Thinking will, that is. Still, I like Spinks’ Thought For The Day, which I’ve pondered many times over the last few years. What do we mean by “socialising,” these days? Sitting right next to? Having drinks with? Babbling uncontrollably at? Being in the same room, even?

I will say that “social” endeavours as defined by MMOs in recent years (i.e. grouping) have become so activity-focused that I talk less in them than I do when I’m doing just about anything else in game. The more button mashing we have to do, too, the less we’ll talk.

So what sorts of things could we do in games that would be a little more conducive to old-fashioned sociability? Traveling is the big one, though I’m not certain it was designed primarily to encourage chatting — it just happens to be something time-consuming and passive that almost everyone has to endure. But when are we going to be able to have picnics or parties or, hell, darts or bowling competitions?

I’m not asking that the big games suddenly become arcade centres but… well, I suppose in a way I am. I just remember that in Asheron’s Call we’d have parties and stuff, because you could drop stuff (food, equipment, whatever) on the ground — or, if you were good at positioning, on tables and other pre-positioned landscape items. People would show up and pig out, not because it “fed” them in any real sense, but because eating with others is about so much more than just food. Also, Asheron’s Call food items sounded fun and tasty, and many of them were chocolate-based (always a win).

We’d also hold equipment swap meets based on the same principles: bring your excess stuff, drop it around the place, pick up other people’s stuff that looks interesting to you.

(For those who wonder if the world ended up littered in other people’s dinner parties and excess gear, the answer is no: there was a sweeper system that would just remove stuff every so often. Bad if you were muling (moving stuff from one character to another), good for the game in general.)

Most Asheon’s Call players will remember nekkid dungeon runs, too. There was no particular point to doing them nekkid except that it was fun — and dungeons weren’t instanced, so you essentially got to streak past whoever else was in there being very serious and professional. We haven’t lost the ability to do things like that, but we just don’t seem to do them anymore.

Have MMOs become too achievement-oriented? Have our incessant demands to have more to do resulted in our having so much to do we never have time to just kick back and be silly? Silly is a large component of fun, at least for me. I miss it. It makes people laugh together, and that is social.

~

Last and mostly unrelated but not least, take a look at another great post from the other side of the fence over at Brian “Psychochild” Green’s place. (My armchair is comfier!)

No, not the play-by-mail game of the 80s and 90s (and if you know what I’m talking about, many props!). Rather, Syp’s thrown down the gauntlet to EQ2 players to give him 5 ways in which EQ2 is better than WoW. Since both games launched at almost the same time 5 years ago, it’s a good challenge.

I’m not generally a fan of numbered lists but this one does interest me, not in any spirit of WoW-bashing but more to examine why I’ve spent more time in EQ2 than in any other game since Asheron’s Call, my first MMO. We originally played it for a year in 2005-2006, then left for greener pastures. I don’t recall wanting to leave the game as such, I think it was more the lure of greener, shinier things “over there” — including various betas like Vanguard. I returned to EQ2 in April this year and have been playing it consistently ever since. The only game that’s lured me away for any length of time has been Dragon Age, and even that is on hold until I decide I’m willing to drag Kaitou’s bored backside through the end of the Fade section.

For the benefit of those new to this blog, you need to know the following about my playstyle to understand how I judge games: I am a crafter who adventures as a hobby; if it’s shiny, it must be picked up, no matter the danger; if it’s harvestable, ditto. I avoid raid-type stuff at all costs, primarily because I’m not motivated by the item-treadmill reward such raids offer, but also because I find them (much like other people view crafting) to be a rather tedious waste of time better spent doing something else. The only exceptions to my item-disinterest include anything that can be used to decorate a house or anything silly that can be used to decorate a player.

Snow White and the Shard of Love (I'm the dwarf on the far right)

So, the list, per Ysh.

1. Crafting. While the process itself is as repetitive and ultimately tedious (for many) as in any other MMO, the “sphere” of crafting, to intentionally borrow from Vanguard, really is independent from adventuring in EQ2. You don’t need to be a level 50 adventurer in order to be a level anything crafter, which was something that turned me off WoW both times I’ve played it. Crafting is the core of my gameplay, not the side-dish. There are many other things that fit into this category, like the plethora of crafter quests that are constantly being added to, that make EQ2 one of the few games that genuinely understand and cater to the crafting playerbase — not the adventuring playerbase that also happens to craft when they can’t get a group.

2. Guild Halls. Quite a few games have guild halls now, but not many of them offer the communal amenities EQ2’s guilds & halls can offer to their guild-based communities. Aside from being very grand buildings with tons of decoration options, guild halls can offer bankers, brokers (think auction house), crafting stations, adventuring/crafting writ givers, and a ton of other stuff that’s normally found in the outside world. The downside is that guild halls have become the social hubs of the game, emptying out city areas that were already underpopulated due to the weird partitioned way in which the two primary capital cities were originally designed. On the other hand, however, most guild halls are at least partly open to the public which means they can become genuine alternative meeting places.

3. Housing. Most other EQ2 players will mention this, I suspect, because it’s one of the most glaring lacks in WoW. If you like housing and you’re playing WoW, you’re SOL, to pile on the TLAs. Aside from the fact that it’s at least offered in EQ2, it also comes in eleventy-zillion different flavours — each city has its own distinct housing look and several different room-counts and layouts to choose from. In Freeport and Qeynos houses you can actually change the texture of walls, floors and ceilings. Furniture can be dropped freeform and moved as you please — there’s no x-axis rotation (as there is now in SWG), but you can resize, move stuff up/down, and rotate on at least one axis, all of which is a lot better than simply being given hooks to hang things on, as in LOTRO. (As an aside, that LOTRO system is one Turbine used in Asheron’s Call housing back in 2001 — time for a change, guys!)

4. Mentoring. Unlike many games, WoW still doesn’t have a system to allow players of disparate levels to play together. That said, since WoW’s focus is now entirely on getting people to max level as fast as possible, it would be silly for them to include any such system, but that speaks to a fundamental difference between the two. EQ2’s levelling used to be really slow, compared to WoW, even back in the vanilla days; the curve has been flattened quite a bit in the intervening five years, but EQ2’s motto is not, and hopefully never will be, “The Game Begins at 80.” This always jarred me in WoW, was one of the things (along with … well, #1-3 above) that turned me off the game, and is I think one of the major contributors to the bad side of raid-based gaming — you know, elitist jerks and gear snobs. (Who are starting to come out of the woodwork in EQ2 as it starts to focus more and more on raiding. Oh, EQ2, step off this path before you become Brown-WoW!) Now in EQ2 you can mentor yourself down for no reason other than that you want to be a lower level again for a while, which reopens up a ton of previously greyed-out content — and trust me, there’s a LOT of content in EQ2.

5. It’s not a Theme Park. It’s not entirely a sandbox either, but one of the things many people who try EQ2 often end up saying is “I didn’t know what to do or where to start!” This is a frequent sandbox-type issue, and actually EQ2 has become a little friendlier to new players over the years, but it certainly doesn’t put you on rails and send you out along the Ride To 80, even today. For the type of player I am this is a definite plus rather than a weakness, because once you get past that head-spinning stage you end up faced with tons of possibilities whenever you log on. It doesn’t always come down to the only choice being adventuring — and I know that’s not the only choice in WoW, but since so much of everything is tied to one’s adventuring level and since the game is by design slanted towards chomping through content, then adventuring and chomping through content sort of end up being most people’s default choice. Fighting stuff is very rarely my activity of choice in any game, and in EQ2 there’s still always more to do than I have time to do it in — which is exactly what I want from an MMO.

I could mention guilds as levellable entities, collections, appearance slots (so that you don’t have to look quite as ridiculous as you do in WoW), art style (it’s on the brown extreme but it’s learning to be more chromatic)… but I won’t, since we only get 5 slots. Go add your own to the comments here or to Syp’s.

Other bloggers to have joined this meme-in-the-making include Stropp, whom I may have had a hand in luring to EQ2 in the first place.  /halo. See also this Elder Game article kindly linked to by one of Syp’s commenters, since it’s an oldish post; good read!

Last but not least, Happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating it today in the US.

Time is a relative thing, especially in games. Specifically: if I’m enjoying something, it flies, and if I’m not, it crawls. This is true of most things in life, but it was brought home to me by some of the comments on yesterday’s post.

I probably wasn’t clear. The Fade/Circle of Magi thing isn’t taking me any longer to complete than any of the other long plot sections (if you’re OC about doing everything like I am). It just feels like it’s taking twice as long. That’s not helped by the fact that, knowing I still have a node boss to slaughter and buddies to free, I really can’t be arsed to fire the game up and slog my way through it.

(If anyone thought I was ranting generally about Dragon Age yesterday, this should set the record straight. I am finding the Circle of Magi bit in the Fade to be excessively long to play. I do believe a few design ideas were overused, which increases this impression of painful repetition, but that doesn’t equate to a sudden “Dragon Age sucks!” ruling.)

In games, a slog is bad. A romp is good, but can easily become so rapid you stop experiencing the game and end up merely experiencing the speed of your progress. The trick is pacing a game so that the player still feels as though they’re romping but is also going slowly enough to feel like they’re experiencing a LOT of stuff. This applies to MMOs just as much as it applies to single player games. I expect most MMO players have had at least one conversation with another player where content was experienced entirely differently by each (“zomg so SLOW and BORING!” vs “wow, that went by so fast I almost wish I could do it again”).

An added design problem is that pacing differs for each individual. We don’t all play at the same rate, do all the same things, or spend the same amount of time admiring scenery and dungeon art. It takes work to provide a smorgasbord of content that the content locusts can NOM NOM NOM their blind hungry way through, but that the … let’s call them content slugs can enjoy much more slowly and completely.

Okay, Content Slug just doesn’t cut it, especially since I’m one of them. Will have to find a better term.

I think this means my honeymoon with Dragon Age: Origins is over. This post is subtitled: Murder Your Darlings, from the writing principle that if you ever write (or design) something you think is way great!!11oneone then you should probably delete it, stat. Or at least make it much, much shorter.

* * * WARNING: Contains some spoilers * * *

They're like sheep. Sheep with magical powers!

Over the weekend I finally started the plot section that involves freeing the Circle of Magi from whatever it is some silly mage has unleashed upon it. You know what mages’ greatest weakness is? Their geek-like inability to ever believe anything can go wrong. “What, one tiny slip and the whole world will go up like a Roman candle and everyone will die horribly? 99% chance that this will happen? Noooo worries, we’ll just trust in the 1% — the odds are in our favour!” Actually, as a species they tend to remind me of Sir Didymus in Labyrinth, only less fuzzy and forgivably cute.

Stupid mages.

Because of them, my character has spent 4+ game hours trekking through depressingly identical corridors in a variety of shapes. Sure, the Fade is impressive when you first get there, and it’s creepy and you never quite know what’s going to be around the next corner. 200+ corners later, you really don’t give much of a shit anymore and just wish stuff would rush you in one big lump so you could slice & dice them and get it over with.

Sometimes it’s a burning corner and I have to change to the right shape. Sometimes it’s a teeny tiny hole, and I have to change to the right shape. Sometimes it’s a big heavy door and… you get the idea.

Again, being able to shapechange was way cool when it first happened. 200+ corners and changes later… not so much. Actually, it just becomes a pain in the ass because the game seems to have been designed to ensure that you have to change shape as often as possible, not for any major plot reason but just to ram you with the fact that, hey, you have to change shape. Isn’t it way cool?!?!

I get it already. Way clever design. Now let me the hell out of here, I’m bored titless. Oh, and you can keep Wynne too, that self-righteous droning wannabe D&D cleric. I’ll be getting Morrigan back into my party as soon as I get out of this place. She may be pissy and pricklier than a hedgehog, but at least she doesn’t sound like I should be getting a pen out and taking notes because what she says is so damned marvellous and important.

(Don’t ask me what poor Wynne did. Nothing, really, except that she was the first I found in the Fade and she faffed about being … well, faffy, all this after half a dozen stern lectures on “I really don’t think this is the time” and “Don’t you suppose we should be moving on?” and “Is this really relevant to our predicament?” My dwarf doesn’t have a huge reservoir of patience to begin with, and being patronised is something I — err, I mean she — doesn’t deal with very well. If you’re going to blab on about how people have to be strong and upright and yadda yadda, then at least make sure you don’t fall prey to the first nightmare that conks you over the head. Really.)

My main bone of contention with this section, in case it wasn’t abundantly clear already, is that it’s just too long. The creepy temple in the mountains was long, and the creepy temple in the forest was long, but they were at least marginally varied in terms of terrain and, more to the point, I wasn’t stuck in them alone with no way to go anywhere else till the damn section is done.

Oh, I get that I can’t leave before the plot bit is done — it would be stupid to do so. This is a plot segment that must be done in one sitting, and wouldn’t make any sense any other way. My point, though, is that it goes on MUCH too long. The fact that there are eleventy-billion stat increase thingies scattered all over the place just makes it obvious that this is a very long maze and that I am a very bored rat. Or mouse, in this case.

And you know,  I don’t actually bore easily. As I mentioned before I didn’t get bored in the other long exploration thingies; it’s not the exploration in itself, and it’s not being stuck in one plot loop. But, relative to the other parts of the game that I’ve experienced, this one has gone on too long because I’ve stopped being enchanted and have instead started getting both bored and irritated.

Fade section — great idea. Hugely long fade section where you have to backtrack a thousand times, cover the same ground in different forms, and generally go down the same corridor à la Dr Who a thousand times? REALLY BAD IDEA.

Shapechanging — great idea! Having to spend 3 seconds as a mouse to get through a hole then 3 seconds as a burny skelly thing to get through a fire and then 3 seconds as a golem to get through a door, 10 seconds down a hallway and then rinse repeat — REALLY BAD IDEA.

Apparently gamers shouldn’t presume to give opinions or advice to developers, but here’s one from me anyway. (I’ve always been real bad at doing what I’m told.)

If you have a fantastic, great, really way cool!!! idea — kill it. Now. Or at least severely maim it before you allow it to become a bloated festering nastiness in your game. Players will put up with almost anything for almost any length of time, but boredom will send them fleeing.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve fit a little more Dragon Age into my schedule. Yeah, I should probably have been doing NaNoWriMo stuff, but life’s been stressful enough without it, and my limited spare time has been devoted to having some fun instead. If nothing else, I’ve discovered I still can write and that’s really what the whole thing was about, for me; I’m not guilt-tripping about having stopped at my not-quite-10k. I’ll pick it back up when things are a little less crazy.

So what, you all say? Quite right too, so back to Dragon Age. I’m still on the fence about spoilerish stuff, but I have been taking a ton of screenshots — 250+ of my own, not counting the ones the game itself takes — and I figured I could share a few of those. I’ll do what I did last time and keep them small, so if you don’t want to know anything about the game, don’t look and don’t click! (I’ll put a break in the post on WordPress, but I don’t think RSS readers cooperate with those. So scrunch your eyes up and scroll on past if you want to avoid anything remotely spoilerish!)

The spousal unit and I have both been playing it, and we’ve chosen very different paths. We’re both playing honourable upstanding dwarven nobles, but we haven’t followed the story in the same way: he’s been mostly doing what the “logical” progression expects him to do, whereas I’ve branched off in all sorts of other directions. My characters went to Denerim somewhat earlier than they were supposed to, though in fact there’s nothing wrong with doing so and the game doesn’t penalise you for it as some older titles used to. You just can’t access certain areas (like the Denerim Alienage) until the game is good and ready. I’ve also been able to start an area or two, bog off (mostly to sell stuff and just catch my breath) and then come back to them later — I was a little worried that this might be an issue, but it hasn’t been.

We did finally shell out for the Soldier’s Peak (aka Warden’s Keep) downloadable content, and I’ll agree with what quite a few other bloggers have said: it’s not bad, but it should have been included in the basic release. Getting people to shell out $7 or more for that is really rather cheeky, especially considering that all you end up with is an open space and a couple of merchants — oh, and a chest, but you could just download one for the normal camp for free instead. The area is fun and the story is good, but worth seven bucks? Nope. Not impressed with EA as far as that goes. We’re already shelling out for the game and we know we’ll shell out for DLC in the future — there’s no need to bleed us for every damn map, especially not when it includes facilities (the chest, a couple of decent merchants) that should be in the basic content to begin with.

Anyway, here are the pix, in roughly chronological order. I’ve got 1920×1200 versions if anyone is really dead keen. Enjoy.

Ostagar

Some people have complained about the excessive cinematics, but I’ve found them very enjoyable. They actually *gasp* tell a story, and most of them are extremely evocative; hell, a few of them are even moving. So yeah, if all you want to do is slay stuff, pick its pockets and then go slay some more stuff, ya might want to check out Diablo or whatever. Less story, more slayage.

Ostagar, view of the horde from above

Ostagar, the battle

Lothering -- Morrigan and Alistair bickering, as usual

Finding Shale

Demon nipples!

The Battle for Redcliffe Village

(Soldier's Peak) Quoth Alistair "She's really let herself go"

Get away from her, you bitch! -- Oh wait, wrong movie

Cultists cultists everywhere and not a drop to drink

Creepy ruined temple high in the mountains

Why yes, we did kill all your culty villager buddies. Sorry!

Another ruined temple, deep in the forest this time

This was not the quick side-trek I thought it would be...

...but it did lead to some pretty moving plot stuff.

Back in the mountains. Uh-oh.

WHAT?!? is your quest? (Excellent quest, as it turned out.)

The best assassin is one who does not know-- err, is a successful one. This guy wasn't.

(Said in the voice of that #$(*^@ NPC in the Dragon Age party camp — the one who does enchantments. Some NPCs should be permanently muzzled.)

I’ve discovered the joys of not having to figure out what I’m going to post on a given day. More to the point, I don’t have much impetus to post right now, and a lot of other things drawing my attention away. I’m therefore taking my own advice and — well, if not exactly taking a break, at least reserving the right to post very infrequently for a while.

Enjoy whatever it is you’re playing at the moment!

Back from another Albuquerque house hunting trip, and tired. Very, very tired. Also unsuccessful — well, we don’t know for sure yet. Anyone who’s hunted houses will know the buggers can be tricky to catch. I might need a bigger gun.

Normal posting service will resume shortly (probably tomorrow).

So, what all did I miss, huh? Did the gaming world implode over the weekend?

Allow me to preface this with #TSW and #dowant — it’s part of my campaign to get noticed and get offered a beta spot. Won’t happen, but in the meantime I can annoy a whole lot of people on Twitter with it. DO WANT! And since Syp can post pix of him as a woman, I can post a male pic to represent me. Besides, it’s House.

As tweeted by several people (thank God other people pay attention to gaming news and pass it on to slackers like me!), Eurogamer reports that Funcom are offering guaranteed The Secret World beta spots to people who sub up to Age of Conan for three months. So, I guess that makes the price of a beta spot a little under $50 these days. Cynical, moi?

On the one hand — DO WANT! On the other, do not want to start paying for a game I don’t really want just to get a beta spot. I’ve got more than enough games on my plate as it is and, you know, AoC wasn’t supposed to be that great to begin with, and not really my bag. I’ve got my story game (Dragon Age) and my crafting/MMO game (EQ2) and I can find plenty of slayage action in both if I can be arsed, so what for do I need another?

So on balance, I probably won’t bother. And in a few months I’ll be all pissed when other people have bothered and are neenering me from their spot in the beta.

I could claim I’m concerned about ruining the launch experience for myself, but I’ve never been particularly motivated to either hide content from myself or be the first to experience everything. I’m one of those relatively sad people who actually enjoy beta testing, provided I don’t glut myself on it like I did a year or so ago and thus end up making myself sick of the plethora of issues one should expect with any beta. If I care enough about a game to be excited about it, I also care enough to want to nail bugs and provide systems & mechanics feedback. In that sense, being in the beta won’t ruin anything at all for me. But I can always make a virtue of necessity.

If nothing else, at least we know there’s currently going to be a beta, and it can’t be all that far away. They could tell us more, but then they’d have to kill us.

Last weekend I found another few hours to play, and decided to finish off the last two Dragon Age: Origins — the human noble and the dwarven noble.

I started off with Taizu, human noble warrior who — cough cough — doesn’t look anything like the other members of her family. There was no particular intent to make her look Asiatic when I sat down, but that’s how she ended up in the character creator and given her looks and class I named her after one of my favourite early C. J. Cherryh books, The Paladin. In the first screenie below you’ll see Taizu’s whitebread — if very noble whitebread — family, and below that you’ll see Taizu herself, with her mother. I kept wanting to ask Mater if she had something she wanted to tell me.

The human noble origin is, in many ways, the most standard in terms of both RPGs and fantasy fare in general, just as the Daelish elven one was the most D&D-like (explore dark underground temple). What that doesn’t mean is that either are bad. Dragon Age does a great job at taking fantasy and RPG tropes and using them both well and, when appropriate, humorously. Much has already been said about having to kill (ten-ish) rats in this origin, so I won’t bang on about it here.

Taizu’s story is somewhat cliched, but it’s still very involving and I found myself empathising with her much more than I expected. She’s a warrior, but she has to stay behind and “watch the castle” (aka do nothing useful or fun) while big brother and Dad get to ride south to help in the war with the Darkspawn. It doesn’t help that Mum, who was once “quite the swordmaiden herself” — in her own words — has now settled down to being a noble chatelaine, and isn’t very sympathetic to Taizu’s requests to be allowed to go off to war and/or join the Grey Wardens. (Duncan is there, of course, as he is in all the Origins.)

Very early on Taizu had to go fetch her supposedly misbehaving Mabari Wardog out of the kitchen pantry, which was a nice touch. Ferelden noble culture is based on those hounds, and in most of the lore you get to read that isn’t written by a Ferelden native, Fereldans are described as being only a few short steps past barbarianism. (Of course, all the cultural and historical lore in DA:O is very evidently skewed by the perspective of its writers, which adds another layer of depth to an already complex package.) Civilised or not, Ferelden nobles love their dogs and anyone as exalted as Taizu and her family apparently are wouldn’t not have some of these. I’d already found that out from playing previous Origins, and it was another example of how consistent the game is in general.

There’s not a whole lot else I can say about this Origin without giving spoilers. The human noble Origin plot isn’t, as I said, particularly difficult to predict, but it’s excellently executed and paced. There’s a great mix of furious fighting and pathos, and no punches pulled when it comes to the wanton murder of innocents. There’s a reason this game has an M rating and it’s not just the silly gore. The only downside of this Origin is that I was so involved in the story that I didn’t even recognise Tim Curry voicing Arl Howe. At least, I’m pretty sure Arl Howe was in this one. Hopefully I’ll get to meet him again later in the story.

By this time I was getting pretty tired of having to stop playing a character every time they started to get interesting, so I was glad to get to the final origin. I’d seen the spousal unit play this one — Dwarven noble — out of the corner of my eye, and since the Dwarven casteless origin had left me kind of meh (more the setting than the story) I wasn’t all that fired up.

So I made Kaitou more out of a sense of duty to you lot than out of any real enthusiasm. She’s a rogue, mostly because I’d only just finished a warrior origin and because and given the choice between fighter and rogue, I’ll always pick the rogue. Also, I wanted to see how a non-warrior type would play out in the Dwarven noble origin, which seemed on the surface to be rather biased towards being a fighter.

(For those who care about such things, “kaitou” means — or so the internets tells me — sharp sword in Japanese, and it took me a while of going through words until  found one I liked and wasn’t too un-Dwarven. Just now, while double-checking this assertion, I Googled “kaitou” and apparently there’s a slew of anime and game characters already called this. Goes to show that there’s just no being original with character names anymore. Sure, I could have used a “standard” Dwarven name but I’m pig-sick of those, just as I am of “standard” elven names.)

Anyway, I figured I’d blitz my way through this Origin and finally be able to pick a character for good and move on with the story. I hadn’t counted on yet another bloody good introduction, this time replete with political maneuvering and intrigue. Dwarves in DA:O aren’t the standard greedy-but-jolly types you’ll tend to see elsewhere. They’re greedy for sure, but they’re certainly not all jolly and they have the most restrictive caste system this side of medieval India. If you’re not born it, you’re pretty much SOL. And even if you are born it, you’re SOL if you don’t know how to play the game… and Kaitou isn’t the sharpest political player in the deck, at least not at the start of her Origin (not the way I was playing her, anyway).

I’d also not counted on her faithful Warrior-caste friend, who shows up in Scene 1 and is by her side right up to the point the shit hits the dwarven fan. When I first saw him I thought he was a glorified minder and Kaitou thus instantly disliked him, but he turned out to be amusing, loyal, and full of hard common-sense that stopped Kaitou from putting her foot in it once or twice. Despite plenty of opportunities for it in the other Origins, this was the first time I actually felt one of my characters might want to get something romantic started in DA:O, though the opportunity didn’t really arise. Most of the time we were too busy trying to make sure we weren’t about the get stabbed in the back or ambushed from the front.

It’s difficult to post any meaningful screenies from this Origin without giving spoilers, so again I’ll ad a few as thumbnails and you can avoid them if you please. They’re not captioned or anything and I don’t think they’re too spoilerish, but you never know. Click at your own risk etc etc.

I won’t reveal who I ended up deciding to play onward (it wasn’t who I was expecting, that’s for sure!) — that’ll be for next time, whenever that is, and provided I can write anything without giving too much away. There’s so much story in this game that it’s almost impossible to say anything without, er, saying anything!

I’m very impressed that I found each of the six Origin stories entertaining. Some were more to my taste than others, but that’s down to personal plot preferences and playstyle, and there’s enough variety in the backgrounds that I’m pretty sure anyone can find a character they’ll enjoy playing, unless they’re dead set on making a Dwarven mage, which just ain’t gonna happen.

While I don’t usually like to grade stuff or even give recommendations, I will say this: if you’re still on the fence about this game and if you’ve got the wherewithal to get it now, do so. Otherwise you’ll be dodging spoilers for the next few weeks/months, which may lessen your enjoyment. On the other hand, if you’re not bothered by spoilers then it’s no big deal to wait, especially since a few useful things (like a chest in the party camp) are being patched in as we speak. Not that I’ve applied any patches after last week’s silliness, but sooner or later I’ll get round to it.

…and sometimes you’re the poor schmuck on the anvil. EA announces a bunch of layoffs.

You can read the rest for yourselves. I just didn’t want you to think I was too pissed to pay attention to news. Props to Listens-To-Train-Tracks Jennings, on whose blog I read this first.