The Forecast: More Dragon Age
Whew. Dragon Age. Yeah. That is how I spent the last five days. I have been completely engrossed by the game. I have put in about 33 hours, have 25% of the world explored and am at 18% of completion. I did find out though that the 18% of completion is a bit misleading as I guess the completion percent is actually the percent of game achievements you have completed and not the percent through the story.
This game has consumed me. It is even worse than Torchlight at consuming my free time. The hours have been passing in the blink of an eye and I have been loving every minute of it.
Once you finish the initial Origin story and the zone after that the world opens up. You are given a choice of about five areas to go through that you can accomplish in any order. The set pieces are beautiful and the characters feel genuine. Their conversations are well voice acted and the banter between characters is really funny.
One thing that strikes me about this game is how much it feels like I am playing an MMO at times. Maybe it is just because it is has been so long since I played a good, epic, single player RPG but this game feels like playing an MMO with a four man party.
Overall, I am probably about a third of the way through the game and am already thinking about starting a new character and how I will play it. My current character is a human mage and is being played as if she does not care for the Chantry but wishes to show people that mages are not to be feared and are good people too. My next character will probably be an evil elf rogue and my final character will probably be a neutral dwarf warrior.
This game is very easily going to take me through the end of the year with gaming. And to be honest, with this game here, the though of playing MMOs has not even cross my mind. At this point, I have no idea if I will be returning to Aion. I want to love it, but NCSoft is making that really hard right now.