense of purpose. When thought of that way, any quest in an open world RPG like Oblivion, or morrowind, can become epic, so to speak. I truly felt like just an obsever from High Rock land who stumbled into a huge mess at just the WRONG time. Low and behold i liked the tension, therefore, I lended my hand to help the land.




The very thing that allows for such in depth creation of dialog branches and quest branching is what takes away from freedom, scale, and other optional indulgences in games. Resources. Developers don't have enough time to completely renovate styles, as we all wish they could, to please us all. In Oblivion, much is left to the player to infer and assume and reason. I love that. It's not based entirely on presentation of story and paths. You choose your path when you exit character creation.....


Aside from all that, i have played and enjoyed many linear rpg's like Diablo 1 & 2, Mass Effect, The Witcher, Baldurs Gate 1 & 2 (1 was far better in terms of story). Yet they do lack almost everything i enjoy about Oblivion, most notably freedom and rewards. I could play through mass effect in it's entirety without becoming very concerned about my gear. And character creation/customization was sub-par.

I do agree with stories being shown through the eyes of character, tis so much more believeable. Factual '3rd party'(as i like to call it) information in games makes no sense to me. It screams to me, "we couldn't figure out how to fit this part of the story into the game, so......., read it in encyclopedia format!!!!!!". Where has true presentation and deliverance gone. Mass effect did well with animating emotion, DA: O with voice, yet most games fall behind when presenting me with a truely believable lore engrossed story that i so desperately crave. I want to feel as though i am watching myself become enveloped into a scene when i play, by what means? PLAYING!! I don't want to go out of my way to catch the the lore, or at least the gist. I know some of you have to agree with me on this.


PS: one game i truly loved which lacked much i speak of is Diablo 2. Spent 1000+ hours at least online with that. looking forward to playing D3....

In response to the earlier post that there are still Morrowind freaks around, I've actually met some people who swear on Arena.

I know a few have dabbled, but the modding for DA O is different from oblivion/fallout 3, why bother learning it all again when you know what you are doing here already :shrug:

True - however, I've met Giskard on the DA O forums and he says he enjoys modding for that game. Myself, I started running around in circles screaming after trying to add a sword to the game. No more, thank you...

This is not true at all. Depending on choices you make party members may try and kill you, will leave you, or will greatly increase their liking or disliking of you, or may not even join you.

So, KOTOR but not Star Wars.

I honestly really love this game. The one thing I think it's lacking is an open world space. It would be FANTASTIC to explore Ferelden in it's entirety.

I wouldn't leave Oblivion for Dragon Age, no. I always say I'm leaving and then a few months later, I'm right here again, posting on the forum!

However, I would like to see a few mods put into that game. Armor and clothing mods, for one. There's too much of the same. I never feel like my characters are wearing anything unique. That and various body modifications. I'd also look into making Alistair romanceable by both genders. I just can't have my characters having a love affair with anyone else! ^_^

I think Alistair is romanceable by both genders... Or at least I thought he was. Hmm, perhaps I was wrong. I know Morrigan is.

And I do agree on the mods... But it's a young game, they will start coming soon.

I Honestly haven't played Oblivion in months. Even with all the mods, I've just gotten tired of it all. I'll come back when some epic TC mod comes out