What if you died at the Joining?
Instead you are raised to join the ranks of the Darkspawn?
To be one of the numerous ranks of chaos and evil.
What if all this is true?
http://www.sswarez.com/games/122525-dragon-age-origins-darkspawn-chronicles-dlc-arm.html
A look at an alternate history: what if your character had died in the Joining ceremony, and the Grey Wardens marched under Alistair's command instead?
Command genlocks, hurlocks, shrieks, and even the mighty ogres.
A dark future awaits. Are you ready to claim your prize?
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
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Seriously this expansion is a wee disappointing. Short and under powered.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I completed it in an afternoon but for $5 its decent value, pretty much the same length as Warden's Keep or Return to Ostagar.
ReplyDeleteThe main problems I have with it is that there is so little story involved. Killing your old companions was basically a series of boss battles with very little emotional resolution since well, they just drop dead. Nothing about how their lives had went up to that point save for a small codex blurb. No voice-overs except for Alister groaning a bit and not even a conversation cut-scene with them giving a few moments of final defiance.
The gameplay itself is pretty hard simply because you lack many of the tools you get used to from the original game. Healing items only work on the main character (the Hurlock Vanguard) and the short length of the campaign means getting equipment upgrades are almost non-existent. You also can never level up any of your new party members, they start with a specific spec-load and you have to take what you can get.
Overall I think its a great concept ruined by the amount of time and effort they could devote to it. Its obvious that everything inside the expansion came from existing in-game assets. The maps, the creatures, the lack of any voice-over or conversation pretty much means that all they needed to do was to create the opening and closing cut-scenes, do some work on a map-maker and then call it a day. In fact one cut scene in the game actually comes from Dragon Age: Origins itself.
Overall, the strength of an RPG is its story. Our connection to the characters and our reactions to what's happening on screen. This expansion does not feel fulfilling in any of these aspects. Its an interesting distraction but I think a full-on expansion like Awakening would have been required to do it justice.
Of course its worst sin was implying that the Warden Commander was extrataneous to events. They would have recruited all the necessary allies to storm Fort Drakon even without him and would have come within a hair's breadth of slaying the Archdemon if not for the fact that the awesome power of the Save/Load function now serves the Darkspawn horde.
I see a lot of potential for this darkspawn chronicles. Too bad they wasted it on a short campaign. Of course this is one of the few RPG which the player start off as a Orc/Goblin Thingy (OGT). Now... Wonder who really enjoyed playing that?
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