Pardon me a moment as I rant. You don't mind, do you? Dragon Age: Origins just came out this week and I've been knee deep in darkspawn blood for the last couple days. I'm loving it, it's like a love child between Oblivion and Final Fantasy XII, with some MMO mechanics thrown in for good measure. Naturally, I've been spending some time on the official DAO forums at Bioware's site. Nice forums with links to the other community features the game includes (which are awesome, by the way).

My complaint, or, dare I say, rant? There is no decent game play discussion going on (outside of the spoiler forum, but there is no need to post spoilers necessarily when having civilized discussions about the game play)! Too many people are freaked out over missing DLC, installation issues, graphics problems, account activation failings and what not. Granted, some of these complaints may have merit and most are related to the PC version of the game, it seems. However, is it really necessary to 1) post 50 billion topics on the same complaint and 2) to be completely uncivilized while voicing said complaint? Yes, yes, welcome to Internet forums, I hear you saying as you idly dismiss my rant. The problem is, they shouldn't be that way, especially not forums run by the publisher and/or developer of a game.

It's nice that Bioware provides a way for legitimate issues (most of these problems should fall under their technical support forum) to be heard, but way too many people are just overly whiny and don't know when to shut up. Technical issues aren't what I want to rant about today, however. What really gets under my skin is the people who fill up the forum with useless posts because they personally think the game should be something it was never intended to be and claim that Bioware said this or that about the game (stuff they never advertised the game to be, I might add - you can't fool most people, so don't even try). They complain about no true open world, lack of inventory space, charging for DLC on release day, the fact that you can't have a same-sex romantic encounter with every one of your companions or any number of other game-related issues. I'll say this here, and it probably won't be the last time you hear it from me:

The game was not made just for you - you are not the center of the universe.

Everyone who wants to complain because the game isn't personally what they want needs to repeat that line to themselves until they get it through their thick skulls. If you want an open-world game, go play Oblivion or Fallout 3 but please stop annoying those of us who are playing and enjoying the game for what it is - one of the best games of the year, regardless of the few legitimate issues with the game itself. Leave the forums for those of us who want to discuss game play issues. As I mentioned earlier, the legitimate technical issues have a technical support forum for you to use. I get constantly annoyed with people who ruin the experience for everyone else.

I don't mean this to be flame-bait by any means.  All I'm saying is that is it really too much to ask to have a nice place to discuss a great game without someone complaining about the game not being tailor fit to their individual tastes every other posts?  Is it?!

I feel so much better now.  Also, I just wanted to use this post for a chance to throw up a picture of Morrigan.  What!?  Time to go kill some more darkspawn.