More Dragon Ages(this train is gonna be going a while). Spent the last two evenings doing the Leliana's Song DLC. Or to be more accurate, I did it almost all the way to the end, realized I could not beat the final fight and more importantly, I'd missed all the pieces of the special armor you can only get from this DLC and started over again to replay the entire thing last night(this time skipping all the cutscenes). And finally finished it the 2nd go around and got the special Battledress of the Provocateur which is basically Rogue super-armor from what it looks like.
So it's a fun little stand-alone campaign that lasts about 2 hours and is basically Leliana's Backstory. Yes, it turns out that nun(?) who is good with a blade wasn't always a nun. It turns out.....She was a spy and an assassin. WHAT A TWIST! Seriously though, it opens strong with her and her team running around in the Capital of Ferelden stirring up shit as part of "The game" and then do a break-in where they plant some documents in the palace before even more hijinks ensue. It's fairly tight, and you get levels every few minutes which means if you have to redo it(like I did), it's easy enough just reallocate stats on the next run. The downside is that it's really linear. The first area gives you some stuff to do in any order and a sidequest or two but the rest is running down hallways and killing dudes, collecting better gear as you go. Almost all the fights are mandatory and while it's great for pacing, it does clash with the spy hijinks because while the game does allow you to plant evidence and hide bodies, it doesn't seem to matter much in the long run and going down basically a corridor with some side rooms isn't conductive to stealth at all.
THe worst part of this is that since the prize of the DLC is the Rogue super-armor, the aforementioned battledress, you need to find 6 pieces of it to get it, both here and in the main game. It does become an objective once you find the first piece(which you get more or less just by playing) but the rest are hidden along the way. You'd think "It's a linear game. How hard could that be?". Well, the big problem is a number of the pieces are hidden in locked chests, chests that can only be opened if your lockpick skill is high enough. Most areas you visit all of once and then never return because of how linear the game is, so if your lockpick skill isn't high enough to open those chests before you have to leave the area to proceed and there's not enough XP to increase it before you leave, well tough shit boss, you ain't getting that piece and aren't getting the armor at all. Restart the dlc. Except you don't know this before going in that's how it's gonna work, so if you foolishly didn't sink points into lockpicking early on, you're gonna miss at least one of them because you can't open the door/chest. Also, one of them is hidden in a chest in a locked room which a tough miniboss in it, a miniboss with a bunch of fucking dogs and you must kill them to get that piece of the armor or you ain't getting the armor. See where I'm going with this?
It's generally interesting with the spy/black ops hijinks(and getting more worldbuilding about Orlesia AKA fantasy France to boot) but it feels constrained by the RPG engine, because much of the game is a linear dungeon crawl and you're flat out told to just kill people because they know the sneaky sneaky doesn't really work here. Some of the dialogue also feels off at times, like one line and the next won't really connect to each other and it feels immersion breaking. Really, this is something that would have been really cool if it had been a much longer DLC, like 10 hours and had an engine that could actually support the espionage stuff it was trying to pull off. I know it doesn't support the darkspawn storyline but there's plenty of political intrigue and backstabbing(also frontstabbing) in the base game, so a DLC that really leaned into it would be pretty interesting. Especially the Spy that got burned and disavowed by her handler twist. It's fun to do once and get the armor but there's no real reason to do it ever again.
With that and two of the other DLCs out of the way, I'm pretty much at the point I guess it's time to proceed with the main quests of the game which I've partially been putting off because everyone recommends the Mage Tower and the Fade as the first one and I remember the Fade being a giant PITA when I got that far years ago. I also wanted to check out some of the DLC I'd never gotten to do because I didn't own them the last time I played(as well as collect the rewards), so that made it more convenient to not go to the mage tower.
It's looking like I'm gonna be going hard on this and I've decided to do the entire trilogy after I finish this game. For those that find this interesting, would it be better if I roll this over to a new dedicated thread so not to jam up the Currently Playing thread?
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