Ark's Ark

This one is rather more fulsome than the previous efforts. It supersedes the test mod that many of us have been using that fixed the archery and dagger issues. You can grab the patch at the official 1.02 Dragon Age Patch page.

Dragon Age: Origins 1.02:

You do not need to download patches prior to Patch 1.02. Downloading Patch 1.02 contains all previous patches. Downloading Patch 1.02 will provide you with all patch data available.

Balance

* Daggers now apply 0.5 points of damage per additional point in dexterity and 0.5 points of damage per additional point in strength, as originally intended. This increases dagger damage for high-dexterity characters.
* During combat, mana or stamina reserves now correctly regenerate more quickly when reserves are low. This allows players to occasionally use an talent or spell in the later stages of lengthy fights.
* When exploring, mana and stamina now regenerate more quickly at higher character levels. This reduces downtime between fights.
* The spells Force Field, Crushing Prison, Cone of Cold, and Blizzard now have shorter durations and/or longer cooldowns. This ensures that combatants can no longer stun-lock each other by repeatedly casting the same spell.
* The cooldowns for several low-level sustained abilities are now shorter. This ensures that players are not penalized for accidentally deactivating them.
* Certain battles were not scaling properly, resulting in excessively difficult fights. They now scale as intended.
* Enemy corpses now drop health poultices and money more appropriately, resulting in less clutter in the player’s inventory.

Gameplay

* In rare cases, enemy corpses were selectable when they contained no loot. This no longer occurs.
* Party members whose combat tactics were set to defensive behavior no longer stop attacking after using a spell or talent.
* In rare cases, combat tactics conditions could fail to determine whether a character had enough mana or stamina to use an ability. This no longer occurs.
* The Rally talent no longer repeats its audio effect if it is active during certain conversations.
* The Rally talent no longer deactivates upon area transitions or conversations.
* The Shimmering Shield spell now deactivates when the character is out of mana.

PC Specific

* Controlling a summoned creature (like a ranger’s pets) during certain special area transitions no longer results in odd behavior.
* Creating a character in a custom module did not create a folder for saves. This could result in corruption of main campaign saves. This no longer occurs.
* In some cases, the class icon was set incorrectly for characters imported from the downloadable Character Creator. This no longer occurs.
* The options menu now includes a setting to automatically download previously purchased content that is not currently installed.
* After installing new downloadable content, the game now always reminds the user to restart the game.
* The icons for some promotional downloadable content items were missing. They now appear correctly.
* The screenshot upload GUI would stop working from time to time on the client. There was a memory override that was fixed. It is a client fix. It doesn’t affect the other problems we have seen on the server.

Plot *Spoiler Warning*

* Promotional downloadable content items now remain in the player’s inventory when standard items are removed at the end of the dwarf noble origin.
* Repeatedly talking to Duncan after gathering the vials in the Korcari Wilds but not the treaties no longer provides duplicate experience.
* Leliana’s personal plot can now be completed if the player substantially increased her approval (through gifts) before talking to her.
* During the siege of Redcliffe, enemies are no longer able to spawn in locations that would break the plot.
* Bann Teagan no longer disappears when he is supposed to be accessible during Urn of Sacred Ashes.

It is possible that I have just become a lot more stupid than I used to be, but try as I might, I couldn’t get Dragon Age’s editor to do ANYTHING without something going horribly wrong. Even though I’d not even changed anything, I somehow managed to break the main campaign and corrupt my saves. Weirdness abounded, with my party just standing about, refusing to follow me, and greeting me as if we were meeting for the first time. Talking to my dog (Chompy) teleported me below the ground. All around there was misery and gnashing of teeth.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one, and there was actually quite a good reason. The toolset’s database is mismatched with that of the live game, so without jumping through a few hoops it’s very hard to make a mod that isn’t going to be having some issues. As I am a very strong believer in not releasing buggy mods, I have decided not to make any until the toolset is patched sometime next week. Sorting out my own bugs is one thing, but I need to be able to trust the toolset to not be throwing in some extra ones. Modding is hard enough without faulty tools.

If you’ve found your game is broken after trying out the toolset you may be able to get things working again by following these instructions. They worked for me at least.

How to fix Dragon Age if the Toolset broke it.

1. Open up the toolset. Go into File, Manage Modules, and create a new module. Don’t ever open up the Single Player module again, as just opening it is enough for it to start writing files and causing trouble. As the toolset automatically loads up the last module it had, and the Single Player one was it’s default, that’s why just opening the toolset was enough to break things. With another module loaded now, you should be safe from that issue going forward.

2. In the Tools menu in the toolset select “Empty Export Directories”.

3. Go into your My Documents/Bioware/Dragon Age/Modules folder and rename the Single Player folder.

With any luck Dragon Age is now fixed and your regular campaign game will now be working properly, though any save games you made while you had mismatched data will still be messed up. Hopefully you have a recent save from before that happened!

I’m looking forward, once the toolset is fixed, to making a few modules of my own. We’ll see how that goes.