These games are definitely worth picking up especially for $10 for the whole series.
Do they install EA crap onto your pc like with the mass effect games ?
I played every origin story in DA:O and finished the game 4 times. Even chose this game for the game dev course back in uni. Good memories. Sadly the successors weren’t as good.
Could anyone give a brief sum up of what are these games about?
I know is a famous series and I think is a fantasy rpg but I don’t know much more about them or why are the so well regarded.
Mostly about deep-dicking elves. I think there’s some combat as well.
Fantasy series with a very D&D-esque world and a combat system that feels a bit like an MMO or a turnbased tactics game. It’s real time with optional pausing, and you operate your whole party at once, with the ability to pause to give each of them precise orders, or to pre-program them with specific responses to situation.
I think it mainly became popular on the back of its characters. The story was good but nothing special, and personally I found the combat in Origins to be absolutely terrible. But building up your party, getting to know the characters and making decisions that affect them was amazing. At least on par in this respect with the original Mass Effect trilogy.
The first one is a love letter to the original Baldur’s Gate games. Tactical group combat, real time with pause, fantasy. It’s an original setting that tries to subvert some Tolkien ideas. It’s pretty good, though it does feel a little old-bioware. The story is a basic “global threat -> gather allies” with a touch of political intrigue. The romance is kind of badly done. It’s peak “give them gifts until sex happens”.
The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION. The story tries to do something interesting in that it follows a single city over a long period of time as tensions rise. It’s not as bad as people say, but it’s very flawed. The romances are okay. Internet shitheads absolutely lost their minds that gay people exist and might mistakenly think you’re interested until you say no thanks.
This one also switched to the dialogue wheel instead of giving you informed choices about what you’d say. It does a subtle thing where your actions in cutscenes and stuff are informed by what style you often pick.
The third one barely holds on to the origins (pun intended). It really wants to be an action game like mass effect. That kind of sucks because we already have mass effect, and I wanted something different for my different game. The story is okay and has some good beats. The characters are really good. The romance is much improved. The gameplay is kind of okay. Mages are really nerfed despite the story saying they’re super powerful and dangerous. The world is big and has a lot of shallow quests. There’s a shit mobile game style “click a button and wait an hour” mechanic. You can mod that out. The story is also a "global threat -> gather power ". I bet critical analysis of the story is fascinating because a lot of it is kind of suspect, politically. But most gamers are like critically illiterate and probably didn’t think about it.
Fun aside: the first game has a “sex scene” where one of the character’s naked state is less revealing than her ridiculously revealing "armor ". The third game you can actually see nipples in the sex scenes, but I think they haven’t crossed the line to show a vag or erect dong (though I haven’t done all the romances). Lots of folks are still ashamed of bodies.
You can import saves from one game into the next. There are a lot of choices to make in all of them.
And that’s my off the cuff typed on my phone quick summary of the games.
Mages are really nerfed despite the story saying they’re super powerful and dangerous.
This is kinda selling mages in the setting short.
Magic in this setting is basically the same as it is in Warhammer 40k: mages get their power from an alternate dream dimension that is also where demons reside, they can spontaneously explode and/or summon demons if they’re not careful, and they’re heavily regulated/repressed. Rogue mages are hunted down and killed by Templars, and everyone else is mostly confined to wizard towers that double as prison camps.
It never comes across in gameplay, but mages and how they’re treated are major plot points in all three games.
That’s what I meant. In the story they’re super dangerous walking nuclear bombs. In the first game, it kind of lives up to it in the game play. You have a massive fireball (with knockdown!), blood magic shuts down the whole field, and more.
But by the third game, mages are more of a “control” class. If you want to actually do damage and kill monsters, you want to play a rogue. It’s extremely disappointing.
I wanted it to be more like dragon’s dogma where you summon meteors and tornadoes. Instead it’s like some ice cubes and a campfire.
I hope they bring back spells like Virulent Walking Bomb from the first games. That one would poison an enemy and make them explode when they died, and if any enemy nearby died to the explosion or within the next few seconds they’d explode too, and so on.
It wasn’t the best spell, but it fit the “mages are one misstep away from becoming eldritch abominations” narrative and damn did it make you feel powerful when the secondaries went off and it turned an entire room full of enemies into mist.
The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION.
It also made every encounter consist of multiple waves, with enemy reinforcements popping into existence inside your party and rendering positioning nearly useless. It’s like they were going down a checklist of ways to make combat less tactical.
One and a half really good games in there
As someone who’s never played, which ones the good one?
Honestly, they’re all at least decent. Which one is the best will vary drastically from person to person. Personally, I liked 1 the most. 2 was decent. 3 was… playable, but with some extreme flaws. 3 is the only one I never finished.
I’ll be a contrarian and throw in my vote for the second game - it’s rushed and flawed and the asset reuse is blatant to the point of being legendary, but the setting and story are the best and most original of these 3 games. Just being a hero of one single city instead of the entire world is surprisingly refreshing.
In general I’d say that 1 has the best combat/tone, 2 has the best setting/story, 3 has the best characters. I’ve heard that 3 can be quite enjoyable if you pretty much only do the main story and companion quests - but I wouldn’t know, I’m one of the poor fools who got stuck in the Hinterlands, and that mistake + the very underwhelming main story sapped my will to continue playing.
Opinions will differ, but generally people really like the first and/or third. The second was rushed, and it shows, mostly by a ton of reused assets and locations.
The first is more loved by hardcore or oldschool RPG fans. The third is more action oriented, generally a lot more colourful, and very much larger. Its combat is generally liked more than the first (except, again, by CRPG fans).
All three have memorable characters.
I bought these and started DAO again a couple days ago. I had them on console before, but it was cheap enough to add to my Steam account. I loaded up a ton of mods this time. So far I’m having fun, but it crashes a lot, so I’m quick saving constantly. I’m not sure if the crashing is the game, my laptop, or the mods. I’m assuming its the mods and so far don’t care enough to figure out which one(s). The good news is, I can go from desktop to loaded game in about 30 seconds, which is a nice change from modern games that take forever to load.
For those commenting on EA, if you buy on Steam you’ll get a launcher, but you don’t need the EA app to play (at least for DAO, I haven’t gotten to the others yet). However, if you just don’t want to give your $7 to EA (after Steam’s cut), that’s totally understandable.
I’d like to give it a try, but unfortunately it looks like it requires the electronic arts app, which I refuse to install.
The first is on GOG as well, for only a few cents more.
If you buy EA games on gog they don’t require the launcher ?
The first game doesn’t require ea launcher on steam either
I think only the third one does. The other two should be steam or standalone capable.
This is correct.
Three questions:
Can I play it in front of my kids?
What’s the minimum play session? (That is, how long from startup to the next save point?)
Is it a lot like Mass Effect?
You can save and stop playing whenever.
The world is dark - especially in the first game. There is slavery, racism, demons, and a few even darker topics. There are optional sex scenes, but they’re rather clean. One of the demon models is rather skimpy. But in the third game you can pick your time in the game while kids are watching to be mostly fun with bright colours and some fantasy fighting. That might be harder in the first.
There are similarities with Mass Effect, but they do play very differently. The dialog system is very similar in 2 and 3, as are the companion interactions in all three.
In Origins there is a lot of grimdark stuff. Women taken into the tunnels and turned into unwilling broodmares that you need to murder
Pg-13, you can save anytime except for combat and cutscenes, not in the slightest
Can I play it in front of my kids?
It’s been a while since I played, but I think the answer is mostly yes. There are sex scenes, but they’re pretty well-telegraphed ahead of time and I don’t think you can get into them by accident.
how long from startup to the next save point?
What’s a save point, to you? The game allows saving at any point (except maybe during combat?), but this may or may not be a satisfying experience to you. For the most satisfying experience you’d probably want to consider your camp the save point, and that can go a couple of hours between occurences, depending on the quest and how good you are (/the difficulty level).
Is it a lot like Mass Effect?
A very similar narrative style with the focus on your relation to the NPCs. Gameplay is very different. Much more about tactics and less about action. Personally I found that balance really awkward and not enjoyable: I’d rather lean more into the action like a Skyrim (or, indeed, ME) style game, or do tactics properly in a turn-based manner like BG3 or Lord of the Rings: Tactics. But I stuck it out for the story & characters which were great, though I couldn’t bring myself to keep going with the big DLC once I lost momentum thanks to finishing the main story, or to pick up either of the sequels.
Never played it but from what i heard it’s kinda like mass effect in medieval fantasy
Do they install EA crap onto your pc like with the mass effect games ?
I’ll point out that you can use Dragon Age Keep to plan out key choices in the narratives of the first two games, and even create a world state for import into Inquisition. Helpful if you want to play Inquisition and want a refresher and/or don’t want to replay the earlier games
Man, this brings back some great gaming memories. I think there was actually a statue of a Dragon Age 2 enemy in one of the Mass Effect games right?
Mass effect 3 had a dragon age armor that boosted biotics I believe
Anyone know how well these work on Steam Deck?
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Inquisition works well enough. It has a few quirks, but it runs good enough to play it through.
Does it require the touchpads for mouse control?
If I remember correctly I only had to use the touchpads for the launcher and the menu initially. After that it was all normal controller stuff.
I was interested until I saw “EA”…
Are there mods for the second and third?
I played a shit ton of DA:O but only a few runs on the second and didn’t finish the third as I lost interest.I mean I would assume so. I primarily played inquisition and origins on console and never actually played the second. I would assume there’s a modding community but don’t really know.
I played through the third recently, yes there are a few mods. The game isn’t very mod friendly so there’s not a ton there but I found like a dozen or so that were worth installing on nexus.
Game still kinda sucks but good enough for one play through if you liked the first (two)
