Oh, and I almost never had to redo missions or fights due to party wipes.

I read reviews from people who only played the console version, and it’s like they’re talking about an entirely different game from the one I played.

All of your complaints are legitimate complaints by today’s standards, but I’d say it goes back more to your first statement; it’s just not your type of game. While all of the things you complained about might technically justify a low review, some of them are actually part of this genre, and why some people love it so much.

First, the graphics. In games like this, graphics have never been the star, or even necessary to be stellar, and while nicer graphics wouldn’t have hurt it, the graphics it has kinda give it that edge of old-school feel in a dying breed of game. Face it, the games this game was made to image (Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale) just aren’t really being made anymore. I adored those games, and I was depressed that no other game had come out since them like them, and Diablo just wasn’t the same for me (yeah, that’s right, I liked these games more than Diablo). Anyway, this was a digression. Graphics, in my opinion, were a minor gripe for the gameplay I loved.

Also, the inconsistent difficulty is part of it’s draws, not its flaws. While you were frustrated, fans of the genre delighted as we got to hacksaw certain enemies to bitty-bits, but still relish that next fight where they did the same to us. Call it masochistic, sure (I have played and love Dark Souls too, after all), but that difficulty spike was satisfying. In other RPGs if you want to smash enemies, you have to backtrack and fight unsatisfying battles yielding 1 or 2 experience points each, fighting the same monster you’d seen ten-gazillion times before. In Dragon Age, they just let you play around a bit before getting serious.

And, the party AI… you’re right, it sucked, and other players are right, it was much better on the PC. In this type of game, you’re *supposed* to be controlling all of your members yourself. It’s meant to be a top-down pause, click and play. However, the click option goes away on the console, and it leaves you shuffling views, pulling a trigger more than an fps (obvious hyperbole). However, I don’t have a computer that could play this game, and while it was frustrating at times, I am extremely grateful they ported it over to a system that made it less than perfect, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to play it at all!

As for dialogue, I fully agree with your desire for voice acting, however, I would like the options to stay the same. The conversation wheel from DA2 was just… frustrating to me. It may work for Mass Effect, but I disliked that when a certain bisexual mage hit on me, my only options were hostile, sarcastic and acceptance. I’m not hostile when I’m hit on, but nor am I gay, and the sarcastic remark was unsatisfying for a reason I don’t remember (I think because it was another one where I played along with him). Rather than those three, I would have liked a “politely decline” remark, where I’m not an ***hole homophobe or, the flip side of the coin, homosexual as well. I also like reading exactly what my character is saying, especially before he says it; more times than I can count I had to redo dialogue in DA2 just because the option simply wasn’t what I thought it would be. It may be less streamlined to give us lines of text to read before we say it, but darned if it isn’t better than having to restart the last save just because we unintentionally pissed off the king with a sarcastic remark that sounded more hostile than was intended. (Heh, overall problem with a “sarcasm” option? There’s many different types of sarcasm, and they weren’t consistent).

For any of you who read all that, thank you for taking your time to hear my opinion, especially when it’s nearly the same length as the article itself!

What surprised me most about this game was that it’s literally just a bunch of “rooms” with invisible walls set up around them that sometimes have no clear correlation with the actual terrain.

Sometimes, you enter a fight and the enemies seem to be in an entirely different league. You load and suddenly, the same enemies with the same team and the same tactics can be defeated easily. Am I supposed to sacrifice a chicken to the game’s virtual 16-sided dice every now and then?

The inventory management turned outfitting your characters into a real chore. Where other RPGs you’re eager to collect just 100 more gold so you can finally buy the “Big Mofo Armor +10″, I always avoided having another go at “classify 20 items for 6 people, repeat for each of boots, body, gloves, helmet, sword and shield” as long I possibly could.

After finishing the game, I’d have to say that while BioWare must have invested a lot of time building all those dialogue trees and special paths depending on who’s in your party and what you decided in the past, the actual gameplay is pretty unimpressive. I like the story, but at no point did I feel myself immersed in it.

The scale of the battles was also very laughable. The king’s army was what? You see about 40 armored guys fighting about 40 darkspawn. In the final battle it’s an estimated 75-100 darkspawn. Oh help, an armed village mob is marching against us. They will surely destroy the entire world. I understand — the limits of non-pre-rendered cutscenes and such — but then make it clear you’re just showing a tiny freckle of the actual battle :->