Living With a Nerd

I finally finished my first play through of Dragon Age a couple of days ago.  Total time: 47 hours, 52 minutes.  The replay potential on this thing is insane, seeing as even minor decisions made a huge impact on the game world.  I’m not going to go back through it immediately, but I will be revisiting Ferelden very soon.

In other news, the slow upgrade process of my PC has begun.  Unfortunately, my power supply crapped out a couple of weeks ago due to an electrical mishap, but there is now a shiny new 700W OCZ ModXStream Pro powering my system, as well as a new DVD-RW drive.    Over the next couple of months, I plan on dropping in an Phenom II X4 965 (the new 125w version…I care about less heat and less power use rather than overclock-ability), as well as a Gigabyte AM3 motherboard.  After that, I plan on upgrading my current 1 TB raid into a 2 TB raid.  The two 500 gig hard drives currently used for archiving will likely get tossed into an mATX case (along with the mATX board and Athlon X2 5400+ currently in my tower) and be made into an HTPC.  The other possibility is that I will take the 750 gig that I have laying around, put that in the HTPC, and get a dual external enclosure so I can have a 1 TB RAID backup.  This would be the more expensive option, but I think it would be best…this way, I have a decent size backup, I only have one hard drive in the HTPC instead of two (noise and heat considerations), plus I get to go through the awesome process of choosing an external dual-bay enclosure that would look sweet on my desk.  My 750 gig is currently sitting in a gorgeous Rosewill single-slot enclosure, so I’m not sure what I would put in its place were I to move the 750.

Over the next month and a half leading up to Mass Effect 2, I plan on going through Torchlight, Assassin’s Creed 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and MAYBE Modern Warfare 2 (although I will likely forgo MW2 for Torchlight).  After Mass Effect 2, however, nothing else I am interested in comes out for a couple of months.  That will likely be the time I spend going through Dragon Age again.

All the while, I’m going to start putting some time into Street Fighter IV again in preparation for Super Street Fighter IV.  Cause you gotta keep your skills up, right?

Dragon Age has been taking huge amounts of time from my life lately.  I bought it only 5 days ago, and have already logged 21(!) hours.  Excluding World of Warcraft (because WoW doesn’t count when discussing comparative time sinks), I don’t think I have logged this much time /played on a game so quickly after obtaining it.  Ever.

The fact that the story can be so vastly different for people despite gamers eventually encountering the same situations is astonishing to me.  We’ve seen how small decisions can have a big impact on a game’s world before (Mass Effect and Fallout 3 immediately come to mind), but Dragon Age takes this theory to a whole new level.  It’s such a huge game, and even the smallest action or missed quest can change things so dramatically, I can’t comprehend what it must have been like trying to develop it.

Even more impressive is that the storyline is entirely unique to each player based on their decisions, race, class, etc…yet somehow still flows as if your version of the storyline is the way it was intended to play out. Changes in the world based on your actions are so organic that you don’t even realize just how much influence you wield.  You, the player, are essentially creating the story as you go along, but no matter what order you do quests or how you complete them it always feels like it was a full storyline written start to finish instead of bits and pieces of different story lines stitched together.

I’ve played games with a more engrossing story before, but never have I seen anything that even comes close to the way Dragon Age brings its story to life.  Dragon Age is an amazing leap forward, and I hope other developers and writers are able to take inspiration from it for years to come.