These games are definitely worth picking up especially for $10 for the whole series.
I’d like to give it a try, but unfortunately it looks like it requires the electronic arts app, which I refuse to install.
I think only the third one does. The other two should be steam or standalone capable.
Could anyone give a brief sum up of what are these games about?
I know is a famous series and I think is a fantasy rpg but I don’t know much more about them or why are the so well regarded.
The first one is a love letter to the original Baldur’s Gate games. Tactical group combat, real time with pause, fantasy. It’s an original setting that tries to subvert some Tolkien ideas. It’s pretty good, though it does feel a little old-bioware. The story is a basic “global threat -> gather allies” with a touch of political intrigue. The romance is kind of badly done. It’s peak “give them gifts until sex happens”.
The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION. The story tries to do something interesting in that it follows a single city over a long period of time as tensions rise. It’s not as bad as people say, but it’s very flawed. The romances are okay. Internet shitheads absolutely lost their minds that gay people exist and might mistakenly think you’re interested until you say no thanks.
This one also switched to the dialogue wheel instead of giving you informed choices about what you’d say. It does a subtle thing where your actions in cutscenes and stuff are informed by what style you often pick.
The third one barely holds on to the origins (pun intended). It really wants to be an action game like mass effect. That kind of sucks because we already have mass effect, and I wanted something different for my different game. The story is okay and has some good beats. The characters are really good. The romance is much improved. The gameplay is kind of okay. Mages are really nerfed despite the story saying they’re super powerful and dangerous. The world is big and has a lot of shallow quests. There’s a shit mobile game style “click a button and wait an hour” mechanic. You can mod that out. The story is also a "global threat -> gather power ". I bet critical analysis of the story is fascinating because a lot of it is kind of suspect, politically. But most gamers are like critically illiterate and probably didn’t think about it.
Fun aside: the first game has a “sex scene” where one of the character’s naked state is less revealing than her ridiculously revealing "armor ". The third game you can actually see nipples in the sex scenes, but I think they haven’t crossed the line to show a vag or erect dong (though I haven’t done all the romances). Lots of folks are still ashamed of bodies.
You can import saves from one game into the next. There are a lot of choices to make in all of them.
And that’s my off the cuff typed on my phone quick summary of the games.
Mages are really nerfed despite the story saying they’re super powerful and dangerous.
This is kinda selling mages in the setting short.
Magic in this setting is basically the same as it is in Warhammer 40k: mages get their power from an alternate dream dimension that is also where demons reside, they can spontaneously explode and/or summon demons if they’re not careful, and they’re heavily regulated/repressed. Rogue mages are hunted down and killed by Templars, and everyone else is mostly confined to wizard towers that double as prison camps.
It never comes across in gameplay, but mages and how they’re treated are major plot points in all three games.
That’s what I meant. In the story they’re super dangerous walking nuclear bombs. In the first game, it kind of lives up to it in the game play. You have a massive fireball (with knockdown!), blood magic shuts down the whole field, and more.
But by the third game, mages are more of a “control” class. If you want to actually do damage and kill monsters, you want to play a rogue. It’s extremely disappointing.
I wanted it to be more like dragon’s dogma where you summon meteors and tornadoes. Instead it’s like some ice cubes and a campfire.
The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION.
It also made every encounter consist of multiple waves, with enemy reinforcements popping into existence inside your party and rendering positioning nearly useless. It’s like they were going down a checklist of ways to make combat less tactical.
Fantasy series with a very D&D-esque world and a combat system that feels a bit like an MMO or a turnbased tactics game. It’s real time with optional pausing, and you operate your whole party at once, with the ability to pause to give each of them precise orders, or to pre-program them with specific responses to situation.
I think it mainly became popular on the back of its characters. The story was good but nothing special, and personally I found the combat in Origins to be absolutely terrible. But building up your party, getting to know the characters and making decisions that affect them was amazing. At least on par in this respect with the original Mass Effect trilogy.
I’ll point out that you can use Dragon Age Keep to plan out key choices in the narratives of the first two games, and even create a world state for import into Inquisition. Helpful if you want to play Inquisition and want a refresher and/or don’t want to replay the earlier games
I was interested until I saw “EA”…
One and a half really good games in there
Opinions will differ, but generally people really like the first and/or third. The second was rushed, and it shows, mostly by a ton of reused assets and locations.
The first is more loved by hardcore or oldschool RPG fans. The third is more action oriented, generally a lot more colourful, and very much larger. Its combat is generally liked more than the first (except, again, by CRPG fans).
All three have memorable characters.
I’ll be a contrarian and throw in my vote for the second game - it’s rushed and flawed and the asset reuse is blatant to the point of being legendary, but the setting and story are the best and most original of these 3 games. Just being a hero of one single city instead of the entire world is surprisingly refreshing.
In general I’d say that 1 has the best combat/tone, 2 has the best setting/story, 3 has the best characters. I’ve heard that 3 can be quite enjoyable if you pretty much only do the main story and companion quests - but I wouldn’t know, I’m one of the poor fools who got stuck in the Hinterlands, and that mistake + the very underwhelming main story sapped my will to continue playing.
