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Dragon Age: Origins Review

A game that goes back to classic RPG roots and almost pulls it off without a hitch

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In essence, Dragon Age is a great RPG from the genre masters BioWare who take the game back to the Dungeons and Dragons lore of times past. Recent efforts of the developer saw us in space with Mass Effect, which was a unique change of pace for the genre but definitely lacked some of the hardcore aspects that fans of RPGs love to have. With Dragon Age, BioWare goes back to the dungeons they first mastered years ago with Neverwinter Nights and its sequel, and they do so with vast success. Not only does Origins have all the stats, character progression and brutal difficulty demanded by the hardcore, it also possesses great accessibility and mostly well-scaled difficulty for newcomers. Disregarding the genre, the story and characters of the game are also worth the price of admission. Simply put, Dragon Age is a fun RPG title with a few little quirks that most players will be able to oversee and enjoy the ride.

Dragon Age: Origins
He looks dangerous. And yes, he is in your way.

Dragon Age Origins takes place during the Middle Ages with all the customary heroes, villains, dragons and witches. It is far from original, but this setting has become something of a requirement for classic RPG titles, so it would surprise me if players were expected anything different. You begin by creating your character and progressing through one of the six available “origin” stories. These are less than an hour long, meant to adjust you to the story of your people and set the motivations for the rest of the game. The origin stories are those of Human Noble, Human/Elf Mage, Dalish Elf, City Elf, Dwarf Commoner and Dwarf Noble. Depending on what character you create determines how NPCs react to you throughout the game. To keep things balanced, BioWare threw in a few subtle sub-plot differences and conversational outcomes, but regardless of the character choice, a vast majority of the game will remain open to you for quests and NPC interactions. Once you complete the initial story, you arrive at the main plot of the game – Duncan, one of the famous Grey Wardens, has come to summon you to join them in the fight against the Blight – a vicious attack by the monsters from the underground called the Darkspawn. The Blight has already happened hundreds of years ago, where the Darkspawn were defeated at the hands of the Wardens – but now they have unexpectedly returned, and the Wardens urgently need more recruits. At a key battle against the invaders, however, one of the human kings involved decides to pull out his army and leave the Wardens to die. This sets up the main story plot – you spend the game gathering forces to fight against the Darkspawn as they did together many years ago, while also trying to escape the assassins sent by the rogue King who wishes to remain independent during the war and grab as much land as he can from the neighboring kingdoms. And so you set off on an adventure to unite four factions, each with their own needs, laws, cultures and leaders, to stand together against the Blight. This is the main story piece that holds the game together, and yes it can be considered linear from this standpoint, as some factions must be helped before others agree to lift a finger. Each faction’s area is full of secondary quests however, which you are free to complete in any order and at any time. The choices you make in the game have some branching results but things all turn out pretty much the same in the end. There is no explicit Good/Evil indicator in the game or in the dialogue, but you can sometimes clearly see the nice thing to say is, and what isn’t.

The story would be difficult to call epic if it wasn’t for the characters. Dragon Age truly features some of the best dialogue and voice acting in the genre where those elements are crucial to the experience. In comparison to Mass Effect, where I often could not help but skip some dialogue, the personalities and dialogue trees in Origins are actually worth listening to. They are well-written, edited for just the right amount of length, and delivered without wasting any time. Depending on your choices in the game and what character you created, the NPCs you meet along the way are all interesting and engaging. It is somewhat easy to spot the characters who could potentially become your party members – they are often met by odd circumstances and nearly outright you are given an option to recruit them. The party members will remain with you for the rest of the game, unless you make some tough choices they do not agree with – at which point they may leave or even become hostile at key points of the plot. When adventuring, you can bring three companions and they will provide unique dialogue depending on the situation you are in. Even the short conversations they have amongst one another while you run around the country side are often worth a chuckle and a pause to listen to. If you prefer something more personal, you can visit your party camp where you are “solo” and free to talk to any of your recruited comrades individually to gain their approval, learn their back story or even give gifts. There is a numerical indicator in the game of what your party members think of you, though this doesn’t affect the gameplay at all unless they hate you completely or love you. You’ll meet plenty of companions along the way, most you are able to refuse to join your party but do so at your own risk – sometimes the new companions come with nice spells and great armor sets, along with unexpected story results later on.

Dragon Age: Origins
Ambushes are never fun

The burning question for a lot of folks was “Is this a true spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate II”? Well, I am unfortunately unable to answer that because it is all dependant on taste. For me, I avoid drawing the line between games claiming to be “spiritual successors” because that simply means the game borrows some key elements from the original, but contains most of the new elements. So if you are looking for Baldur’s Gate III only, you should just keep waiting because Dragon Age is its own game. The core of the game that isn’t based around character interactions and story progression is combat. And to be honest, the game does a great job of balancing the combat with the conversations, so I cannot call it an “action RPG”. There are a few parts of the game were the designers really let their inner egos go, and created dungeons which you will be exploring for what seems like forever. At some points it even became a grind for me to continue clearing room after room of spawning bad guys while adventuring through similar-looking caves and corridors for almost an hour. Sounds like heaven for some, but it did get brutally repetitive at a few sections and I really started to miss the other big part of the game – conversations and plot progression. So just be aware that a few sections will either have you thrilled to be killing yet another room of bad guys, or bored to tears because you haven’t seen a non-hostile NPC for such a long time. Dragon Age does try to keep the combat very engaging and fun though, with melee characters often performing brutal finishing moves on the enemy that approaches its death. The downside is that you will likely miss a lot of these cool takedowns because you will be too busy juggling the rest of your party and zoomed out a bit far to make out what just happened.

If there are any negative things I will say about the game, it is the extreme micromanagement. Not the usual RPG stuff – looting in the game works as well as any other and I enjoy finding new weapons and armor and selling the old – but the whole “Tactics” business. Once again, some people will surely love this feature because it basically lets you program your AI teammates to allow for some great combos during battle with little involvement from the player. For me, however, this feature was very tedious and frustrating at times. The Tactics feature allows you to setup all of your characters to perform any action available to them based on triggers. The list of tasks executes based on these conditions and also down the line – you start off with just a few Tactic slots, so you setup the basic “Nearest Enemy visible -> Attack” combo, along with “Self health <25% -> Drink health potion”. The frustrating thing about this system is that your characters are literally brain-dead during battles unless you manually order them around, or have perfected your Tactics decision tree. As a simple example, if you enter combat and only have one character selected, he will begin attacking as you asked while the rest of your party stands in place, getting chopped to bits by the incoming enemy group. That’s more than frustrating, to watch your party refuse to even acknowledge enemy presence unless manually setup to do so either in-battle or at the previously setup Tactics logic. If you select the whole party and tell them to attack, they will do just that – swing with the sword or throw the elementary firewall at the enemy until it is dead, only rarely entering their Tactics decision tree to actually perform some moves or spells. So the best way to play is to setup your Tactics tree and then stick with controlling only one character directly. The catch is that your Tactics tree is only limited to 3 or 4 slots at the beginning, so as you level up you will be able to add more actions based on the conditions a character is facing. This also means that you may need to keep re-arranging your Tactics tree when new skills become available, because the Tactics execute in a Top-to-bottom manner, so be sure to place your “Heal yourself if dying!” setting at the top and leave it for the rest of the game. Your character’s total inability to act on free will (Unless Tactics are setup) makes for some literally turn-based combat through some difficult parts of the game that action fans will likely find frustrating. As you have to keep pausing the game to assign your party new orders because their Tactics tree is too short to setup any effective attack combinations. All in all, the whole feature is extremely frustrating and seemingly useless for the majority of the first half of the game, were Tactics slots are too limited in number to be effective, leaving you with pause-and-go gameplay which simply breaks the combat flow.

Dragon Age: Origins
He's dead - no blood splatter analysis needed

On a general note, I found the combat to also be unbalanced in terms of difficulty. Early on, there are plenty of times you will die unless you choose to pause the game every couple of seconds and assign new tasks. However later in the game when the party has heaps of gold, loot, weapons and Tactic tree combinations, you will breeze through every dungeon on Medium difficulty all the way to the finale. Enemies do scale in difficulty but they are no match for your deadly weapons and attack combos. Another thing that I find annoying is the warriors – you are often fighting groups of baddies at a time and your tanks are in the heat of the battle – yet they poses so few area-of-effect damage attacks, that they become almost useless. While your one or two warriors are busy attacking a single target, your mages are tasked with continuously nuking the whole area and trying to keep the heat off of themselves. In other words, the mages are very overpowered and overused in the game, with the rare exceptions of fighting smaller groups or single enemy bosses.

The game is fairly open-ended, as mentioned earlier, except for a few set pieces where you have no choice to return and can only go forward – a great example of this is a battle earlier on in the game for which I simply was not prepared for and caused me much frustration. Sure, there was a confirmation needed that I was “really ready” to fight, but it was so above and beyond anything I’ve faced previously (wave after wave of enemies) that I spent a lot of time trying to get through it. The game does treat deaths fairly – if a character falls but your party eliminates the enemy that attacked, they will get back up and recover health over time. But in this particular instance the battle was on-going for a good 10 minutes so any deaths were non-recoverable until the very end. Given that, the game also lacks any kind of indication of what level the enemy is so it is hard to judge if you are behind the game’s intended character leveling curve. The only exception to this is enemies marked with yellow names, but those are usually mini-bosses anyway so they are expected to be difficult. The game’s quest journal also lacks any kind of direction, often leaving you to wander around actually trying to figure out where the location of your quest goal is.

Having been developed over many years, Dragon Age is running on an older engine that showcases some below average visuals, especially early on in the game. As you progress though, visuals improve as indicated by later years of the development process. The game is not very flashy or particularly great looking, but it doesn’t need to be. The voice acting is great, regardless of when it was originally recorded and things fit together nicely given the game’s huge lifecycle to the release date. This is great news for RPG fans though, who are not known for demanding the latest graphics or upgrading their PCs very often – Dragon Age is less of a demanding game then Mass Effect from my benchmarks, so even older video cards (Nvidia 7xxx series, ATI x1800 series) and processors (Core 2 Duo) will have no problem running the game. One of the big factors of the promotional visuals was the blood, and it does look great on your character’s armor but the downside are the very ugly pools of red texture that cover the floor after you kill a boss or a large monster. The sound of the game was discussed earlier, it is well composed and provides good atmosphere to the gameplay. Excellent character voice acting and well-written dialogue add to the composition values.

Dragon Age: Origins
Traps are bad, unless you want to cook some skeleton meat

Dragon Age: Origins is a great start for the series from BioWare. The game smoothly fits the setting and characters expected in the genre while bringing their own originality and outlook on things. The gameplay is rock solid for the most part, though its tough difficulty curve, combat balancing issues and useless friendly AI may bring much frustration to all but the more dedicated fans of RPGs. The world of the game is vast and I know that this review has barely scratched the surface of everything that you can do and see. Dragon Age is a good game that should be played for the story, characters and combat and should be on your holiday wish list this year if you have any interest at all in old-school Role Playing Games.

Our ratings for Dragon Age: Origins on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
Presentation
84
Excellent story and characters, but the game lacks a bit in visuals. The character menus are designed well and overall the interface is very friendly.
Gameplay
80
Classic dungeon crawling mixed in with interesting story and engaging atmosphere. Some gameplay elements may prove too frustrating or challenging for casual fans though.
Single Player
90
A broad and lengthy experience that will keep you busy for many hours. Some replayability thanks to "Origin" stories, but ultimately lacks the freedom of random content generation.
Multiplayer
NR
None
Performance
(Show PC Specs)
CPU: Intel Core i7 CPU 930 @ 2.80GHz
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X 1GB
RAM: 6GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
PC Specs

90
Due to an older engine the game will run well on a wide range of hardware configurations. No crashing issues encountered. A few bugged quests, but it's forgivable due to their sheer volume.
Overall
87
Dragon Age: Origins is a fun and engaging RPG experience that dedicated fans will love, but some newcomers may have troubles with. Decisively worth experiencing.
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#3 Jan 7, 2010 16:57:36 (Jan 7, 2010 16:57)

SpectralShock
How about Blizzard?
#2 Jan 7, 2010 14:02:30 (Jan 7, 2010 14:02)

DoomGiverIV
Honestly between Bioware and Bethesda why would anyone play a single player rpg by anyone else.
#1 Dec 5, 2009 11:14:20 (Dec 5, 2009 11:14)

sirdesmond
Great review.  I definetly agree that it could be hard for a lot of newcomers to this type of game to grasp. A lot of people, myself included, have been having a lot of trouble with combat, especially early on in the game because we are all so used to playing third-person action game's like Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, whatever.  Once you start playing it like Baldur's Gate, scrolled back and pausing a lot, it becomes a lot easier to grasp.
Dragon Age: Origins
Dragon Age: Origins box art Platform:
PC
Our Review of Dragon Age: Origins
87%
Great
The Verdict:
Game Ranking
Dragon Age: Origins is ranked #70 out of 1957 total reviewed games. It is ranked #8 out of 63 games reviewed in 2009.
70. Dragon Age: Origins
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Dragon Age: Origins
18 images added Dec 1, 2009 22:44
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