Dragon Age: Origins (p2)

Okay, so now I've seen an ending for the game, anyway. It wasn't terrible, though it wasn't terribly satisfying either. Part of the latter is likely dependent on the specifics of how things played out during the endgame, and different choices could likely have changed the outcome.

Whereas my last post was pretty general in nature, this one goes into specifics. This contains spoilers. Seriously.


So some of your conversational choices matter. They just don't always matter in ways that are apparent, or predictable. That's probably the source of my biggest annoyance. There are a lot of places through the game where there is no "good for everyone" answer, and even if you try to be the neutral peacekeeper between opposing groups, you will almost always end up supporting one side or the other, whether you intend to or not.

Setup: I played this first time through with a female human noble warrior. My active party almost always included Alistair, Leliana, and Morrigan. These were characters I met early, so I was most attached to them, they covered the bases of warrior, rogue, mage, and it worked well. They got the best items, I rarely worried about gearing the others. Alistair and Leliana both both usually approved of my attempts to be a "good guy" and got way up on approval. Morrigan less so, but having a mage borders on essential and I didn't get the other one 'til much later.

Alistair always seemed to joke to cover insecurities. He was shy and uncertain. Since he mentioned his bloodline, he's been adamant about not wanting to be king and saying he wouldn't be a good king anyway. He also ended up as the romantic interest for my female lead.
So when it came time to back someone for the throne, I pushed Anora. What happens? Alistair pitches a fit, and there's little I can say to console him. He acts as though this is a huge betrayal, when all my character really wants to say is "I want you with me rather than on the throne."
Then I decide to be (relatively) merciful toward a major enemy. Through the game, Alistair has supported positive, kind actions. Apparently this is his breaking point. He goes ballistic over this act of mercy and leaves. All those hardships together, the romance, out the window because of a desire to stop the bloodshed.
What. The. Fuck?

Then Morrigan shows up with this plan on the eve (practically speaking, technically it probably took more than a day) of the final battle. It has its good points. But she sent me off to kill her mother and now this plan sounds remarkably like exactly what her mother wanted to do. I want to talk her down, convince her that this won't solve things in the long run, but she won't have any of it.
At the very least, I'll grant this doesn't seem a 180 from her personality. She's always come across as self-serving. This is pushing an extreme, but at least it's in the same direction she has been going.
The conversation comes down to "my way or the highway." I refuse to play along, and Morrigan leaves.

So with these two choices, I've lost half of my primary group. Oh, Alistair gets replaced, as it were, but the replacement is nowhere near as good, lacking the gear Alistair walked off with and being less familiar in general build. Trying to do the right thing happens to have shot me in the foot right before the endgame.
I could have chosen differently. I could have used other characters more through the game. It didn't have to come out like this, but I seem to have walked straight into something approaching a worst case scenerio.

So we get into the final series of battles, and it's brutal. The earliest parts aren't actually very dangerous, with hordes of darkspawn you can one-shot, but it's annoyingly repetitive.
Then the fights actually get harder. Even on easy, I have to change my tactics and do some careful pulling to get past some parts. Some parts, I think I made it through more on luck than skill. Non-active party members remain a level behind the ones in use, but the replacements for the two I lost probably hurt me here, too.

Then the game commits what I consider to be a cardinal sin of RPGs. While my main group is off doing their thing, my other party members are forced into a fight. Suprise! Time to do all that leveling up while paused at the beginning of the fight. Oh, and time to put on the best of whatever gear you happen to have in your inventory, because if you haven't outfitted them, you'll feel it.
It's only one fight, but I abhor this in games. You want to require/forbid a specific character for a specific quest, fine. But making the player take over characters they haven't used, aren't familiar with, and may not have geared is frequently not fun. If I wanted to play them, I would have done so in the rest of the game, don't make me do it now. Grrr.

Then back to the main group, and I run into a roadblock area where the party wipes repeatedly at the entrance to Fort Drakon. Even on Easy, there's so much there that it's overwhelming. You can't out-range the archers/mages. There aren't any corners to use for cover. It doesn't help that you're jumped right after transition, so most buffs you want to do are done under attack. I'm sure it also didn't help to have two sub-optimal characters in my group of four.
I tried holding back, I tried rushing, I tried taking the time to summon a ranger animal and get buffs up, I tried not...
I know they're trying to convey the overwhelmingness of major battle and all that, but sometimes game designers forget games are supposed to be fun, too. Getting stomped down by what seems to be unbeatable odds within sight of the end of the game is not fun.
In the end, I was so frustrated with it that I looked up use of the developer console to cheat my way through the fight.

The actual ending itself? Okay. I can't say I have a problem with it. I note the epilogue's use of scenes and specific mentions of how some things you did along the way turn out - which would be different depending on what you did.
There are some oddities, though.
Through the game, there's a sense of "The Blight is spreading, if we don't unite yesterday we're all going to be overrun, and it'll be the end of everything!" And yet when you win, some characters comment "Hey, we beat the Blight before it even spread to other nations, awesome." Um... aroo? So for all the doom and gloom, we actually caught and pushed back the Blight earlier than in the past? Ooookay.
Everyone also seems to think defeating the archdemon ends the Blight, and that's about it. But there's mention in the epilogue (and I don't think I missed anything that would have affected this) that there are still enough darkspawn left to form roaming packs to threaten the land for some time to come.
The queen offered a boon. What I really wanted to say was "Let me form a legion under the Grey Wardens to beat back the darkspawn and help the dwarves recover the Deep Roads so we might be able to eventually end this cycle for good." Sadly, that wasn't an option.


So... I don't know. Pretty good game overall, I think, though not perfect by any means. The combat is still overly difficult in places, and while the story progresses mostly along the same path, there are some choices and consquences that are serious. It made me feel for the character(s) in the story, which I respect. It made me mostly feel loss, hurt, and betrayal, though - and some people will hate that.
Part of me wants to run through it again to see things I didn't or from another perspective. Part of me still seems the frustration of the endgame as fresh in my mind and isn't eager to go back to that.