I was bored yesterday so I decided, what the hell, and bought this game. Spent quite a few hours playing it and didn't go to bed until 3 am last night.
The fighting is EXACTLY like Knights of the Old Republic so it was easy for me to pick up since I'm familiar with that game. It even has the exact same problem of when you're near death and you try to run away, the enemy slashs at you and kills you even after you ran like 20 feet away. I'm disappointed that you don't have more control of the action like pressing a button to attack and block like in Jade Empire. I would prefer that but like I said, its a lot like KOTOR and KOTOR was awesome.
If you want to play this game for the first time and not set it to wimpy easy mode then don't choose the Rogue. The first time I played I decided to start with Hard difficulty and I immediately had to switch to Normal because I kept dying. It was taking me 15-20 minutes to kill a group of 3 enemies and I had to be real smart and careful. I finally got frustrated and moved it down to Easy and I was still dying a fair amount. So I restarted the game at Normal difficulty with a Warrior and it made a HUGE difference. I made it back to the spot I was last game (which wasn't very far) in about one third the time and I only died ONCE. Now the game is too easy and I might need to restart on hard now. I don't know why the Rogue is such a wimp and can't kill anything and why your party members seem to be wimps too when you choose Rogue. Another reason not to choose Rogue is, at least early on, money and items are REALLY easy to come by so having those extra lockpicking and stealing skills don't seem to matter much. I was having a blast going around pickpocketing everyone my first playthrough but there really wasn't much to buy from all the money and selling items I stole because my character was too weak to wear good armor but even if he wasn't, the heavier armor drains the stamina bar very quickly so its better just to be fast and wear light leather armor. Plus, the game I bought came with the Dragon armor so if you keep putting your points in strength and make it to 38 so you can wear it, that armor has really high stats and you may not need anything else till the very end of the game. Or you can sell it for a hell of a lot of money. So don't worry about money and items.
Mr basehart I also thought about naming the dog Wrex but I decided to go with "Shithead" (The Jerk reference) my first try but was a little more serious the second time and chose "Rufus". Now I'm regretting not naming him something like "Shoeshine" (the dog in the Underdog movie) or the like. I haven't seen any possible funny dialogue options yet like if you were to name your dog "The Whore" and the game tells you something like "The Whore barks excitedly" or anything like that so the name doesn't seem to matter.
I'm only barely to the part where you first see the map screen and get a mage in your party but so far I give this game an 8.5 out of 10 . The graphics are beautiful and it really does have a very detailed story although I was too busy hitting ESC so I can't say much about what its about. I don't care much about fantasy story but I can definitely understand how people who like that sort of thing would find it incredibly awesome. I expect regular gamers who enjoy rpg games set in medieval times to see this game as a 10 out of 10. My only real disappointment like I said was not being more involved in melee combat but other then that one thing the rest of my score is based on personal preference of the genre. This game has me even more convinced that Mass Effect 2 is going to be insanely good.
Here's my character's profile if anybody cares:
http://social.bioware.com/playerprofile.php?char_id=165065&display=character&nid=2289773619&game=dragonage . I am kinda curious what characters other people chose and what kind of success they're having. This guy on Normal difficulty has been pretty easy so far. I even got the achievement "Bloodline" by not dying throughout the whole first segment. I was still healing and playing smart so its not like I just charged in blindly with sword blazing.
