Bioware is cementing its place among the premiere development studios of our time. If Dragon Age: Origins is what Bioware can do with the might of the EA empire behind it, then I can begrudge them no longer. It is my vote for the Game of the Year and any fan of the role-playing genre or fantasy novels cannot pass this one up.
I do not dare dive into the expansive story that encompasses this game. It rivals Lord of the Rings (Jrr Tolkien) in scope and scale, A Song of Ice and Fire (George R.R. Martin) in political intrigue, and the original Dragonlance Chronicles (Margaret Weiss, Tracy Hickman) in enjoyment. It was much like an excellent fantasy novel that I just couldn’t put down. The characters are memorable, entertaining, and alive. The ambient dialogue that takes place among your party members while you stroll about town is brilliant in addition to being expository. The player gets to develop relationships with characters that join the party, much like Baldur’s Gate II. You can fall in love, knock boots, or learn class specializations from them. If you piss them off enough, they will leave. They have their own aspirations and desires, and they will often be vocal in the choices you make. There are also six backgrounds to choose from, and aside from each of them having its own opening chapter, will offer different dialogue and affect the game in different ways, which was a really nice and interesting touch.
The voice acting is incredible and sets a new benchmark for videogames. The banter from the playable characters always managed to put a smile on my face, and the villains are appropriately sinister sounding. Even the background NPCs that litter the different towns and cities are well done and have interesting monologues or dialogues. If you’re the type of player that likes to talk to every person in the game, then your task is going to be more pleasant than in the past.
The combat and gameplay will be familiar to those who have played the Baldur’s Gate series or Neverwinter Nights. You assigning actions to a group of up to four characters. In the PC version of the game, you have an entire action bar you can fill up with skills for easy access whereas on the console versions, you map skills to the buttons. You can pause the game at any time in order to strategically plan out your moves. Where Dragon Age differs from its predecessors is the adoption of the Final Fantasy XII tactics system. Each character has tactic slots which you can fill with conditional commands so that your characters can heal anyone below fifty percent health, for example, or attack the target of a party member. This system has its advantages and drawbacks as characters will sometimes not do what you expect, but the use of tactics are entirely optional and in general make combat faster. You can also save presets of tactics so that you can easily change from offense to defense in just a couple of clicks. The camera is quite interesting and provides some variety to the experience. The default third-person camera puts you in a flexible view similar to many games like World of Warcraft, but once you zoom back all the way, you get a strategic isometric view. You can’t see as far in the isometric view though and miss out on a lot of the detail, so I found that I traveled in the third person view but changed to the isometric camera once I was in combat. The one complaint I have about the camera is that it should let you zoom out farther in the third-person mode and have a button to switch to isometric as opposed to automatically switching when it zooms out all the way. A really minor annoyance as I prefer the wider field of vision.
The graphics in the game are plenty awesome and surprisingly runs at max settings even on my two-year old PC. One little thing that I enjoyed about the graphical presentation is that the blood splatter from combat will make its way into dialogue cutscenes, so your party members are talking with blood all over their faces and armour. The art and graphics has that efficient Bioware style which some people may not like, but the character creator provides sufficient customizability and I enjoyed the presentation.
The difficulty of the game is unusual and refreshing, especially for the role-playing genre. Even random groups of enemies are usually no cakewalk and require some management. Whereas I could just walk around and defeat groups of enemies without even pressing a button due to the tactics in Final Fantasy XII, I found myself micromanaging many of the battles in Dragon Age. Survival is a bit of an issue since healing spells have cooldowns that prevent you from continuously casting them. There is also basically no way to grind levels on your characters, so the traditional “get more levels” method of overcoming difficulty in role-playing games won’t work. Gold is not easy to make, either, so getting the best items from all the vendors is nigh impossible. The few dragons you encounter in the game are amazing and epic to defeat, and after defeating internet dragons so easily in World of Warcraft, it was a refreshing reminder that dragons should be hurting you in the face area. Needless to say, I am impressed with the difficulty and am playing through on the hardest difficulty this time just to challenge myself even more. One neat little addition to the combat are these little finishing animations that your character performs on an enemy, such as jumping onto an ogre in slow motion and stabbing their eye or spinning to chop off an opponent’s head – similar to God of War.
For a single player game, Dragon Age offers spectacular longevity. In fact, the first thing I wanted to do after completing the game was to go through it again with a different character and a different plan. I wanted to explore the different dialogue and plot paths, try a different character build, a new background, a harder difficulty and even a new group makeup. The game does a very good job of forcing difficult choices upon you and failed attempts at persuasion will sometimes close opportunities forever, so you have to play through the game again a few times in order to see everything it has to offer. There are achievements to collect if you’re a fan of those, but the content out-of-the-box takes 40-plus hours to complete and there’s more to be had in two downloadable content packs.
The content packs are the only gripe I have with the game. Warden’s Keep offers a party chest, an extra vendor, and an extra (albeit amazing) sword. Stone Prisoner offers a new playable character with its own back story, quest, and hilarious voice acting. They cost $7 USD and $15 USD respectively, and neither are really worth the money. They each provide about one to two hours of gameplay, but if you truly can’t get enough of the game there are worse ways to spend fifteen dollars. Hopefully the next content pack, Return to Ostagar, will offer a lot more content considering you can get excellent full games like Torchlight for $20 USD. As with previous Bioware games, the community has taken it upon itself to offer up some free content to spice up the experience. With the release of the toolset, we’re already seeing modifications that allow you to respecialize any character, add a party chest to your camp (which is better than having to travel to Warden’s Keep), and change the faces of characters in the game. There’s even an ambitious project to remake the Baldur’s Gate series with the toolset, which I will personally be keeping an eye on.
In case I haven’t gotten this point across: Dragon Age: Origins is amazing, incredible, and just about every other superlative you can throw at it. In fact, I need to stop writing this review and go play it some more.
I just wanted to point out that the level of the enemies always reflects / matches your own. When you first enter a area, the level of all enemies contained within it are adjusted to your current level.
This personally was a huge immersion breaker for me and almost killed the game for me, so to speak.
I find it incredibly retarded that your hero, after having been in over 500 battles, killing thousands of feared darkspawn, several dragons et cetera, gets a real workout from a drunk hobo in a tavern who’s never even held a sword before. Why ? Cause the game thinks its fun if they set everyones level to match yours.
Once I realized this, all motivation to play the game was pratically gone. You won’t feel powerful at any point of the game, since even the monsters at the very beginning are always as strong as you. There is no progress in strength and every battle from beginning to end feels like a carbon copy of another.
You may get more skills to toy around with, but every battle essentially works out the same way. You will have your set of skills you like, and you will use it in every battle. After all, excuse me if I am mistaken, but I see no difference when fighting darkspawn over fighting thieves or dwarfs. You get bum rushed by a horde, you use sleep, nightmare, AoE or whatever and you’ll be doing the same thing for the entire game pretty much.
All in all, technically the game is outstanding, the story is one of the best that has come around in a really long time.. but the fact that enemies level together with you and that every battle feels the same lowered my opinion / fun of the game by quite a bit. If you don’t mind these things then go ahead and buy it, if you do, there may be better games for you out there ( I found Risen’s way of handling monster strength far superior. )
I was a big fan of the adjusted difficulty, actually. In addition to enabling them to let you play through the game in any order you wish in terms of the middle quests, it also meant I was never bored by the combat.
Your power level does feel like it scales without sacrificing the imminent danger that is felt in the combat. For example, I’m playing through it a second time on Nightmare, and though the beginning parts were very hard, the game has gotten a bit easier since level 8. There are still fights I need to reload multiple times and I find myself just playing with injuries instead of healing them all instantly.
I am very impressed with the balance of the game. You are right, you will use the same skills every battle, but is that really any different from other games? Some skills will be better or you will like them better than others, and you will use them. That’s not much different than WoW, Oblivion or Neverwinter Nights for me.
I haven’t noticed the same thing that Bio2Hazard has pointed out. I’ve walked into areas and have been SLAUGHTERED by bandits that simply kicked my ass until I employed some strategy.
I love this game.
And I hate you guys for making me buy it.
That’s right.
You heard me.