Thought I'd post some comments from Desslock at Qt3, who has apparently played >120 hours for his 8-page PC Gamer review.
From this thread:
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-t…73#post1916973
Hey, as I mentioned in my review, BioWare games usually have 3 choices - good/bad/petulant teenager-nobody-ever-chooses-option.
While I definitely think that's a legitimate criticism (which I share) of past games, it's not true of Dragon Age generally, which does a better job of providing choices that seem varied and reasonably viable than almost any RPG. Dragon Age is a significant improvement in that respect. To be honest, it's the first BioWare game that (at least) matched the style of Troika/Obsidian, old Black Isle games in that respect - BioWare games have always had good stories and generally solid dialogue, but their method of storytelling has been simpler. There's an amazing amount of choice in Dragon Age.
Sure there are some quest instances where you have to elect to help, or not, but even when there's only two end results in those circumstances, there's different ways to arrive at those endings - the bottom line is, the choices just feel more "natural", less like you're gaming, and are more ambiguous and intriguing, so you're more likely to choose a personalized path based upon the character you're roleplaying instead of just "gaming" the result you think you want to have.
My bolding.
I think you'll also like the way magic is handled in Dragon Age, then. Mages are fucking dangerous and treated as such. They're lobotomized, hunted down, forced into training, or executed.
People aren't using light spells to walk their dogs - the clergy have no magic (and are opposed to it, for possibly legitimate reasons) it's a relatively low magic setting. It's a testament to the quality of the writing that reactions seem alternately sensible and atrocious, but always plausible.
It's the way stuff like that is handled that makes Dragon Age the "mature" RPG that I really enjoy - not the animated puppet sex.
You can tell what each companion thinks of you at at any time - i.e. there is a visible "meter", but it's personal to each NPC.
NPC influence is a timesink (and it's possible to "game" it through giving gifts) but a pretty rewarding one — companions have a ton of dialogue, so you'll miss a lot unless you buddy up to them (and miss the romances, of course), but even then there's a lot of context specific dialogue, so you'll never hear it if they aren't in your party during the event — or if another companion that they riff off of isn't also in the party at the time. They also have some decent personal quests, and the conversations that companions hold with each other while you're walking around are also substantive and relevant, far beyond the amusing little barks they'd have in BG, for instance.
But playing with different mixes of companions will be one of the biggest sources of replayability - they're all pretty interesting and different.
I can't even imagine how difficult this game was to QA, given all the choices and variations, etc. — crashed zero times in 121 hours, no bugs, one incorrect journal entry (which had no affect on gameplay). It's actually amazing that there weren't evident scripting errors. Actually maybe one incident I can think of where characters acted like you had knowledge of something that I hadn't actually scene. but very clean technically.
Only technical issue is that system requirements are pretty high, especially given the nature of the graphics. Unfortunately, given the protection labyrinth I had to go through to get a build, I was only able to install the game on one of my systems, so I only saw its performance on a high end machine (video card seems to be key). I previously played it on a mid-range card at BioWare for a preview and it was fine - it was a slideshow on a low-end card, however.
Mid-range anything that was a good video card over the past 3 years (i.e. geforce 8800 GTS+). Anything more recent is certainly fine. I wouldn't recommend it on the official min-spec of an ATI x800-gen card or geforce equivalent.
I played it at 2560x1600 with AA maxed though on a high end current card and it was completely smooth, as you'd expect.
There are definitely some goofy things in Dragon Age that the ad campaign foreshadowed — the game is almost fetishistic with its use of blood splashing all over melee fighters (although it worked for John Boorman in Excalibur), and the animated puppet sex is among the silliest content I've seen in a RPG…the European developers do sex in RPGs better, not surprisingly - or at least they have more fun with it.
Game has a timestamp on the saved games.
Played all the Origins, a couple of which with differerent friends, and about 12 hours with alts (primarily one in which I let my wife make all the decisions, but I controlled for the combat, etc.) - the rest was with my main character. I definitely have an OCD style, and can never not complete any quests (although there was one in the Mage tower that I couldn't figure out so I moved on) — you could do it faster if you skipped through dialogue quickly, or spent no time currying favor, or played the combat on easy, but it's a big game.
Just to be clear for the Desslock haters, these are all in response to specific questions, so there is a context.
Sounds pretty fantastic, on the whole!
