Be Excellent To Each Other

I'll (possibly) be having a giveaway of this on SavyGamer. Because I am going up in the world and you can't stop me.

If I do I'll post it here.

Pee See

Anyone else excited? I will admit I've only started to appreciate swords n' beards RPGs in the last few years... Oblivion really broke down that wall for me, Risen tempted me and Fable 2 disappointed me. But being a mighty wizard and hurling powerful spells is appealing more and more, even if I'm discovering it over a decade too late.

Check out the video.

I think it's out on 360 the same time as the PC.

PC Gamer (proper UK one) has reportedly given it 94%. The odds of it being another Braveheart are quite low.

Oblivion... only a few hours in.

Mwa haaa haaaaaaaa, Mwa ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaaaaa.

MWA HAA HAAA HAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

100+ Hours for me so far on the bog standard 360 version, still got Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles to play though yet.

My heady whirlwind of a social life distracts me.

(JohnCoffey laughs in the distance from atop his tram)

The other two - The Stone Prisoner and Blood Armour - are free to all legitimate owners of the dark fantasy RPG.

It's called Warden's Keep and it'll cost you seven dollars to download. It adds a new party camp that includes storage so you can free up backpack slots when you're adventuring. Bioware claims this was created after early reviews complained about the lack of inventory space. But rather than fixing the game by giving everyone a storage locker, they opted to use the problem as a way to make more money.

The bottom line is this: the lack of inventory space is a problem given the way the game was designed. The solution to this problem will cost you seven dollars above and beyond the money you paid when you bought the game. Dragon Age, as sold, is slightly crippled by design. Once again, Electronic Arts pushes the limit for how to bilk you for more money. Here's a wonderful single-player RPG and the publisher is doing their level best to make you keep paying for it even after you've already bought it.

Shame on you, EA.

seven things -- spoiler free! -- I wish I'd known earlier.

1) Since I'd rolled up a Dalish elf - they're the outdoorsy variety - I figured I'd bump up her herbalism skill to keep my party in potions. Only later did I realize that one of the NPCs you can't miss starts out with the second level of herbalism. And unlike poison-making, which limits who can actually use poisons as well as make them, you don't need herbalism to benefit from better potions.

2) The game seems to go out of its way to include locked chests. I've missed a lot of treasure for lack of someone with the deft hands skill. Since my character was a rogue, that should probably have been me. Instead, I end up compulsively going back through a lot of areas with a deft handed rogue in tow just to unlock the locked chests. It's probably a bit compulsive of me, but I've found some good loot I wish I'd gotten the first time around.

3) I wish I'd put at least a point into the coercion skill to leverage my cunning or strength for the persuasion and intimidation options that come up during dialogues. As with the locked chests, I was surprised with how many of these there were. And since I already had a high cunning, at least a single skill point would have made that cunning all the more useful.

4) There will, of course, be times that you're adventuring alone for some contrived reason. That's to be expected in these kinds of games. But I wish I'd known that one such time would involve me being unable to summon the corrupted spider I had invested four skill points in getting. My character has the ranger specialization maxed out, so she's been relying on a bad-ass spider to make up for her lack of melee skills. That spider was inaccessible during a stretch of gameplay that proved particularly tough.

5) I finally dealt with my inventory problems by resigning myself to never using any of the elemental resistance potions, poison coatings for weapons, or gear for one of the two party members who uses specialized gear. If I'd made this decision earlier, I would have been able to tote more loot back to camp to sell and would have had more money to buy goodies.

6) Whoa. Grenades are awesome. They played a big part in the combat in Mass Effect, but little did I know they would be so useful in a fantasy world! I slogged through many a battle that would have been a lot easier if I'd appreciated sooner the value of a judiciously applied acid flask or shock bomb.

7) I wish I'd paid attention sooner to the tactics screens. Early on, before you're comfortable with the pace of combat, here's an important tip that I must insist you follow: For every character, and especially your front-line fighters, go to the character screen, select tactics, and insert a new first line that instructs the character to drink a lesser health poultice as soon as his health is below 50%. It'll save you a lot of grief, injury kits, and reloaded battles.

Fuck me, who here has time to read or listen to all of the gobshiting shitty fantasy cuntgush that spews from the gobs of the characters in games like this?

I'd actually blanked that out. You bastard.