Archaon

...not a trilogy, then.

Speaking of sequels, how many of you out there are playing your character as an extreme religious skeptic, knowing full well that you'll be in some way vindicated by the end of the trilogy? I can almost guarantee that "The Maker" will turn out to be either secretly evil or not real.

It wouldn't surprise me. They did throw a lot of references to their older works in there. Like the dirty pair of pantaloons that were "possibly golden or silver at one point". Or Gaxkang the totally-not-a-lich. I'll tell you what, though. I'm definitely not touching this game again until they do something about the memory leak. If I see a loading screen and go off to make myself a sandwich and a cup of coffee, the game should not still be loading by the time I get back. Especially not if it's an area I only left a minute ago.

No kidding, though at least the duel isn't as weakly justified this time around. "OK, you've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm guilty, but if I beat you in a duel then I get off scot free and you die." Why would you ever have a law like that?? Anyway, I just finished the game. For all its flaws, even the monotonous and sometimes frustrating combat, AND THAT GODDAMNED SCALING ENEMIES BULLSHIT, I did like it, and I'm probably going to play through it again sooner or later. However, it still didn't come close to dislodging Baldur's Gate from my "King of RPGs" throne. Not that I really expected it to.

Huh. You know, something just occurred to me. How come there isn't any "One-handed" talent tree? I think that'd be pretty nifty. It'd be the weakest option for auto-attacking and pure damage output, but it'd make up for it with more powerful talents. And they'd be awesome and flashy. As it is, if you're going to put a weapon in one hand, there's just no reason not to put one in the other as well. Or a shield. That kind of sucks. It'd be cool to play a fencer type of warrior. I have to say, I found the Landsmeet cutscene to be a bit...underwhelming. I was expecting something more like the courtroom scene in Neverwinter Nights 2, where you finally get to put all those points in Diplomacy to real use and commit a verbal massacre against your enemies, bringing every single one of their lies and misdeeds to light, turning everyone against them with a ferocious speech and leaving your lawyer completely awestruck. None of the actual battles in the game were as satisfying as that moment. Instead I just felt like I was being cut short. Like the scene was just pressing on without me, even though I had more to say. *spoiler* And why the hell is Alistair bitching at me for making him king when I already got him to agree to it and marry Anora? You cannot tell me you're OK with me doing it and then give me the "How could you do this to me?" spiel when I do it. Also she is totally hot and honor-bound to get it on with you. Grow a pair. EDIT: OK, I think my game is bolloxed. *SPOILER* Firstly, Alistair is acting like he's the king now even though I went back and decided to let Queen Anora rule alone to put a stop to his whining. Secondly, when my party members were giving me the send-off before I went to fight the archdemon, Loghain said that it was an honour to stand with me. Except that I personally beheaded Loghain at the Landsmeet. So presumably it was Loghain's invisible ghost? If I get the wrong ending(s) because of this, I'm going to be very annoyed.

Possibly, but she gets pretty damn stroppy over it if you offer to sleep with Isabela with her in the party, so I don't know about that. Also, I find it odd that they went to the trouble of making the characters' helmets invisible during cutscenes...but they didn't do the same for sustained spells and whatnot. It's a little jarring to be transparent, glowing white and emitting three different auras when you're having a casual conversation with someone. That said, I wish they'd just had a "Do not show helmets at all" option, because the majority of them look so damn goofy. Especially the cowls.

ARGH. I really, really, really hate it when you splurge on some fancy new item you find in a shop and then ten minutes later you find a better one lying around in a dungeon. "Just this once," I thought. "Just this once I'll stop being so damn thrifty and actually spend some of the money I have before the end of the game." The one time I let myself go and it comes back to bite me in the ass. Well, that's it. I'm never buying anything in a video game again. EDIT: OK, so getting a peck on the cheek from some lady you helped out gets you a -10 disapproval from Leliana...but sleeping with a prostitute only gets you a -1? What's going on with this woman?

If the shapeshifting forms were anything like the temporary ones you get in the Circle of Mages segment, I'd be all over it.

To be honest, I'm not going to bother with it either. I'm just an obsessive completionist.

Alright. I am now convinced that the Curse of Mortality spell exists solely for enemies to use in order to piss off the player. "Oh, what's that? What's that? You're about to win? CURSE OF MORTALITY BITCH HAHA NOW YOU'RE GOING TO DIE NO MATTER HOW MANY POULTICES YOU CHUG" Speaking of which, why the hell do the characters drink poultices? That is not what you do with a poultice.. I can understand if they didn't want to create separate animations for "applying poultice" and "drinking potion", but if that's the case, why not just call them "Health potions"? Nobody would have cared. Also, it is so damn annoying when enemies just appear out of nowhere. I don't mind it so much when it's a spider dropping down from the ceiling or whatever, but when a group of foes just magically pops up behind you or charges in from a room you just cleared out as if they've been there the whole time...ugh. Hate that shit. So as to break up the litany of complaints, however, I'll mention something I've noticed that I do like. From what I've seen, your party members will always take care to avoid any traps that you've spotted, rather than just blundering straight into them. They see a pressure plate on the ground, they'll be able to bypass it without you having to take control of each of them individually and painstakingly march them around it. This is a very refreshing change from the likes of Neverwinter Nights, where your companions would happily go charging recklessly through a corridor filled with traps just to kill a single, feeble enemy at the other end of it. EDIT: Anyone know what Morrigan's deal is? Everyone else seems perfectly happy to teach me their specialisation once their approval hits 25-30, but Morrigan's is nearly maxed out and she's still being a damn cocktease about it. Do I have to shag her first or what?

Do YOU realise that that would have been letting the game win?

You know, as awesome as the special "Ogre kill" animation is, you'd think they'd have the decency to make you invincible while you're doing it, or at least allow you to cancel out of it while there are still about twenty Genlocks shooting at you. EDIT: Jesus' balls, the Deep Roads is nothing short of a goddamned test of endurance. To the player. OK, here we have a big dungeon, followed by another big dungeon, oh and there's this other big dungeon you can go to if you want you probably should there's some cool stuff in here oh and here's a BOSS and here's another BOSS and SPIDERS SPIDERS SPIDERS and then we have another dungeon and some more BOSSES and oh look another big dungeon but OK this is the last one look there's this ominous lead-up to a big boss fight and HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THAT BOSS THAT IS ONE AWESOME BOSS this is totally the final boss of this area it's OK you're done it's finished now HAH JUST KIDDING IT'S ANOTHER BIG DUNGEON AGAIN. For the love of god, cut me a break. This is starting to feel like work.

Hurlock. Hurrrrrrrrrrrlock. HURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR lock. I imagine mods saying that when they lock a dumb thread. They're like "HURRRR, lock."

Top Gun theme.

Thankfully, none of this matters anymore because I just became an Arcane Warrior. Imagine a nerdy, awkward kid in school who gets picked on every day for being all quiet and studious and asocial, but he just keeps his head down and puts up with it because he knows his studies are what will really matter in the end. Then, over the summer holidays, he knuckles down and does some hardcore weightlifting and martial arts training, and when the next school year starts, he returns to dangle women off his arm and wreak unbridled carnage on everyone who has ever slighted him. That is exactly what I felt like once I donned a suit of heavy plate and got my first taste of Combat Magic in action. Except I already had women dangling off my arm because apparently Leliana is very easily impressed. It's time for RETRIBUTION. EDIT: Urgh. I'm really starting to wish I'd gone for Morrigan instead, because I'm finding it completely impossible to keep Leliana from charging into melee rather than using her bow; you know, the weapon she's actually GOOD with and has all the fancy combat techniques for. I'd understand it if she only switched when someone got too close, but no. Unless I take control of her directly, she insists on diving into the fray unless she's practically on the other side of the map. And she doesn't even need to use her melee weapon anymore because I took that skill that stops her archery being interrupted if she gets hit. I swear, it's like for every thing this game gets right, it does something else wrong to balance it out. Having a communal inventory and not having to worry about encumbrance is good, but why can't I drop items and come back for them later rather than having to destroy them when I run out of space? Being able to position characters individually to set up ambushes and such is good, but what's the point when most of the difficult fights have cutscenes before them that automatically place everyone right in front of your enemies?

That's just it. I'm not. I don't even have any AOE spells right now. I prefer to play "battlefield controller" mages rather than blasty mages, so I've focused mostly on debuffs and stun/paralyze/restriction/whatever spells. So I send in my tanks, let them get some hits in, then cast a debuff and, say, Paralyze, both of which invariably get resisted, and then I get to spend the rest of the battle being chased around while everyone else pelts the monster to death with arrows. I guess it works, in that it allows me to win, but it's still boring as hell and completely retarded. The only spell I have that doesn't get resisted all the time is Crushing Prison, and even then, sometimes it just doesn't do anything. I cast it, it doesn't get resisted, the forcefield effect appears around them...and nothing happens. They can still attack and they don't get locked in place. Which is bullshit. This isn't a JRPG, god damn it. You can't make me work my ass off for some top-of-the-line killer spell and then not allow it to function on anything important.

Did I miss something? I finish one area with Leliana in my party and suddenly she's all up in my business like we've been going out for two years. It's a little jarring to suddenly go from "It must suck being an elf" to "Let's talk about our future together." This is why, if you're going to have a romance option in your game, you need to have it work based on time passed, rather than just "influence" or "approval rating" or whatever you want to call it. Spread it out a bit. Give me the "Sucks being an elf" talk, then make me go out and do some quests or accomplish a plot-critical objective before I can get the "It's a nice night" talk, regardless of whether their love bar is at 80%. Feels so much more natural than getting a whole bunch of talks at once and being told somewhere in the sudden avalanche of dialogue that we've apparently been chatting it up for months and keeping watch over one another at night. Have we? NO-ONE INFORMED ME. MAYBE THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN A CUTSCENE FOR THAT. But why do I have to tell you this anyway, BioWare? You've done it before. You did it in Baldur's Gate II. You did it in Knights of the Old Republic. You did it in Mass Effect. So why the hell not do it now? Do you think we're so desperate for the now-obligatory make-out/sex scene that we need to have it fed to us before even a quarter of the game is over? WELL MAYBE WE ARE. But you're not proving anything by stooping to our level, BioWare. Have some integrity. EDIT: It was also pretty painful to listen to her getting all cute and flustered and asking Alistair to ask me if I'm checking her out...about ten minutes after she joined the party. Christ, woman, get a grip.

"Resisted! Resisted! Resisted! Resisted! Resisted!" This is ridiculous. First there was that ogre, now it's a dragon. My mage might as well not exist in these goddamned orange monster battles. This is part of the reason why I love the Baldur's Gate series so much. Yes, there are enemies that are resistant to magic, protected from it or even immune to it, but there's always a way to get around it. You could use indirect attacks, or tie them up with a horde of summoned monsters, or use some buffs and wade into melee yourself, or even just use one of your many, many counter spells to break down their protections. You would never, ever be caught in a situation where a mage is relegated to spewing crappy little projectiles and having to rely on pure luck to accomplish anything useful. EDIT: And, seriously, why the shit is is that even though Alistair has Threaten activated at all times and enemies are supposed to be drawn to those in the heaviest armour, everything insists on attacking my mage and never anyone else? I DO NOT CONSIDER RUNNING AWAY ALL THE TIME TO BE AN ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE.

So this isn't a sequel to Mass: Effect?

Yeah, it isn't hard if I kite it. But if I try to fight it any other way it just resists everything that isn't a plain attack and smashes everyone to pieces in seconds. Not to mention the fact that I practically have to kite it, because it insists on attacking my mage and only my mage, and so I'm pretty much stuck running around like an idiot because standing my ground would be suicide. Because it doesn't make any friggin' sense. If there are four viable targets in a room, you're not going to just focus on one to the exclusion of all others and fruitlessly chase it in circles whilst the other three slowly and laboriously shoot you to death. Not to mention the fact that there's no reason why you should only be able to attack while standing still. It's not so much a "strategy" as it is abusing the limitations of the game system, and it's pretty devastating to the immersion. It's also not fun. Of course it'd be ridiculous to expect anyone to program a flawless AI that can adapt to anything, but I don't think it's ridiculous to expect them to balance the combat so that the player can win without resorting to cheap exploits.

OK, so I just got the game and I've reached the first Ogre. I was able to defeat it fairly soundly by kiting it to death, but you know what? I'm not going to accept that as a legitimate victory, god damn it. That's a cheap MMORPG bastard solution. If I can't find another way to beat this thing, I'm putting this game in the incinerator, because I refuse to play anything that encourages such bullshit "tactics". EDIT: Also, I find it very odd that, with people's unblemished complexions and toned physiques and perfectly aligned facial features, they still saw fit to give everyone realistically brown teeth.

Tobal No. 1. Shadow 3.

Seriously. Used to be that I'd consider it a personal failure on my part if I couldn't get everyone in the party through a battle alive, and I'd reload and do it again no matter how far back it would take me or how decisively I would otherwise have won. Now it's just "Eh, they'll be up again in a sec." AND I'LL TELL YOU ANOTHER THING. We used to have to deal with HORDES of enemies that had a whole arsenal of bullshit instant death attacks that would end a battle (and the whole game) prematurely just because your main character failed one measly saving throw. AND WE LIKED IT. OK, we didn't really. But we still struggled through it, damn it.

What? HALF-ORCS CANNOT BE MAGES. YOU ARE EITHER A LIAR OR A CHEATER SIR.

I think he means Zevran.