Over the weekend I went through the two current DLC packs for Dragon Age: Origins. I didn’t really plan it, it just happened that I liberated the Warden’s Keep on Saturday and got Shale into my party on Sunday. It got me thinking about the cost of DLC.

The Stone Prisoner (which adds potential party member Shale) costs $15 while Warden’s Keep costs $7. The upcoming Return to Ostagar will cost $5.

Some folks think these prices are too high, while others consider them fair. I can kind of see both sides of the argument. When I’m determining value in a game, I basically break it down into a cost/hour number.

So in support of the pricing, if I spend $5-$7 for a piece of DLC and it entertains me for an evening, that seems ok. Going to a movie is going to cost me a lot more than that. Going to a meal still more. I could get a Starbuck’s Latte for $5, or I could spend an evening going through this content.

Looking at it another way, though, how does that $5 compare to the entire game? Dragon Age (PC) lists for $50 and has what? 60 hours of gameplay? (I’m guessing..I haven’t finished yet.) For ease of use let’s assume it’s a 50 hour game. So that’s $1/hour. Does the Warden’s Keep contain the 7 hours of content it would need to match the value of the main game? No, it doesn’t. Of course there’s more than just the adventure of recovering the Keep from the forces of evil. You also get some unique items and some storage space. Putting a dollar value on that is tough.

The Stone Prisoner is even harder to gauge. From Bioware’s point of view I can see why they’d price it so high. It’s another NPC in the game, with new art assets and animations, new (and considerable) voice talent, and both the quest to free Shale and his NPC quest. Plus potentially more voice acting from the other actors to react to Shale (guessing here too…I don’t use him).

So I can understand how this content was costly to produce. But I’m not sure that’s going to matter to most gamers. Will they get 15 hours out of Shale? Rescuing him is pretty fast (maybe an hour). I don’t know how elaborate his personal quest is, but neither does the potential buyer.

Bioware has promised 2 years worth of DLC for Dragon Age: Origins but (as far as I know) they haven’t really gone into detail about what that DLC will be. Will the story be extended or will it all be “side story” stuff? Will we see more NPC companions?

If the Stone Prisoner costs $15, how much would a short add-on campaign that’ll last you a few evenings cost? Twice as much? $30? Over half the price of the game? That seems crazy.

Maybe Shale was priced high just to drive customers to one of CE or Deluxe versions? The Collector’s Edition is $60, so it costs less than buying the standard edition + the Stone Prisoner DLC.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what we get with Return to Ostagar. $5 seems like a good price for a chunk of DLC. If I spending an evening having fun playing through Ostagar, I’ll feel like I got my money’s worth.

How about you? Where’s your comfort zone when it comes to paying for DLC? I’ve used Dragon Age: Origins to illustrate this post, but feel free to comment on DLC costs in general.

So it seems someone else may have survived the Battle of Ostagar, but this person was captured by the Darkspawn (rare, but it does happen. Bregan was captured, after all). Now this individual has escaped and he or she is looking for help from the Grey Wardens.

Yeah, that’s pretty sketchy, but thus far Bioware has revealed only a few details. We do know the just-announced Return to Ostagar DLC for Dragon Age: Origins will cost $5 and should be out ‘this holiday season.’ In it, you’ll head back to Ostagar for some payback, the chance to find the king’s arms and armor, and get another chance to recruit BarkSpawn into your party (actually my dog is named Milo but so many people seem to name theirs BarkSpawn, I coudn’t resist).

Hopefully we’ll get more details soon. Stay tuned!

A busy weekend kept me from playing as much Dragon Age as I suspected I would, and it came after me not touching the game in any significant way in the last few days of last week (due to other commitments, not lack of desire).

Tonight I finished one… ‘chunk’ of the storyline. Trying to avoid spoilers but if you’re playing you know what I mean. You’ve got a bunch of X items you have to take to various places to do some things. Anyway, I finally finished 1 of them. My save game is at 20 hours. There are 4 (or 5?) of these chunks, plus side quests, DLC quests… there’s a LOT to do here.

What’s amazing is how it feels like they’ve tucked games within games. A section I just finished had gameplay quite different from anything I’d done up to then. And when I say “section” I don’t mean 10-15 minutes. It took me a few nights of playing to get through it. Wonderful stuff.

I had hoped by now to be covering the modding scene and things of that nature, but it looks like it’ll be a while before I get to that.

On the bright side, the modding community isn’t going as crazy as I thought it would. I installed the tools and took a quick look at them and they were somewhat daunting, so I’m sure modders are still getting comfortable with them. With luck by the time I finish plodding through the game, there’ll be some quality modules available.

One thing I’m not going to do, is rush through the game. I’m enjoying myself far too much to cut corners; I’m going to savor every minute.

In the meanwhile, it never hurts to check out the list that Bioware maintains.

I hope everyone is enjoying the game as much as I am!

So I’m about 16 hours into my current game, with enough in other characters that I can probably safely say I’ve put 20 hours into Dragon Age: Origins so far. I’m growing ever more sure that this is my personal Game of The Year, which frankly surprises me given how much I enjoyed Infamous and Uncharted 2.

But no game can stand up to 20 hours scrutiny without revealing some imperfections and Dragon Age is no exception. Of course, no game is perfect. The title of this post is intended to provoke.

Anyway, here’re two things I’d like to see changed/added to Dragon Age: Origins.

First up, inventory. We’ve got a fairly limited amount of inventory space, and I’m not 100% sure why that is. Plus, there’s no way to put something down (unless I’m missing something); if your pack is full and you want to pick something up, you need to destroy something you’re carrying. When I’m in a large area with no vendors and no way out and my inventory fills up, it can be a little annoying. Granted there have to be some limits. But I hate that I’ll have to throw away, for example, a kite shield in order to make room for a silver ring.

Why not let us pile up extra gear somewhere in the corner of an area, so we can come back for it later (there could even be a chance that by the time we get back, someone or something will have rummaged through our loot).

As a sort of corollary to this issue, here’s a more controversial issue. I’d like to have a different inventory system. The way things are now, you get X inventory slots and every item (or stack of items) takes one 1 slot.

I get why they did this: to keep things simple. But Dragon Age isn’t a simple game. Now don’t be alarmed, I’m not calling for a “Tetris” inventory system. Rather, I’d assign a number of “burden points” to every carryable item, and then I’d give the party a set capacity for burden.

An example might make this more clear. Currently you start the game with 70 inventory slots. Instead of 70 slots, give the party the capacity to handle 700 encumbrance points worth of stuff. A ring would have an encumbrance value of 1. A shield would have an encumbrance value of 10. A plate chestpiece might have an encumbrance value of 20.

So now when you’re at capacity and want to pick up a ring, you can throw away a shield and get the ring and have some extra room to spare. Or you could throw away a salve and swap in the ring and still be capped. On the other hand if you find some plate armor you want to lug around, you’re going to have to make a number of sacrifices to fit that in.

Honestly that’s a “thinking out loud” idea. But I do think it’d be nice if we could drop items. This isn’t an MMO where we have to worry about lag from items being dropped by hundreds of parties, after all.

Until we get changes to the inventory system, you can head to Spinksville where Spinks talks about a mod that gives you some storage space in camp. That’ll at least help you squirrel away all those rings, statuettes, bottles of wine and other giftable finery you’ll pick up in your travels (but that each take up the same space as a piece of platemail).

Second, I have a feature request. I want a combat review camera. I love the combat system and I love the spectacle of combat. But I feel like I miss a lot of cool stuff because my back is turned, so to speak. This is particularly true while playing as a rogue, since you’re in the middle of battle and constantly moving to get in some back stabs. It may not be as bad for mages or other ‘back line’ characters.

Too frequently something will happen in a battle when I’m not looking. Suddenly two of my party will fall and I’m not sure what caused it. Or a Tactic condition will be met causing a mage to cast a spell that levels half our enemies and I’m not really positive which spell it was.

Enter the review camera. This gizmo lets you rewind time to the start of a battle and then gives you a free floating camera that lets you observe (passively…I’m not talking about a retry) the combat from whatever angle you feel is best. You can watch from the position of that enemy mage who lurked in the shadows until we sent our hound after him, for instance. Or you could just fly around the battle, watching it from all angles; maybe even add a feature so you could save “films” of epic battles in this way? Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to edit ‘combat films’ and then save them in an online album to show off to friends?

Anyway, that’s enough for today. Can’t wait for the weekend to arrive so I can put in more serious Dragon Age hours. Sneaking in 30-45 minutes on a week night is almost worse than not playing at all!

I guess the Bioware/EA press juggernaut took a week off to catch their breath. But they’re back and this time a decent video of the combat system in Dragon Age. Clearly the people being filmed expect you to be watching this before you play, so there’s a bit of redundancy (assuming you’re playing DA:O right now, and if you aren’t…why not!?) but they also talk about where they drew inspiration from and what they were ‘going for.’ (You can decide if they hit their target.)

A short epilogue talks about how many more stories there are to tell in this universe. Whether that’s a tease for DLC, an expansion pack, or a sequel, I don’t know. I’d be happy with all three, myself.

So after promoting Dragon Age heavily for the weeks leading up to the game, I’m happy to say that it is everything I hoped it would be, and I’m very much enjoying my time in the game. I spend much too much time reading and re-reading the codex and chatting up every NPC I can find who has a conversation tree (including my own party members).

Because of this, and a slow start, I assume I’m far behind other folks who are just jamming through this like they would any other game while I savor each moment. According to Raptr I have 15 hours into it, and probably another 5 when I wasn’t running the Raptr client. And yet I feel like my journey is just beginning.

The downside is, I don’t have anything to post about the game. I hate spoilers and I don’t want to spoil anything for others. I’m burning to talk about the choices I made but can’t really do that without spoiling things for myself and other people. Heck I’ve started unfollowing (temporarily) people on Twitter who’re talking specifics about the game.

I’m finding I’ve really missed this sense of “What happens next?” in my gaming. I’m usually playing MMOs months after thousands of people have hit cap and are talking nonchalantly about so-and-so actually being a dragon and the instance that exposes her and so on… you can’t really prevent spoilers in an MMO unless you’re one of the obsessed individuals who stays up for 72 hours straight to be the first to hit cap. The first time you do a group-based quest someone (who has done the quest 4 times on different alts) explains exactly what is going to happen when. Just the nature of that kind of game when you’re a slow leveler like me.

I had no idea how much I’d missed rich western-style single player RPG gaming until I started playing Dragon Age: Origins. I’m already thinking of the different choices I’ll make the next time I play. And I’m wondering what sorts of side stories we’ll see both from Bioware and from talented amateur game designers.

I see this one having a pretty long reign on my hard drive, even if it may mean some quiet days here at Dragonchasers.

If I’d known then what I know now…

I’m not going to go into spoilers, but some events that happen in the Dragon Age storyline are going to hit people who read the prequel novels a lot harder than those who didn’t. If I’d known ahead of time what was going to happen in the story, I would’ve urged folks to read The Stolen Throne and even The Calling (though it wasn’t that great a novel it did contain a goodly amount of backstory) before playing.

And yes, with the weekend here I’m finally done waffling and creating ‘alts’ and am actually moving forward in the story!

If you bought your version of DA:O digitally, or if you bought the console version, you might be interested in downloading the manual for the game (I haven’t seen the console manual but I’m told it’s pretty thin). I just had a read through it and learned some nuances I wasn’t aware of. Plus it gives some info that might help you in picking a race/class combination.

If that isn’t enough, there’s a fan-led project called Dragon Age: Origins – The Missing Manual (at least, that’s what it is called until O’Reilly, who publishes “The Missing Manual” series, hears about it). It’s very much a work-in-progress but already does a good job of making existing information easier to parse. For example, this chart on what each character behavior setting does is, to me at least, easier to grok then looking at the tool tips in-game.

If you bought Dragon Age: Origins digitally you may encounter problems installing the Toolset. Bioware is working the problem, but in the meanwhile here’s what I did to get it installed.

Run the installer. The problem happens while installing MS SQL Server, and specifically while configuring it. You’ll encounter an error with an ignore/retry prompt. Leave that floating on screen.

Open:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\dragon age origins\tools\toolssql\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Install\sysdbupg.sql
(substituting paths as required; I did this on Windows 7 Home 64-bit)

Search for:

SELECT @certificate_name = QUOTENAME(@certificate_name, ””)

and replace the line with:

SELECT @certificate_name = ”” + REPLACE(@certificate_name, ””, ”””) + ”’

Now hit Retry. You will probably get a new error along the lines of “Unable to Create database.”

Now open:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\dragon age origins\tools\toolssql\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data

and delete these files:
temp_MS_AgentSigningCertificate_database.mdf
temp_MS_AgentSigningCertificate_database_log.LDF
if they exist.

Finally go back to your installer and click on Retry again.

The installation *should* proceed smoothly. If it doesn’t, check the error logs in:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\dragon age origins\tools\toolssql\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\LOG
to see if you can tell what’s tripping things up.

There’s also a problem where the installer tries to write the uninstall.exe file to the wrong directory. Haven’t found a fix for that yet, but hitting Ignore lets you finish the installation and run the tools. Might mean some manual registry cleaning some day when you uninstall the tools though.

More details can be found here:
http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/8/index/109796/1

and here:
http://social.bioware.com/wiki/datoolset/index.php/Installation_with_Steam

I tested this on my Steam install but forum denizens say it works for Impulse as well.

[Updated the steps to take out a shortcut that may have been causing problems (see comments.)]

Ysh didn’t whisper quietly enough when she pointed this out to Scopique so I overheard…

The Dragon Age Toolset is now available for registered owners. Let the creating begin!

Well after a lot of consideration I decided to restart Dragon Age, replacing my Human/Noble/Warrior with a Human/Noble/Rogue. “Gillain” is a character I created over 20 years ago. He’s a fairly typical charming rogue. Not an outright thief but not above conning a rich man out of his coin. A bit Robin Hoodish, I guess. And he fights with dual weapons. Long ago it was dual axes but these days it’s dual anything. So I created him in Dragon Age tonight.

My first character was a Dual-Wielding Warrior, and I dunno… it just seemed silly to not go sword and board with a warrior, but I love the idea of a whirling dervish of twin bladed death /hyperbole.

I did learn the bonus/dlc rings and things appear for every character, so that was good news.

I thought I’d just whip through the opening moments of the game and catch up, but once again I got engrossed with talking to people and (re)reading the codex. The conversations were different enough to be interesting a second time through.

If you play a Noble, at least the Warrior or Rogue, your first quest is to go talk to your brother, who is saying goodbye to his wife and son (he’s headed out on campaign). Once you find him and do the ‘forced’ conversation, be sure to talk to his son before you leave the room. The kid is a hoot!

And here was a surprise. I was messing with Tactics and just seeing how my party would fight based on my limited understanding of the Tactics system and… my party wiped! Mind you I had a ton of poultices, I just wasn’t paying attention. But the Warrior waltzed through those early encounters on auto-pilot. So either the Rogue is a lot squishier, or my tactics were horribly broken.

I continue to be amused (and at times slightly disappointed) by the amount of gore in the game. Here is me and my trusty hound Milo after we killed a few rats. Lots of blood in rats, apparently!

Last night was all about computer problems and then getting Dragon Age downloaded, unlocked, messing with DLC issues and so on. I barely played.

Tonight was different. Tonight I finally got a chance to really take a small bite out of Dragon Age: Origins. And I’m loving what I’ve seen so far.

Honestly at the low levels I’m at, combat is very simple. I’m sure it’ll get more interesting later on. But with no real Skills yet, I just pick who everyone is going to attack then sit back and watch.

And I turned off Persistent Gore because it was so silly. I’m playing the Noble origin and early on you have to kill some rats (what else?!) and in so doing you get totally covered in blood. Then moments later you have an encounter with some family members and visiting nobles, and there you stand, blood spatters across your face, chatting up some lady in waiting. It was just silly. Toggling off Persistent Gore means the battles are still bloody but afterwards your party takes a moment to clean up a bit.

What I’m *really* enjoying is the lore that I’m uncovering. I’m so glad I read the novels first because I keep meeting people that were in the books. In fact Duncan, leader of the Grey Wardens, is a newly annointed Grey Warden in The Calling. I’m playing slowly and reading all the codex entries and exploring everywhere I’m able to explore.

It’s been a long time since I played a single player RPG like this one, and I’m actually finding the solo aspect somewhat freeing. I’m not in any hurry to “level up” or anything. Just drinking it all in and having a blast.

Mind you, all told I probably have 2 hours into the game so far, so everything could change. But for right now I’m really enjoying myself. I can’t wait for the weekend when I can just sit down and play for hours straight!

Apologize in advance for any typos; want to pound this out before work.

I don’t think I’m alone in having some problems getting all the DLC coming to me with my digital download version of Dragon Age: Origins. It doesn’t help that there are so many sources of gee-gaws: pre-order bonuses, deluxe version bonuses, store-specific bonuses and stuff you earned playing Dragon Age: Journeys.

I finally got everything working and wanted to share my experience. I used Steam so some of these issues may be unique to that platforms.

First, in the Steam client, under “My Games” right click on Dragon Age Origins and pick View Game CD Key. You can have as many as 3 keys in here. The ones with hyphens (xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx) are redeemable DLC codes (1 for pre-order, 1 for the deluxe version). On the Bioware social site, log in and from the left nav panel (under your portrait) pick Profile and then Redeem Promo Codes. Paste these keys in that field and hit submit. The key with no hyphens xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is your game registration key. You put that in under Profile and then Register game.

I had to enter keys several times to get them to work, since the site is so overloaded.

The next problem I had was that 1 bit of DLC downloaded and installed, then 4 more downloaded but didn’t install and I couldn’t get them to install. And other stuff I had coming wasn’t showing up at all. From surfing forums this is happening to a good number of people.

To fix that problem, run the Dragon Age Launcher and pick Configure from there. Once the Configuration Utility pops up, pick Repair and then Clear Download cache. Now run the game and check your Downloaded Content. This cleared up the problem for me.

If everything is running right, you should see the Warden’s Keep either available for purchase or (if you got the Deluxe version) installed. Once I flushed my cache it was available for purchase, which told me I had to go back and re-submit my redemption code one more time. Then I hit the swirly refresh button at the bottom right of the in-game download screen and Warden’s Keep and Shale and some other items started downloading.

Hopefully the servers will be a bit less burdened tonight and these issues will go away, but without clearing the download cache ‘stuck’ DLC doesn’t seem to clear up.

I still haven’t figured out how to get screenshots to upload, or to access the characters I built ahead of time with the Character Creator.

I’m looking forward to *playing* Dragon Age tonight. Last night was more or less about wrestling with it (and with my computer, which seems ‘fixed’ now that I replaced the new ram with old ram).

I’ll admit it, I’m surly tonight. Dragon Age ships, and my gaming PC rolls over and dies the same night (unrelated, I hadn’t even run Dragon Age when this started happening).

But the press barrage must go on!

We have our first Dragon Age: Origins music video. The band is Thirty Seconds to Hell, the song is This is War, and it is debuting in Dragon Age: Origins, or so I’m told. *shoots hateful glare at the gaming PC* You’ve already seen a lot of the footage, but I guess this is a fresh way of looking at it!

Tonight I have another batch of Dragon Age: Origins screens, compliments of our friends at Bioware. There’s a mix of shots with and without hud elements. A few new baddies in here.

I have to be honest, I’m kind of tired of looking at screens and videos and am very much ready to play. I suspect the same is true of you, dear reader, but if there’s one person out there that finds something new to delight over, I figure they’re worth a quick post.

[Update: That lucky SOB Tom Chick is playing! I read this account of a battle and my anticipation ratcheted up another dozen notches. I also found it really interesting how much it sounded like an MMO battle in some ways.]

I also have a growing concern about the amount of gore that is in every batch of screenshots; I’m hoping you’ll be able to tone that down a bit when actually playing the game. I don’t mind gritty but some of the shots I’m seeing just seem a bit over the top…

Anyway, here’s tonights back of screenies!