Hello, everyone!

Sorry about the temporary hiatus but I've been terribly busy moving between apartments. But that's all done now and I can update again. The thing is that I've nothing particularly special to update about. I guess I'll go with my later-than-late impressions on the Return to Ostagar DLC for Dragon Age: Origins. First off, BioWare as a game studio can honestly say that they have some of the best writing present in video gaming today. Mass Effect 2 is fantastically well written. And by writing I don't just mean the dialogue, I mean the entire handling of communicating things to the player.

In light of that fact, it's surprising that Dragon Age: Origins has such unmemorable writing. It's not necessarily bad, but certainly does not stand out like it does in Mass Effect 2. And Return to Ostagar is written insultingly badly. I guess that it's on par with the real average of the level of writing in video games, but compared even to DA:O's writing it just stands apart as awful. Basically, the thing about Return is that you titularly return to Ostagar, which is the site of a tragic battle early on in DA:O. The return is supposed to stir all kinds of strong feelings in the player. The problem here is that we don't have a chance to do that, because the game rushes to tell us that You're Feeling Strong Regret Over the Death of This Unimportant Yet Somehow Memorable Soldier's Whose Corpse You're Staring At Now. It's a slap in the face on both in terms of immersion and being disrespected as the receiver of the story.

They do this a few times and generally I felt pretty annoyed for the duration of this DLC. And while on the topic of DLC, there really is a ton of it for Mass Effect 2, but I just haven't bothered with any of it. At this point I dislike DLC partly out of principle. I like it as the option to add things the developers couldn't finish in time for the release date, but these days it seems more like there's a whole new department for people who think up DLCs to be released specifically after the game is released. It's a money-grubbing technique and I dislike it for what it is.

OK, that's about it for this week. Disgustingly weak, I know. I've just been very busy and this is all I could come up with. Ah, anyway, I'll try to have more meaningful content next week. Until then.