Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

At this point I’ve spent over 100 hours in the world of Fereldin.  I’ve saved Elves, I’ve killed Darkspawn, I’ve taken down dragons, and I’ve saved the world.   If you want an epic fantasy roleplaying game, all of the elements are here.  An exiled protagonist, dark sorcery, epic boss battles with evil fiends, and an epic and expansive story to tie it all together.  After what seems like an eternity waiting for it, I've finally gotten my opportunity to review Dragon Age: Origins, and I'm going to do it as spoiler free as possible.

Tackling Dragon Age: Origins is a bit of a daunting task.   Just like reviewing other large RPGs, it's essential that you fully explore the balance of the game, as well as the various classes and characters available to the player.   In the interest of time, I can't say that I've explored every square inch of Fereldin, but I'm about to tell you why you should.  As with all of my reviews, I will do my level best to remain as spoiler free as possible while still granting the reader the necessary information to see if this title is truly right for them.

The game title is Dragon Age: Origins, and to that end there are actually six Origin stories available from the very start.    You’ll select between male or female, human, elf, or dwarf, and then warrior, mage, or rogue.   Based on your selection, you can also choose backgrounds for your character.  For instance, if you make a human warrior, they will be a noble.  If you make an Elven warrior, they can be Dalish or a city elf.  Additionally, a dwarf can be a commoner or a noble.   These six choices make up the origins for your character, but it isn't something cosmetic - it'll affect a great many aspects of the entirety of the game.  Since Elves were once slaves and are considered less than equal by a great many folks, you'll face racism and stereotyping throughout your adventure if take that path.  Playing a woman will have you encountering sexism from folks who think their saviors can only take the form of a man.  There are over 800,000 spoken lines of dialog in the game, and I have no doubt that these six origins are the source of that number.  

Once you’ve decided on your sex, race, class, and background you’ll get to the character customization.  To illustrate the depth of this game, you’ll be able to modify your characters complexion, tone, tattoos, hair, eyes, nose, mouth, jawline, neck, voice, and far more.  Once you spend the requisite obscene amount of time making your character, you can spend five attribute points on either strength, dexterity, willpower (determination and mental fortitude), magic (natural affinity for the arcane), cunning (learning and reasoning abilities) and constitution (determines health and resilience). There are no ‘throwaway’ stats as each skill grants different things for different classes.  Willpower grants more stamina for combat techniques and special attacks, magic can help you craft potions, dexterity can help archery accuracy but can also help with dodging incoming projectiles and traps.  Even a mage needs to sidestep an acid bath trap every once in a while.   With your character choices finally carved in stone, let's take a look at the storyline of Origins.

In a nutshell, the land of Fereldin is besieged periodically by creatures called Darkspawn.  When led by an Archdemon, they will band together and form a Blight that will spill out from the Dwarven kingdom of Orzamarr and out onto the land surface.   From there they will consume every man, woman, child, and city of the world unless they are stopped.   The only chance for salvation are a group called Grey Wardens who make incredible personal sacrifices to imbue themselves with great powers that enable them to stop the Blight.  Regardless of the origin story you select, you'll obviously become a Grey Warden, but you cannot complete this daunting task alone.   Using the right of conscription and ancient treaties, you'll travel to the various lands of Elves, Dwarves, and Humans to build an army of nations to prevent ultimate destruction.  This journey is the bulk of your adventure in Dragon Age: Origins. 

The storyline is somewhat simple on the surface, but it couldn't be any further from the truth.  Embarking on one mission will have you going to another city to gather a needed component which will push you into helping other folks to curry their favor, and soon enough you are 15 hours into the game and still haven't completed the initial task you set out to do in the first place!   The plot threads are many and they spread far and wide, leading your band in a criss-cross path across, under, and beyond the land of Fereldin.  Just when you think you've got a handle on the storyline, some massive event happens to shake things up.  True to Bioware form, there are also romance options in the game, as well as a deep conversation system that allow you to truly care for your travelling companions in a way not seen in many RPGs to date.  The world of Fereldin is populated with real people with real problems - very few characters in the game felt throwaway or shallow - an impressive feat supported greatly by some fantastic voice work from celebrities and voice actors and actresses alike. 

The game will give you a great many opportunities to recruit several characters into your party, but even characters you don't treat particularly well can be plied with gifts, so you'll have to do something pretty drastic to make them leave.  Near the end-game you'll be faced with much harder decisions that can actually rub characters so far the wrong way that they may even try to kill you.  By 40 hours you'll become attached to these characters and their personality, making some of the decisions agonizing.  Very few companies can write dialog this well, but Bioware easily writes the book on it. 

The voice work isn't the only high point in the audio department - Inon Zur turns in an incredible performance once again, with Vocalist Aubrey Ashburn adding her incredible vocals to the mix.  I have to tip my hat to Simon Pressey, Audio Director for Dragon Age: Origins - he and his audio team have done an incredible job across all platforms to bring this world to life.  I purchased the Collector's Edition of Dragon Age: Origins and was happy to see that the soundtrack was included.    I did run into a few points on both platforms where the audio repeated, was incorrect to the scene, or didn't play at all.  This was repeatable, so I suspect we'll see a patch to resolve it soon.

Many of you own a PS3, Xbox 360, and PC, so this review is going to cover the Xbox 360 and the PC and the differences between them.   We’ll start off with a look at the combat on the PC.   The PC platform has advantages including a mouse, keyboard, more powerful processors, RAM, and high powered graphic cards.   The sum of the equation is a more tactical and easily controlled experience.  The interface is somewhat like World of Warcraft, which is a fairly defacto standard at this point.  Your spells, skills, and other shortcuts are grounded to the bottom of the screen, with players able to drag anything you wish to it such as health poultices or special weapon-enhancing salves.  Your journal entries are organized by number so you can see which you’ve found and how many you have yet to find.  A combined inventory system that can be sorted by type keeps your gear, gifts, and goodies all packed for use.  You can use a point and click interface to control your character movement, or you can do the same thing with the WASDEQ keys to move and flank.  Similarly, you can click the items in the toolbar, or use the number keys to fire off spells and skills.  At any point you can take control of any of your characters directly, giving the other characters over to the AI to control.  It is a system instantly familiar to anyone who has played an RPG in the past year or so, and it works perfectly.   The camera can be moved to a close third-person perspective, or zoomed to a top view similar to that of Neverwinter Nights.  This allows you to use the closer view to enjoy the world up close, while zooming out to a more tactical or strategic view for large area of effect spells like Fireball and Sleep.  Pause and play commands like Knights of the Old Republic combined with a dash of Baldur’s Gate makes for a simply perfect control scheme.  Executing complex combat scenarios like unleashing two rogues from stealth position while tossing a fireball into a crowd of Darkspawn while an archer unleashes pinning shots to hold enemies in place is simply effortless to execute.  The only complaint I actually have with the controls is that the camera still occasionally fights with you, leaving you with no clear way to unleash your arsenal safely.  This mostly manifests indoors, so the issue is exacerbated in the Deep Roads scenarios which all take place underground.

The console controls for Dragon Age: Origins have been, in the words of Dr. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, “slickified”. Built from the ground up to work in the best fashion for the platform, the controls have been simplified a bit to ensure that the controls don’t become so complicated that the game ceases to be fun.  Some titles have tried to use mouse movement via the control sticks, but most, if not all, have met with disaster.  In this case, rather than the deluge of skills and spells accessible via the toolbar, they are accessible via the face buttons of the controller.  Mapping up to 8 skills to the face buttons using the trigger as a toggle, you can approximate the experience of the PC version, albeit simplified.  The camera on the other hand is completely locked to the third person view.  You can roll the camera around in a 360 degree arc, but it is kept close to the action.  You lose the tactical view, but the framerate is kept consistent.  This system is probably closer to what you might remember from Mass Effect.   Nowhere is this more true than the radial menu  system.  The radial menu allows you access to everything that you haven’t mapped to the face buttons, but in real time.  Quick-use health poultices are automatically mapped to the first ring of the radial system, but everything else is subcategorized for ease of use.  The learning curve isn’t very steep with most players easily grasping the system within the course of two hours.  The scenario I mentioned above isn’t impossible on the console versions of the game, it just requires a bit more use of the radial menus and the tactic system.  With the console version of the game, it seems that sometimes the controls are interpreted more as suggestion than an order, leaving your characters to die instead of taking the health poultice that you’ve ordered them to quaff.  Similarly, the tactical system occasionally becomes somewhat unresponsive, causing your characters to do precisely the opposite of what you’d like them to do rather than what you’ve scripted them to do.  This is especially bad when your mage charges headlong into a throng of enemy troops to drop a fireball at their own feet, rather than lobbing it safely at the enemy.  As far as the GUI goes, the portraits for your characters are set a few inches into your view, rather than being grounded to the left side of the screen.  I’m sure this was done to accommodate a 4:3 aspect ratio, but honestly how hard could it be to make that something you can toggle, or better yet, something automatic?

Graphically on the PC, Dragon Age: Origins swings from 'just ok' in some spots to truly fantastic in others.  Earlier areas like the Kokari Wilds are somewhat lackluster, visually reminding me of World of Warcraft, and not in a good way.  That said, other places like the Mage Tower are rich with detail in all directions.  You'll spend a great deal of time in various towns so you'll begin to notice a bit of texture repetition, but it isn't overly distracting.  On the Xbox 360, the game makes that graphical swing a little bit more pronounced.  The detail level is similar to what the PC version looks like on Medium settings, occasionally showing your shiny new armor as some sort of painted-on skin instead of something made of steel.  There is also some mipmapping and pop-in that isn't present on the PC version thanks to a much closer view distance on the console.  Close-ups on characters is also somewhat hampered by some occasionally bland textures.  The good news is that this texture downgrade is paid to ensure a rock-solid framerate and realistic load times.  

Now we come to the most important part of any game - how does it play?  In this instance, I find that the differences between the two come down to the differences in mechanics.   With the PC being a more tactical experience with a more flexible camera I felt more comfortable selecting more spells, specialty attacks, and active skills.   On the console, with a limit of only 8 quick-slots I found myself selecting more passive skills for my team, improving their overall performance instead of gaining specialty attacks and area of effect spells.  This changes the gameplay significantly as the PC version is then played more like Knights of the Old Republic with its pause-and-go gameplay.  The console version played far more like Mass Effect, leaving your party to execute their attacks based on the game AI in real-time, pausing to issue occasional special attacks or to take direct control of a character to help flank or otherwise engage the enemy tactically. I'm not saying it's impossible to run Dragon Age: Origins on the console in the same tactical fashion as it is on the PC, but I'm saying that it is difficult to the point where the rewards are too few.  The occasional AI issue does hamper gameplay, especially in the aforementioned "Mage thinks he's a tank" scenario, but it behaves fairly well for the most part on both platforms.  Certain characters will come with a many tactic slots open, giving you a great deal of flexibility in their intelligence, while others may need to spend the points to gain those slots.  The AI is much like anything else worth doing - the effort is proportionate to the reward.  
Dragon Age: Origins has had a long history, and it has finally culminated in a product worthy of an RPG of the Year nomination.  Compelling epic storylines, characters so rich you can become emotionally invested in them, and a great combat engine that works on multiple platforms - Dragon Age: Origins has what it takes to take the RPG genre to the next level.  While it is fairly safe fantasy setting, there are enough twists and turns in the story that you won't mind the familiarity.  Is it a worthy successor to the house that Baldur's Gate or NeverWinter Nights built?  Absolutely!  If you are a fan of RPGs, they don't get much better than this.

Gaming Trend Score

90

1. Graphics: 85
2. Audio: 95
3. Controls: 85
4. Gameplay: 88
5. Value/Replay: 97
6. OVERALL:90