Rock, Paper, Shotgun

UPDATE: SEE BELOW

I keep having these grand plans for writing about the Dragon Age DLC. Since the game came out I’ve intended a Wot I Think summing up the content subsequently released for my favourite game of last year. But at every turn I have been thwarted by a confusion of DLC management. An enormous array of bugs and errors are making it near-impossible for some to access their paid for content. And the tale of Return To Ostagar, originally due out on 5th January but still a no-show, is rapidly descending into farce.

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I’ve banged on quite enough about Dragon Age’s first expansion, Awakening, due this March, so I’ll not witter on more here. Just to say there’s a trailer for the new content below, explaining the outline of the plot, and not featuring any silly rawk music. Post-game spoilers below, naturally.

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Before I begin, other news: Return To Ostagar, today’s DLC release, has been delayed. No word when it will appear. Sadpanda.

Onward. After yesterday’s scurrilous rumours of a potential Dragon Age expansion called The Awakening this March, the truth has come out. There’s a Dragon Age expansion due this March, but it’s called Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening. There’s no “The”. Take that, Eurogamer.cz, with your so-called “news”. It’s set after the events of the main game, with you playing a Grey Warden Commander aiming to rebuild the Warden’s ranks. One thing. It’s going to cost $40.

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Dragon Age is getting bigger. A little bit bigger tomorrow, and then perhaps rather significantly bigger in March. If the words spoken by Czech Eurogamer are true, we could be seeing Dragon Age: The Awakening in a couple of months. (Via That VideoGame Blog.) When I spoke to EA bods before the game was released I was told, “We’ve got at least 30 hours more content ready for the game already,” so it’s no surprise that the expansion rumoured for March should be about 15 hours long (or, for perspective, twice the length of the average console shooter). Tomorrow, however, definitely brings us the smaller DLC pack, Return To Ostagar.

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I rather painfully hit a wall in Dragon Age a couple of weeks back, finding my enjoyment stymied by the twin tediums of getting killed far too much and getting bored of wandering endless dwarven caverns and elven forests that required an absurd amount of backtracking through narrow, empty corridors. (Really, would it be so wrong to turn on the instant map travel system in major areas once they’ve been cleared of enemies?) Finding myself with some free time, I headed back in today, only for the former problem to re-rear its annoying head. I knew what was causing it – I didn’t have a good healer. As well as that, my main character, a mage, was a mess of mixed abilities, lacking a core function, horribly prone to inflicting friendly fire with his more powerful attacks and running out of mana horrifyingly quickly to boot. He was screw-up, in short – a liability in every fight.
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Danger! Danger! This contains a few minor, character-specific spoilers – but nothing to do with DA’s main plot.

My first few hours with Bioware’s latest had more worried I wasn’t going to be entertained. Sure, I was having fun, but my party, the people I was travelling with, were pretty dry. Facetious holy warrior Alistair had a nice line in comic deflections, but arch sorceress Morrigan seemed a textbook line in sneery, sultry know-it-alls (though I’m sure there are many stings to be found in her self-confident tale) and, while the dog was sort of cute, it wasn’t exactly chatty. As for wide-eyed, pseudo-French bard Leilana – well, my cat could read those lines better than her. Sigh. Could I really make it through a couple of dozen hours with these ciphers, these stereotypes, these appalling cod-Euro accents? (Though, seriously, I like Alistair a lot). Then I met Shale, the golem – almost immediately the game’s bright, dazzling star.
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Sorry about the delay on this. The plan was to judge it last night, but there were – er – unavoidable delays. In a pub. Sorry. However, I’ve judged the competition and selected the winners, turning this into a very Dragon-agey day indeed. Hopefully they’ll have their copy of the Dragon’s Age Direct2Drive shortly. The standard of entries were high. Many people did copies of famous people. Many people did copies of us. Many people did seemingly completely normal fantasy characters, with bios, which is very sweet. Some people did things which make me genuinely disturbed. Some of them are winners. But which ones? Click, to discover.
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We’re playing Dragon Age. Except for John, because he’s already finished it and reviewed it for PC Gamer. The rest of RPS were a bit later to the party, so to speak. Consequently we’re a little… distracted. We offer a few early thoughts below. It’s probably fair to say that there will be minor spoilers in this article.
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Dragon Age playing masses, the 1.01 patch is out, and it’s likely essential. Those who’ve seen my PC Gamer review, and indeed very many others saying the same, will have noticed complaints that the Easy difficulty level at certain points isn’t altogether that easy. And I’ll wager many playing on Normal aren’t exactly finding it a breeze. The patch notes explain that they’ve, “made Easy difficulty easier”, and crucially, “slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty.” I’ve yet to check what difference it actually makes, but hopefully this will address my one major complaint with the game. Steam has already auto-patched, so restart if you’re playing it over there. (And while I’m here, here’s Eurogamer’s review of the 360 version – it seems the PC won this one rather well.)

Over the weekend the Dragon Age pre-loading has started, meaning if you pre-order it – er – it’ll start downloading. Early. And similar. Anyway, to celebrate this momentous event, Direct2Drive have given us five copies of the Digital Deluxe Edition to give away to you. Our fine readers. So it’s compo time! To secure your copy of this much anticipated game, you have to use the recently released character creator to make the most interesting looking character you can. What does “interesting” mean? Well, you read the site. That’s your job to work out. Reverse analyse our evil noggins. Anyway – when you’ve done that, send a link to a grab of your creation, perhaps with a little in-mail elaboration of why you think it’s so splendid. Don’t actually mail us the screengrab. Mail us a link to the photo. I repeat, mail us a link to the grab of your character. We can’t have our compo inbox bunged up with enormous jpg files, you understand. Anyway – get the creator from here and get cracking. The compo will close at 6pm EST GMT on Thursday 5th, so those who don’t win still have time to actually pre-order the thing. The usual compo rules apply.

EDIT: If you have trouble grabbing, try FRAPS.