::spoiler warning: If you haven’t played DA:O yet, and are scared of tiny spoilers, beware! It’s too hard to censor everything, and I’m feeling lazy.::
AHAHHAHAHAHAHA. ::shoots self::
Dragon Age, in general, is a particularly sore subject right now. It’s been over a week since Dragon Age 2’s release and I have yet to play it. In fact, I have yet to remove the shrink wrap from the case(s).
IN FACT, I’M NOT EVEN HALFWAY DONE WITH DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS.
The last time I played Dragon Age: Origins was over a week ago, and it was a helluva marathon; I sat my ass in a computer chair and went at it for 14 hours, but I didn’t progress as much as I had hoped. But, 14 hours is 14 hours, certain things did happen, and I’m going to try to remember what they were (even if it’s a week later). Unfortunately, I was a bad girl and ignored most of the codex entries. I felt rushed and compelled to finish Origins in one sitting, but uh yeah. That clearly wasn’t going to happen.
Alright!
When I booted up the game, I had just made it into Lothering, I just never made an entry about my progression to that point. Morrigan was finally in my group, and before I set off to do any of the Lothering quests, I spent a chunk of time getting her (and Alistair’s) approval rating up. On that note, I forgot how easy it was to get Morrigan’s rating to “warm” right off the bat. She’s SOOO easy. Or maybe she isn’t. I’ve never played as a male warden. Whatevz.
Anyway, I ventured into Lothering, acquired my newest minions (Sten and the lovely Leliana) and completed all of the town’s quests. I forgot how much there was to do in Lothering. In the past, I had missed out on a few of the Lothering quests (seeing as it’s destroyed by Darkspawn later on) so I made sure I did everything, from finding the boy’s mother, collecting herbs, building a trap, making some poison, killing bears, murdering the bandits, blahblahblah. YAY FOR COIN!
Now, I’ve never had an issue with getting Leliana to bat her eyelashes a little harder at my warden, but I’ve never been able to get Sten to fully open up to me. During my first play through of Origins, he told me about his sword (which ultimately leads to his “personal quest”) but because I was literally at the end of the main story, I couldn’t retrieve his sword without being forced into the Landsmeet (or SOMETHING like that). So, Stenny-Poo and I were never BFFs. This time I will make amends. Before you know it we will be crimping our hair and painting our nails together.
Moving on…
The first place I went to seek assistance from was the Circle of Magi, because A) It’s my least favorite and I wanted to get it out of the way and B) Wynne is crucial to my party. So off I went, across Lake Calenhad and to the Circle of Crud. Why did I just refer to it as crud? Because there is ONE part of “The Broken Circle” quest that I despise, which is when you face the…crap. Is it the sloth demon? Is that his name? Whatever, he’s the dude that casts you into the Fade. And in the Fade, you must assume the shape of four or five different things (a mouse, a man on fire, a golem and a spirit) and run around, solve all of these puzzles, and until you complete all that junk you can’t proceed within the main quest.
Okay, I get it, the purpose of it is probably to familiarize the player with the Fade, which I understand since it’s a big part of Dragon Age lore, but I wish I could omit it from the game. Simply put, I find it boring.
WELL FUNNY STORY. I was on my way to the sloth demon, dreading every step, when I decided to take a mini detour and search a room for loot. There was a vanity mirror sparkling (indicating it had some item I could loot within) and when I clicked on the mirror…BLAMMO!! Next thing I know, I’m in a room you can access only AFTER defeating the sloth demon.
What?
Just to make sure, I backtracked to where the sloth demon would be waiting for me, and sure as shit, there he was. Next to him was a dead mage. As much as I didn’t want to risk activating the Fade quest, I knew I needed the item on the mage. And OSNAP! I was able to recover the item. It would be crucial to my upcoming battle with Uldred.
Ladies and gentlemen, the game glitched and skipped the ENTIRE SLOTH DEMON/FADE INSTANCE.
Now, my initial reaction was to jump for joy. BUT…but. A few shitty things came from this:
- I missed out on stat increases that you can only acquire in the Fade.
- I missed out on experience points
Bummer, right?
I left and confronted Uldred. Now, the item I had looted from that mage was supposed to protect myself and others during the fight against him. Unfortunately, because I hadn’t actually killed the sloth demon, the game didn’t recognize the item I had looted and First Enchanter Irving died during the battle.
This in itself ultimately lead to another bout of suck: When I reached Redcliffe, I couldn’t save both Connor AND Isolde since there was no Circle to call on. I had to resort to blood magic and sacrifice Isolde. Alistair yelled at me because of it. WAAAH. Other than that, Irving’s death just means that the Templars will be fighting on my side when it comes time to face the Archdemon instead of the mages.
WOW. This is a lot of writing. I’m just going to stop for now. If you seriously read all of this, I’m sending you a cookie.
[All log entries related to Dragon Age: Origins can be found here]
yay! I get a cookie! Congratulations on skipping the fade I think you lived every persons fantasy that ever played Origins. I found Morrigan to be much easier to bed than Leliana that being said I love a challenge especially with a pious ginger at the end of it (and crazy too the trifecta). Anyways, it is good to see that the shiny new game has yet to tempt you. (Bioware has trained you well the Desire Demons are doing their job.) Woo go Brit!
I’ll be honest I hate the Fade part, too. Glad to see you were able to skip that part, but sorry it kind of messed up the story and you missed the exp.
On a side note, yay I get a cookie!
Derrick: YAY! It’s funny, because Morrigan is always the first character to start warming up to me. But then she starts disapproving the good deeds that I do, and then her approval rating falls. Then it goes back up, then falls…sigh, women right?!
SDJoyce: :D thanks for reading! I’ll send you a chocolate chip cookie. It may be stale by the time you get it though XD
I have never played this game before but I read this entire thing. Why? I find your blogs very enjoyable even if I only understand one out of every 300 words.
Also, cookie please.
HAHA, Sean! That made my day!
I hated the fade quest the first time through, but the other 8 times (uh, yeah, did I mention I’ve done DA:O 9 times?) I learned to enjoy it quite a bit more- mostly because I learned once you get to switch to the mage archetype, you can never die with regenerate, and then once you have the golem you can just whomp everything so easily.
I agree though, it does wear on you a bit. I always wondered- since dwarves don’t do the fade, if you play as a dwarf and get to that demon, it would strike me you’d be immune and able to skip the thing legitimately. Actually never got that far as a dwarf (yet)!
You have more stick-to-it-iveness than I do… if a game glitched on me in a way that altered things, I would be *compelled* to reload and redo- and if it wasn’t possible, I would actually start over regardless of how far in I was. (I’m a start-over addict.)
I’ll pass on the cookie, I desperately need to lose more weight so I can land myself a hot gamer woman of my own some magical (likely imaginary) day!
Jaym—you are my hero.