After knowing how bad Dragon Age 2 was, why would I ever want to try the third one? I've been asking myself that question every single time I write another one of these. Like Dragon Age 2, it has the same questionable writing, human race bias, shitty romance, and major plot holes. And like Dragon Age 2, it also has almost nothing to do with darkspawn. Isn't the reason for Dragon Age to exist is because of the blight? An army of darkspawn led by the archdemon, a dragon, and the gray wardens that stand against them. Its like imagine if Nintendo releases Super Mario Bros 4 and there was no Mario, or Luigi, or Bowser, or even the mushroom kingdom. Instead you play as a random guy called Wolfe and he goes around doing chores for random people and the game ends like that.
Like the first two Dragon Age games, this one is heavily human biased. The first one is not biased as much. You can play all races and there was a good representation of all races. Romances however, is only humans and elves. David Gaider, lead writer of Bioware states "I don't find dwarves attractive and I generally hate them so I won't write romances for them." Its not word by word but it exactly what he meant. So the only romances you have in all three of the Dragon Age series are humans or elves, with the exception being Iron Bull for DA:I. Most of the romances are locked out unless you are human or elf too, with the exception being Iron Bull. In DA2 you were only able to play as a human too, and the story centered around humans. DA:I, although you could play any race, mostly centered around humans too. I played a Elf and I have to point out that all the mage gear are locked out for me. I found a robe and it says "Human trained only." What the fuck is human trained? You fucking racists. My mage is sitting around with level one gear while the entire party is decked out in level 10 gear. How the fuck do I find gear that fits Elves?
So human bias aside, its nice that you are able to play as any race again. Even the Qunari is available this time around. The story focuses around you randomly showing up and causing the big bad guy's plan to go wrong and blow up the sky. You somehow magically stole his powers and are able to close the rifts that ripped across the world causing demons to travel through from another dimension. Then people started calling you the Herald of Andraste. Next thing you know the inquisition started and you have to go around closing rifts while the mages and templars are fighting each other and everyone else. Sounds very Dragon Age right? One thing I do like is the war room. You basically have three advisers that you can pick for certain missions. Should you send your spymaster to deal with this mission? or send your commander? Different advisers will give different results, and rewards. The missions are updated in real time. So if you look at the clock and its 4pm, the mission says 4 hours. You can fuck around with side quests for four hours or turn off the game and come back at 8pm to continue the mission. Missions also cost power to unlock, which is gained from side quests. Which brings us to another issue.
There are way too many side quests. I don't mind doing side quests if they are interesting. Like Skyrim I could wander around until I find something interesting and suddenly I'm exploring some ruins and find some quest. The majority of the quests I've seen you get from running across dead bodies on the floor or an NPC asks you to hunt ram for meat. The bodies always have a note and it always either leads to a loved one, a random chest, or to the killer. After coming across the hundredth body you start to wonder what the fuck you are doing in this game. This is boring. I don't want to go scavenger hunting for corpses. I want to fucking continue the story. Then head back to the war room and start a mission. I spent 7 hours fucking around with side quests in the first zone and barely finished a quarter of the area. I gave up and used all the power I got saved up and continued the main story. I opened up 3 more zones but I haven't bothered going there. Whats the point its just boring side quests that does shit for the main story. I don't want to fucking hunt bodies. But you have to because the power cost for mission start racking up quickly. What a way to pad game length. Side quests aren't the only thing you can or have to do though. You can claim landmarks or areas by running up and slamming a flag onto the floor like manifest destiny. A settler camp? a village? some castle? FUCK THAT. SLAM THAT FLAG DOWN. Its yours now. By claiming stuff you gain influence. With influence you can level up the inquisition rank and get more bonuses.
If you played the previous Dragon Ages you'll find that the combat in this one is more like DA2 than the first. Its more actiony and you focus more one one character while the AI controls everyone else. Unlike the second one though you can swap to the mode the first one uses. The one that gives you an overhead view and preplan out commands for the team. However all this is unnecessary because the AI is clearly balanced around playing a single person and having your three other teammates ram into the enemy with their faces until they die. Perhaps in the hardest difficulty you may need to plan things out. For this version, combat is mostly about holding down your autoattack button. If you are on PC that is the right mouse button, which is also the camera button. The camera is janky and chances are you'll end up fucking around with how you perfection positioned it by targetting an enemy. That is where you go to the options, plug in your controller, and select gamepad mode. Now things are looking better. You can use the right analog stick to position the camera, the left analog to move and the right back button to attack. This game feels like its intended to be played on a controller. However playing on the controller the jump button and the talk/action button is the same one so you end up hopping around when trying to open doors or get the attention of an NPC. Back to the combat, your mana or stamina pool is very small but it regenerates very quickly. A simple fire spell drains 80% of your mana so the rest of the time you are just holding down the button shooting ice shards from your staff. Every 10 seconds or so you click another button and hold down that autoattack! At least make it a toggle or something. Another thing I need to point out is that healing skills are removed from the game. There is also no natural regeneration. The only way to regenerate health is to drink healing potions. At the start you are able to carry 8 of them and they are automatically refilled everytime you go back to town. This is a giant pain in the ass. Its impossible to completely avoid damage so you're constantly going back to town. Whats worse is if you're like halfway into a dungeon and you're low or out of healing potions. Do you spend 20 minutes to walk back or you carry on and reload when things go wrong.
Exploration is a pain the ass from the issue mentioned above but there are more. I've mentioned how bad the quests are but getting to where you are supposed to get to is a pain in the ass too. The map screen is an ugly piece of shit where you can't tell what is what. Is this a mountain? Do I climb up somewhere? Is this underground? I'm supposed to find someone/something but the quest shows a giant ass circle, am I doing this right? One thing I have to point out, what is the fucking point of a jump button when there is nothing you can jump over. You see a rock in front of you and you decided to just jump over it instead of wasting a second to circle around. You jump get stuck, try again, get stuck, fiddle around and give up and walk around the damn thing. You just wasted a minute of your time. What the fuck is this piddly jump. Your feet barely lifts itself off the ground. You want to try climbing a hill for the quest? Don't bother jumping it doesn't do shit! The only way to climb up a fairly flat hill is to find the only path available up. Basically don't bother jumping just circle around stuff and pretend anything that's not flat ground to be an obstacle. Some quests appear on the mini map as a big purple circle meaning that the objective is somewhere inside there and you have to find it yourself. Its usually not that hard to find but I find it funny how big some of the circles can get. Its three times bigger than the town you were in and all you wanted to find was a NPC. Other quests are so long and tedious you look at it for one second and go "fuck this shit." Collect 8 caches hidden around all over the zone. Can you spread them out more? I find wasting 30 minutes traveling around on a single side quest very enjoyable. You do get a horse near the start of the game by doing a side quest. However the horse is slow as shit and you're constantly getting on and off to fight random enemies on the field or picking up stuff you run by. If it gets hit it magically disappears into nowhere and you have to resummon it again. Wait for it to show up, and then get back on. I find that the horse slows me down more than the tiny bonus speed it gives when you hold down the run button while mounted. Yes you need to hold the analog button down while moving to get it to run. The last issue I have with exploration is that the areas are badly balanced. You never know what is too high level until you die. The entire area of the zone could be level 4 but this single camp in the middle of it is super high leveled that one shots you the second you start combat. You run around kill a few monsters and gear drop for levels 8 and above. What? I'm here too early?
I haven't gotten very far into the story but so far its the same Bioware style writing. Everything is black or white and into the extremes. For example, during the mage path on the main quest, spoilers ahead, you basically get three choices. You free all the mages from the circle (pisses off your companions), you basically make them into your slaves (pisses off your other companions), or you basically leave them to their fate and die (pisses off the rest of your companions.) It uses the same chat wheel circle where the top right button is the nice response, the middle right button is the neutral response and the bottom right button is the rude response. This can also translate to good and evil choices as well. Do you give a man all your money with the top right button, or do you kill him and all his family and feed it to his dog with the bottom right button. One thing though, is when talking to romance-able companions is that a heart button will appear on the top left occasionally. This is like a get out of jail free card when it pops up. You're arguing with Cullen about freeing the mages when you are at the point where there is no way to move on without dropping his reputation for you, you click that fucking button. You can go from murder, death and angry arguing to "you're so handsome blah blah blah" and then you get bonus reputation. These buttons always show up at the oddest times. What kind of person in the middle of talking about enslaving mages suddenly decide to flirt. Its also the most awkward responses too. The only companion romance that seems interesting is Dorian, the gay Tevinter mage. He's a little arrogant but he's the least awkward of everyone. While Cassandra will babble on like shes stupid, Josephine will completely misinterpret, Greywall will tell you that you shouldn't pursue him, I want to puke when I talk to the racist Cullen, Sera is a pain in the ass, Solas hates me because I'm too elfy for him, Iron Bull doesn't give a fuck about what you are, and Vivienne the worst character ever. She completely hates my guts because I helped the mages and hates me because I'm a elf mage and its just been a huge hate war. I like to point out that you cannot kick companions out after recruiting them with the exception of Sera. I don't know what makes her special but from all the comments I've read about her and hundreds of pages of discussions about her. I can see why people really hate her and they gave us the option to kick her out.
This game is a mess. I'm not even trying to pick out the worst parts of the game because this is the entirety of the game. Everything about the game is bad or lacking in some way. I hold this game to high standards because I'm comparing it to the original Dragon Age and to other open world games like Skyrim. The thing is I really liked Dragon Age Origins. I wanted this game to succeed but it let me down more than Mass Effect 3 did. The game never jumps out to wow you its just mediocre. Everything feels generic and some of the decisions made for this game are questionable. Instead of making it an open world and filling it up with the most boring quests that makes grindy MMO quests look amazing, they could focus more on polishing the main story. The open world is just padding anyways.
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Lords of Xulima - You Missed Your Attack
What is Lords of Xulima? I had no clue when I saw this name. There was no review sites talking about it, no one on any major forums knew what it was but apparently there were some random people praising this game. What better game to try than some nameless game that some random people tell you to. First of all I want to mention that this game is very old school. Like Might and Magic X Legacy level of old, and you know how much I hated that game. So what makes this different? For starters, its not fucking boring, and there is an actual story to the game.
When you first start the game you are brought into the character creation screen where you have to make 5 additional party members to your main character, Gaulen the Explorer, a unique class. You can choose their portraits, name them, pick a god and then that is about all you can do. There are 9 classes you can choose from and you can pick the same class if you like. You can have a team of 5 mages no one is going to stop you but you won't get very far. Your party has a formation. There are 8 slots in the party screen, 4 in the front row, and 4 in the back row. You cannot place a member in the back row if there is no one in the front row. Melee attacks cannot be used in the back row unless they are using a polearm. Melee classes are naturally more durable so you are going to put them in the front rows anyways. The usual teams are 3 melee and 3 in the back, or 4 melee and 2 in the back. After you have all this done its time to start playing the game.
When you enter the game you listen to some text on the screen. I want to point out this is probably the worst voice acting I have ever heard. Worse than Persona 3's robot voice acting. I know this is an indie game and they probably don't have the funds for professional voice acting but I can still criticize it. Its so awkward that you can't even follow the story. When you finally finish the back story you start off at a beach where you ship capsized on. Its a top down game and you move by clicking your mouse on the location and your character will walk towards it. The biggest issue about this is that there are two speeds in this game. SLOW AS FUCK or FAST AS SHIT. When I first started I didn't know you had a "run" toggle. I limped around at a snail's pace until I realized you can press the Alt key to toggle run. Running makes you go faster, but drains your food faster so there's no difference between walking or running. Just hit the fucking Alt key and play the game. However, there is a problem. If you're running you usually can't see whats ahead of you in your vision. There is a fog where everything is blacked out except the vision near your party. So you could be running around and suddenly stumble into a pack of high level monsters. You fucked up. Now restart the game.
Before we get into monsters and combat and such lets focus on the world map first. You have a food meter. This is reduced by walking/running around the world map as well as camping. You can camp anytime as long as you are not near hostiles. You may rest for 4 hours which will clear most wounds, 8 hours which will clear fatal wounds, or rest until full. Get used to this screen because you'll be clicking the camp button after every single battle. EVERY SINGLE BATTLE. Food can be gathered from bushes or trees on the world or bought at the Food NPC. Food is cheap but you'll be going back to town very often to restock because of camping in the wild. Enemies show up in two ways. In dangerous areas they will randomly attack you. But usually you can see the monster on the world map, if you mouse over them you can see their aggro circle. Walking into that circle will automatically start combat. Different monsters have different sized circles. You can also see what their party consists of and there will be a difficulty description such as Easy, Balanced, Difficult, Titanic. Difficult is doable with a well built party. You may lose a few party members during the fight but you can do it. Titanic is the highest difficulty I've seen so far. Going into these battles will basically wipe your entire party in a single turn. This can get annoying when you are forced to go through areas where its a fucking maze full of Titanic monsters. You have to slowly walk through by avoiding aggro circles. So you have to keep mousing over them to see their area and taking a step or two. If you have run on you'll end up dying a few times. And just to make it worse during the mazes you cannot save so you'll have to go back to the beginning every time. So this is finally a time for walk, but its so fucking slow. So you take multiple tries by overshooting your step or waste your time walking slow as fuck. Either way it both takes way too long so pick your poison.
In combat enemies have a party with the same formation setup as you, 4 slots in the front 4 slots in the back. Melee can only hit targets adjacent to them. With the exception of spears where you can hit one slot further. This means you can poke an enemy from the back row or poke an enemy hiding in their back row when you are in the front row. A melee on the corner slot cannot attack the enemies on the other sides. So you must be thinking, lets get some range and not worry about this formation bullshit. Unfortunately there are no archer type class. The closest you have are bards and thieves. Bards are buffers, they don't hit hard at all, and thieves are built to be front liners with daggers or swords. Bows are pretty shit and no one uses them. The exception is Gaulen who could use bows but he's the sturdiest character in the game so you want him in the front row. Not just as a tank but because he's the weakest character in the game and you might as well use him as a meat shield. So bows are out so I guess its up to magic! The three pure casters in the game are the Mage, the Cleric, and the Divine Summoner. The cleric is a healer so it doesn't have any damage. The Divine Summoner is basically what it sounds a summoner. Once you drop your summons you don't do anything. So I guess its up to the mage. They must be good right? Well to be honest, they are great when you first start. Spells have a 100% accuracy, they can hit any target anywhere, and they hit hard. However once you get to mid game you'll get into a big issue. Your PP drains in just a few spells. You can literally cast 3-5 spells before you run out and is are forced to drink a potion or stand there doing nothing. At least your damage is high for now. When you reach late game your damage starts petering out and your PP costs are so high you run out in 1-2 casts. So this is a game for melee! Melee characters start off with the most pitiful damage in the game and the worst accuracy I've ever seen in any game. You miss your attacks 75% of the time and against fast enemies like wasps expect a 10% hit rate at best. You can see the % when you mouse over a target. However once you get over the hump that is early game you start doing more damage than mages without the limiting factor of PP and you can actually take a hit. Some classes are also really shitty and worthless. Balance is a big issue.
Leveling is very old school. There are 5 attributes and every level you can spend one point in two of them. Strength increases your damage, Constitution increases your health, Agility increases something I don't care about, Speed increases the frequency of your turns, and Energy increases your PP. Basically the only stats that matter are STR, CON, and SPD. You only want enough Agility to wear weapons. Stack the crap out of speed so you can move multiple times before the enemy moves once. Energy sucks because you get 2 PP a level so say you are level 80 and you put one in it every level that is 160 bonus PP. That may look like a big number but you have to remember high level spells cost 200 PP a cast. You also get 5 skill points to drop into a pool of like 40 different skills. Each one takes like 80 levels to max out. The skills include stuff like different weapon masteries that increase accuracy/damage when using that weapon or Learning, which increases the % of exp gained. You might be wondering why you want that. Its because enemies don't respawn. Once you kill them they're gone forever. Even the ones that randomly attack you. Once they die they don't come back. There are many spells to learn as well depending on your class, skills that increases critical chances, non combat skills like Perception that lets you detect higher level traps, Exploration that slows down food consumption when walking, to Mercantile that increases money made from selling. Depending on the class the points required will be different. For example you want Gaulen to learn lock picking you need 3 skill points per level. On a thief, that same skill is only 1 skill point per level. Its overwhelming at first and you have no idea what to do, but its fairly straightforward after thinking about it. Just make Gaulen learn all the non combat garbage and be a meat shield and have the rest of your party learn combat skills.
Overall the game while having a few issues, is quite fun to play. Its not particularly difficult if you have a decent party. I had a Barbarian, a Thief, two Mages, and a Cleric as my party members. I haven't run into any problems so far. The story writing isn't bad. Its quite enjoyable but be prepared for some fairly bad voice acting. Give it a try if you like old school RPGS but don't expect a perfect game.
When you first start the game you are brought into the character creation screen where you have to make 5 additional party members to your main character, Gaulen the Explorer, a unique class. You can choose their portraits, name them, pick a god and then that is about all you can do. There are 9 classes you can choose from and you can pick the same class if you like. You can have a team of 5 mages no one is going to stop you but you won't get very far. Your party has a formation. There are 8 slots in the party screen, 4 in the front row, and 4 in the back row. You cannot place a member in the back row if there is no one in the front row. Melee attacks cannot be used in the back row unless they are using a polearm. Melee classes are naturally more durable so you are going to put them in the front rows anyways. The usual teams are 3 melee and 3 in the back, or 4 melee and 2 in the back. After you have all this done its time to start playing the game.
When you enter the game you listen to some text on the screen. I want to point out this is probably the worst voice acting I have ever heard. Worse than Persona 3's robot voice acting. I know this is an indie game and they probably don't have the funds for professional voice acting but I can still criticize it. Its so awkward that you can't even follow the story. When you finally finish the back story you start off at a beach where you ship capsized on. Its a top down game and you move by clicking your mouse on the location and your character will walk towards it. The biggest issue about this is that there are two speeds in this game. SLOW AS FUCK or FAST AS SHIT. When I first started I didn't know you had a "run" toggle. I limped around at a snail's pace until I realized you can press the Alt key to toggle run. Running makes you go faster, but drains your food faster so there's no difference between walking or running. Just hit the fucking Alt key and play the game. However, there is a problem. If you're running you usually can't see whats ahead of you in your vision. There is a fog where everything is blacked out except the vision near your party. So you could be running around and suddenly stumble into a pack of high level monsters. You fucked up. Now restart the game.
Before we get into monsters and combat and such lets focus on the world map first. You have a food meter. This is reduced by walking/running around the world map as well as camping. You can camp anytime as long as you are not near hostiles. You may rest for 4 hours which will clear most wounds, 8 hours which will clear fatal wounds, or rest until full. Get used to this screen because you'll be clicking the camp button after every single battle. EVERY SINGLE BATTLE. Food can be gathered from bushes or trees on the world or bought at the Food NPC. Food is cheap but you'll be going back to town very often to restock because of camping in the wild. Enemies show up in two ways. In dangerous areas they will randomly attack you. But usually you can see the monster on the world map, if you mouse over them you can see their aggro circle. Walking into that circle will automatically start combat. Different monsters have different sized circles. You can also see what their party consists of and there will be a difficulty description such as Easy, Balanced, Difficult, Titanic. Difficult is doable with a well built party. You may lose a few party members during the fight but you can do it. Titanic is the highest difficulty I've seen so far. Going into these battles will basically wipe your entire party in a single turn. This can get annoying when you are forced to go through areas where its a fucking maze full of Titanic monsters. You have to slowly walk through by avoiding aggro circles. So you have to keep mousing over them to see their area and taking a step or two. If you have run on you'll end up dying a few times. And just to make it worse during the mazes you cannot save so you'll have to go back to the beginning every time. So this is finally a time for walk, but its so fucking slow. So you take multiple tries by overshooting your step or waste your time walking slow as fuck. Either way it both takes way too long so pick your poison.
In combat enemies have a party with the same formation setup as you, 4 slots in the front 4 slots in the back. Melee can only hit targets adjacent to them. With the exception of spears where you can hit one slot further. This means you can poke an enemy from the back row or poke an enemy hiding in their back row when you are in the front row. A melee on the corner slot cannot attack the enemies on the other sides. So you must be thinking, lets get some range and not worry about this formation bullshit. Unfortunately there are no archer type class. The closest you have are bards and thieves. Bards are buffers, they don't hit hard at all, and thieves are built to be front liners with daggers or swords. Bows are pretty shit and no one uses them. The exception is Gaulen who could use bows but he's the sturdiest character in the game so you want him in the front row. Not just as a tank but because he's the weakest character in the game and you might as well use him as a meat shield. So bows are out so I guess its up to magic! The three pure casters in the game are the Mage, the Cleric, and the Divine Summoner. The cleric is a healer so it doesn't have any damage. The Divine Summoner is basically what it sounds a summoner. Once you drop your summons you don't do anything. So I guess its up to the mage. They must be good right? Well to be honest, they are great when you first start. Spells have a 100% accuracy, they can hit any target anywhere, and they hit hard. However once you get to mid game you'll get into a big issue. Your PP drains in just a few spells. You can literally cast 3-5 spells before you run out and is are forced to drink a potion or stand there doing nothing. At least your damage is high for now. When you reach late game your damage starts petering out and your PP costs are so high you run out in 1-2 casts. So this is a game for melee! Melee characters start off with the most pitiful damage in the game and the worst accuracy I've ever seen in any game. You miss your attacks 75% of the time and against fast enemies like wasps expect a 10% hit rate at best. You can see the % when you mouse over a target. However once you get over the hump that is early game you start doing more damage than mages without the limiting factor of PP and you can actually take a hit. Some classes are also really shitty and worthless. Balance is a big issue.
Leveling is very old school. There are 5 attributes and every level you can spend one point in two of them. Strength increases your damage, Constitution increases your health, Agility increases something I don't care about, Speed increases the frequency of your turns, and Energy increases your PP. Basically the only stats that matter are STR, CON, and SPD. You only want enough Agility to wear weapons. Stack the crap out of speed so you can move multiple times before the enemy moves once. Energy sucks because you get 2 PP a level so say you are level 80 and you put one in it every level that is 160 bonus PP. That may look like a big number but you have to remember high level spells cost 200 PP a cast. You also get 5 skill points to drop into a pool of like 40 different skills. Each one takes like 80 levels to max out. The skills include stuff like different weapon masteries that increase accuracy/damage when using that weapon or Learning, which increases the % of exp gained. You might be wondering why you want that. Its because enemies don't respawn. Once you kill them they're gone forever. Even the ones that randomly attack you. Once they die they don't come back. There are many spells to learn as well depending on your class, skills that increases critical chances, non combat skills like Perception that lets you detect higher level traps, Exploration that slows down food consumption when walking, to Mercantile that increases money made from selling. Depending on the class the points required will be different. For example you want Gaulen to learn lock picking you need 3 skill points per level. On a thief, that same skill is only 1 skill point per level. Its overwhelming at first and you have no idea what to do, but its fairly straightforward after thinking about it. Just make Gaulen learn all the non combat garbage and be a meat shield and have the rest of your party learn combat skills.
Overall the game while having a few issues, is quite fun to play. Its not particularly difficult if you have a decent party. I had a Barbarian, a Thief, two Mages, and a Cleric as my party members. I haven't run into any problems so far. The story writing isn't bad. Its quite enjoyable but be prepared for some fairly bad voice acting. Give it a try if you like old school RPGS but don't expect a perfect game.
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