dragon age

Minor Technical Difficulties

Kluwes5 Comments

So I started a new play through of Dragon Age: Origins this week on PC. It’s only been about 13 years since my last one and that was on the PS3 so it’s basically like my first time through all over again. It’s been a while since I booted up an older game (ya, ya 2010 is old now). It’s amazing how many thing I take for granted that just work with games now.

Borderless Window for one. Dragon Age either runs in Full Screen or a window. I can’t stand playing games in window mode, everything looks so small and seeing my messy desktop breaks that immersion! So that option was out.

Let me tell you, Dragon Age does not take kindly to switching to other applications when in full screen mode. Every time I went to take a note it was a gamble whether or not the game would come back up. Either the game would crash to desktop when the window was opened back up. It was a fifty-fifty shot whether I’d get back in. To get around that, I used the SimpleNote app on my phone to take notes even though I had the desktop version open on my second monitor.

It felt a bit silly but you gotta do what you gotta do, you know. That’s the plight of the game blogger.

Speaking of plights, Dragon Age doesn’t support Steam Screenshots. I found this out when I hit F12 to take one and the game crashed yet again! So I went to my backup option, Greenshot. It’s free, it takes screenshots, it even puts them in a folder for you. I typically only break this guy out when I’m playing games through Epic because that still doesn’t support screenshots. Unfortunately Greenshot, wasn’t really working while Dragon Age was in full screen. When I went to take a screenshot everything would freeze up for a few seconds. I’m noticing a trend here…

I thought maybe I could suck it up and play in windowed mode. Greenshot appeared to be working there. Appeared is the key word here. When I went to look at my screenshots they were not what I was expecting:

I was about to call it a day. But on my next launch of the game I saw the familiar green logo in the corner of my screen for the Geforce Experience overlay. I have only seen this thing in action once and that was last week where it kept saving clips of me being killed in Hunt: Showdown. I had no clue I could also use it to take screenshots and, surprisingly, it worked without an issue in full screen. It does save them to the Videos folder in Windows which I find weird but other than that it works!

Which brings me to my last pain point with this aging title: It. Kept. Crashing! Well most of it was my fault, I’ll admit, trying to swap applications while it was running BUT it also crashed while playing a few times. I managed to get past the starting zone of Orzammar – I’m playing a dwarf rouge by the way – and to the surface to join the Grey Wardens. This about 1.5 hours in to things when the game crashed while I’m running around trying to find my next plot point. It had been a little while since I saved and even longer since the auto save saved so I found myself losing some time.

That’s when I remembered that these older titles usually have some sort of mod or stability patch that makes them run better on newer hardware/ Windows versions. So off to the internet I went to find one. The first Google result lead me to the 4GB LAA Patch for Dragon Age: Origins which let’s the game access more than 2GB of RAM. For the EA and GOG versions of Dragon Age there’s a little program that needs to be run on the Dragon Age .exe.

Since the Steam version is encrypted you need an unencrypted version of the .exe which I found on NexusMods. I found the guy’s video on how to install the patch confusing so I went to try and find a write up somewhere. Lucky for me, there was a 10 year old Steam thread that detailed how to to it, which in all honesty, was very easy. Now that I have it patched, the game hasn’t crashed once in the last few hours.

Hooray!

Reminiscing on Dragon Age

Kluwes1 Comment

A few months ago I saw the entire Dragon Age franchise on sale for like $15. At the time, I wasn’t looking for a big fantasy RPG of any sort let alone three. But I know me so I scooped it up for the inevitable day that I would be compelled to play it. That day has come. It was apparently last night.

This 1000% has to do with all of the news I keep seeing about The Veilgaurd coming out this October. Also because I can’t seem to do anything unless I make it into a project. So of course I’m like “Let’s play all of the Dragon Age games! I totally have time for that!” (I probably don’t…)

So there I was, creating a new characters in Dragon Age: Origins and reflecting back on my time with the series as a whole. Well – not really – but I needed a way to somehow segue into this next part! I make no claim that any of the following is actually accurate, I’m just jotting down what I remember, I didn’t bother to fact check anything other than the dates the games came out.

Dragon Age: Origins was one of the first games I played through on the PS3. I must have gotten it over winter break of my freshman year of college because by the time I picked up the physical copy, it was the ultimate edition. Fun fact, I used the remaining balance of my meal plan that semester to buy it.

What I remember most about Dragon Age were the commercials leading up to the games release. I distinctly remember seeing one at the movies is somewhere in between those Maria Menounos Noovie things they played before the trailers. Grey Wardens looked awesome! A fantasy game that wasn’t Lord of The Rings!

What I remember from my first playthrough of the game? Not a whole lot. I remember Alaistar, the swamp witch lady, a particularly challenging boss fight with a very large boss, and speccing my character out to be a sword and board warrior. That last part was my favorite, I liked that I could be an actual tank for my party taunting enemies and knocking them down. It wasn’t a role I played a lot of in other RPGs, preffering characters who used a bow over melee. I also remember the combat feeling like a tab targetting MMO complete with a big hot bar with lots of skills that somehow was manageable on a controller. I thought that was pretty cool too!

Other than that, I couldn’t tell you much about the story. Something about the templars hunting down mages maybe? But then, that might have been a bigger plot point in Dragon Age 2 which I also played, though never finished. I did finish Dragon Age: Origins. Spent plenty of nights that winter break sitting in front of the living room TV plodding my way through. I did start the DLC, but I think around that time, classes had started back up. I never got back to it and just played Dragon Age 2 the next summer.

Dragon Age 2 I remember being more of an action game. Less create your own character and more you’re going to play our character but you can change their looks and pick their class. I don’t know how true that is, it’s been ten plus years since I played it. I think the main character actually had voice lines which I always preffered over the Silent Protagonist type.

For that game, I switched it up and played a mage. Again, I think a big plot point of that game was outlawing mages or something so I thought it was an interesting background to try out. I distinctly remember being a gravity mage that pulled enemies together and flung them all over the place while my party wailed on them. Good times.

Dragon Age: Inquisition dropped the fall of 2014, the year I graduated from college and had just started living with my then girlfriend/now wife. It wasn’t a game that was on my radar anymore, I had fallen off of gaming in general during college, well except for League of Legends. We played a lot of that.

I think my mom gifted it to me for Christmas that year. I distincly remember creating a character in the likeness of my now-father inlaw which my now-wife did not find it the least bit funny. I, on the other hand, found it very amusing…I remember some cutscenes, an interegation of sorts, then being thrown out into the world and not getting very far.

You know what also released in the fall of 2014? Destiny. That had a hold on me for at least a year and there wasn’t’ much time for anything else.