PC GameSource Blog

All bugs aside, I had a lot of fun with Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening. Ok, so the writing wasn’t quite as good. Alright, fine–there wasn’t enough talking and decision-making for the amount of combat the game throws at you. I’ll concede that the game is far, far buggier than I would expect from Bioware, even in an expansion. But it was obviously rushed, so some bugs are to be expected, and will hopefully be fixed if they haven’t been already.

But on the bright side, players get to delve back into Ferelden for the second-greatest adventure you can find in the kingdom, and chances are if you’re interested in the game you’ve already finished the first at least once.

Chances are also quite good you’ve also read a number of reviews far more thorough than this. So, to cut to the chase–I’ll confirm what many of those reviews conclude–if you’re into the game, you should definitely give it a shot. If you haven’t played or didn’t enjoy the original, then there is no reason you should play or would enjoy this one either. But if you’re one of those people, I really think you should give the first game another look–it’s truly a deep and rewarding experience.

A word of caution–I did run into a couple of game-breaking bugs. Spoilers follow. Check the Dragon Age Wiki’s Bugs page for full details. Mainly, be careful when and how you complete the Amaranthine smugglers quest, because it can break other parts of the game and ruin your experience as it did mine (the quest ended early and all of the guards in Amaranthine hated me even though I meant to help them). Additionally, toward the end of the game when I chose to help Amaranthine instead of the Keep, the game map indicated the keep was destroyed by darkspawn, while the ending credits confirmed it remained standing strong thanks to the defenses I purchased. All in all, it ended well, and you wouldn’t have had a chance to go back there in the game anyway.

Bioware, I want more large Dragon Age DLC!

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While it’s too early to state any more clearly, without even having crossed the Omega 4 relay yet I can without a doubt say Mass Effect 2 is one of the greatest games of this generation. It takes everything we loved about Mass Effect and amps it up a few notches. It fixes most of the complaints and enhances almost everything else. ME2 is now a lean, mean, role-playing, shooting machine.

But alas, the title still has its fair share of bugs to be worked out in future patches. The worst of them have been addressed and there is no point in rehashing them. But one bug in particular has continued to annoy me since release day.

Randomly, when Shepherd is next to a wall, on a ramp, or really doing anything collision-based, he will suddenly appear a few feet off of the ground, floating in midair. He can turn (and yes, you can save the game–but don’t!), but he can’t move around.

Unfortunately the only way I’ve found to get past it is to load the most recent save and continue from there. It’s never happened twice in the same place for me. Luckily, the game auto-saves a lot, and I’ve never had to replay more than 10 minutes or so due to this bug. It certainly does need patching though.

Look for our full review once we finish playing BioWare‘s new–ok, I can’t hold back–masterpiece.

For years we have been enjoying a well-sorted list of Oblivion mods thanks to the wonderful BOSS (formerly fcomhelper). But Fallout 3 users have been left in the cold, with sparse, scattered, and/or conflicting information about where their mods should go in their load order.

Early on this year, the developers at our partner SingularityShift (eg. mostly myself) released the first pre-beta of FOMS, whose final version (0.6.6.1) was released in April. FOMS used XML templates to facilitate sorting and management of conflicts, dependencies, and related information for Fallout 3 mods. It was very basic with a very limited UI that provided just enough functionality to sort and manage mods, but it had some inherent issues in the fact that it was developed with hand-written tools in a scripting language that has some serious limitations.

Recently, SingularityShift released the first alpha (Alpha 1) of FOMS 2, which is a complete rewrite taking advantage of the robust features of the .NET Framework and WPF to provide a greatly-enhanced sorting experience, including a Template Manager to create and manage XML templates, live conflict/dependency/message tracking, robust backup/restore options, and more all driven by a flexible Preferences system that will ultimately allow users to customize many aspects of the application.

Given that it was a first release, users have uncovered many bugs and submitted many wishlist items and feature requests. Now, FOMS 2 Alpha 2 is nearing its release, and some of its new features that have been recently unveiled are:

• Refactored windows and unified resources for a smaller size, tighter code, and better performance and stability
• The Template Manager is being dumped and replaced by Template Studio, allowing much-enhanced functionality such as template downloads, backups, merging, cleaning, upgrading, and much more.
• Conflict/Dependency recommendations and resolving are now included, so you don’t need to hunt through your list to find and fix the conflicts/dependencies yourself.
• Many smaller fixes and improvements for a better overall experience.

Keep your eyes peeled for the new release!

As always, you can follow along with the software’s development at its project site.
You can discuss it with other Fallout 3 users at Fallout3Nexus and don’t forget to watch the official site at falloutmodsorter.com for release information and more details!

(If I have some shame, can it really be considered a shameless plug?)