I've sank about 8 hours into it so far

+ No frills action rpg, run around and kill hordes of stuff, pick up loot, carry on.

+ The dog/cat companion is great, he helps you kill stuff and you can load him up with items to run off and sell for you so you can carry on killing things and taking their stuff(tm).

+ Meaty spells and abilities, everything feels very powerful, when you shoot beams of fire at people you can feel it burning them =)

- Story is quite dull, no real interest in it for me.

- Quests feel tacked on as an afterthought, usually I pick them up and forget about them, then when I get a "quest complete" message im pleasantly surprised :)

- The game is starting a feel like a bit of an xp grind. The motivation for going out and clearing a dungeon is to get xp and loot, and thats about it. There are no real high end goals beyond that. Perhaps if you could collect some sort of tokens from rare enemies to buy better gear it would be an added incentive to carry on playing. But as it stands its quite shallow in the end.

- No multiplayer/online play. Aparently they are making a free-to-play MMO which could work out very nicely, but I do notice the absence of multiplayer here.

If you liked Diablo / Titan Quest / etc.. you will probably love this :) its good fun and you cant go wrong for this budget price! 

OK, I broke down and bought this yesterday and played for a few hours. Verdict: if you liked Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, you need to get this NOW. 

EVERYONE STOP TEMPTING ME YOU FUCKERS

Because I CAN'T get it now, I don't have enough time to get another epic, massive RPG. I have too many games to beat as it is. I have too much stuff to do. I just don't have the god damn time for an awesome BioWare RPG. SO GET OUT OF MY HEAD AND STOP TEMPTING ME YOU GOD DAMN SUCCUBI OF VIDEOGAMES 

 

7u 

Why does he tease me so? =) 

I don't get it, I was looking at some benchmarks, and with my current CPU (an old 2,4 Ghz E6600) and a 5870, the benchmarks say Dragon Age is supposed to be heavily CPU-bound and run at ~26 fps. Thing is, 5870 is retardedly strong and MY gpu is an old 8800gts, yet my computer runs the game at 30+ fps at 1680x1050 everything on HIGH, I am yet to see a single slowdown anywhere. This was a really pleasant surprise.

On a sidenote, I am 8h 44min into the game and I am merely at 9% complete. And I am not even doing EVERY quest (I am going to leave that for the 2nd playthrough). Really puts into perspective the fucking ripofs the game market is full of, where a game is being sold for 60euro and the entire fucking thing lasts for like 8-10 hours total. 

your comments bode well for me. i've been thinking of picking this up lately, but i've heard some goofy stuff about it like how DLC is built into the game itself such that NPCs will actually tell you to go buy DLC so you can do their quest or something.

can you put down some more comments when you've got furthur in please? :) 

I've heard some complaints that a few NPCs kind of "break immersion" by suggesting you obtain "premium content" to continue. I wouldn't know, I got the Deluxe version which already includes all the DLC. Deluxe edition was a mere 5 euro more than the bare game on STEAM and the 2 included quest areas offer roughly 4 hours worth of content, so it was a no-brainer. 

Really puts into perspective the fucking ripofs the game market is full of, where a game is being sold for 60euro and the entire fucking thing lasts for like 8-10 hours total.

If a game is worth it's money or not is hardly price divided by play time! Any potential rip-off factor has far more to do with the vast majority of games being uninteresting dribble :P 

Anyone playing League of Legends? (dota clone by the people who made dota. 'tis good fun. and free. kinda.) 

have huge playtimes. Partly because of replay value, of course. 

funny how people complain about playtime, when Quake was released and people made the quake done quick videos, no-one complained about price/playtime then =)

I do think that MW2 is overpriced, but not because its short, because its more expensive than everything else :) Its an obvious moneygrab by the publisher.

I've not played it yet, but if its anything like modern warfare 1 it will be fantastic, MW1 is also very short, but I've replayed it more times than I've replayed half-life 2 because its just so damn fun.

Also, I like commas, a lot! 

For me, if I get 6-8 hours out of a game and those hours are fun, I got my money's worth. I don't want 40-80 hour epic conquests anymore - I don't have the time. :)

And it's just not feasible these days, honestly. Content takes too long to create and unless you're going to do a sandbox game it's very difficult to create endless reams of content like in the old days without crunching for years on end. 

And it's just not feasible these days, honestly.

Yet, somehow, Bioware and Bethesda seem to be able to do this consistently ;) 

It took me a month to first play through Quake. I had to look up and ask about both bosses. Probably around 20-30 hours in total. 

"Yet, somehow, Bioware and Bethesda seem to be able to do this consistently ;)"

Yeah. Sandbox and/or highly repetitive environments. Those factors make it possible. :) 

What I'm saying is that you can't have stuff like the levels in Gears of War 2 last for 40 hours of gameplay. There's just not enough man power to create unique stuff that will occupy the player for that long. 

I SAID STOP!! FFS I JUST SPENT $170 ON MY CAT'S TRIP TO THE VET I DON'T HAVE THE MONEY FOR DRAGON AGE! OR THE TIME! STOP SEDUCING ME!! 

yeah that new painkiller expansion sure got awful reviews. could it really be that bad?

i'm not keen on huge games either, i don't have time for 30 hours+. 10 hours is fine. once i get to the 10 hour mark i find myself looking at the level list just to see how many levels are left. it becomes a drag.

did someone say fallout3 is like 200 hours long? FUCK THAT! give me quake 20 times over. there's too many games out there to waste that amount of time on a single game, running through the same environments over and over again. 

Don't play long games that are a drag, play long games that are fun. 

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1096-Dragon-Age-Origins 

to put off getting dragon age, i started playing quake4 again.

i like it a lot more now than when i played it the first time, for some reason.

the whole first segment (from the start up to when the mcc lands) is great. gameplay is fluid and continuous. radio chatter really conveys the sense that the war is more than just you. my favourite parts are when you're backtracking through an area but from a different path (you're on these catwalk things) and then some new guys are charging in through the original path through the area and they get ambushed by strogg, but the strogg don't see you.
it was really satisfying to blow them away and feel like you're helping someone else out even though they're just npcs. 

if anyone's interested, apparently, they released some of the music in the game: http://machinarium.net/blog/data/bonus_ep/machinarium_soundtrack_bonus_ep.zip 

Thanks for the link!