I've been enjoying it quite a bit so far (the 360 version). It's a pretty standard D&D style western RPG, which I like. Nice change of pace from all the turn-based Japanese ones. The storyline and setting are original, and not based on anything... they're not
very original, but fairly decent, and the game world is quite deep (occasionally a little TOO deep, when you get confused over the relations between certain characters and such). You'll often run across things that add information to your "codex" which you can read in the sub menu. These readings add a lot of backstory, and explain the history of the world. So far I'm only a short way into the game, but there are a few things that bothered me a bit:
- There are some graphical flaws... the graphic are nice, but not so incredible for the 360 as to explain the occasional poor framerate. Strangely, it seems most noticeable in the cutscenes, while actual gameplay seems relatively smooth to me. Speaking of the cutscenes, most show your character up close, and the textures used for your weapons look noticeably low res. Once in a while, I'd also see flickering textures... only 2 or 3 times so far, but very noticeable when it happens. There are also all kinds of clipping issues, usually with your weapons. Lastly, there's not a lot of physics going on... you'll see characters with their hair in long braids, but the braids are locked in place and move with the characters head rather than obeying gravity. Also, you'll notice a lot of characters wearing the same clothes or hairstyles. Once in a while, you'll notice characters with similar voices too, though it nowhere near as bad as Oblivion was for voice actor overuse.
- I created a female elf character, and the opening story involved my character and a friend discovering a cave with a strange mirror in it that cursed us both... my character survived by becoming a Grey Warden, by my friend was assumed dead. There wasn't a whole lot of meat to this opening section, and it seemed more like just an introduction to the storyline and gameplay. While I have yet to try any of the other 5 openings, I assume they're similarly short. On the plus side, many character that I've encountered since leaving for the Grey Wardens have specifically mentioned my characters gender and race... so I'm guessing the game actually does follow through on that aspect. One thing I haven't really gotten so far, is that almost every dialogue choice I'm given includes at least one option to get defensive about humans treatment of elves... but so far, I'm not really feeling it. Part of the intro story included a part where my parents were killed by humans, but I only got this story by coercing someone into telling me, and I could very easily have missed it... occasionally I come across humans mistreating elves, but I can't seem to take it personally enough to fight for them or anything. We'll see.
- The game world doesn't seem very interactive. All the chests, crates, etc that have something of interest in them are glittering to show that you can search them, but anything that is not glittering is just a static part of the scenery. I guess Oblivion spoiled me by allowing me to ransack entire houses and open every cupboard and drawer in town. Likewise, there are a lot of generic characters in the game. If you see someone who's just named "Soldier" or "Farmer", then you know they won't have anything useful to say.
- In order to do anything with DLC, including redeem codes, you have to log into some retarded EA thing. What is the point of this? All my other games just use Xbox Live to store all the content. It's not convenient at all, and it seems like it's just another trick for EA to harvest email addresses or something. I would have gladly chosen not to participate, but then I wouldn't be able to redeem any of the codes that I got with my CE copy.
- Combat is pretty straight-forward. Just select a target, and press A and your character will start attacking, with no input needed. You can activate various effects you have learned to change your attack patterns. For example, I'm trying to style my character as an archer, and two of the abilities I have allow me to either fire rapidly (at the cost of no critical strikes), or to fire more accurately (higher damage, slower speed). These are both toggle effects that have effect until I specifically disable them, though they consume a portion of an ability gauge that I haven't quite worked out yet (I assume this is so you can't stack too many of these abilities). There are a few problems I had with combat though... for one, when your target dies, your character just stands there. As an archer, it was sometimes not immediately apparent that my target had just been killed, as they were some distance away, so there's some wasted time there. There's actually a whole tactics screen where you can change what characters do in some situations, so maybe this is just a case of me not knowing what I'm doing yet. Also, the A button is used for much more than just combat... searching dead bodies, disarming traps, etc... so in the heat of combat, you can't search a body... even if your next enemy isn't even on the map yet, but you're aware of them, you have to run over, kill them, then find your way back to the body. Likewise, my character discovered a bunch of bear traps while other monsters were attacking. I pressed A trying to attack them, but my character instead dropped to the ground and started disarming traps. Lastly, it's kind of neat that your characters get blood splattered on them in combat... but the effect is WAY overused. You'll kill a single wolf, and your character is *covered* in blood.
Anyways, these are all fairly minor problems in my opinion, and I've been finding the game very enjoyable all around. The interface is functional, load times were reasonable, there is a pretty wide variety of loot that you can carry around and switch out, plenty of abilities to gain and NPC's to fight with. You can get a decent number of people tagging along with you, though you can only have 3 with you during any one phase of the game, you can swap them out when you make camp. Each character will start to like or dislike you based on your actions, and you can talk to them to influence this as well. All the areas of the game that I've seen so far have included extra things to find, which turn into quests. So it really pays to explore areas thoroughly. It's also nice to see a role playing game where you really CAN choose a role and play it, even if that means being an enormous asshole rather than a saint.
--Zero
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moycon, on Thu Nov 5, 2009 9:35 PM, said:
He was playing it all last night! Its kinda fun watching him figure out the 360 controls lol. 
