Back in Thedas for a bit, finally going back and rectifying my never having played the Dragon Age: Origins DLCs.
I did Golems of Amgarrak first, which I wanted to enjoy more than I did: a deep roads expedition tale with golem work sounds good fun, but what Golems actually mostly becomes is a fairly linear adventure with some puzzle mechanics that don't make a ton of sense, a slightly minimalist story, and a general horror vibe. It was an interesting reminder of how much the horror elements and especially the body horror bits were important in Origins (and even DA2), because they're much, much more limited in Inquisition. Fantasy games struggle with horror vibes: the body horror bit in some ways is one of the horrors you can get to stick, because of the visual elements, but the sense of tension that I think they wanted for the whole thing never quite landed, perhaps in part because the puzzle mechanics made it feel like an odd puzzle box rather than a horrifying place of hauntedness. I will admit I just turned the settings down for the final boss fight of the DLC after dying once on Normal difficulty, I did not have the patience to try and approach that famously difficult fight in the way it was intended. Finally, the "oh god there were more" bit at the end, which is a good creepy final horror twist, didn't work because the horror hadn't quite landed for me: I felt annoyed at the sense of "oh you didn't really beat them look" rather than creeped out (the harvester, the core monster of the DLC, occupies an odd space in that sense in that it's meant to be the quick, creepy kind of horror monster but they also had to make it a tough combat opponent for the boss battle). Anyway, it was alright, the place was destroyed, nobody got anything much cool out of it, there's probably horrendous numbers of monsters down there still, the end.
Then I started Awakening which I'm enjoying a lot more thus far in that it actually feels like Dragon Age: my one downside is that I have two companions so far (Oghren and Anders) and I don't honestly like either of them, with the only companion I was starting to enjoy the company of being killed in a scripted scene. Also, everything in Awakening seems to involve
terrifying sums of money so I hope the quests are suitably rewarding to allow one to get everything done. But I have plenty of side quests to look into and I'm enjoying having a new little bit of Thedas to poke around (and indeed rule) so we'll see where that ends up.
EDIT 27.07: Right, that's Awakening wrapped up. Thoughts:
First and foremost, I like Awakening and I wish more people were willing to make whole little RPGs of about this length. I would very much like more 10-20 hour, story focused CRPGs with strong characters and good decision arcs, and would happily pay good money for them. I genuinely don't know why this isn't more of a thing.
Second, as much as some of the Awakening characters annoy me, I think that's partly unfair to them, because two of them I'm badly disposed towards because of what I know they end up doing in the next game and a third I'm meh-disposed towards because of the previous one. It's possibly no accident that I ended up with my core party being the three most awakening-specific characters: I liked Nathaniel a lot, Velanna is yikes-level elf supremacist but otherwise alright, and Sigrun is a Very Good Dwarf and worked very well with my own character (both effectively shared the same origin/original home, so I liked that a lot).
Most of my frustrations with the game were technical, the game was pretty unstable and sometimes I was getting under an hour of gameplay between CTDs, but I guess it is an old engine.
There are a few mechanical issues too: Oghren's approval is way too hard to get up and I think he's one of the harder characters to divine what he wants, so I never finished his quest (I got to +75, I needed +76, I am a little bit mad about this). Also generally the gifts system is kinda fun but a bit of a mess in places/is hard to logically intuit. For example, Nathaniel likes "practical gifts" and Sigrun is "interested in the surface world", particularly talking about books and spyglasses, and Velanna likes "green things and elven things". But while Sigrun gets a whole cutscene for the spyglass gift, she'll be meh about a sextant because that's one of Nathaniel's 'practical' gifts, despite the two things being sort of obviously interlinked. And you can't give her the blank journal because Velanna needs it to write elven stories in, but you should give her the pot plant because it's a surface thing, Velanna won't want that despite it being objectively green and a plant. That said, it's not a bad system overall, just needs a bit more flexibility.
There were some continuity issues too, rather than running Sigrun or Velanna's areas to their end points I ended up doing bits of each in a piecemeal way, and this led to some dialogue issues where e.g. Velanna was at the Vigil joined the Wardens
before the scene where she agrees to become a warden, and ended up giving spoilers for the end of her plot section because the game flagged it as already having occurred.
It also continues to be interesting to look at how the series has changed -
Awakening isn't trying to be a horror module like
Golems, but the darkspawn in it are absolutely horror creatures in a way I think is pretty rare in DA:I, especially the very too-many-teeth-quadrifoil mouth of the final monster. I feel like later titles have shied away from some of the heavier content too, there's one quest in Awakening that involves you discovering a suicide and there's nothing magical, no trickery, it's just a flat human tragedy. It's not exactly super well handled, either, it's very heavy content for a tiny sidequest that you just turn in by telling his wife without even a cutscene dialogue. So in some ways it's possibly good that there's less of that in later games, though also I think the slightly better depth of writing in Inquisition could handle some of this sort of thing better.
Some things I liked: court scenes, those are fun. Those and the closing-fade-gates section in Blackmarsh were actually interestingly reminiscent of Inquisition, so . The little side plot with the "orphans" in Amaranthine was also good, very much enjoy my light relief quests in RPGs. Kal'Hirol was well done, as well, as usual I would like to have some more dwarf stuff that isn't ruins, but if you're going to do yet another haunted dwarf ruin/abandoned thaig then this is one of my favourite ones because it was done in a way that felt like it highlighted what Dragon Age is trying to do with dwarf society very effectively. But please, developers, let me actually rebuild a thaig as a base in a Dragon Age game sometime and I will be very happy indeed, that would be fantastic.
In general I wish I rushed RPGs less than I tend to: I'd like to feel I could do a couple of runs and learn them properly rather than always ending up checking walkthroughs because I'm only going to do a single run and don't want to miss content. But at the same time, I'm relatively unlikely to rerun Awakening any time in the near future, so I'm glad I did get to see most of the stuff there even if I ended up spoilered on a couple of plot points. Awakening is definitely a campaign I would consider playing through again, honestly much more so than a lot of others because it's a lower time commitment and good fun.
