Well, I pre-ordered DA:O from Amazon with the special shipping that gets it to you on the day the game appears, and so I got mine on Tuesday evening. My son almost immediately went nuts. He has been looking forward to this almost as long as I have. We have both played Neverwinter Nights, both 1 and 2 and enjoyed them. Unfortunately for him, his grades suck at the moment and he won’t be playing it real soon.
The installation takes a while, but that is understandable, for such a large game. In the box, there are codes for two different add-ons for the game, a Shale creature and the Dragon Blood Armor. Interestingly, the Dragon Blood Armor is also going to appear in Mass Effect 2. If the pictures seen in the DA:O box are correct, the Mass Effect armor will look radically different from the other armors in that game. In fact, the Mass Effect armor looks a lot like a full suit of historical plate armor, but stylized and modernized.
And yes, I know enough to make statements like that. I spent nine years making replicas of medieval armor. Check out Red Dragon Armoury.
Now, back to the game.
Character Creation is a fairly long process, if you don’t use some of the time saving presets. The character creator is more like Oblivion than like Neverwinter Nights or Mass Effect. It is a bit more advanced than Neverwinter Nights 2. You can change dozens of features, which is cool, but it is much harder to make a grotesque character than it was in Oblivion. It is easier to get back to the defaults, and the changes seem to have less effect on each other.
One cool feature is that DA:O creates a portrait for you based on the character appearance that you create, and then you can alter the portrait. You can change the background, the position of the head, and the expression, then lock everything down and start the game.
I chose a Human Noble as my Origin story, and I have only played one character so far, so I cannot comment on the others, but where you start the game depends on which Origin story you choose. That is a somewhat cool idea that will keep the game interesting on replays, and it gives you an immediate impact on the story based on your choices, which is exactly what an RPG should do. This is also different from Mass Effect where all the character background choices are in the past, but they have an effect on the story later on. I will be watching for quests and content that refers back to the Origin story.
So, I made it through the first battle, which happens even before you leave home. I won’t give away more of the story, but it gets you started slowly, which is a good thing, because the controls are totally different, different from Neverwinter Nights, different from Mass Effect (PC), different from Oblivion, different from any game I have ever played. The game uses W and S to move forward and back, but you turn rather than backing up and instead of using A and D for side to side movement, it uses Q and E, and when you use any of these, you turn and run in that direction in relation to where the camera is facing, no side stepping. You can run and turn your character with the mouse, but it requires that you press and hold the right mouse button. You can also right-click on the ground, and your character will move there. You do a lot of things by right-clicking, which can get a little confusing, especially since some places you have to left-click.
I might write another review with information about the skills and spells system, but that is all mechanics which don’t really affect my enjoyment of the game. The one thing I will say is that it is not like Oblivion, where you advance your skills by using them and then that causes you to raise levels. DA:O uses experience points (XP) and you get a lot of XP from killing monsters, but you also get XP for finding items, completing quests, unlocking things (just one example) and I assume there will be more ways to gain XP. I really liked the system in Oblivion/Morrowind, but it does lead to the abuses. You won’t gain levels in DA:O by jumping off cliffs or sneaking along behind people. I cannot say yet that I really like the system. I haven’t tried it out enough yet, but it isn’t bad, so far.
Finally, the story, so far not too bad, but more than a little predicable, I foresaw both of the major plot turns in the story. I won’t give them away, but to me at least they were pretty obvious, especially if you think about what RPGs usually tend to do. First, they like to give you something personal to fight for. Second, they tend to like to cut you off and make you search for your allies and friends, and of course treachery tends to be a common theme.
More later, when I have played more.
