Well that was fun

Last Tuesday, I got Dragon Age: Origins. I promptly threw myself into the game, cackling over the fact I had the rest of the week off to enjoy it. I’m now almost (or just over, I lost track) 30 hours in on my first character, and damn, I’m in love.

Yeah, there’s some stuff that irritates me, but it’s so minor, it feels like I’m trying to find something bad about it. The conversations that the rest of my party has with each other while we’re walking crack me up. These characters have personality, which can be lacking a lot of times in games. Bioware hasn’t let me down in the past, and they didn’t this time either.

And yes, there’s a romance section. I went for the easy obvious choice for a human woman character: Alistair. He’s irreverent, cocky, cracks jokes at the worst times, and you can almost see him poking and prodding those people that irritate him til they explode, where upon he would run off giggling. At the same time he’s fiercely loyal, honest, brave, and while not ambitious, he’d do whatever it takes to ensure peace, and god help you if you hurt those he cares for. Add in that he’s been sheltered his whole life and has NO clue how to deal with the opposite sex, so he keep trying to not trip over himself and screw things up.

Did I ever mention I have a very large soft spot for sarcastic-yet-sweet knight errants? Yeah, thanks Bioware. I got to hear growling from the other end of the couch while playing this and grinning my head off at Alistair’s profession of love to my character. At least cookies calm the Jared-beast.

The voice acting is amazing (and a little odd when I blink at the screen and yelp “Hey! That’s Shishio!” at a random dwarf), and the storyline is compelling. The only real problems I’ve had are:
1. I’m not at home still playing this and,
2. The Fade makes my eyes hurt from constantly trying to focus.

So all in all, not too bad of a use of my time off last week, as far as I was concerned. Especially since my guild has effectively ended in WoW. Jared and I both sighed and got to evaluating our options. We could either move to another guild for end content, move to another server, stay where we are and accept we’re not even going to do 5-mans within the guild, or say “So long and thanks for all the fish.” Well as of right now, neither of us has cancelled our accounts, but he’s handing the leadership over to another guild member.

We’ve both reactivated Lord of the Rings Online, and have been playing that this week, when we haven’t been playing DA:O. I have so many group quests in there on my main character, it’s insane. Right now, I’m waiting to see if the couple of guildies that are exploring LoTRO with us continue, and if they do, then when they’re at that level, we can do the quests together. Siarian is now level 30, and I’m starting to sweat the gold gathering for a mount at level 35. It costs 4 gold and 220 silver. I have 2 gold, barely.  Did I mention that one gold is 1,000 silver? /faint

So how do I feel about the guild all going their seperate ways? To be honest, not too badly. I keep in contact with a good chunk of them via Facebook and emails, so I’m not exactly losing many of them. And weirdly, when I got the Hallowed title on Wrenn, I thought to myself “Okay, WoW can blow up tomorrow. I’m good.” Would I like to see more of the game? Sure. I’d love to see what the end of Uldar looks like, or any of ToC other than the 5-man stuff. But most of what I was doing in WoW these days was fluff bits – hunting for more achievements and pets. Things that didn’t really advance the game for me. So while I’ve not cancelled my account yet, I most likely will at some point. I’ll be a little sad, but I still have the friends that I made in it, and that’s really what matters.