Dragon Age Origins

One of the key innovations of DAO is the way characters are introduced to the game world through race/class dependent sub-stories (origins).  Having played through the Circle Tower, Alienage, and Dalish origins, I'd say these are reasonably well done and a nice concept. The Alienage origin is particularly compelling, so much so, that by the time I reached Ostagar I found myself hating humanity. These feelings passed too quickly though, as the game doesn’t provide sufficient fuel to maintain the fire of that outrage.

 

The central plot-line is only fair, with everything laid out right from the start and without significant twists; by the time your character leaves Ostagar you know pretty much how the entire game is going to play out: you are going to go to four different groups to collect allies, confront the usurper, confront the Darkspawn horde, and then take your hard-earned bow. That’s pretty much the storyboard and the game sticks to it like a [insert clever metaphore here]. The few minor plot twists that do come up are so ham-fistedly foreshadowed that they won’t surprise even the most obtuse players. While I try to avoid giving away spoilers in a review, the only spoiler I have to give is that in Dragon Age there are no significant spoilers.

 

As this is an FRPG, each potential ally requires aid before joining your cause.  Apparently Murphy manages in the Maker’s absence, as each of these groups find themselves on the brink of total collapse. It all seems a bit over-done and predictable. In a Darwinian sense you can’t help but wonder if Fereldin doesn’t need a good purging, and as such, if the Darkspawn aren’t the real protagonsists of this poorly wrought tale. 

 

While the story-board is somewhat predictable and over-played, the more fine-grained components of story-telling are handled extremely well. The dialog feels less contrived than in any RPG I’ve played to date. Key NPCs have rich and believable personalities. The romantic sub-plots are excellent, and not as rigid as previous forays into this area (I suspect partly by accident and partly by design.) The interactions between party members are frequently brilliant, while not as troublesome as I recall them being in BG (an improvement on the concept.) The voice acting also falls into the category of “best ever.” Truly exceptional. 

 

In most cases, the main character’s dialog options are both diverse and natural. There were only a few occasions that I yelled at my monitor “my character wouldn’t say any of those things!” which for me is an improvement over most other games in the genre. 

 

Graphics

The graphics are good, but not exceptional.  They’re a bit better than good enough to not detract from the game, which is more than enough for me. The finishing move sequences are entertaining, except when longer sequences trigger during an on-going fight (ie times when a character could be doing something more useful than making pretty weapon flourishes.) 

 

The main graphical irritation I found was the blood splattering, which makes any character that has been in even a brief melee look like they just finished an all-day, no-holds-barred paint-ball war. I suspect this effect was meant to be “gritty” but starts out as “comical” and then quickly moves on to “annoying.” 

 

Then there are Morrigan’s eyebrows, and the horrifying lack of oral hygiene across Ferelden…eh, but what the hell.

 

Another innovation of DAO is the ability to customize character "tactics."  Here again, the concept is good, but the implementation falls flat, and you're left wondering if this wasn't just an easy way to avoid a difficult part of the game's development. 

 

My first foray into setting up DAO tactics was to set one of my characters to “use” an acid grenade on any cluster of three or more enemies. The action properly fired when I encountered the next large group, resulting in the character suicidally setting off an acid bomb in the middle of my party.  Not a very good tactic...and there seems to be no way to instruct a character to use an item on the “enemy cluster” instead of on himself. Even if that worked, there’s no way to differentiate between a cluster far away and a cluster up close, so I suppose the basic idea just won't work...which raises the question, in what situation did developers intend for characters to use an acid grendade as part of a tactic?

 

For the most part you can use tactics to drink a potion when they're almost dead, and then fire simple talents under simple conditions.  There are no 'and's or 'or's here. There’s no ability to differentiate between the condition object and the action target. The system is simply too primitive to work well and there are far too few slots available. You therefore wind up micromanaging your way through an asynchronous pause-fest. Again, it’s a great concept, but given the current implementation I prefer even an out-dated turn-based approach.

 

 

The basic mechanics are a conceptual improvement over the D20/D&D model, but being an entirely new system, aren't quite balanced or refined yet. The lack of a distinction between armor and defense has always stood out to me as a fundamental flaw in most game mechanics, so I'm glad to see Bioware address that reasonably. 

 

Magic is way over-powered in the game; a hand-full of over-powered (and far too often insta-cast) spells dominate the field. Rogues and warriors often feel like little more than attractive accessories for spell-casters. Ranged combat needs some tweaking as well; while it’s far from useless, it’s also not really a viable focus area. The cunning combat path for Rogues has some crippling deficiencies that need resolution.  

 

These severe balance problems are compounded by a design decision to make the mechanics (mostly) invisible.  While this is a great role-playing concept, it leaves only trial and error to navigate character development and equipment selection. As successful character development is such a key ingredient to RPGs, the overall result is a bit of an under-recognized disaster. 

 

Once you realize that the keys to success are a) having as much magic as you can fit into your party and b) picking the particular spells that are most effective, large sections of the game become trivially easy. Until then, the game can be frustratingly difficult, far more difficult than BGII was under any party configuration.

 

In terms of volume of content, at least, Dragon Age does not disappoint. My own game came in at over 100 hours, and while most players probably won’t go quite as OCD on inventory management and following up every possible side-quest, reports of play times in the 60-80 hour range are common. Given the trend toward less game content, this one is refreshingly content heavy.  Still, much of this content feels repetitious, an effect that is compounded by a lack of variation in tempo and plot. 

 

The content of the game also needs much more balancing; money is too tight early in the game, items are a bit too focused toward traditional warriors. The illusion of a semi-open world is tempered by the reality of a difficulty curve (eg going to Orzammar immediately after Ostagar is as reasonable a choice as any, but likely to result in a frustrating experience.)

 

Unfortunately, Dragon Age Origins does not live up to the Baldur’s Gate high-water mark of ground-breaking, epic high-fantasy, but it comes fairly close in some respects.  In the end, it probably comes closer to hitting the mark than any FRPG since, and that’s something that the folks at Bioware can be proud of. For all my criticisms, I actually enjoyed the game most of the time, and even enjoyed being annoyed by it.  If you are a fan of this genre, you won't want to miss out on Dragon Age.

 

Perhaps some projects need the refinement of a second iteration. While currently a glaring weak point, I’m hopeful that the new game mechanics can mature into something far better than anything we’ve seen to date. As for the weakness in the overall plot, well frankly, this is an area I would never have expected Bioware to fall down, and we can only hope this was a one-off failure (and that the perpetrator(s) are summarily executed.) I'd say that there's a decent chance, with itterative improvement, the Dragon Age series might even come to surpass Baldur's Gate in the annals of FRPG history.  Here's hoping, anyway.