Damn. After the huge mess that was Call of Duty: Ghosts, I decided not to buy the next game of the franchise. And I swear - I didn't! Problem is, somebody else did it for me and now we're kinda streaming our results.
Our sweet, sweet results.
I won't lie. I'm having more fun with this game than I had anticipated, but it has its fair share of problems, starting with maps, which freeze and stutter like mad to slightly less problematic maps, which let me play at around 20-30 FPS to only maybe one or two maps, which actually run at a full 60. Which, of course, are exactly the maps other players constantly vote for, so the whole experience lacks a certain sense of variety.
One nice touch is the return of user-made emblems, which you can stick on your player card, your uniform, guns and everything. I've made a fun little Berserkerkitten, wielding a giant knife and all that. Yay!
Pictured: Fine art.
Problem is, whenever there's a Call of Duty, which allows players to show off their creativity, the result is always one of two things. A dick or a swastika.
Because idiocy knows absolutely no limits. Also... black dicks? Really?
We have a history of strange neighbours. There was Sam Capone, who used to live upstairs. What a fucking cool name. I bet he had a cool mafioso nickname, too. Sammy "The Knife" Capone or something. Grew weed all day. Whole street smelled of it until even our cats were tripping balls. Most creative phase in my career as a writer. They busted him in winter, when our house was the only one without snow on the roof.
I might have told you guys about that one night where I heard the lady upstairs fight with a man and I wanted to rush out and stop the guy from doing whatever he was doing to the poor woman. Turned out he was running for his life while she tried to shank him with a broken bottle. That same lady also set fire to her kitchen and just closed the door and ignored it, hoping for it to go away by itself.
Our newest neighbour tends to leave little notes, complaining about how our noisy tv is keeping her up all night. Which is funny, because we don't have a tv. Claire uses my computer monitor to watch her soap operas three times a week (in the afternoon, which isn't exactly the middle of the night) and that's pretty much it. I bumped into her earlier tonight and she told me that Claire and I are the reason she doesn't want to live here, because there's a repulsive smell coming from our place, like some dead guy was rotting in our house. Charming. I gave her the thumbs up, said "great" and went back inside, because between that and punching her in the face, I was too confused to come up with any satisfying ways to respond.
For a minute or so I considered going upstairs for round two or to take a piss on her doorstep, but then the pizza was there, everything was good and a few minutes later two guys showed up, banged on her door and shouted for her to let them in. It didn't take long until there were three of four people trying to get inside and when I asked what was wrong, they apologized for the noise. I told them I saw her just a few moments ago and she was behaving a bit... uh... hostile, so I was informed she wasn't being herself and "we may have a problem."
The cops and a bunch of paramedics showed up a little while later. Not entirely sure whether or not they took her away or decided the situation wasn't so bad after all, but they stayed for a while and our house looked like a murder site or something. Our neighbour had breakdowns before (family members banging against the bathroom door while she was shouting at them and calling them names) and I suppose one can suddenly hear phantom television or smell dead people when you're fucked up enough.
So now we're sharing the place with a crazy person. Not entirely sure what to make of this. So the next time she's banging on my door or leaving a note, telling me she caught me setting her cat on fire or some other stupid shit like that, what am I supposed to do? She might be an alcoholic or maybe she's tripping balls or maybe a tumor is making her hallucinate or some shit, so it doesn't seem right to high-five her in the face with a chair. On the other hand this place is both my home and my office and I'm not in the mood to spend the next bunch of years taking abuse from a screaming banshee, just because she's fucking mental.
I finished Dragon Age: Inquisition and it makes me sad. Such a great game, but I reeeeeally don't feel like exploring every last inch of the game world now, finishing every single last side quest and shit, because frankly, that stuff is really just boring filler and doesn't hold a candle to the incredible story. There's a lot of bitching, whining and moaning going on when you look at websites like metacritic, where stupid people talk about how Bioware "ruined the lore" and "shit all over the story" ever since the two Bioware founders left the place. Which is interesting, considering the story was penned by David Gaider, who was already responsible for the first two games. So you mean to tell me that Gaider himself is crapping all over his own lore, simply because the story didn't go in a direction you had personally hoped for? You stupid, stupid assholes. It's the same damn crap that happened in Mass Effect 3. Boooo, we didn't like the controversial ending, let's downvote the fucking game everywhere and hate Bioware for all eternity. I have never kissed a girl.
WARNING: This post contains spoilers. If you haven't finished Dragon Age: Inquisition yet and you don't want parts of the story revealed to you before you get there in the actual game, turn back now, look at porn, get back in the game, just gtfo.
The good people at EA (never thought I'd call them that) were kind enough to let me have a copy of Dragon Age: Inquisition and 50+ hours into the game I'm still having difficulty putting down the controller to get some actual work done. The game has its flaws and I'd rather micro-manage my characters and their attributes (it's all distributed automatically now) instead of managing every tiny aspect of Skyhold. I don't really want to choose from 250 different thrones, banners, drapes and other crap to kit out a virtual base of operations. I wish I could just hire an interior decorator for this stuff.
Nitpicking aside, I'm rather impressed with the game, the dramatic storytelling and the fantastic writing. Bioware made some bold choices here and I was particularly surprised by a quest involving Dorian, a mage who can be hired as a companion for the Inquisitor. Frankly, I was fully expecting to hate Dorian when I looked at character trailers and previews. I mean, just look at that silly, drawn-on facial hair!
I don't mind the fact that he's homosexual. All of my friends are, too. He's just a bit... flamboyant? There is one particular quest where the entire world is in flames and there is this constant sense of impending doom and he complains about the interiour decoration of some old fortress. See? SEE? THIS is why I feel the urge to keep decorating Skyhold even though I don't care for this kind of feature in RPGs! Stuff has to look nice or people get bitchy.
Dorian is a smartass, his facial hair is stupid and I just didn't like him very much when the game first introduced him to me. But the guy grew on me over time, he gets some of the most brilliant lines in the game and he's a decent enough character once you see past the somewhat annoying surface. And since it's perfectly normal for companions in Bioware games to betray you and stab you in the back if they hate you enough, I made sure to be friends with everyone, including Dorian.
As part of his storyline, I ended up accompanying Dorian on a meeting with his estranged father. They're not exactly best friends, Dorian has absolutely nothing nice to say about his old man and when you encourage him to talk to his father, it turns out that the main reason for all the bad blood between them is the fact that Dorian prefers the company of men.
You can break up the whole thing, tell Dorian that his old man isn't worth it or tell the guy to go to hell, but if you encourage them to talk to each other it turns out that Dorian's father deeply regrets how he treated his son and that he seeks forgiveness.
Look, I get it. It's soap opera material. But I've never seen anything like it in a video game and their decision to put this quest in there was brave and nothing short of impressive.
Homosexuality is treated as perfectly natural and nothing weird in Bioware's Mass Effect universe. One of Shepard's crewmen openly talks about his husband, whom he has lost in the war. Nobody picks on him for that or jokes about it, nobody calls the guy names, because it's the distant future and people are past that kind of crap. Things aren't quite as happy in Dragon Age. Dorian and his dad are at each other's throats, because the young mage is openly gay.
The Inquisition is also home to the first transgender character I have ever seen in a video game. Cremisius "Krem" Acclasi looks and fights like any male soldier, he has short hair, no boobs and when you first encounter him, he sounds like a woman. Frankly, I thought it was just a bug and the game was accidentally displaying a male character model for a female character. That kind of stuff happened a lot in games like Guild Wars, where random NPCs would look male and speak with a female voice or vice versa until they got fixed in a patch. No big deal here.
That's until Krem casually mentions binding breasts at a later point in the game. Turns out Krem was indeed born female and it never felt right. He talks about how he never wanted to wear dresses as a kid and how he posed as a man to become a high-ranking soldier. When you ask the leader of his unit if there are any issues with him being a woman, he tells you off. "He's not a woman. [...] Krem's a good man. I don't give a nug's ass that it's a little harder for him to piss standing up."
I have met people on the internet who felt they were the wrong gender. I had a friend, some guy in Manchester in his late 50s, who would occasionally wear his wife's clothes. One day she caught him and he told her that he wanted to be a woman. The two of them had been married for more years than I had been alive, but she left him when he went through with it. The hormone treatment, the operation, the whole thing. He... she wanted to be whom she felt she really was enough to give up on their marriage.
I won't lie. I think it's weird. I have no right to judge. It's none of my business whether people feel happy with their gender or not. But I don't think I'll ever be able to understand it. I will never know how it feels to be in that kind of situation and I'm pretty grateful for that. But I like how Dragon Age: Inquisition brings it up, makes you think about it. And teaches tolerance. A good game shouldn't just teach you that if you hit a boar hard enough, gold will come out. That being a hero, a "good guy" doesn't just mean you punch dragons in the face or decapitate bad guys in epic cutscenes. A good game makes you think. And maybe a good game can teach you just a little bit about values. I like that idea. I think they're doing a good thing here.
And with a face like this, my Inquisitor isn't really in any position to judge.
We'll be streaming Dragon Age multiplayer tonight. It's gonna be messy. I don't honestly believe anyone would even want to watch us, but I'll give my friend the benefit of the doubt. He's very enthusiastic about these things. Nothing to lose, right?
It's my birthday this week. First time I won't be receiving any emails or phone calls from my dad. He was never very good with this stuff. I remember one year where he called a day late, because he forgot. I wish things could have been different. I wish we could talk.
I can't believe it has been a whole year since I've replayed the first two Dragon Age games. Dragon Age: Origins is still one of the greatest RPGs I've ever played and Dragon Age II... sigh. Yeah. And then there's Dragon Age II, which is an okay RPG that doesn't deserve to be called Dragon Age and isn't much more than a husk of a proper BioWare RPG. I didn't hate it or anything, but it turned the original Dragon Age experience into a console-friendly arcade experience for morons, with very little customization or role playing aspects and a bunch of companions I just can't give a shit about.
Dragon Age: Origins had some incredible, memorable party members like Morrigan, who was a bit unpredictable and antisocial and had this constant rivalry going on with her "mother" Flemeth, who just so happens to turn into a fucking dragon whenever she's in the mood. Yes, the game also had its boring, stereotypical dwarf and an elven assassin, who was basically a much gayer version of Shrek's puss in boots, but you could genuinely care about most of the companions and the banter between group members like Alistair and Morrigan was brilliant and often hilarious. Meanwhile, Dragon Age II had a shaven dwarf and a bunch of guys, who couldn't wait to betray you.
In fact, one of them nukes a whole bunch of people and starts a war, forcing you to exile or outright kill the fucker, while another one simply runs off at some point, so you can choose to go after her and sell her into slavery. This is not how you make the player care about their companions. And don't get me started on the dark, brooding, stereotypical white-haired anime elf named fucking Fenris, of all things. With tribal tattoos and a ridiculously oversized sword. What the fuck is this, Final Fantasy? Yes, I get it, the game was also released on consoles, you want to appeal to a younger audience, but that's no excuse to give your characters no fucking personality, even if they're walking cliches of themselves.
Don't get me wrong - it's interesting to put some assholes or traitors in the party and things can get boring when everything is happy-happy-joy-joy, but maybe add a few likable ones here and there, too? I couldn't care less if any of those guys died. I'd be sad to lose Wynne, Morrigan or Alistair from Origins. I'm aware that it's totally possible to get most of them permanenty killed, but I don't do shitty playthroughs like that.
Anyhow. Dragon Age II is still an okay game and you should totally play it if you've enjoyed Origins. It's just a lot more shallow than the first one, but it looks glorious and the combat is fun and fast-paced, so there is that.
And now the third game of the series, Dragon Age: Inquisition, is less than three weeks away and promises to fix so many things that it's hard to judge how much of that is just the usual PR-bullshit and how much if it is actually true.
People complained about how their decisions didn't really have any effect on the three "different" endings of Mass Effect 3, so BioWare promised over 40 unique and different endings for Dragon Age: Inquisition. They also promise over 200 hours of gameplay. And when something sounds too good to be true, well...
I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. What I've seen so far looked absolutely incredible and I'm not seriously expecting those alleged 40+ endings to be vastly different from each other. So I won't really be disappointed when it turns out that the differences between endings will be very minor. I'm more concerned about the artificial stretching of content in those "200 hours" of gameplay. I don't give a shit about collections, hidden achievements and tons upon tons of secrets, especially if you are forced to waste lots of time with them to get a "good" ending.
Nobody gives a fuck about boring errands. "Good sir, it would help me tremendously if you handed these 20 leaflets to the people in town" or some shit. Dragon Age: Origins did it, it didn't make the game any more fun and spending hours trying to find every last asshole you were supposed to hand random shit to didn't feel fun or rewarding. Look, I get it, you have to add some useless filler here and there in order to give people the advertised amount of gameplay, but I'd much prefer if games were advertised as featuring only 30 or 50 hours of gameplay and you actually get to play the damn game in these hours, not hunt after stupid flowers and rare beetles and lost family signets and other useless crap nobody really cares about.
I also have mixed feelings about the Dragon Age Keep. You know, the website, which lets you create a starting savegame for Dragon Age: Inquisition, based on your actions and decisions in the predecessors. First of all, how fucking stupid is it that PC users can't just import their fucking savegames from previous games? I've been keeping my save files on my computer for years and years, anticipating the next game, fully expecting to carry over my heroes and decisions. Instead, I have to answer over 300 stupid questions on a website, telling the game what I did or didn't do in the first two games.
What adds insult to injury is how you can "import" your characters from the first two games into the keep, but it will only use the names and (attempt to) recreate the likenesses of your custom heroes and that's it. Nothing else carries over, you'll have to set it all by hand. And if you haven't uploaded your original characters to your BioWare account, then you won't be able to import them into Inquisition at all. You can choose from a bunch of premade heroes on the website to make up for it, but why not just allow people to upload their damn savegames or skip the stupid Dragon Age Keep completely and just let them move their savegames from one title to another, like in Mass Effect?
Probably fucking DRM. If you can only use a legit BioWare account and their website to move custom heroes from one game to the next, then you'll be forced to actually own all three games on the exact same BioWare account or it won't work. I have the games right here, but I have never bothered to upload any characters or data to the Origin cloud, so I had to download and reinstall Origins and Dragon Age II just to get all of that shit into the Dragon Age Keep. Not remotely fun or user friendly.
The biggest problem is how there is never enough context when the Keep asks you about your decisions in the previous games. For instance, I was faced with the following options for a particular NPC: Nathaniel is well and alive / Nathaniel is dead / Haven't encountered Nathaniel.
Great. How the fuck am I supposed to remember if I met some asshole named Nathaniel in a game I haven't touched for a year? I had to google that shit and read up on most of the questions on Wikipedia. It took me a half hour only to recreate a world state, where both my main character and Alistair had survived the final battle. Turns out this only works if you've boned Morrigan (which I did), but her child has to be "an old god" and not human. I don't fucking know what the child turned out to be, because I didn't play any of the DLC and never met Morrigan again, so I played it by ear, picked a human baby and doomed my main character. Took a lot of trial and error to figure out why the keep always declared him dead.
Besides, knowing exactly which actions in the first two games do or do not have an impact on the world of Dragon Age: Inquisition also brings a few spoilers. The website asked me whether my character in Dragon Age II was a goodie-goodie, a sarcastic prick or a nasty old cunt, so it's relatively safe to assume that he'll make another appearance and have whatever personality I picked for him on the website. I'm genuinely excited about his comeback and I hope I'll get to fight alongside him and my main character from the first game, but the surprise would have been so much nicer, had I experienced it ingame and not through a question in the keep.
The keep asks whether certain characters lived or died in your playthrough, telling me I'll see them again in Inquisition - if they lived. Heck, if I fucked up and got them killed in my game, I can just lie to the keep and say they totally lived and get them back, anyway. It's not the end of the world, but it spoils a few surprises, it allows me to cheat and it makes my original playthroughs a little meaningless. I know, I know, I still got to experience the story and I know what it's all about, but now I can change any detail I want with a click, no matter how hard I tried during my actual playthrough or how much I sucked.
I noticed something funny when I played through Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom the other day. There is this RPG cliche where your main character is the son of some legendary swordsman, who once saved the world and then died or vanished or some shit and you have to pick up the family sword and save the world all over again and yada, yada, yada. Phantasy Star III takes it to a whole new extreme by letting you play that world-saving swordsman, then letting you play as your own son. And his son after that, once that storyline is over. It's funny. My old man played and finished all of these games when I was a kid, then I started finishing them all when I got older, just like he used to and now my son is getting into these games some more. Three generations of world-saving sofa swordsmen.
We're re-watching all the old Star Trek movies right now and it's funny how, once you reach a certain age, everything is and always has been about being "too old for this shit", long before they came up with the first Expendables movie. Many of the pre-TNG movies are about how the Enterprise and her crew are outdated, they're taking a rather humorous look at how none of them are getting any younger and sometimes things get downright depressing and characters question themselves, wondering if they have grown too old for the whole ting, altogether. They sound a bit like my late grandmother.
In the 32 years I have known my grandmother, she always seemed obsessed with death. When I was a little kid she'd tell me that most of her time was up and how she was sad that she wouldn't be around to watch me get old enough to visit her with kids of my own. She totally lived long enough to experience exactly that, but talking to her you'd get the impression that she may just crumble to dust at any second and without warning. Heck, I remember blowing soap bubbles when I was a kid and she'd tell me that the bubbles die when they pop. "But they really live on when they pop, right? They just lose their form." - "No. They're all dead." Thanks, grandma!
Ugh. I'm not sure I want everything in life to be about death or about being too old for shit now. Columbo is dead, Leslie Nielsen is dead, a whole lot of actors and famous people I grew up liking have kicked the bucket and with a bit of luck I'll live to see Jackie Chan, John Cleese, Patrick Stewart and a ton of other cool people die in no particular order. Imagine you're 70+ years old and in a world where Han Solo, Captain Kirk, John McClane and Rambo are dead and the young generation won't know who the fuck they were. Wow, that's gotta suck!
Well, there might be funny aspects to becoming a modern old geezer, as well. Large-scale war is going out of fashion and for all we know, we might grow up to be Warcraft veterans, instead. After all, I fought in all three Warcrafts, long before most of you young, ignorant fucks ever heard about WoW. And cybersex is probably gonna be pretty fucking epic. I don't think I'll ever become too old for that kinda shit. Bring it on, future!
