{"id":455,"date":"2009-12-18T13:58:46","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T03:58:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/?p=455"},"modified":"2009-12-18T13:58:46","modified_gmt":"2009-12-18T03:58:46","slug":"moving-on-from-dragon-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/2009\/12\/moving-on-from-dragon-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving on from Dragon Age"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With MacquarieCon out of the way (more on that soon, I promise), I knuckled down and finished <em>Dragon Age<\/em>. I know there are a number of different endings, and there&#8217;s a particularly interesting one that I would like to take, but now that I&#8217;m done with my first play-through, I&#8217;m not sure that I can be assed doing it again straight away. I deliberately avoided a bunch of sidequests so there would be some surprises, but I know it won&#8217;t be enough to keep me interested.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I think party of the problem is the complexity of the combat system. While <em>Mass Effect<\/em> was laughably simple (action RPGs often are), more traditional games can get complex. In games like <em>Neverwinter Nights<\/em>, I had no problem maximising my build because I knew and grokked the underlying D&amp;D system. With <em>Dragon Age<\/em>, I was learning on the fly, which resulted in a substandard build that only really became effective in the last quarter of the game.<\/p>\n<p>And then I made some bad decisions about party makeup in the final stretch, forcing me to drop down to <strong>casual<\/strong> (the easiest difficulty setting) to defeat the Archdemon. At that difficulty, it&#8217;s very easy to see the changes the game is making to make things easier for you. For one, the ballistae don&#8217;t jam, and they distract the dragon so it can&#8217;t do anything.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, part of my eagerness to move on is that <em>Mass Effect 2<\/em> is approaching fast, and I&#8217;ve been given a pile of things to try on my new PS3. I&#8217;d really like to get through a bunch of those games by the end of January. They&#8217;re mostly old games, so I probably won&#8217;t write about them unless something stands out.<\/p>\n<p>All I have to do now is commandeer the TV back from P.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With MacquarieCon out of the way (more on that soon, I promise), I knuckled down and finished Dragon Age. I know there are a number of different endings, and there&#8217;s a particularly interesting one that I would like to take, but now that I&#8217;m done with my first play-through, I&#8217;m not sure that I can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[6],"tags":[86,269,88],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p149Qe-7l","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=455"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":459,"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455\/revisions\/459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}