You're not going anywhere, the game is.

I just had to post this part of a project update from the Kickstarter by Bare Mettle Entertainment about the game they are making with the help of their Kickstarter.
The game is called Sui Generis, you can read more here on Kickstarter.

"We feel that in recent years the focus of most CRPGs has shifted from creating an immersive world to providing a streamlined gameplay experience. Rarely is there room for subtlety or engaging your wits. Games have been evolving into something where anyone can play for a while and feel they've achieved something. Ultimately though, our achievements are purely virtual, and we didn't even have fun. You're not going anywhere, the game is. You're just along for the ride and nothing you do really matters. We don't exactly come out feeling like we've accomplished something, more like we've satisfied some addiction. It's easy to forget, but we know that games can be genuinely fun, worthwhile and stimulating.

The kind of roleplaying experience we dreamed of and hope to create is one that hasn't been possible without a human game master who can intelligently respond to all your actions. We want your actions to have meaningful effects, not as pre-scripted "choice and consequences" over which we have no real insight or control, but as a world that is affected realistically by everything you do. We want you to be able to make mistakes, to fail and to feel that your successes are your own. We even want you to accomplish things that we as designers have never foreseen. We want a world capable of supporting your most creative strategies, where hypothetical scenarios turn out to be real. We're talking about roleplaying, immersion, being master of your own character in a world that can make you believe it is real".

This quote exactly captures how i have been feeling about gaming and games, no matter how great they were and i thought i liked them.
No matter how much i loved games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, i still have to finish a second playthrough, i mean i want to but i just can't, i allready know what's going to happen, what my choices are going to be, so you allready know how the game is going to end.
And to be honest games like Skyrim and Oblivion are much the same when it comes to questing, the only difference (and reason i still play them) is that you can still just roam around in the world and add lots of stuff through mods.

The same thing goes for MMO's, it's all one big scripted adventure with an outcome allready set, the developers have allready made up the story for you and you are just along for the ride, in the end you know you will be the hero of the world, the saviour of the galaxy.
The path has allready been layed out for you, the only choice you get is path A,B or C (Good, Neutral or Bad) but the end result is always the same.

 Quote: You're not going anywhere, the game is.

In the end it should be a choice i made, not a multiple choice answer given to me by the developers.

So, yeah i am kind of excited to see if Bare Mettle can pull this off with Sui Generis and i am glad i backed a game like this.
It would be awesome to blog about my game progress and know that i have a completely different story than anyone else playing the same game.

Until then i'll just keep dreaming...

Into Oblivion

After finishing Dragon Age, or all the DLC to be more precise, i felt a bit let down. Somehow most of it was fun but especially when it came to Witch Hunt i felt like, "was this really neccessary?".
All along it felt like it was leading up to something and when i found Morrigan i thought, now things are going to start... but nope cue credits..
To this moment i still don't really know what i learned here or what the story was about, other than trying to find Morrigan, no revelations, no surprises, nothing..

Anyway while playing i felt like doing a completely new playthrough of Dragon Age from the start, but after finishing Dragon Age i actually felt like re-installing Oblivion :)



Since my old saves were corrupt (constant crashing) and i didn't have all addons that i use to run with the game i decided to roll a new character and do a new playthrough and i have to say that i still enjoy Oblivion a lot, i really enjoy going where ever i wanna go instead of feeling like i am on rails (like Dragon Age), i can follow the questline(s) or just go wandering around in the world and see what crosses my path.

Since starting this new game i have allready discovered some locations that i had never seen before despite the fact that i have allready spend over 170 hours on Oblivion, that combined with the many great addons/mods out there still make it a really great game to play.

I am stil very excited for Dragon Age 2, but for now i am perfectly happy playing Oblivion :)

Dragon Age: The Hunt is on

Well the fix i wrote about yesterday did seem to fix the problems i was having, i managed to finish Awakenings and played through Liliana's Song and Golems of Amgarrak and am now on (the) Witch Hunt.

Have to say the both Liliana's Song and Golems of Amgarrak were a bit to short for my taste, but fun, playing Lelliana's Song was definatly fun, eventhough i allready kinda knew the story it was still fun to play through.

Golem's of Amgarrak had a very difficult boss fight (maybe to difficult), i was playing on easy and the only way to win this was by "spamming" health potions inbetween swings, all my companions went down almost instantly dispite me trying to (micro) between them and having them take health potions as often as possible. Luckily i had plenty of health potions in my inventory to get my warden through the fight, yay for stacking up on those.



Another thing i had to change though was a bit more complicated, i had since i purchased Dragon Age, moved my folder containing the game and for some reason the authentication thing wouldn't work no more, so i couldn't access my recently bought DLC, luckily i managed to find a forum post containing a fix that worked for me.
Unfortianatly it involved messing around with the Command Promt (CMD) under windows (something i haven't done in years), but thanks to this forumpost here i managed to get it uninstalled and installed/working again (the section .3.2.4. "Uninstalling and reinstalling Dragon Age Updater Service if you receive errors at point 3.2.2 or everything else failed" did it for me).

It is something that really annoys me, really, i know companies are trying to protect their property/IP/game against piracy, however in the end it's always the (legally) paying costumer that suffers. If everything works properly, no problems, but if i have to go through so many loopholes to get your authentication "service" working, you are punishing the wrong people here.
And the fact that there is such a huge problem shooting guide on how to get your DLC to work, is (i think) evidence enough your authentication system is flawed.
Besides those who wanna pirate are gonna do it anyway, they will find a way to crack it, so why punish those who support you..

Almost all of those systems depend on an internet connection, which is fine as long as it works, but when you for whatever reason loose your connection, you can't even play those games you payed for, another example i recently encountered was with Blizzard, now there system (Battle.net) works almost perfectly (well most of the time), but recently Battle.net went down and i could not play WoW or even play Starcraft 2 in single player mode because of it.

Anyway enough about me ranting :)
So here's to hoping for no more troubles!!

Dragon Age: Finally Awake

Way back i started playing Dragon Age: Awakening and i got lots of crashes from the start. Initially turning of some mods fixed it, but when i got a bit further along into the quest line, to the point were i was thrown into "The Fade" i would get a crash no matter what as soon as i got around the first corner and started that second fight (you have the first fight after the cut scene).

The game would simply crash to the desktop, no matter how many times i tried and as a result i haven't touched Dragon Age since, eventhough i loved the game.

Yesterday i figured i would try to play again, hoping that there might have been some fixes in a patch or something, but no luck, as soon as i got into that particular fight the game would crash again.

After some google searching and reading through posts on forums i did however found something that made sence, apperantly it's much like the problems i had with WoW, "too much" memory in my system (Win7 64-bit 4g ram), or in other words, the game client is designed to run with 2g ram and as soon as it gets over that the game simply crashes, eventhough my system can run with 4g.

This post/thread here actually had the thing that fixed it for me.
I used a program called CFF Eplorer, that has a "patch" to make the game client work with 4gigs of memory and for now i have to say it fixed the problem, i am now getting past that dreaded fight and am able to continue.

I haven't had a lot of time yet to play more so i still have to see in the long run how it does (if there's a memory leak in the game it's bound to crash later on), but finally getting past that fight without crashing felt like a huge victory.

I still can't believe it was so easy to fix, after all i tried (like re-installing etc.), all it needed was a little patch to the .EXE file, basicly a few seconds work.

Now to play the rest of the story of Awakenings and all the DLC after it (hopefully).

Dragon Age: (A Rough) Awakening

First impression of Dragon Age: Awakening, was one of suprise, i imported my character and was very suprised to see her show up without armor and weapons. Turns out non of the previous DLC works with this expension, so my character started fighting in her underwear and without "Starfang" that awesome sword.

In my opinion a bad choice, afterall this is an expension to the original, so i should have access to all the DLC.

As soon as i started playing, i started having crashing issues, first idea i had was to turn off any/all third party mods, which seem to stop the crashing, so yeah third party mods not (yet) working with the new expension.

I managed to get quite a few hours into the game and am now at the point where i entered "The Fade" and there is no way to keep going, the game just keeps crashing to the desktop, no matter what i try.
So far it has been a nice experience, i did enjoy the story, but i do get a little feeling that there's more EA behind this expansion than BioWare, as in EA pushing BioWare to publish despite some problems and also to me it feels a bit unfinished, especially if you can't use any of the previous DLC.
It just feels like it was rushed out of the door to keep the Dragon Age franchise "hot".

I am hoping for some patches soon, as it seems more people are having these crashing issues, until this expansion i had no issues with Dragon Age besides the loading times getting longer and longer as you play(which i am also experiencing with this expansion), but that was no issue to me as i would ussually take a little time and save and restart the game.
It also seems that EA does not support this game for Windows 7 64-bit, their "advise" install another operating system.... Now i know EA is only the publisher, but that's not the kind of advise you want to hear.

I am just hoping i am seeing things that aren't there and that BioWare is still in full control of their IP's, but then again the recent news about EA's expectations for Star Wars: The Old Republic are not very encouraging.
I am still having some trust in BioWare and will wait for a patch to come out soon that will fix some of the issues. In the mean time i will keep trying to get past the fade, so that i can (hopefully) continue this game.
Anyways, hope that, when you are reading this, you are not having the same problems..

I am sad i finished Dragon Age

I finished Dragon Age Origins and i am kind of sad.
I really enjoyed the game but i am sad because you can't continue playing after you defeated the Archdemon.

According to my achievements i finished 75% of the game.

I can start up the game with my character that finished the game, but the only cities/regions i can access are the DLC locations, but since i allready completed those during the normal playthrough, there is nothing to do anymore, no fighting, no exploring.

Really wish i could just continue playing it, but i guess i'll have to start a new game..

I think this is a really bad choise, especially if it's such an awesome game.
You spend a lot of time developing/leveling your character and can't go back to play.

I hated Fallout 3 for it (although i still played it) until they changed it so you could keep exploring after finishing the main storyline, in fact i went out of my way to not finish it.

I also really enjoyed the fact that in Mass Effect 2, you can import your character from Mass Effect 1, so it kinda feels like you continue to play with your first character.

Now of course, Dragon Age Awakening is coming (and i allready pre-ordered), so i'll have something to look forward to, i (on purpose) haven't read or watched anything about it, but i do hope i can continue to play it with my current character..