codrus

I finished my playthrough on Sunday, and my opinion hasn't really changed. The end-game sequence was fun, but suffered the same problems (with uneven difficulty levels) that I'd seen earlier in the game.

Now, I'm fiddling with the tools. The code is interesting in that so much of the game is hard coded, including skills, talents, and characters. Something along the lines of...

if (ALLISTER_BLAHBLAH) doSomething

The snob in me would rename and refactor most of their game scripts -- most of it looks very expediently written, without regard for future changes, readability, or any other -itys really.

Anyway, I mostly dug into the code looking for a few specific things, which I'll put under a cut. They aren't story spoilers, but they do affect how you build characters.

An aside: Their tools installer is very very broken. I had to dig out my SQL 2005 books and do some book lernin' to get their game databases installed correctly.

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I'm about 3/4 of the way through the game, and I've learned a lot. Dragon Age is not a forgiving game, even on normal. There's a few reasons that stand out:

- The difficulty level is inconsistent. Some trash encounters are tougher than bosses, if you haven't discovered the right combination of spells to defend against them (e.g. bandit archers).

- Some conversation trees are absolutely traps with no right answers. I think they assume people will save the game, try them all, and then pick the path of least damage.

- Talent descriptions are very vague without hard data to make intelligent choices. If you fail to make the right choice, congratulations, you've been trapped. There are a lot of traps.

- While the main quests can be done in any order, some areas are harder than others.

In general, Dragon Age is a save and restore game. Save, try things out, then go back and play through. Or you don't, and you get trapped by bad choices that they didn't educate you enough to avoid. Dragon Age will be an awesome game when I play my SECOND character all the way through, because I'll know where most of the minefields are.

Anyway, the rest of this is suggestions based on what I've learned. Let me know if you've hard different experiences. I'll keep plot spoilers to a minimum.

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This will still be short since I only have 10 minutes to write it. But it deserves a bit more than I've been willing to write.

Dragon Age is a great spiritual successor to the original Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 in a way that Neverwinter Nights never really managed. I'm playing it on the PC -- my understanding is that the Xbox and PS3 versions are a bit less tactical and a bit more action oriented -- but you get a whole party, and you get to control the whole party, which is a pretty big win.

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Why is it that whenever I have a Chantry priestess in my group, they turn out to be a rogue? Is there something going on here?

P.S. It sounds like the DLC problems are a faulty installer, and that a fix will be forthcoming.

Outside of the fact that Bioware's downloadable content and social web beta really really suck, Dragon Age is pretty fun.

Bonus points for extremely large amounts of gratuitous blood spray and tons of friendly fire from spell casting.

Talking with Lee about the end of Season 4 (not 4.5).

Battlestar Galactica AND Planet of the Apes

Last night, I started the process of reformatting the drive on my desktop PC and installing Windows 7. Prognosis is good -- the OS is installed, drivers have updated, and I'm making progress on reinstalling all my old applications. Getting the data straightened out will be a pain, but I have it all backed up.

Early opinions of Windows 7:

-- Snappy. Anecdotally, drive and network performance seems better overall. In particular, downloading and applying patches (and/or updated drivers) was very quick.

-- I'm a little dubious of their modified dock icons, but they'll probably grow on me. When I had 3 windows opening downloading things, sometimes things would pause, and I'd have to realize that it had brought up a new dialog window. The only hint of this was a new icon in the dock.

-- I don't like the control panel organization. The names of some of the panels or links is not particularly illuminating. The security panel felt like a wall of text rather than showing pretty red icons to show my the AV software wasn't installed. I actually had to read *shudder*.

While I'm still learning where they put everything, I give it a thumbs up so far.

This is for all my friends with too much free time. :)

http://www.heroesofgaia.com/

It looks like a Heroes of Might and Magic style MMO, all web browser based. It just entered beta.

(Sadly, fiddling around with it a bit, this looks VERY buggy at the moment. I can't make it through the tutorial steps without getting errors. YMMV. I may look at it again in a few weeks and see if it has stabilized.)

Some old, some new, some good, some bad.

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REALLY high speed photography.

http://gizmodo.com/5378302/watch-ten-minutes-of-glorious-bullet-impacts-at-1000000-fps

Please show your work.

Had a fun session of my D&D game this weekend. I'd had to rush a bit to put together a couple of encounters, but was pretty happy with how both ran. The second one had some vaguely interesting crunchy bits that I think I can build on top of.

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In a conversation with a co-worker today, I said something that stuck with me. Roughly, it was:

(edited my post slightly, it wasn't what I meant)
"I want to do the right things on the days when I'm smart to discover the mistakes I make on the days when I'm dumb."

From now on, that's my mission statement for adding unit tests and other sanity checking to my programming projects. :)

I feel like there are too many good games out there right now. I want to play them all, but I barely have time for more than 1 or 2. I'm not just talking computer games. Board games and RPGs as well. Just a huge confluence of quality gaming out there, and not enough time to take advantage of it all.

This is a good problem to have, I think. :)

The pro-character builder argument: It is easy to use, prints nice character sheets, and generally updates quick enough that I can take advantage of it.

The anti-character builder argument is a bit harder to quantify, but we've been discussing it lately.

* When it is buggy, it is annoying. Particularly, it seems like bug fixes for certain problems have come slowly. I report the bugs as I find them, but I suspect that everyone who used to fix things is now working on the monster builder.

* As a social phenomena, the character builder provides a strong disincentive to actually coloring outside the box. Custom content is, at best, just a small note you get to provide. You can't specify things in enough detail that the program can actually use it. I've seen a few posts from 3rd parties saying that this contributes heavily to them leaving the market. It doesn't matter how good your custom class is if it is harder for me to use it than a WOTC class.

It actually goes beyond custom content. Some things are not well implemented. I'll give an example: Recently in my game, it was revealed to the players that the villain is trying to reassemble the Rod of Seven Parts. So I've been looking to see how artifacts are implemented in the CB. The answer is "not well". In WOTC's new artifact scheme, every artifact has 5 different stat blocks, depending on how happy the artifact is with you. The character builder only provides one of these stat blocks. So, once the player gets the artifact to an interesting power level, you get to do the work of maintaining it yourself. Joy! Some artifacts also offer special (and permanent) gifts after they leave you. But I see no way to actually add those to a character.

Anyway, it seems to me like if I want to add any custom content (or use certain pieces of official content), the character builder stops being useful, and becomes actively annoying. Maybe the 5e character builder will finally realize that people like to customize their games. A basic version of this in XML does not seem like it would be too hard to do.

Since it seems like the thing to do, I did a bit of cleanup on my friends list and syndication feeds. There's probably still some more I could trim -- people who don't post or rarely post -- but I mostly keep those around so that people can read my locked posts. Assuming, you know, anyone ever reads these things. :)

Now if only LJ would start pulling down feeds again.....

I may try to make a few posts soon, but I'm pulled in a lot of directions right now, so I haven't had much new to say.

I misspelled 'misspelled'.

This one will be quicker, as my lunch is almost over.

I wish that there were more mechanics other than "save ends". Specifically, it would be nice if there were more mechanics that actually relied on character skill rolls. And more skills other than heal.

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I've been thinking about triggered powers lately, both for my own game and the other 4e game I'm in. I'm reached a place where I still love the concept, but I'm not sure of the implementation in 4e. To be more precise, I think that the triggered powers are something that takes time for players to get their heads around because it is a big change from 3e.

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