Here's something I've been thinking about for a while...

Is anyone else shocked that they didn't get Jennifer Hale to voice anything in this game? She's been their go-to girl for quite a few games now... Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate: Ultimate Alliance, Baldur's Gate II, KOTOR, Mass Effect... it just feels wrong not to hear her again. I'll admit, I've become quite enamored with her performances over the years. Not that the voice actors for Morrigan and Leliana do a bad job, not at all. They've been quite good. But Jennifer Hale and BioWare games, they're just two great tastes that taste great together. Or something like that.

Maybe she was just unavailable because of her duties on Brutal Legend. If so, that's a real shame.

Ya know, it's great that Dragon Age Origins has 6 unique player characters you can start with. That means potentially six playthroughs, adding up to a shitload of hours. That's all well and good but uh... I find myself feeling quite bad about this. See, I don't think I'm ever gonna choose to play a dwarf character. Like, maybe just to see his origin at the beginning, but never a full playthrough.

Now, you're probably asking, why would I do a silly thing like that? Why such a dislike for playing the humble dwarf? Well, it pretty much boils down to one issue:

The thought of actually watching my dwarf character kissing and making love to Morrigan/Leliana is frankly horrifying. Absolutely appalling.

Ya know, there's this one thing that's always bothered me about Mass Effect and now DA...

People treated Specters in ME as supermen of a sort. But really, you're visually just another soldier in battlearmor and carrying a gun. Not that remarkable, right? Same issue here in DA. I come up on some wounded soldier and he somehow knows that I'm a Grey Warden. But uh, how would he know that? I look just like any conscripted bum with a suit of armor and a shield and sword. How does my appearance look like a Grey Warden? Not to mention, I wasn't technically a Grey Warden yet. Shouldn't a Grey Warden look like some uber knight with shiny bling or something? I just, I dunno what to think here. There's absolutely nothing to distinguish a Grey Warden from any regular soldier. Why would any NPC talk about Wardens in hushed tones of reverence, when there's no visual indicator that a Warden is among them? I don't get it.

KOTOR was a different matter cause it's obviously easy to tell a Jedi with a lightsaber from any regular soldier wielding some vibroblade.

 Now, here's a ginger thought. And as a disclaimer, I haven't played Dragon Age: Origins yet. But uh... just throwing this out there... here's my question to cast to the wind. Why aren't the game's AI tactics set up properly by default? Why does the player have to take time to fidget around and set them up? Couldn't a lot of complaining and griping have been wholly avoided if BioWare had delivered their RPG with the AI set up already? Then the OP would be able to play the game in a satisfactory manner from the outset, and this thread never would've been created. Everybody's happy. Why didn't BioWare take this route I've just laid out? Why did they inflict needless torment on innocents? Couldn't they have foreseen that not having any sort of AI set up by default would prove problematic?
 
This I pose.

Did anyone notice this? Or am I the only one?
 


Apparently cranes are just an optical illusion.