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Kotor was rather popular, and also good, but it’s time maybe to try making an RPG that isn’t essentially another thinly-veiled ripoff. If you can’t, then just make Kotor 3 and let me get my Star Wars fix already. I realize that it’s easy money, but at least try mixing it up a bit. Try rearranging the bones to come up with a new animal.

How about some menus that aren’t wheel-based? How about a game with more than 5 towns? How about an rpg where every conversation scene isn’t about tiptoeing around your crew of opinionated crybabies? How about a storage system that I don’t have to pay extra for?

There is little that annoys me as much as having to stop in the middle of a dungeon and decide which of my items will probably sell for less than others (and can be dropped/destroyed) so I can pick up the gift/weapon/potion/whatever that I’m not sure if I’ll need later in the game. Yeah, yeah. Here comes the argument that the game has backpacks for sale that increase inventory space for in-game gold. You know what games that sentence describes? Mmo grindfests; which are the bastion of offensive game design.

There are a few ways for (benevolent) developers to handle this. You can go the Final Fantasy route and let me carry x99 of any existing item, but no more than that; or you can try the Jagged Alliance design and give me a limited personal inventory with persistent drops (dropped items staying right where I fucking dropped them and never leaving unless I intentionally move them). If you don’t feel like coding either of those, you could just stop putting so damned many items in the game. I don’t need twenty similar swords to choose from if I don’t have the ability to carry them all.

Now, I haven’t played Torchlight, but I hear that you can sell things while in the middle of a dungeon. Word up on that. Perhaps other game companies could take that under advisement and add something similar in the future. And no, I’m not willing to pay an additional $10 for the convenience, you greedy assfunchkins.

You know what else sucks? The targeting. I have lost count of how many times I’ve accidentally targeted someone on my team instead of targeting an enemy. No, I wasn’t trying to open your conversation screen, I was trying to attack/loot/freeze that evil demon right fucking next to me. This would have been an easy fix: d-pad left/right for enemies, and up/down for friendlies. (I’m guessing this is the part where guys playing the PC version laugh at me derisively.)

Bottom line: I don’t hate Dragon Age. I’m going to play it all the way through. I might even play it a second time and play as a different class. Its formula keeps getting reused because it makes for a decent game. I just think that, at this point, they’ve gone to the trough too many times to not be called on it. If I spend more time thinking “that’s just like in [earlier game]” or “god dammit not again” than I do “that’s fucking sweet” it tends to obstruct my enjoyment of the game.

P.S — What the hell is with Morrigan only looking good in the one outfit? Change her armor and an entirely different body model is loaded. Bullshit.