Corpse Camping the Dragon – Discontent and Whiny

In case you weren’t aware, this is the place where I rant about Dragon Age 2 and write humorous posts about my playthrough. I’m very good at the former and very bad at the latter. But that doesn’t stop me from trudging on, so stay a while and listen.

At this point in the game I have quite firmly settled on renaming DA2 into Side Quest 2, because that seems to be the primary focus of the game. This may be because side quests are so brilliantly done and narratively superior, or because the main story just simply sucks (well, they do have a better storyline, at least). For one thing, side quests do their job. They are supposed to be small pieces of the story that take your focus off the main quest and occupy you for just a little while, so you don’t get bored too quickly. Continuation isn’t important, but DA2 does a good job with it (how you complete side quests influences other side quests later on).

The main quest though…

Corpse Camping the Dragon – Timetravel for Dummies

I can’t believe it. Can you believe it? Is this another instalment of “Blaq cries about BioWare’s apparent lack of ability to make a decent RPG since Dragon Age: Origins”? It seems so. I bet you didn’t think there would be one and I have to admit that I didn’t either. I’m sure you know that I’m not that thrilled about DA2, which means you’ll fully understand why I lost most of my enthusiasm for the game when I saw that saving the city wasn’t the end of the storyline. It was hard to go back and finish the game when there are so many better ones that I could play. In addition, I’ve done the smart thing of replaying the large portion of the game with a rogue character (which pulled me in much more than the warrior, I have to admit), including most of the content I haven’t been through yet. You can imagine that replaying the already-stale content wasn’t a prospect I’d enjoy.

But damn it, I said I’d finish it and I will! If nothing else so I’ll be able to rant about it on the grounds of having played all of it. So here we go…

Corpse Camping the Dragon – Clone Wars

My last camping of the corpse of a generic dragon ended with Qunari deciding to purge the city. You can imagine that was bad news for Kirkwall, but luckily there was me and my ragged band of companions, ready to save the day. After a short cut scene where the Qunari were quite rudely showering us with spears, we find ourselves outside their compound with the city on fire and the hairless stoics slaughtering anything in sight. I can’t say I hesitated before charging into them.

Corpse Camping the Dragon – The Qun Demands Popcorn

I feel like Dragon Age 2 should come with some popcorn, because it’s not as much a game as it is an interactive 3D novel. Which would be fine and all, but the problem is that one of the things a good novel needs is a good story, which DA2 simply doesn’t have.

Ok I’m exaggerating. There’s a lot of game in there, but the reason I say there isn’t is because the gameplay is bland and missing those key ingredients that make an RPG an RPG. Man, I’ve started ranting already. I hope to leave some ranting for my final post in the series so for now, let’s go corpse camp some dragons (or Qunari more appropriately).

Who knew Qunari read Russian classics?

Corpse Camping the Dragon – Sidelined

No new posts for an extended period, again!? Am I new at this?

Well, no, but that doesn’t mean I’m any less lazy. I’ve spent my free time this weekend and Monday watching Dreamhack streams (keeping up with three different competitions can be quite time demanding) and then on Tuesday I was just LoLing around. Which isn’t exactly recommended when you have a backlog of Dragon Age 2 gameplay to blog about and are notorious for sporadic posting!

Ah well, it’s not the first or the last time this has happened. So I wouldn’t be keeping my hopes up of this ever changing. In other news, apparently the four people who voted on the new blog design are split on the matter (50/50), which leaves me wondering why I asked for an opinion anyway. Well, you’re stuck with this theme now because I’m lazy and won’t go changing it back. If you don’t like it, maybe you should have voted on it, eh?

Am I bitchy today or what, it must be that time of the month. Or maybe it’s the heat. Anyway, Dragon Age 2!

Corpse Camping the Dragon – I See (Un)Dead People

When I last wrote about my exploits in Dragon Age 2 I just completed my trip to the Deep Roads and Porcupine Hawke was now asked to finally deal with the Qunari in the city, who have been loitering around ever since I can remember. But apparently they’ve only recently become a problem, so of course I am called on to solve the mess. Even though I have no desire to do so.

Oh well, what can you do. A greedy mercenary’s gotta do what a greedy mercenary’s gotta do.

Corpse Camping the Dragon – Going Deep

The poll results shows that people generally don’t care what I write about, as long as do it. Ok then, here’s today’s contribution:  Phasellizzle boom shackalack volutpizzle that’s the shizzle. Go to hizzle semper adipiscing lorizzle. Da bomb pizzle est. Nulla sapien i’m in the shizzle, pot nizzle, accumsizzle shizzlin dizzle, fermentizzle quis, pede. Izzle nec sure. Etizzle i saw beyonces tizzles and my pizzle went crizzle ornare ante. Maurizzle justo. Vestibulizzle boofron get down get down nibh go to hizzle commodo. Pizzle fo shizzle you son of a bizzle sizzle my shizz, consectetizzle owned elit. Sizzle dang bizzle. Quisque mi fo, funky fresh izzle, shizzlin dizzle a, eleifend a, gangsta. *

Corpse Camping the Dragon – Let Me Roleplay!

I’m beginning to wonder if Dragon Age 2 is the sort of game I should be writing diary posts on. I get the feeling that the writeups aren’t very exciting or entertaining, perhaps because of my general inability to write, which I can do nothing about, or because the game simply isn’t as exciting as exceptional games usually are. Which does imply that Dragon Age 2 isn’t an exceptional game, but I’m sure you got a whiff of that before you read this. Because I don’t want to act on a feeling and abandon writing about DA2 (I probably will finish playing it) and then find out that the series weren’t that bad, there will be a poll below this paragraph. Please vote on it, but not before reading the rest of this post as it will help you decide. I’ll provide virtual hugs for anyone who votes.

Corpse Camping the Dragon – We Built This City On Rock

I finished my last post with a rant after I completed the tutorial section of the game. I was expecting things to only go uphill from then on (wait, isn’t uphill worse than downhill?). As it turns out, bad things can get worse. But fear not, there’s always a solution. Read on to find out the extent of today’s whining.

Yes, I'm sure they will be reasonable. People you want to kill generally are.

Corpse Camping the Dragon – The Beginning

I’ve finally picked up Dragon Age Deux and I’ll be attempting to write a series of entries that will be a cross between diary entries, a let’s play, an opinionate and mindless ranting. Originally I wasn’t planning on playing the game after I saw what BioWare did with the franchise, but a brilliant idea hatched in my brain and I just had to give it a go. I’ve talked about my inability to roleplay a bad guy (or my general inability to roleplay) in an RPG, and it’s something that really irks me. If I ever want to see anything besides the “good guy” path in a game I have to arduously and consciously remind myself at every fork in the narrative road to not simply go down the one that seems the best to me. I’m sure you can imagine that takes away from the game and hinders immersion. But in Dragon Age Deux, in a game that I didn’t think was a proper RPG in the first place, I decided to attempt to roleplay a complete asshat. It doesn’t matter if I have to stay conscientious and am unable to fully immerse myself, because I wouldn’t want to do that in the first place, right? In any case, here’s my first encounter with the game.

I like big swords and I cannot lie...