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I'm about 23 hours in. Close enough? (no spoilers) Aemon Send a noteboard - 16/11/2009 07:29:14 PM
As far as I'm concerned, it's still great. There are two things in particular I'd like to comment on.

1) Story / pacing. After you finish your introductory storyline of a few hours, the world opens up to give you 3-4 main, overaching quests, each of which will bring you to several areas in a general location. I don't usually like stuff like this, because it tends to ruin the pacing of story driven games. Dragon Age does a really good job of interleaving the three quests though. It never feels like you made a mistake by going to place x before place y. Quests from one place often send you to another. The dialog is written very cleverly to avoid inconsistencies which could occur from visiting places "out of order." It's well done.

2) Difficulty. Dragon Age, like a lot of western rpgs, has no random battles. Given that, you can't grind to level yourself up. This is another thing I usually don't like. It's fun to constantly improve your character. It's often more fun to spend twenty minutes grinding out the next ability so you can play around with that before the next boss. Of course, doing that tends to ruin the challenge of the game. Dragon Age manages this nicely by providing fairly constant fighting in appropriate areas. There are a limited number of enemies and you can't level yourself up more than the game wants you to, but you're always improving. It feels like you're always working on your character, even though there's a glass ceiling. It's a good compromise.

Anyway, I still like the game a lot in spite of being fairly far in. The story is brisk and exciting, and each new area is pretty cool. The one issue I can see people having is gameplay. You get new skills to make you more effective, but gameplay doesn't hardly change at all when you get them. If you're prone to annoyance at repetitive gameplay, you might have a problem, given the game's length.
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I'm about 23 hours in. Close enough? (no spoilers) - 16/11/2009 07:29:14 PM 506 Views
Thanks, Aemon. - 16/11/2009 07:40:54 PM 486 Views

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