Thoughts on Dragon Age: Inquisition -- Spaghetti Mage

Beware the dreadwolf! Fen'Harel!

When I first played Dragon Age: Origins years ago, I was unimpressed.  The combat seemed weak, and I quickly became consumed with another game: Skyrim.  For many years, I ignored the Dragon Age series.

Looking for something new several months ago, I bought Dragon Age: Inquisition for about 8 bucks.  The more I played, the more I became consumed with it.   I was really impressed with storyline.  The character interaction never got stale, and there are many, many twists in character development (Thom Ranier???).  The gameplay is fun, and there are plenty of side quests.  Special classes are available for whatever class you play.  

I started the game with a female elf mage.  I tend to always opt for magic users.  Later in the game I made her into a knight enchanter, and ultimately finished the game with her, beating Corypheus.  If you create a female elf, and have a romantic storyline with Solas, it ties into The Trespasser DLC extremely well.  It essentially makes part of the plot a tragic love story.  I also created a female dwarf warrior, and ventured deep into the game with her.

The cast of characters is fun and impressive.  Each has their own storyline and a truly unique personality.  Morrigan's entrance into the story made things interesting.  Some of the criticism I have seen online claims Corypheus was a weak boss, and that the story flounders at times, but I just didn't feel that way.  In fact, by the time I was playing Trespasser, I was grinding hard just to see how everything turned out with "Solas".  It could be argued, that Corypheus wasn't the real boss at all, and was in fact a pawn.

I liked the different areas available to venture to.  The Fade was creepy, the Storm Coast was awesome, and my favorite was the Hissing Wastes.  I liked how you could randomly judge enemies you had defeated from your throne, and the battle with the dragons in the game was intense!  As the game progressed, I found myself more concerned with building weapons than finding them. 

If there was a weak point, maybe one could point at the war table.  I don't think it detracted from the game, but I think the potential to make it really awesome exists.  It could be a mini-strategy game within the larger perspective of the entire story.  The player had the opportunity to recruit agents, but their significance seemed to wane later in the game.  Also, eventually so much Power is obtained that it's pointless. 

Overall, it was an incredible game, and I am hooked on the series now.  I'm eager to see the ramifications of Thedas after the rise of the Dreadwolf.  Bring on Dragon Age 4!!!

Thoughts on The Outer Worlds -- Spaghetti Mage

 

 

When I saw the ads for The Outer Worlds, I thought Fallout + Space.  It sounded awesome! When I first started playing I was excited, exploring new alien worlds.  I started gaining team members! Parvati and Vicar Max had interesting tangents. Fighting the Mantis Queen was cool.  The quirky A.I. onboard computer on the ship The Unreliable was hilarious.

But slowly, the storyline began to fizzle out, and the theme of the game, fighting the evil space corporation Spacers Choice began to lose it's appeal.

The game goes nowhere...it fizzles out.  It's not an incredibly long game to begin with, but players have found ways to beat the game in under 11 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4aybZ-ltXA

 One of the comments says it all: “Not knowing the story and just watching this speedrun makes it break down like this: ‘Local man steals materials to fire himself into the sun.’”

Granted, there are multiple endings, and the speedrun ending has the player skipping a ship supposedly holding frozen colonists into the sun.  It makes me feel like the game I played was mostly sidequest fluff.  Essentially, it was.

The Outer Worlds now has a DLC called Peril on Gorgon.  Maybe the story will pick up, and depart from the mired "evil corporation" theme.

Diablo 3 Season 21: The Necromancer

 

I first played a RPG game called Diablo back in 1996.  I was in high school at the time and had played many other RPG’s but Diablo was a little different.  Most RPG’s employed a turn based attack system, but Diablo was more of a fast paced hack and slash adventure game with a heavy emphasis on the weapons and armour of your character.  But there were many of the same RPG elements that I loved about other games where one could choose a character class and skills that got stronger over the course of the game.  The other thing I always liked about the Diablo series was one could play in Co-Op mode with a friend and enjoy the experience together.  I next played Diablo 2 in the summer of 2000 when I was in college.  I really liked the way Blizzard focused more on the story of the game and added some great features like trading items with other people.  Then in the summer of 2012 I played Diablo 3 which took the action adventure RPG to a whole other level.  I remember playing it for many months at the time if not years.  I would make multiple characters to see which one I liked better and like to compare all the skills and play styles.  I really liked how Blizzard kept developing new parts for Diablo 3 like adding Act V and also the Necromancer character.  They kept improving the game instead of abandoning it to start some new project which makes the game get better and better over time.

Fast forward to the year 2020 and it has been a while since I played Diablo 3 although I would pick it up here mostly around the Christmas break when I had more free time from work.  There are some games that are so good that I find myself going back and playing them over and over again.  Recently I started playing through Diablo 3 again as the Necromancer and I wanted to share a bit about my experience with it.  One thing I noticed right away was that the game is now organized into seasons that last around 3 months each.  One can still play the main game and not bother with seasonal play, but the seasons add a lot of new items and Blizzard constantly rebalances the skills and items to make a new experience for that season.  Currently we are on season 21 and I decided to build a Necromancer as I heard that the corpse explosion skill had been buffed for season 21.

I started playing a new game and created my seasonal character and named her Lysithea after the tenth moon of Jupiter which was named after the mythological Lysithea, the daughter of Oceanus.  Selecting a name is a critical part of the process in playing a Role Playing game. The right name can really draw one into the character and Lysithea just seemed to fit a character who could animate the dead and command a skeletal army to fight for her.  I once knew someone who named a Demon Hunter “Shooty” which although the name does somewhat relate to the role of the character I find it difficult to immerse myself into the character with a silly name.  My daughter also made a character and she selected the Demon Hunter class.  It is fun to be able to spend some time with her playing this game.

After I created my character I started playing though the story of Diablo 3 and remembered all the other times that I had played it although I had forgotten a few parts in the story and was pleasantly surprised all over again.  I had intended to play through all the way to Act V, but I started to notice that there were much better ways to advance levels and get better items.  So I started doing bounties in the adventure mode which was really fun because after 5 little quests of killing an Elite monster or clearing a map area one would be rewarded with a nice cache of items.  These items were always random, but sometimes a legendary or set item would be included in the reward.  These were really hard to find in the story mode, but after 30 min or so of playing the bounties one could expect a nice item to be included.  I also got a lot of crafting supplies and recipes for the blacksmith to crate set items or legendary items for me.  This was a lot more fun than playing the story mode because I got access to better items in a quicker way.

Diablo 3 is all about getting better gear and advancing levels to be able to conquer more powerful enemies.  However, there is an even better way to get more powerful items than bounties and that is exploring greater rifts.  “Rifting” as it is known to the community is the process of opening a greater rift, clearing out all the elite packs and lower minons, summoning the greater rift guardian, and then dispatching of the guardian all before a 15 min timer expires.  The reward for clearing a greater rift is even more powerful items and also a chance to increase the level of a legendary gem which makes one’s character even stronger.  I am currently on GR50 (GR stands for greater rift) and the max is GR150.  Each level increase makes the monsters get stronger, but the loot also gets better.  I am trying to get strong enough to beat GR70 which will open up Primal items in the game.

Sometimes Diablo 3 can feel like a grind where one is just endlessly killing monsters in order to summon the Rift Guardian, but finding that one last set item to unlock the last ability or finding an item that boosts other aspects of one’s character can really be rewarding.  I’m sure I will move on to another game at some point, but I’m having a blast re-playing the Necromancer and will probably make a new character in season 22.  It has been really fun to dive back into the world of Diablo and slay the demon hordes once again!

 --Mike