I bought Dragon Age: Origins – Awakenings when it first came out a few months back, played for a couple of hours and… just stopped. I think I was a bit Bioware-d out from thoroughly playing through Dragon Age itself and Mass Effect 2 in fairly short order, and Awakenings didn’t ram a crochet hook of pure stimulation up one nostril and yank my brain out through the medium of excitement alone. The icon was sitting on my desktop filed under “must get back to at some point”, and after the Grand Theft Auto IV expansions with their interminable conversations that you have no control over I though it would be nice to actually pick what I got to say for once, fired it back up, got hooked in this time, and played it pretty solidly through to the end.

[The rest of this post has been rated as “Mild” by the British Board Of Possible Spoiler Warnings. No big twists will be revealed, but if you want to know absolutely nothing at all about any aspect of the game, look away now.]

Story-wise, “solid” is probably a fair description; as I said, it didn’t grab me instantly, but in the right frame of mind it’s engaging enough, and there are some interesting revelations about the Darkspawn as you go. In many ways it’s a slightly cut down version of the original, after a brief introduction there’s A City Bit, A Forest Bit, A Spooky Fade Bit and A Dwarf City Bit that you can choose to visit with some interlinking quests, with a Big Final Battle once you’ve completed the other areas. Each segment is quite neat in its own right, and none drag on too long.

Companion-wise only Oghren comes with you from the main game, and hardly develops past Obnoxious Drunk, I never really cared much for him. A couple of new party members are soon available: Anders the Mage who looks and sounds a lot like Alistair in a dress, and Nathanial Howe, son of Arl Howe, who starts off a bit Inigo Montoya (“you killed my father, prepare to die”), but can be conscripted into the party, and I don’t think it would be a massive shock to reveal he can gradually soften to you over time through the right conversation options. Three more are available over the course of the game, a total of six not making quite such a mockery of going adventuring with a party of four while a massive entourage of slackers just hang around the camp. There are no romance options, though, a bit of flirting with Anders was as much as my female Warden could manage, despite there being a perfect rom-com setup with Nathanial (“His father killed her father! She killed his father! Now he’s out to kill her, but through a whacky bunch of hijinks they end up having to save the world together; while looking for Darkspawn, they found each other…”)

Mechanically there’s quite a bit of new stuff to play with. The level cap is raised, with new spells, talents, abilities and specialisations to pick from as you go; where Mass Effect 2 cut right down on the number of activated abilities, by the end of Awakenings my Rogue must have had around 30 icons on the hotbar for assorted attacks, buffs and skills, and few types of health and stamina potion from the inventory (stamina potions being a welcome addition for non-mage classes, who’d previously fling themselves upon opponents using a wide range of devastating moves, get knackered in about seven second flat, and spend the next couple of minutes panting and occasionally auto-attacking). It teeters gently on the edge of being a bit too much, especially for mages, but with the ability to pause in combat you can always spend a while hunting through the spellbook for that situationally useful ability you’re fairly sure you have somewhere.

I scarcely bothered with the crafting options in the original game, finding or buying potions and ignoring traps entirely; Awakenings adds Runecrafting, and a bit of extra weapon damage never hurts (or always hurts, more to the point) so I thought I’d give it a bit of a try. Very broadly, two runes of the same type can be combined into one more powerful rune, and a vendor sells unlimited quantities of the lowest level runes, so to get a level X rune you buy 2^X rubbish runes, a stack of consumable-type-stuff, and click away. It’s not a bad system, but each rune takes up one inventory slot, so even if you totally clear your inventory (a difficult task for a compulsive pack rat, even with the storage chest provided) you can only cram in enough raw materials for a couple of the most powerful runes at a time. This wouldn’t be a major problem apart from the fact that I trained one of my party up in Runecrafting instead of learning it myself, and the rune vendor is in your keep, the equivalent of the party camp from the original game where all your companions hang around between questing. As you’re not actually in a party in the keep you can only use your own skills, which meant crafting consisted of buying a load of stuff from the vendor, leaving the keep to form up a party including the runecrafter, standing just outside the door of the keep actually making the runes, running out of ingredients, going back into the keep (disbanding the party) to buy more from the vendor, leaving the keep again… I could’ve respecced my character to learn Runecrafting (official respec books are another addition to Awakenings, though plenty of mods allowed you to do it in the original), then re-respecced afterwards to drop it for more useful talents, but that seemed like a fair bit of hassle as well. Nice idea, perhaps a bit of a MMOG-y timesink, so after creating a couple of uber-runes for my favourite sword I decided to skip the 1% benefit of making a bunch more.

Speaking of crafting, another minor annoyance: Wade the Blacksmith turns up again, and can make powerful weapons and armour from certain rare things you find in your journey. A piece of Heartwood, for example, Wade could turn into a bow or a shield with just a flawless ruby, a bit of catgut, and some oil. Great! I’d found catgut and oil earlier (through the traditional RPG hero method of taking everything you ever see that’s not nailed down), except somehow, either through my own carelessness or a glitch, they didn’t seem to be in my inventory or storage chest; maybe I’d got rid of them while trying to clear space for the runes. Still, something as common as oil, that must be lying around all over the place; store rooms at the castle, merchants are bound to sell it, maybe just pop along to the nearest coast line and scoop some up from a spill… but no. No, apparently oil is just as rare as the living heart of a sapient tree, and there’s only one flask of it in the entire world.

With the arsenal of new abilities I never had too much trouble in combat; I have a suspicion this might be from turning the difficulty down to “Easy” when I made a bit of a start at a second play-through of Origins to get a different ending, and not changing it after installing Awakenings. Even the bigger beasties like dragons went down fairly easily with a bit of pausing and health potion use, I can’t remember having to reload due to party death at all, so it was quite nice as a casual wander around Amaranthine with occasional widespread slaughter. Towards the end of the game I had to choose a party for what I thought would be Something Quite Important But Not The Big Final Battle, picked three characters who volunteered, and was plunged into what turned out to be The Actual Final Ultimate Battle of Finality with three rogues (including me) and a mage. Not really the optimal composition, but they still managed to defeat everything without great difficulty.

All in all, if you liked Dragon Age: Origins, Awakenings is another satisfying dollop of Darkspawn-slaying fun.

Danger! Here be Dragon Age Spoilers! Previously on the show: allies had been gathered fairly easily, but things hadn’t quite gone according to plan in the Landsmeet. The situation looks nice and simple as we head for the final act, though: Evil Archdemon to be killed, world to be saved, tea and biscuits for everybody, sorted.

The night before the final battle, Alastair popped his head around the door for a quick chat. He was besotted with me, we were ecstatically happy together, I’d just made him King, I figured he’d probably want to show me his gratitude. And by “gratitude” I mean “hammer“.
“Hi” he began, “you know how like we’re all in love and that? Well, I’m going to have to go and shag a bunch of other birds.”

All right, his reasoning was slightly more complex, involving the need for an heir (look at the mess we were currently in due to lack of succession planning) and the fact that Gray Wardens inevitably went bonkers in the nut, meaning a child of one Gray Warden parent was risky enough let alone two, but it was still a kick in the teeth. I went back to Leilana and tried to persuade her that when she’d given the ultimatum and made me pick either her or Alistair she must’ve misheard me, I didn’t say “well regretfully I’ll have to choose Alistair” at all, it was actually “sod Alistair, he’s just going to go off and ‘ensure the Royal succession’ with some strumpet, it’s you I want” but she wasn’t having any of it. That just left Zevran as a possible romantic interest, but he was a bit too close to Captain Bertorelli from ‘Allo ‘Allo to be a serious option (whatta mistake-a to make-a!)

Still, never mind, once I’d heroically killed the Archdemon I’d be fighting ’em off with a stick, right? “Oh yeah, about that…” chirped up Riordan, the conveniently liberated Warden, “I should probably just mention that whoever kills the Archdemon dies themselves. Y’know, it’s a bit like when you’ve got a nuclear hand grenade with a blast radius bigger than your throwing range. Only not like that, and with more magical essence and stuff. But don’t worry! I’ll do my utmost to strike the final blow.”
“Uh huh. The geezer that’s just turned up is our ultimate saviour? Seems a bit unlikely, doesn’t it? Lacks a bit of emotional impact compared to having to choose between me or Alistair. Though if the silly git had let Loghain join up, it would’ve been a perfect Evil Henchman Has Change Of Heart And Achieves Redemption By Killing More Evil Boss But Dying In The Process (there must be a snappier title for that on TV Tropes).”
“Well, narrative imperative does rather suggest that doesn’t it, but we’ll sort it out at the time I’m sure. Hope I haven’t dampened the mood at the pre-battle party too much!”

I didn’t really fancy the vol-au-vents after that and slunk off to bed, but got buttonholed by Morrigan on the way. “Don’t worry, my liege, I overheard that stuff about a Warden having to die, and I have a cunning plan!”
I sighed. “If it’s putting a pair of underpants on my head, a pencil up each nostril and saying ‘wibble’, I don’t think it’s going to help”
“Better than that! I sleep with Alistair, then the evil-demon-essence-thing will latch onto me instead of the Warden who delivers the killing blow, and result in me being pregnant with a demon-Alistair-god-magic-baby-thing.”
“That’s the worst chat-up line I’ve ever heard. Still, it might work…”

Dilemma time: having gone to all the trouble of making Alistair King, if he struck the final blow to the Archdemon and popped his clogs we’d be back to square one with the other main ruling candidate locked up. On the other hand if I struck the final blow, being dead would put a serious crimp in my plans for the weekend, as well as making a direct sequel a bit difficult (Dragon Age 2: I Got Better!) If Riordan struck the final blow then nobody would give a stuff, hence being a somewhat unlikely eventuality. Or! I could unleash a demon-Alistair-god-magic-baby-thing on the world. Hrm. As the old saying goes, “better to face the possibility of a demon-Alistair-god-magic-baby-thing in the future than your own imminent death in the present”, so I told Morrigan to go for it. As long as I could watch. “That’s the worst chat-up line I’ve ever heard” said Alistair, but he went along with the plan. The strumpet.

Finally we plunged in to the actual final battle, and that was nicely done. For a start it actually made sense of a fixed party size! “A small party of you, say, hrm, oh, I don’t know, picking a number at random, four should go and confront the Archdemon while the rest of the group stay and defend the gate!” The allies you’d gathered in the earlier part of the game were available to call on as reinforcements as you hacked your way through the city (ever-so-slightly undoing the good work of explaining why you have a fixed party of four by giving you a massive pool of troops to call on, only instead of rushing the Darkspawn with a massive human(/dwarf/elf) wave assault you sportingly only unleash five or ten of them at a time; even then it’s an impressively large scale battle that caused the framerate on the old PC to drop off when the fireballs started flying, so it’s obvious why full army RTS-type battles are impractical). Riordan, surprisingly enough, didn’t manage to take out the Archdemon on his own, but the heroic overpoweredness of Morrigan, Wynne and a giant stack of mana potions did the trick. Archdemon stabbed, magical essence diverted to Morrigan instead of killing me as promised, all that was left was the coronation, victory parade and biscuits. And the “what happened to…” montage; apparently Alistair wasn’t the most natural King and kept buggering off on various quests, but fortunately he left the Kingdom in the incredibly capable hands of… me. So that was OK.

I’m quite interested in all the other possible endings, though not interested enough to play all the possible origins through all the combinations of decisions; it’s where the story can really open up, as there are no more fixed points it has to manoeuvre your character to. Spinks posted an interesting link to the rpg.net forums where people discuss their own endings, and I might try another playthrough sometime, steering towards ending up with Leilana and getting Loghain to strike the final blow on the Archdemon.

What’s also interesting is the announcement of an expansion, Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening (expanding not only the game but the variety of punctuation in the title), with the option to import your character, so perhaps another fixed point to be manoeuvred to after all; I wonder if it’ll take account of all possible endings of the original game, or assume a single “canonical” version?

Previously in Dragon Age: Zoso the Rogue had gathered together an army of Elves, Dwarves and Mages to defeat the Blight, but first there was the small matter of Teryn Loghain to deal with. All was going according to plan as the team headed to Denerhim with Arl Eamon…

(More spoiler-y Dragon Age spoilers follow,)

So as we headed for the capital everything seemed to be proceeding towards the requisite happy ending: overthrow the tyrant, smite some evil, home for tea and scones. Before actually calling the Landsmeet for the tyrant-overthrowing, Arl Eamon thought it would be a good idea to make sure we had the support of more Arls (and possibly Ukes, Aronets and Iscounts, I’m not sure of the exact structure of the Dragon Age nobility), so we sniffed around a bit for more evidence, clearing the Tevinter out of the Alienage and finding evidence linking Loghain with slave-trading.

The first bump in the previously smooth road was Queen Anora. We got word that despite nominally still being in power she was being held prisoner by the rotten bounder who’d done in my parents; a damsel in distress, you say? Sorted! Off to the rescue. I was worried for a moment it might turn out the princess was in another castle, but nope, there she was, and we bundled her back to Eamon’s estate. Only instead of being all “Swoon, I’m so grateful for being rescued, but the excitement has got to me and I must lie down for a while”, she put herself forward in place of Alistair as the prime candidate to be ruler after we deposed Loghain. That set me thinking that I’d just been taking it as read that Loghain was a Bad Man and needed a kicking, but I wasn’t really sure what his motivation was for abandoning the King at Ostegar. Was he in league with the Darkspawn, deliberately allowing them to overrun the kingdom? Did he just spot an opportunity to grab power? Did just think the King was a bit of a dick (he had a point) who was letting the country go to the dogs? Was he really a patriot, determined to protect the Kingdom in the face of a threat he considered to be greater than the Blight? And now his daughter, the Queen, was selling him out, so what was *she* up to? A double agent come to spy on us, who’d cooked up the whole being captured business? A pragmatist who could see the way the wind was blowing and wanted to be on the winning side?

Until then, Alistair had reluctantly accepted prospective Kingship; he didn’t really want to rule (one of the prime qualifications for a position of power, in my book), and I was pretty sure I could trust him after all our adventures. The “optimal” approach looked to be to get Alistair to marry Anora; continue the royal bloodline, put a thoroughly decent chap on the throne, but with the experienced and steely Anora around to actually run things. Trouble was… I’d got quite fond of Alistair. Usually I’ll play characters as… well, as me, so even if playing a female character it feels strange to engage in a romance with a male NPC, but Alistair was pretty engaging in a Hugh-Grant-in-rom-com sort of way, if Hugh Grant spent less time running bookshops and attending weddings and more time stabbing ogres in the face and acquiring useful abilities for smiting enemy magic users. I think the player character being mute in Dragon Age has a slightly odd effect, it almost makes them seem like an external observer, despite being the centre of everything. It could be very immersion breaking if “you” have a voice that doesn’t seem appropriate or match your idea of the character, but the complete voicing of everyone else throws your muteness into sharper relief compared to previous games where conversations were more textual, and just seemed to put a bit of distance there such that getting together with Alistair didn’t seem weird. Or maybe I’m in denial about something. Anyway… I made a sort of half-hearted suggestion to Alistair about marrying Anora, he got a bit cross, and I dropped the subject. I didn’t trust Anora enough to fully support her, so I made some non-committal about being pleased she was on our side, but I wouldn’t be able to back her bid for leadership, and things were all a bit awkward around Eamon’s mansion like Christmas with a couple of sets of in-laws who don’t really get along.

Volunteering to take the dog for a walk to get away from the tense atmosphere, I wandered off and did a bit more evidence gathering, got revenge on the git who’d offed my parents, was banged up but planned an ingenious prison break (it involved a wooden vaulting horse and bag of soil down the trouser legs, only that took a bit too long so I went with the almost-as-ingenious Plan B of picking the door lock and punching all the guards to death), found the son of a noble who’d been imprisoned after he started asking awkward questions about Ostegar, found a spare Gray Warden who’d been lazing around in a dungeon while I was doing all the hard work (honestly, he hadn’t even constructed a wooden horse to vault over) and rescued another noble that Loghain had chucked into prison. I was pretty sure I’d gathered sufficient backing amongst the nobility to stand against the slave-trading king-abandoning noble-imprisoning Loghain, so off we toddled to the Landsmeet and I presented my case (“Loghain: what a bastard, support Alistair instead, he’s a bastard too, but the good kind”).

The nobles seemed to be going with it until Anora turned up and showed her gratitude for the earlier rescue by siding with her father, which I took as reasonable proof she was only in it for a nice tiara. Either that alone was sufficient to turn the tide back for Loghain, or I’d overlooked some other way of getting more support, as the Landsmeet couldn’t reach a decision on a new ruler and decided to settle things the old fashioned way instead, with a full-on ruck. Several stabbings and a couple of fireballs right in the rebuttals convinced the doubters that they hadn’t actually considered our thoroughly convincing arguments carefully enough, though Loghain himself insisted on a one-on-one duel (which seemed to be mandatory; I didn’t notice a “LOL NO WAI!” option to have him riddled with crossbow bolts). Obviously the Teryn hadn’t come across the old country saying “never propose a duel when your opponent has a massive stack of health poultices”, which didn’t give him much of a chance in the resultant fight, and he surrendered.

Mindful of International Humanitarian Law and the treatment of surrendered combatants, I was keen to see he was treated humanely and that no outrages were enacted upon his personal dignity. The others took those concerns on board, but instead proposed two alternative plans: either give him a nice cup of Darkspawn blood and turn him into a Gray Warden, or cut his head off. Flipping through the Geneva Convention I couldn’t find any references to Darkspawn blood, and decided that course of action might be OK if we told him it was Ribena. Loghain could’ve been a useful ally too, especially with Sarevok’s precedent as Ultimate Opponent Turned Handy Party Member, but Alistair, in flagrant breach of Article 3, was quite insistent on killing him to death. I tried to talk him out of it, but he rather hoist me by my own King-selecting petard by deciding he would take the crown after all and pointing out that, as King, he could do what he jolly well liked. There didn’t seem to be much of an alternative, so I let him get on with it. One beheading later, it rather put paid to any lingering ideas about an Anora/Alistair ruling combination, patricide being a notoriously bad choice for a first date (even worse than a romantic dinner for two at the local kebab shop), and we had to lock Anora up.

Still, justice had (more or less) prevailed, and with the nation (pretty much) united it was time to give the Archdemon a good kicking. At least that looked nice and straightforward. Until Alisatir popped his head round the door wanting a bit of a chat…

(To be continued. Again.)

Danger! Dragon Age spoilers follow, of a spoiler-y nature. Don’t read unless you want to be spoiled, or require reduced lift and increased traction.

The structure of Dragon Age, and indeed many CRPGs, invokes predestination; with finite time and resources (especially the voice acting, I imagine), the game obviously can’t represent every possible outcome of every decision and has to guide you through certain set pieces. It’s like an inverse butterfly effect, you’re going to go to the Circle of Magi, the Dwarves and the Elves, and there’s going to be a fight with the Archdemon at the end of it, no matter how many butterflies flap their wings. What’s interesting is how the game offers you decisions which simultaneously have an effect on the outcome, but can fit within that overall structure to minimise the amount of assets and testing required.

I was pretty happy with the way things were going up to the Landsmeet. I’d secured the requisite allies, with dollops of noble self-sacrifice: I’d cleared the demons out of the Circle, saving as many mages as I could; I’d freed the werewolves from their ancient curse (noble self-sacrifice: Zarathian, albeit he needed to be persuaded with a bit of stabbing); I’d destroyed the Anvil of the Void, on the grounds that Branka was more of a fruitloop than a loop constructed entirely of fruit (noble self-sacrifice: Caridin bungee jumping over a lava pit, but forgetting to attach the bungee). I slightly kicked myself at missing out on a noble self-sacrifice when releasing the Arl’s son from demonic possession, as I brought the Circle in rather than getting the mother involved in a blood magic ritual, but everyone seemed happy enough with the outcome.

Generally, the earlier in the game something happens the more fixed it is; the origin stories all end up with you at Ostegar and once there I’m sure you can’t decide that being a Gray Warden doesn’t really fit into your career plans after all, and you’d like to go into insurance instead, possibly via banking. It’s the storyline equivalent of the fallen tree or overturned table that present an insurmountable barrier to your character, the conversation options are there hinting at the wide open spaces of infinite possibility (“I’m not ready to become a Gray Warden!”), but you know where it’s going really (“Yes you are, now shut up and drink your darkspawn blood or you can’t have any pudding”). It might be a problem if you’re wanting an open world with (nigh) limitless choice, but it’s the price you pay for an involving story.

Though a particularly trenchant commenter previously insisted that the game was AWESOME because it forced you into tough decisions where sometimes there’s no right choice, for those main quests I’d suggest it’s actually the reverse: there’s no wrong choice. You have to come out of the quests with allies of some sort (interesting as it would be to have options that totally screw everything up, to destroy all mages then refuse the help of templars, to slaughter the elves but still release the werewolves from their curse, to leave the dwarves in the grip of isolationism, the Final Battle might be a bit shorter if it’s just four of you against the entire Blight), and from the options presented, and doing a bit of reading around, I think I could live with any of the alternative outcomes. Saving the mages presumes the survivors really are a nice bunch after all, as opposed to hideous demon-things just pretending to be nice until they eat your brain, so you can understand the reason for the Right of Annulment and it wouldn’t be too tricky to support it:
“I’m sorry, Warden, I have called for the Right of Annulment. It is my only option.”
“Yes, I agree.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Definitely. Can’t take any risks with these demons. Take off, nuke the place from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
“You don’t want to plead with me at all? ‘Just give me an hour, if I don’t come back then cleanse the whole place, but I have to try’, something like that?”
“Crikey, no, you just told me there’s all sorts of nasty stuff on the loose in there, I don’t want my brain eaten.”
“Oh. Right. It could be terribly exciting, though? I was thinking we could have all the templars out here, maybe some siege weapons with flaming ammunition, very dramatic against the night sky, and I’d be all, like, ‘Prepare to fire!’ and have my arm raised, and then somebody would be all ‘Wait! What’s that?’, and these silhouettes would emerge from the tower, and as the light from the flames played across them we’d see it was you, supporting the bloodied but defiant First Enchanter, and we’d all cheer and stuff.”
“To be honest, if the timing is that tight then even if I do triumph against the forces of darkness it sounds like a better than evens chance of you levelling the place anyway, especially if I dawdle a bit when coming down the stairs, you’re not selling it y’know.”

The elves and the werewolves, well, I don’t think you could ask for a better illustration of why you might side with the Spirit of the Forest. I could even *just about* see my way to supporting Branka, on the grounds that golems are really, really awesome. “The end justifies the means”, after all; the main problem here is that “the means” are not only horrifically unpleasant on two counts (the way golems are created and Brankas efforts to secure the anvil), but the latter is also batshit insane:
“The Anvil is protected my many devious traps, Paragon.”
“Right, traps. Presumably for many centuries they’ve kept the Anvil safe from the Darkspawn hordes that infest these tunnels?”
“Yes, Paragon. The craftsmanship of the traps is amazing, it must have taken an amazingly skilled Dwarf to construct them.”
“Hmm. Something this cunning, it would take another exceptional engineer or smith to have any chance of getting through, right?”
“Definitely. Gibbering wretches like the Darkspawn have no chance, that’s why the Anvil has remained safe until now.”
“Right, I’ve got a plan! I’m going to create loads of Darkspawn.”
“Yes, we should bring the most skilled… wait, what?”
“Create loads of Darkspawn. Obviously in this tunnel system riddled with Darkspawn, where us Dwarves constantly fight to hold the Darkspawn back, the never-ending waves of Darkspawn who can never be totally eradicated, what’s been missing is Darkspawn. I’ll make a load of them.”
Still, in the dim mists of time there’s some sort of twisted logic to her motivation that you could just about rationalise to get hold of an army of golems to fight the Blight, though you’d want to shuffle Branka off to a nice padded room rather than involving her in any military planning…
“So that’s the situation, the Darkspawn are marching on Denerim. Does anybody have a plan? Anybody *apart* from Branka? No? All right, Paragon, what do you suggest?”
“The Darkspawn have a day on us, and are moving quickly. We have only one choice. We must teach a load of pigs to play the banjo. Ding ding ding ding ding oink oink ding ding ding ding ding oink ding.”
“How does that…”
“Wait! How could I be so foolish! There is another option: we could make a really big pancake. I mean, like, five metres across, or whatever the fantasy equivalent of a metre is in this setting, and then cover it in gravy.”

So I had my allies. Things were even going well sartorially; the massive armour sets get progressively more awesome, and all the warriors in the party looked fantastic, clanking around in their heavy metal. My rogue, meanwhile, had gone through a period of looking like a cut-price Roman re-enactor from an episode of Time Team, but settled on a Dalish armour set that looked pretty good (Dalish tailors clearly taking heavy inspiration from Louise Jameson as Leela in Doctor Who), even if the exposed midriff didn’t seem terribly practical. As I’d done the Warden’s Keep DLC very early on, though, the Warden Commander plate armour was only Tier 3, which meant my rogue met its strength requirements in the latter stages of the game, and that looked better still. The mages still got the short end of the stylish clothing stick, but we kept them at the back of any group photos behind Shale and Sten, and they made up for it by being ludicrously overpowered anyway.

So everything was proceeding according to plan, we called the Landsmeet, and that’s when things went slightly out of control…

(To be continued…)

I need to get something off my chest. It’s a mace. And a shortbow. And a pair of chainmail gauntlets.

Yes, time for another Dragon Age post as everyone enjoys them so much. Just to be abundantly clear: it’s a really good game and it’s precisely because it does so many things so very well that certain little things stick out all the more. Things like having a camp full of incredibly dangerous people, and offering no explanation of why you only ever bother taking three of them out and about with you; of course there are myriad excellent reasons, technical limitations, replayability, yada yada, but I’d just like some nod towards it in-game. Maybe in a dream at the start:

Archdemon: “LOL u r such a nub u have to zerg me”
You: “NO WAI i r totally leet i cud pwn u solo”
Archdemon: “OK lets both fix party size at 4 thats fair”
You: “yeah OK”
*first fight is your party vs 23 Darkspawn*
You: “WTF HAX!”

All right, so that serves as an illustration of how attempting to explain meta-mechanics within the plot often ends up being far worse than just saying “it’s a bloody game, get over it you nitpicking git”. Still, today’s quibble is chests, and not Morrigan’s unnaturally sticky-back-plastic-dependant top (if alchemists can come up with a flaming weapon coating or health restoring poultice, I’m sure a suitable adhesive is easy enough).

Treasure chests, loot-containing barrels, crates, weapon racks, suitcases, vases, piles of stones, wardrobes, armoires and cupboards are staples of CRPGs in much the same way that staples are staples of stapling. That’s fine, there’s nothing I like more than a good rummage in a chest (and I don’t mean… oh, just take all the hilarious chest innuendo as read from here). If a dungeon doesn’t come with the requisite stock of loot-stuffed containers I’m highly miffed. Dragon Age, though, like Baldur’s Gate and many other games before it, sprinkles loot-containing objects all over the place. Wandering around a town, there’s a sparkly barrel, stroll up to it and… hey, here’s a longsword! And a bow in a crate over there. Slightly incongruous, but not utterly ludicrous. But then you go into a house or an inn, open a door, see a couple of people in the room, barge in, open the wardrobe in the corner, rifle through it, take the dagger that was sitting at the bottom, click to talk with one of the occupants and they say… “Good morrow, Grey Warden”. Not “Guards! Guards!” or “Who the hell are you?” or “Get out of my wardrobe!” or “Please don’t hurt me, you terrifying blood-spattered armed maniac who’s just broken in to my room and stolen my dagger”. There are a couple of instances where attempting to interact with an object actually provokes a response, but they’re the exception rather than the rule. Yes, it’s a very small thing, but picking at that thread of the Pullover of RPG leads on to wondering why you’re in the house in the first place, and indeed why the instinctive reaction upon arriving in any town is to thoroughly explore every single location, talking to everybody (unless they have a generic title like “Peasant” or “Noble”) asking if they have any menial tasks they’d like done while you happen to be in the area like it’s bob-a-job week, stuff you were taking entirely for granted, and before you know it the pullover’s unravelled you’ve ended up with the Crop-top of Absurdism, and then… Oh, wait, we’re back to Morrigan’s top again.