Witch Hunt! Demiboy vs. Backlog, Part 1
I have 227 unfinished games in my backlog, across all platforms. I also want to do more blogging and writing. My solution: randomly sort my list of unfinished games, then play them in that order and write about them! I won't move on to the next until I've finished my current one or given it a fair run for at least a week. Inspired by Decadent Gamer!
Previous: Terra Battle.
I have a bittersweet relationship with Dragon Age: Origins. (Spoilers follow, if such things matter to you this far out from its release!) My wife and I enjoyed the heck out of it one after the other, and it was a blast seeing how differently the major notes of the story went between our two playthroughs. "Don't trust Zevran," she warned me, as my Dwarven Rogue got intimate with the pretty elf. But I believed in him, and though he tried very literally to stab her protagonist in the back, he and my lead character stuck together to the end. Our respective interactions with Alistair also diverged quite dramatically. She romanced him, only to break his heart by pardoning the traitorous Teryn Loghain at the Landsmeet. My Alistair, on the other hand, stood by my decisions, and ultimately gave his life for mine when defeating the Archdemon.
That wasn't the way I'd wanted the story to end, though.
From the moment I learned that a Grey Warden's final sacrifice was necessary to end the Blight, I envisioned my character gladly stepping across that final threshold after a climactic battle. But when I got to the Archdemon fight, I discovered I was on a sort of timer: if it dragged on too long, the game would freeze up, and I'd have to reset the Xbox 360 to try again. And it turned out it simply wasn't possible for me, with the characters the way I'd built them to that point, to clinch a victory so quickly on the difficulty setting I'd played the entire game. I had to go down to Casual, which turned "climactic battle" to "pathetic cakewalk". Instead of an Archdemon, I had to make do with a kitten in a dragon suit.
Somehow, this utter putz terrorized a whole continent.
As if that wasn't indignity enough, the crash issues also denied me my heroic sacrifice. Once I blitzed through the fight, I was given the choice: accept Alistair's offer of substitution, or proceed with the final blow myself. If I chose to do it myself, the game crashed. In order to see a final cutscene and let the credits roll, Alistair had to be the one to die. It was bizarre, frustrating, and a huge letdown after what was otherwise a great game.
So it was with a sad wry smile that I greeted the random sort's offering of DA:O's "Witch Hunt" DLC for my first play. It's a continuation of a story whose conclusion left me feeling robbed; the technology-mediated disappointing anticlimax of the base game was the reason I hadn't pursued the DLC right away on my first go. Hopefully, this added chapter would at least behave better! Plus, it'd been years since I last played any Dragon Age. Would I even remember how? It would be too much to expect of a DLC that it would provide me a from-scratch set of tutorials.
Indeed, it didn't put forth much effort getting me back on board, beyond starting things off with a completely trivial combat encounter, but I needn't have worried. Dragon Age features simple if-then "Tactics" settings for characters, including predefined scripts for party roles, that automate most gameplay. I pilot the MC, run them up to the highest-profile target, and mash all my cooldowns, while the AI characters do the fiddly work of buffing and healing. All I needed to do was remember how to drink healing potions (which did take some button experimentation), in the one or two fights that actually had a chance of wiping me out.
I only vaguely remember the setting elements referenced in the dialogue, but it doesn't matter much. The whole thing is a straightforward "go to location A, fight monsters, find widget; go to location B, fight monsters, find widget." Go to the Mages' Circle to learn about magic mirrors, go to some Elven ruins to get a broken magic mirror, go to a Dwarven thaig to get lanterns to power a search for more magic mirrors... uh. It's a bog-standard side quest chain, which makes me wonder what the impetus was for creating it as a standalone DLC episode rather than integrating it into the main game like some other DLCs did, e.g. "The Stone Prisoner". It could have opened up after Morrigan leaves in the main story. Perhaps they weren't able to round up the whole original crew to do voice lines? At least they did get Claudia Black in to reprise her role as Morrigan!
All in all, it was a fairly mediocre DLC. Part of it was distance; I had forgotten why Morrigan vanished in the first place, so I wasn't especially invested in the plot. The least they could have done was throw in a brief reference at the beginning of the episode, rather than wait for the denouement to bring it back up. And even then, when I had the chance to ask "Why did you want to take the Archdemon's soul?" and I thought "oh yeah! She left after I didn't let her do that"... she refused to answer the question. I thought the whole point of this DLC was to wrap up loose ends like that! Between that letdown, and the fact of it being more "Kwazy Kwest" than the Where in Ferelden is Carmen Sandiego I'd pictured from the description, well. If buying DA:O DLCs piecemeal instead of getting the whole package were even possible these days, I wouldn't recommend grabbing this one.
Image screencapped from BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins by Dragon Age wiki user Vhardamis.
Next up: Starpoint Gemini 2, a space sim/action RPG thing I don't remember buying!