More Dragon Age: Origins. Bloody hell this game just keeps going. Not that I mind, but it feels like I'm on my 3rd 5-pound steak for the evening. There's just so much of it. Close to 40 hours in, and it still feels like I'm probably only somewhat close to the end. After which there's of course the Awakening expansion and the close to a dozen DLC, only a couple of which are even available during the main storyline. I've yet to clear any of those that aren't, but the idea of expanding on the storyline and characters through DLC that's designed to be played in a specific order seems intriguing.
One thing I've come to appreciate the most about this game is (and yes, I'm fully aware of how boring this sounds) the economy, and how well it's balanced. In almost any RPG I've ever played, even the truly fantastic ones like Witcher 3 or Divinity original Sin 2, I've had mountains of cash by the midgame, and once I've bought the most valuable items money tends to lose all meaning except for very specific god-tier uses (like the grandmaster sets in Witcher 3). Here it seems there's always more good stuff you can buy, and it never feels like you can just empty every merchant inventory in the world Skyrim-style, you have to actively consider your purchases. Even crafting materials are priced right so that you can't just buy them willy-nilly, except the ones for the very lowest-tier items.
I stumbled upon a pretty unforgivable design fuck-up in this game though: at a point in the game there's a brief section where you're taken to prison, and are forced to break out. I'm playing a Rogue, and had maxed out lockpicking and close to maxed out Stealth, so first I just waltzed out without engaging in combat once. Only to discover when I got out that while my equipment had found its way back onto my character, literally everything in my inventory was gone. The way it's designed is that you're supposed to take on the jailer solo (a very low-level enemy you can kill by sneezing at), and using a key you take off his body you unlock a nearby chest which contains all your items and equipment. However, due to presumably a gas leak at Bioware, someone decided that the chest should only even be highlighted as an interactable asset after you've killed the jailer, meaning that if you can lose your entire inventory purely by accident for a reason you had no way to know beforehand.
But wait, there's more! In the section you're meant to get a guard uniform to disguise yourself and walk out in it. Said outfit is unbreakable, and cannot be unequipped. The aforementioned chest containing your inventory automatically equips whatever you were wearing prior to the prison section when you open it. Meaning that if you open the chest after getting the guard disguise, all the gear you had on you simply disappears into the void, it just doesn't exist anymore. So there's actually a double fuck-up here. Thankfully the game autosaves extensively enough that fucking yourself over is mostly avoidable, but it's still a pretty damn bad design error.
