To awkwardly start with a summary, this is an enjoyable game that will take up hours of your time even if you don't go down every avenue that it allows you to explore. The reason for this caveat is to ensure you are not put off trying this game out because of the critical nature of this review. The thing that frustrates is that with a couple of simple tweaks this game could have been raised from good to incredible, so any of the criticisms below should be read as “if-onlys” rather than anything more damning.
Despite this game being marketed as a dark sword and sorcery epic full of lots of awkward moral decisions, it's not really. It is certainly epic, and the fantasy mainstays of elves, dwarves, and darkspawn (or orcs, by any other name) are knocking around, but the plot does not veer too wildly from most other Tolkien-inspired stories: “bad thing happening where hordes of orcs, sorry darkspawn are rising up and causing mischief”? Yes. “Dwarves like tunnels and caves”? Yes again. “Elves are keen on woods and like shooting bows and arrows”? Unsurprisingly yes. After choosing a combination of race, sex, and flavour (fighter, rogue, or wizard) you find yourself recruited into the Grey Wardens whose job it is to rid the world of evil with a group of companions... and so on.
In spite of Bioware being unafraid of using recognisable fantasy archetypes, there is enough meat in the story and the world history that makes the playing experience a little richer. Having such a depth of background is a good thing, but where this dramatically falls down is through the medium of text. The game’s 'Codex' (where all this information is kept) displays everything as text, and can be hard to read, especially on CRT screens. This sort of thing is fine when it comes to subtitles or the occasional snippet of text, but reams of fuzzy text describing some legend or other that may prove invaluable to how to approach a given part of the game is off-putting, which in turn loses the game a bit on the user-friendly score. Who cares what the “god X” did when “Y” happened? All I now care about is whether the monsters in front of my party are likely to beat me senseless.
Conflict is a mix of action-oriented play and strategy. On encountering a group of bad guys, your party members respond to direct commands regarding where to move, who to attack and how, by either preconfiguring their behaviour in a strategy screen e.g. ‘use this power when first encountering the enemy’ or alternatively by toggling the party member you have direct control over. This is an excellent addition as this gives you the opportunity of battling as different types of characters (rough and tumble fighter, sneaky rogue, or magician) rather than being limited to your lead character decision at the beginning of the game.
Your companions also receive skill bonuses depending on how much they like you. This is determined by a sliding scale where the more you make dialogue choices they agree with, the more their appreciation of your character slides in your favour, and vice-versa. You may also curry their favour by supplying them with gifts. This can be jarring if, for example, you lose some buddy-points with a virtuous party member due to performing a cruel action. Should you be able to effectively buy them off by giving them some gold? Perhaps this more of an indication of how easily swayed your party members are rather than of a broken friend mechanic.
In-game conversations are implemented well enough with one glaring omission; your character’s voice. Conversation in this game has taken a step backward from the elegance of Mass Effect, where conversation choices were made from a dialogue wheel containing brief labels describing the type of inquiry. For example “Where?” as opposed to “Hmm, that is interesting. Please tell me how to get there.” At this point your character would be the one to do the actual talking. Hearing both sides of the conversation makes enquiries sound a little more natural and makes your own character stand out in their own right rather than be another stereotypically silent player avatar. With Dragon Age, we get the tried and tested bit of speech, then choose a response. The “bit of speech” mechanic that has been around for years may perfectly fine, but as Bioware have already delivered a more elegant alternative, why go back?
Another reason this seems inappropriate is the character creation step at the beginning of the game where you choose the type of voice your character will have in the game. This voice is only heard during snippets of in combat dialogue like “Argh! I'm hit!”. It takes a while to figure out that the occasional voice that pipes up during combat is your own. It’s strange to be so talkative while fighting enemies, but not so during conversation…
...And for a final flurry of whining complaints; the game looks good enough but not great, there are only ten save game slots, combat can be glitchy (being stuck behind an unopened door during combat is no fun when the only reason you can’t open the door is because you're in “combat mode”), the lack of multiplayer co-op, and you don't have anywhere to dump your ill-gotten gains for a future occasion without either selling it to someone and buying it back later, or simply destroying it. Finding a neat piece of armour you may only use when you reach your next level means carrying around the blasted thing everywhere you go until you level up.
As noted at the beginning of this review the negatives are picky. The plot is interesting and twisty enough to draw you in, and the action parts are enjoyable in that every success (or resolution) in the game feels well won (or deserved). Dragon Age: Origins is a fun way to divert many hours of your time, but disappointingly fails to keep pace with games that have gone before it.
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