Dragon Age - 20 Minute Look @ Giant Bomb

I used to be totally purist "nobody goes down or I reload", and truthfully most times I still go by that. But ya know, sometimes after seemingly an hour of playing one battle over and over again, having a member of the party just get "knocked out" can be kinda refreshing… they get up, shake themselves off. Have a swig off the canteen, and we're progressing thru the game again.

Dhruin said:

Not for most people, they don't. Most people just reload if a battle doesn't go their way. A significant number of people reload just because they used too many potions or "didn't do well enough".

That means: noone dies. Ever.

The DA system encourages people to accept the consequences and it's still bloody hard, which is better than just pressing "reload".

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I agree. DA ist nothing but as mature as it wants to be.

It would be just silly to market a game as being "dark & gritty" and not thinking this out to the consequences.

Otherwise it would be "dark & gritty for teenagers", then.

The death part of the game is what bugs me the most. I can't stand that my guys go down and then just get up without any kind of consequence (other than the -1 attribute which is fixed quite easily) It feels like cheating to me and frankly a little boring.

There's a hardcore mod out for DA: Origins now; version 1.0 has been reached.

There's no injury kits at all - if memory serves? (or very few...)

Health potions (poultices) only heal about 35% of what they used to do in the vanilla game.

There's some other changes also; I'll see what I can dig up...

Sounds good, aries. Thanks for the heads up.

This game is centered around the party members being able to shake off their wounds after a battle, but if you take that out of the picture then it will make the battles more intense. Hopefully they'll be much more interesting, but not impossible

Maybe, I'm just too used to my party based rpgs being like Wizardry, BG or even the gold boxes before that. This new style of playing takes a little to get used to. I'm not sure why I didn't mind it in NWN 2, but in this one it is annoying the heck out of me.

Edit: Just played the redcliffe area and OMG that was freaking hard. I was down to one guy against 3 and managed to just barely survive. I ran out of health packs and was down to using injury kits to heal him. I may have been very wrong about this combat style. That was a lot of fun.

The first time I tried it I got killed with 3 enemies left. Second time got wasted pretty quick, but the third time I changed my tactics a bit and it worked. Barely, but I survived. I may get into this combat after all. The thing about it was it wasn't impossible, just hard. I figured just the random encounters could be extremely difficult even after all I read about Redcliffe. I was dead wrong.