Both games offer extensive storylines, lots of spoken dialog and some excellent voice acting. Both also allow you to take your character in different directions. Once you get beyond those Bioware tropes, the two games diverge pretty significantly.

I’ve played through both games once, and working through second run-throughs on both games. Given that both games have been reviewed and discussed substantially, I’m going to narrow in on one aspect of the two games: how characters are developed. (Note: there may be spoilers ahead.)

The Character is You – or Is It?

First, let’s talk about the character you play.

Your character in Dragon Age is you. That is, you can customize the look and appearance, and play through any of several origin stories. But your character has no voiced dialog, even when responding to party members or other NPCs who have very distinct voices. I know players who actually read the dialog out loud, to give the character voice.

Mass Effect 2’s character, on the other hand, is Commander Shepherd. Both the male and female versions have voice dialog. (Jennifer Hale, as the female Shepherd, is particularly good.) That choice – using spoken dialog voiced by actors – might mean you have a little emotional distance from “your” Shepherd. On the other hand, you can certainly customize Shepherd’s facial appearance at the games beginning. So it’s something of a mix. I found myself pretty much making the decisions I might make with “my” character.

In both cases, as with any RPG, “your” character may not necessarily behave as you would in a similar situation. After all, it’s a game, so having a little fun by acting differently is part of the oeuvre of gaming.

Still, giving Shepherd a distinct voice does impact the game. Scenes with dialog or cut-scenes resonate differently – perhaps more like a TV show or movie – than the strong and silent type. In some ways, Dragon Age is a little like the Half Life series. Gordon Freeman in Half Life isn’t voiced by an actor. (In fact, Freeman has no dialog whatsoever, so you can only imagine the responses when people talk to you. Then again, Half Life and its sequels are not RPGs.)

The choices made by the two Bioware groups when it comes to the character voicing do create an interesting dichotomy. Mass Effect 2 does feel more cinematic. The cut scenes are much more extensive, the over-the-shoulder view feels a little more movie like, and the interactive scenes where Shepherd is talking, gives the feeling that you’re more “along for the ride” rather than being in the world.

By the same token, the lack of spoken voice for the player character in Dragon Age is at times disconcerting. I would have like a little more in-game emotional resonance, beyond talking to my computer.

Your Party

In both games, non-player characters have vast amounts of spoken dialog. Some players find this insufferable, and try to skip past as much of it as possible. Personally, I love the voices, if they’re well done, and listen to most of the dialog all the way through at least once.

The playable NPCs have much deeper individual storylines in Dragon Age. The options are richer, too – the characters in Dragon Age all seem imbued with very distinct personalities, and can even have emotional cycles – sometimes testy, sometimes receptive – depending on the situation.

In both games, you have to recruit party members, and then do an additional quest for each member if you want to unlock certain abilities. It’s another classic Bioware trope. However, the way those quests are structured in Dragon Age just feels more organic. Often, they pop up during conversation in a very naturalistic way.

Take Alistair in Dragon Age, for example. In some ways, he’s a key part of the story, yet you can also dispense with him if you like. He evolves over the course of the story, and can rise to become a good king – or not.

Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, clubs you over the head with these additional quests. They’re blatantly called “loyalty quests.” They often pop up in your quest log, even before you talk to the party member involved. Perhaps the most detailed quest is Tali’s return to the Quarian flotilla to face treason charges. Yet, Tali doesn’t really change (other than unlocking an ability.)

Then there’s romance.

The way love and romance is handled in Dragon Age is pretty simple: anything goes. That’s a little like real life, and you can happily be heterosexual, non-sexual or gay if you like. It’s still a little on the heavy handed side, but still feels more organic than the Mass Effect 2 romances, which often seem like a puzzle game inside the game. On top of that, none of the romances that count towards the romance achievement can be anything but heterosexual. So it all seems a little contrived and judgmental.

In-Game NPCs

The major NPCs you encounter which aren’t part of your party also seem more developed in Dragon Age. The deepest of these are the two contenders for the dwarven king you encounter, and the fallout from your choices are not so obvious at first.

On the other hand, your interactions with a number of NPCs have potentially far reaching impact in Mass Effect 3. I say “potentially,” because none of the Big Decisions in the original game really seemed to affect the sequel much. Whether you decided to come to the rescue of the council, or let them die had little impact in the overall gameplay. Some of the dialog changed, but there seem to be few repercussions overall. It would have been interesting, for example, if a darker path opened up because the alien races really do hate you for letting the council die.

Of course, there were some big decisions in Dragon Age as well. It will be interesting to see what fallout comes from your Big Decision regarding Morrigan, for example.

Final Thoughts

Both games are actually excellent, and many of the decisions regarding character development seemed to cater to the different styles. Dragon Age is very much a classic computer RPG, and the deeper characters and has a more organic feel. By the same token, not having voice for your character somehow makes the game seem like its missing something.

Mass Effect 2 is a streamlined action RPG, and the fairly shallow character development serves to move the story along in a more cinematic way. While some people may prefer one style over another, I had a blast with both – probably because the experiences were so different.

One of the funnier bits I ran across was the dueling AMD / Nvidia booths in the North Hall foyer. I’m not sure if this was intentional, or an accident, but they’re almost right next to each other.

The potentially coolest thing I saw was Nvidia’s FG100 DX11 graphics card actually running in a PC. No word on final specs, pricing or power consumption, though. Now it’s off to CES Thursday and more meetings.

CES is a strange show in some ways. It’s really a show for buyers, the people who decide what to order for store (and virtual store) shelves for the coming year. There are also classes, mostly targeted at those buyers. But it’s also a giant show for media. There are way too many journalists and bloggers trolling for too few stories.

Perhaps more accurately, there are too many journalists trolling the same ground. In some respects, that’s why blogging is great. A blogger who only cares about Internet connected fitness gear, for example, can just write about that.

On the other hand, if you’re a casual, but interested, reader, you’ll find vast numbers of articles on various web sites and newspapers about the same stuff. There is a definite herd mentality, particularly among the tech-focused, mainstream press. That’s the nature of the beast, though, so I’m not sure how it could change. Good writing makes up for this, and if I come across some really good articles, I’ll either post links here or in my twitter feed.

If you want to read my impressions, I’ll be posting daily reports at Tom’s Hardware. I’ll also be posting tweets from my twitter account, @loydcase.

I’ve got a busy schedule, mostly focused on enthusiast PC technologies. I’ll be talking to Intel, AMD, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and many more. I’ve managed to squeeze in a little show floor time, too.

I’ve got some plans for Improbable Insights, too, but I’ll share those upon my return from Las Vegas.

We’ve had a Dish Vip622 DVR running for several years now. The 622 is an HD DVR, which can record standard definition and high definition content. The day after Christmas, we were watching a DVD when the audio was almost completely drowned out fan noise. Have you ever heard a PC graphics card when its fan spun up to full speed? That’s similar to what we were hearing.

I paused the Blu-ray player and discovered that the Dish Vip622’s fan was spinning at full speed. Using the Logitech Harmony One to switch to TV mode revealed… nothing. No picture, no audio, nada. The Vip622 had bit the big one.

I didn’t get around to calling Dish Network for several days, but once I did, they scheduled a tech to come in and check it out. The wait, surprisingly, was less than 48 hours. Like most service organizations, Dish doesn’t give a specific time for an appointment. Instead, you’re given a time window. In my case, Iw was too expect the tech between 8AM and 12 noon.

Imagine my surprise when the Dish van rolled up to our house at 8:05AM. When the tech arrived, he listened to my description of the symptoms and immediately went back to his van to get a replacement unit.

Dish apparently no longer carries ViP622’s, so instead the tech swapped in a ViP722k. Interestingly, you lose built-in over-the-air support with the 722k, but do gain another 100GB of hard drive capacity. It took about a half-hour to set it up and verify it was working. While he was setting it up, we talked, mostly about business and new gear. Business has been down somewhat – no real surprise given the recession – and most of his work has been satellite dish relocations as people have moved.

I signed some paperwork, and the tech left. The whole affair had taken less than an hour. After he left, I picked up the Harmony One and fired up the TV.

Nothing.

Actually, there was something: my Onkyo TX-SR875 receiver fired up and the Sony HDTV also powered on. But the Vip722 remained resolutely off.

I grabbed the Dish remote, and tried to turn on the ViP722. Sure enough, it turned on.

I realized that I probably needed to reprogram the Harmony One, which meant downloading the Logitech Harmony software, since I hadn’t programmed the remote since upgrading to Windows 7. Harmony remote are actually programmed via a web app running on a PC or Mac.

The process of programming a Harmony is somewhat cumbersome if you’re a sophisticated user, mainly because Logitech seems to want the whole affair to be idiot-proof. For example, once you start down a path (adding a device, for example), that’s all you can do. Despite this linear mode, you can still click on the tabs at the top of the screen to switch to other modes – you just can’t do anything until you actually press the “done” command.

Also, Logitech’s database of device controls is user-generated. I discovered that the control setup for the ViP722 was severely limited, at least compared to the 622. I actually needed to add a soft button so I could switch to DVR mode to manage or watch recorded shows.

Once the program was uploaded to the remote, I took it upstairs and fired up the TV.

You guessed it: once again, the TV turned on, the A/V receiver fired up, but the DVR stayed off.

It turns out that the 722k has multiple addresses for receiving either IR or UHF signals (the Dish Network remote can operate in either IR or UHF mode, if you have a multiroom setup.) The Harmony apparently sends out its IR signal over a different channel than the 722k’s default setting of IR channel 3. I had to reset the channel to IR channel 1. Dish actually maintains an online copy of the manual. Chapter 10 of the manual describes the process of changing the Dish IR receiver remote address.

Resetting the VIP722k Remote Receiver Address (from the manual)

Once that little chore was done, everything worked as it should.

This took more research than anyone just wanting to watch and record TV should have to perform. It’s as if the complexity of the PC universe is gradually encroaching on the world of consumer electronics. I suppose it’s the price we pay for more flexibility and programmability. But as PC interfaces become easier, the CE world seems to be adopting the worst of the old ways. Let’s hope this all improves over the second decade of the 21st century.

It’s in response to a question: “What are your thoughts on how PC gaming is dying?”

My first thought: way to pick a loaded question. But then oft-quoted analyst Michael Patcher goes on to demonstrate his ignorance, by saying: “Nobody has a PC that’s faster than a PS3.”

Say what?

Patcher launches into this chewy tidbit focusing on the CPU, rather than the platform. The PS3 has certain computational strengths because of the cell processor, but it’s something of a CPU dead end. IBM recently announcing it was ending its own development efforts on the Cell. As Intel moves forward into 32nm, with the upcoming Gultown, Arrandale and Clarkdale CPUs, the PC processor is still advancing.

The ignorance doesn’t end there. The commentators throw around other juicy bits of misinformation, like “dual quad Pentium 3.2…” “ … that costs $2,000.”

But the PC isn’t just the CPU. Any PC consists of memory, storage, chipsets… and, of course, the graphics card.

Right now, I can build an $800 PC with an AMD Radeon HD 5850 that’s arguably substantially more powerful than the PS3. You can even see it in games that run on both platforms, where I can get higher, smoother frame rates in titles like Borderlands and Dragon Age at higher resolutions than I can on a console.

There are the logical fallacies, like dismissing Starcraft II because it’s irrelevant. After all, “Anything that’s gonna sell in Asia and anything that’s gonna have a subscription” doesn’t count in Patcher’s book.

In other words, a data point that doesn’t agree with the premise isn’t valid. And neither are Asian gamers or MMOs.

At times, it also just gets insulting, like the idea that “the gamer is the guy who’s gonna play by himself.”

Good job dismissing woman gamers and all those people playing online. Say, isn’t one of the Xbox 360’s main value proposition its strength in online gaming?

And to think people pay these guys for their insights.

I’m not going to argue the strengths and merits of console gaming versus PC gaming. That’s a topic for another, more lengthy discussion. Rather, my point is that if you’re getting paid for your insights and knowledge, maybe it’s a good idea to have those insights be, you know, accurate.

Or am I asking too much?

I’m also having more fun with combat than I often do with computer-based RPGs. Maybe that’s because I’m treating the combat as if it were really a tactical mini-wargame. Because of that, I’ve been having a blast – and been successful – even in some very tough fights. Here’s what I’ve been doing to be successful.

What follows is my take on effective combat in Dragon Age for the PC version. Combat in the PC game becomes much more of a tactical strategy game than the console version, so bear that in mind. I’ve avoided any plot spoilers, focusing on tactics to take down enemies as effectively and quickly as possible.

What’s Not Here

This is about combat management. I’m not going into details about character builds or what type of mage/rogue/fighter to build. I will talk about specific build traits I found useful, but my general approach to character building is to build a character, not a walking set of stats.

Similarly, I don’t talk much about party makeup. While I would tend to bring along two mages, a fighter and my main character (an elven Rogue), that was more an artifact of the story. For example, I’d almost always bring along Alistair and Morrigan, because I found the dialog interplay between the two of them hilarious.

If I play through again, I’ll probably use a completely different party. On the occasions where I mixed up the party a bit, I did have to adjust tactics (not having a healer, for example, meant bringing along lots of healing poultices.)

Prior to Combat

Before you dive into combat, you should prep the party for combat. But how do you know if you’re going to have a combat?

Easy. Have a rogue in your party. More importantly, have a rogue with a couple of levels of stealth skill. Halt your party, put your rogue into stealth mode, and have him scout ahead. If you’re running through winding passages – all too common in this game – you’ll want to have your rogue be the party scout fairly often.

A rogue in stealth mode (hiding in shadows) will also often trigger enemy spawns. Some enemies can also hide in shadows, or are invisible. But they’ll sense your presence, even if they don’t see you, so they’ll often suddenly appear – enabling you to fix their location.

If have at least two levels of stealth (three is better for this tactic), you can even throw grenades or set up traps to soften up large groups of enemies. When the bomb goes off, they’ll move toward you (the direction from which the grenade was thrown), but still not see you. This allows you to draw smaller groups of enemies toward a waiting ambush.

Similarly, moving a rogue into enemy held areas using hiding in shadows allows you to spot and disable traps ahead of time. Some rooms can be full of various traps, and disabling them makes for a more effective assault when the time comes.

Use "hide in shadows" to scout enemy held territory

Managing Resources by Sneaking

In one case, I ran my rogue through a long series of areas loaded with numerous lesser enemies. At the very end, I ran into a boss battle – which automatically brought my party up to that fight, bypassing all the lesser, tedious battles. Sure, those smaller battles might have generated some experience.

But I was in that particular area with relatively few healing poultices and even fewer lyrium potions (to regenerate mana for my spellcasters.) Bypassing the smaller battles allowed me to husband my resources and save them for the bigger fight.

Buffing the Party?

The idea of buffing your party before entering combat seems like a good one. Spells like Glyph of Warding or Heroic Offense may seem like a good idea before a battle starts. In practice, it’s not so useful. What seems to work better is to pause immediately after entering combat, and applying buffs.

However, beware of the one-action queue. It’s too easy to try to give multiple commands (eg, issue a spell, then tell the character to move), only to realize that the character is moving without casting the spell. You can only queue up a single action when you pause. However, you can pause any time you like, so if you prefer a turn-based approach, just hit the space bar after an action is performed.

]]> http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/12/07/managing-combat-in-dragon-age-origins/feed/ 4 http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/20/find-me-on-the-web-and-in-print/ http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/20/find-me-on-the-web-and-in-print/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:10:41 +0000 Loyd Case http://www.improbableinsights.com/?p=783 The dearth of blog posts here is not alarming. It’s a good sign. No, really.

Actually, I’ve just been busy. Here’s just a few things I’ve got cooking:

• Radeon HD 5970 performance preview at Maximum PC online
• The eight card roundup I wrote for Maximum PC (print) also went online
• And in a trifecta, my column on the state of AMD also went up at Maximumpc.com
• I just wrapped up a formal book proposal and submitted that (more details if it gets approved)

On a related note, it looks like I’ll be writing a couple of articles a month, plus blogging for Anand Shimpi over at Anandtech. I’m looking forward to that.

More stuff to come here as well, so stay tuned.

]]> http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/20/find-me-on-the-web-and-in-print/feed/ 8 http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/13/multiplayer-lan-gaming-the-better-experience/ http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/13/multiplayer-lan-gaming-the-better-experience/#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:06:58 +0000 Loyd Case http://www.improbableinsights.com/?p=779 I’m not much of an online gamer. That’s not to say I don’t play online games. It’s just that, when I’m alone, I generally gravitate to single player games. On the other hand, I do like a good multiplayer game, and I get to indulge my desire for playing with others on a weekly basis.

The problem is, though, I’m spoiled.

When we were first looking into buying our house back in 1997, we discovered it had a daylight basement. At the time, I was a full time freelance writer (as I am once again.) The basement doesn’t actually appear as floor space in the county assessor’s report – something about below-grade areas not being considered part of the living space. It’s an odd quirk around here, but then most houses in northern California don’t have basements at all.

The basement was partially finished, so when we moved in, we added carpeting and third wire ground to all the basement outlets. I also added a 200A service to the house, replacing the aging 100A box that came with the house.

The basement has two rooms, a large storage area off the larger room, plus a bathroom and a roomy closet where the hot water heater and furnace live. The smaller room became a spare bedroom while the larger room, with its associated storage area, became my office and lab space. Eventually, when my wife began working out of the house full time, the spare bedroom was converted to her office.

If you want to check out more details on the basement lab, check out the blog post on the http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/08/17/294/ basement lab.

Ever since the network was set up in the lab, we’ve had LAN gaming sessions most weeks; eventually, these multiplayer gaming sessions were dubbed “Friday Night Follies.” The office space itself is pretty large – 18 x 15 feet or 270 square feet. I’ve added workbenches (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/workspaces/11723/ IKEA GALANT tabletops with the T-legs), plus a couple of older rolling PC workbenches from http://www.anthro.com/ Anthro, which were part of a budget line the company no longer makes.

I can – and have – crammed up to ten working systems into this space, though the most we’ve had on the LAN for gamin is eight. Most Friday nights, though, it’s just four of us, though tonight (November Friday the Thirteenth), there will be six.

We’re pretty eclectic, though we tend to favor co-op against the AI to playing PvP. We have a mix of gamers, too. Two of them play MMORPGs (one is an MMORPG fanatic), while the third player is like me: single player when on his own, and multiplayer when he comes over to my place.

We have, on occasion, even played an MMO game or two, including D&D Online, Guild Wars and the flawed, semi-tragic failure that was Hellgate: London. That’s the only time I’ve ever really played MMORPGs – on my LAN, with my friends.

I’m completely spoiled by the experience.

The idea of playing online, talking to other gamers through a headset, dealing with lag and griefers, is simply unappealing. I realize I’m also missing out on some potentially great experiences. It all comes down to simple time budgeting: how much time I have for gaming, versus work, versus family life versus other interests. A lot of the time I might spend in online gaming is instead spent with single player games. Lately, for example, I’ve been completely sucked into Dragon Age: Origins.

So maybe it’s a hit on my geek cred that I’m very rarely found in any online games. But then, I’ve got my own LAN party going most Friday nights. How much more geeky can you get?

]]> http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/13/multiplayer-lan-gaming-the-better-experience/feed/ 8 http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/12/amd-intel-and-the-meaning-of-competition/ http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/12/amd-intel-and-the-meaning-of-competition/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:47:03 +0000 Loyd Case http://www.improbableinsights.com/?p=774 So Intel and AMD settle their antitrust litigation for a cool $1.25 Billion. With a “B.”

The timing is certainly interesting, coming so soon on the heels of New York State’s recent filing against Intel on that same topic. Toss in the European Union judgment, and you get a picture of a beleaguered Intel, fighting a battle on multiple fronts.

What does the settlement really mean for consumers and OEMs? How will it affect AMD going forward?

There are still a lot of unknowns from this brief announcement. In many ways, it’s a classic settlement – AMD gets cash, rights to some Intel patents and an agreement from Intel to stop it’s anti-competitive behavior. Intel, on the other hand, readily agrees to ceasing and desisting said behavior because, after all, both companies want “To avoid the time and expense of litigation, and without any admission of liability or fault…”

Intel is substantially larger than its arch-rival, generating around six times the revenue of its smaller competitor. It’s also very profitable, while AMD has only recently been able to pull itself closer to profitability. Still, all the litigation is a drain on Intel’s resources, a continuing pall on Intel’s reputation and a distraction from developing new technologies and products.

According to a conversation with AMD spokesperson Drew Prairie, the way to think of the agreement is as a logical extension of past agreements with Intel – and hence only applies to the CPU side of the equation. That’s an important point, which I’ll get to shortly.

Intel had recently complained that AMD’s split into a fabless semiconductor company – AMD – and a separate, manufacturing subsidiary – Global Foundries – was a violation of past patent agreements. Intel now drops that claim, which has two key implications:

• Global Foundries can now fully split with AMD, and isn’t required to be a subsidiary even in name.
• AMD can contract with any chip manufacturing company to build any AMD product.

While the legal wheels are still turning, this logically completes the split of AMD into two separate entities. This also means that Global Foundries really needs to stay competitive – it can’t rely on a captive AMD to give it business forever.

Now let’s get to the graphics question.

As I noted earlier, you can think of this settlement as a logical extension of past agreements between AMD and Intel. According to Prairie, this gives Intel no rights to AMD’s intellectual property on the graphics side. That’s pretty major, since Intel is trying to build its own GPU in Larrabee. If Intel violates any patents AMD might have that are purely graphics related, AMD would be free to pursue legal action.

There’s one other important point: AMD and Intel will continue their separate paths. There’s no bus licensing involved, so you won’t see AMD or Intel suddenly ship pin-compatible CPUs. This is by no means a return to the socket 370 era.

Consumers probably won’t see much of a difference at first. I’ve started to see an increasing number of interesting products built around AMD technologies, including the recently Dell’s recently announced Inspiron Zino HD. Given that increasing number of AMD-based PC products shipping recently, it’s likely that Intel had pulled back from whatever anti-competitive behavior it may have engaged in (that it doesn’t admit doing, mind you.)

OEMs will win, too, having a little more freedom to develop products that they see suit their own customer’s needs. AMD is pushing forward with its plans, including a renewed strategic approach that more tightly integrates GPU and CPU sides of the company. If AMD can just stick with a single core strategic message, OEMs will feel much more comfortable doing business.

If you get right down to it, though, Intel is a big winner, too. Sure, it’s out of pocket $1.25 billion, but it avoids losing to AMD in court, along with the potential of much larger punitive damages. In some ways, Intel is actually getting off cheap. And since Intel is so profitable, it can still use big discounts to lure OEMs to use Intel-based solutions.

Let’s hope that the playing field really is leveled. AMD still has a big chore ahead of it, building its Fusion products, keeping its feet in the server side and trying to keep Nvidia at bay in the GPU business. It’s a daunting task, but at least AMD can hope that this settlement means that it has a fair shot at the market now.

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