Dragon Age: Origins

BioWare have made quite a few great games. I’ve only played a couple of them, namely Mass Effect and this one; but that’s good enough to make me respect the company. I purchased Dragon Age on the merit of Mass Effect and its critical reception. I knew it would be an engrossing, addictive venture, and it was.

This is the first truly traditional RPG I’ve ever played. RPGs are normally in fantasy setting; everything I’ve done up to this point has been more in the sci-fi direction. This one is unquestionably an orthodox fantasy game. You’ve got your warriors, mages, and rogues, a looming evil, dungeons, armies, and epic battles. There’s even the opportunity to have relationships (romantic or otherwise) with pretty much anybody in your party. In that aspect it’s even closer to the books from which this genre gets its material.

The story is pretty cool, if not very original. It’s hard to write an original fantasy story. There is some arch-demon thing leading an army of nasty orcish dudes to destroy everything, and you end up being one of the few people that can kill it. There’s political betrayal, demonic possession, ancient technological evils, and lots of other fun happenings to keep it a little non-linear. Your decisions made in dialogue sequences often affect the story, although usually they have more effect on your party members’ allegiances to you.

Technically speaking, the game is pretty impressive. The character models are very nice to look at, and the animations are very well done. Blood is an integral part of the game in more ways than one; it’s pretty much everywhere. Thus, bloody graphics are given special attention. The environments are varied and anything but flat. There is plenty of opportunity to revisit different locations when quests are completed, often necessary in order to get items that were unattainable before. One thing I quite like is the doing-away of “farming.” There are no respawns of enemies, ever. Once you clear out an area it’s clear, unless the plot necessitates a new batch of baddies. This makes it a little harder to advance your characters but it keeps things from getting dull.

The coolest bit though is the combat system. Since you have a party of up to four, things can get pretty complicated in the issuing of commands and whatnot. The solution is pausing, kind of similar to that in Resident Evil 4; while the game is paused, you can look at the battlefield from any angle, figure out some strategy, and issue commands to anyone in your party. Ignoring this feature is very unwise.

I do have a couple technical gripes. After a few hour of play, the game often got pretty sluggish and used increasingly more RAM. Restarting the game seemed to fix it. Also, near the end of the game I started getting one-hit kills on all base-level enemies. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or a feature though, since I was playing on Easy mode and there were an awful lot of baddies. It just seems kind of cheap.

I played as something of an asshole mage on my first run in order to unlock a specialization for my next playthrough, in which I will be a goody-two shoes. Should be fun!