04.11
2009
2009
Uninvolved, you make calls with your head and not your heart, and you never feel like you can escape the gravitational pull of the game’s design the way you can in, for example, Bethesda’s RPGs.
I’ll not take umbrage with the many negative things Oli Welsh has said about Dragon Age as I haven’t played it. This statement, however, cannot go unchallenged. I can’t remember a game in which I spent more time having to account for the ‘pull of the game’s design’ than Oblivion. I still remember spending around 10 minutes jumping off a roof in order to improve my athletics skill and so get full rewards upon levelling up. That was not a call made with my heart.
Words about gaming published on the internet. How novel.
Now that I’ve spent some time with the game myself, I find myself disagreeing with this review. He mentions the origin stories, for one, which he felt were an overly long bit of exposition you had to hack your way through. Not in my opinion. I really enjoyed that part. Actually, I’m now at the point where I’m leaving the “exposition” part and entering the world at large, and I’m a bit scared things might degenerate into the usual grindy questing. So either we have very different tastes, or things are going to get even better from now on.
About this particular quote, I fully agree with you. I spent a lot of time hopping from one place to the other just to get my skills up. And believe me, seeing your armored knight bunnyhopping does not help immersion.
I also found it slightly strange that he bashes Dragon Age for having no soul, only to bring up Oblivion as a counter example. Oblivion had bits and pieces of soul scattered throughout, but they didn’t really amount to much when combined. (Same thing, only amplified, happened in Fallout 3.) Now if they had mentioned The Witcher, now that’d be a different story…