Dragon Age: Origins Review

Dragon Age: Origins is a pretty standard fantasy RPG, which takes place in the kingdom of Ferelden. There are humans, elves, and dwarves, who are combating against a horde of orcs, goblins, and ogres, who are hell bent on destroying the world. The thing that sets Dragon Age apart from the rest is the incredibly deep relationship and decision system that BioWare is known for, as well as an air of originality that exists throughout the game. While this game does have a pretty long list of problems, it somehow managed to be a game that I couldn’t put down.

The Good
As I said, the best part of this game is the relationship and system. Choices made in this game aren’t just tiny blips in the story. The player is constantly required to make decisions that have huge affects on the overall story of the game. Not only that, but the decisions test your own personal set of values and whether or not you are willing to compromise your character’s self in order to gain something of value. Decisions will also affect how party members view you and can allow for some romantic run-ins or some awkward conversations. It’s simply amazing how far decisions go and how much voice acting was done to accommodate all of the different possibilities.

An equally impressive part of the game is the story. There are parts of the story that resemble many other fantasy stories, Lord of the Rings being the most prominent, but those similarities have an original twist to them. For example, there is a group of warriors known as The Grey Wardens. They are charged with defending the world from Blights and the commanders of those Blights, known as archdemons. Now while the concept of these warriors isn’t something new, the way that individuals become Grey Wardens is something I’ve never encountered before.

There is also a very rich back-story, which is probably the most important part to making any world feel real. Each group of people has a lengthy explanation of where they are and how they got there. The player obtains this information mostly through texts, which are scattered across the kingdom, as well as small talk with various NPCs and party members. Some books can even give characters access to another very cool part of the game: specializations.

Dragon Age only has three classes, which doesn’t seem to be enough to cover all types of play. To remedy this, BioWare gave each class four specializations, which allows the three generic classes (warrior, mage, rogue), to turn into a wider range of classes. Many of them we’ve seen before, but some, like the Arcane Warrior, which turns a simple mage into a plate wearing badass, is not seen very often. This is a great way to change up a piece of RPGs, which is usually set in stone.

One of the more irritating parts of many RPGs is the lack of ability to travel to any part of the map right from the get go. This is usually because the enemies there are much to high for the player’s character to handle. Oblivion is a prime example of a failed attempt to fix this, with a very poorly crafted scale-to-level system. Dragon Age on the other hand allows the player to travel wherever the want without having to worry about getting one-shot by some big scary monster. The difficulty remains the same for most of the game, until the end, where the difficulty naturally gets harder.

A common practice in MMOs is raiding dungeons with a party of other adventures to take down big and scary monsters. Dragon Age also has a party system, but to make up for the lack of three other human players, the player indirectly controls the other three characters through tactics. These tactics tell the Ally AI exactly what to do in any given situation. This can be anything like “use health potion when HP <50%” or “use Inferno when enemies are cluster in a group of three or more”. The downside to this is that it takes a long time to set up tactics and if you don’t use tactics, the Ally AI that is used in place of tactics isn’t very intelligent.

One very welcome part of the game is the variation in quests Most of the quests can be summarized as someone needing your help and you must wonder through a dangerous dungeon full of many different ways of dying. But through a use of different setting, characters, story, and enemies, you never feel like you’re just doing the same errand over and over. Since this can very easily be a game killer cough Assassin’s Creed cough, it’s a great addition to not have.

One last positive thing to add about the game is the character customization. When creating your character, players could spend upwards of 30 minutes creating and tweaking their character. Or you can be like me and use one of the presets because you just want to play.

The Bad
*Note, just to restate for anyone who didn’t know this already, I play my games on a PS3 and some of the problems I mention don’t exist on other platforms, with the PC version having the least of the problems. I also apologize if this section turns into a rant.

One of the greatest parts of Mass Effect was that no matter the character that you created, they would still talk during the conversational cutscenes. This not only gave the character a voice, but also made them feel more real. Dragon Age on the other hand does not have this luxury. Obviously it would be much harder to accomplish the amount of voice acting required to copy Mass Effect because of the option to create a character from three different races. But this combined with an emotionless face makes the player’s character feel extremely empty.

The biggest experience killer for me in any game is a poor frame rate. Sadly, this game has a very poor frame rate for a large portion of the game. For the first 8 hours and the last 8 hours, the frame rate was at its worst. Luckily, the rest of the game isn’t so bad, but still appears a little bit. But still, the poor frame rate at the beginning can lengthen the time it takes to get into the game, which is pretty long as is. It also hurts the epic feeling BioWare tries to portray during the climax of the game.

There is also this weird lag that occurs with quest checkpoints. By this I mean, there was a lag between completing a part of a quest and the game recognizing it. For example, I was wondering through a dungeon with an NPC. There was supposed to be a cutscene that triggered after I killed the boss of the dungeon, but the game took over 30 seconds to recognize that I killed the guy and start the cutscene. This is an extreme case and this occurred mostly towards the end of the game, but its still a quite irritating problem that made me nervous about a broken save file many times.

Earlier in the review, I mentioned how mixing the use of specializations was a nice way to mix up the genre. Well, there is a downside to them as well. Since the classes are intended to be very basic, the talent trees are only four spells long. Mages are hurt the most by this, but so are the other two classes, just on a smaller scale. This allows for a typically damaging mage to heal, or a melee rogue to hit at range with a bow, but there are no “fire mages” here.

Most RPGs start the player off with a character of humble beginnings who rises to the occasion to become a hero. And by the time the character becomes a hero, they have something that shows they have really gone somewhere. That something is a badass looking weapon and badass armor. Their weapon is ornately designed and their armor makes them look like someone you don’t want to f*** with. Sadly, there is a severe lack of badass items in Dragon Age. Throughout my travels I found two sets of armor and two weapons, which were awesome looking. Three of them were from DLC though. There are definitely items that have good stats, but very few of them look the part.

This game is most definitely an RPG made for a PC. This is most obvious when you look at the controls. For the most part, every level the player gains, another spell is added to their list. By the end of the game, most players will reach level 20, which means ~20 different attacks players can use. PC users don’t have a problem with this because they have at least 24 different buttons on the keyboard they can hotkey spells to. Controllers on the other hand have significantly less buttons. Instead of 24 hotkeys, the console version only gets 6. The other spells are accessed through the radial menu, which is somewhat clunky. It’s a game like this that makes me wish developers would remember that the PS3 is mouse/keyboard compatible.

The last negative I have to say about this game is the broken difficulty. This is only a minor problem because it only occurred a few times throughout the game, but there are fights in the game that require more luck than skill in order to defeat. This basically forces the player to save just before that fight and play it over and over hoping the one thing that can easily kill them doesn’t happen. But again, this only occurs a few times, so it’s not a huge problem.

Conclusion
As with Modern Warfare 2, I had a love hate relationship with Dragon Age: Origins. It required me to forgive many of its problems, in order to access the fun buried beneath them. Luckily, there was plenty of fun to be had with this title. I would definitely recommend this for a purchase for any hardcore RPG fan. For any else who is a little more hesitant, Santa has yet to go on his sleigh ride, so you might want to ask him for it.