InsaneBear

Review: Dragon Age: Origins (Xbox 360)

Score: Superb
Time to beat: Approximately 65 hours while completing almost all side-quests
Loved the most: Exclusion of morality meter allowed me to actually role-play.
Hated the most: The interface is too clunky and many game-play elements seem out of date.

With titles like Baldur’s Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, and Mass Effect, a certain degree of quality has come to be expected of BioWare games. Dragon Age: Origins is the latest RPG to follow the formula of morally-conscious, character-driven epics, and for the most part, it does the BioWare pedigree justice. While the game doesn’t really push any mechanical boundaries and needlessly suffers from poor interface design and technical issues, the engrossing world of Ferelden is full of strikingly relevant scenarios and a bevy of characters you’ll come to love. It all adds up to a memorable role-playing experience that leaves you wanting more.

The way your journey begins is actually a first for video games, as far as I know. Depending on the race, class, and social standing you select while building your character, the first few hours of your story will play out in six very different ways. These unique intros are called “Origin Stories” and have a very profound effect on how you’ll perceive the world around you and the actions you’ll be inclined to take later on in the game. In the case of my exiled Dwarven Noble, my return to Orzammar (the underground Dwarven Kingdom) saw me hell-bent on sabotaging a particular royal heir in favor of a candidate outside the royal family. I wondered to myself why anyone would support the proper heir in his bid for the throne before realizing that this story was only personal to me. Had I been some foreign Mage traveling to Orzammar, I might have supported the blood-heir gladly. It’s also interesting to play through multiple Origin Stories and see how seemingly irrelevant characters in one origin play major roles in another.

Regardless of your character’s beginnings, you’ll be swept into a monumental battle against the evil Darkspawn soon enough. It is here that your character is inducted into the fabled Grey Wardens, nationless men and women from every caste who swear to defend the land from Darkspawn at all costs. One terrible defeat later, and your perilous quest to gather ancient allies and unite Ferelden against an unstoppable force is set into motion. If this story sounds very Lord of the Rings so far, that’s because it is. But that grandiose scale is a good thing that gives your objectives a sense of importance.

What’s not a good thing however, are the rather un-Lord of the Rings-ish production values. Where as Peter Jackson’s motion-picture classics built a believable and entertaining world through visually stunning sets and costumes, Dragon Age suffers from undeniably bland art-direction and graphics. RPGs of the past couple years look noticeably better and run smoother as well. Nor do they endure the excessive loading times of BioWare’s latest. Character models and animations are a stark step back from Mass Effect, and while the core-quests feature a nice variety of environments at first glance, extended time in any one place reveals far too much repeated geometry and identical character models.

Another aspect of Mass Effect that out-shines its newest BioWare sibling is the inclusion of a fully-voiced protagonist. Shephard’s voice gives him a real personality that’s contributed to his iconic status, while your Grey Warden in Dragon Age feels stuck in the last generation. It’s a minor inconvenience that is soon forgotten, but one that’s quite jarring at first and probably robs the game of an extra layer of immersion.

Otherwise, the voice acting is generally good, if not great. Most NPCs read their lines adequately and your recruitable party-members tend to speak with an endearing conviction that actually makes you consider their feelings. And it certainly helps that the writing is so routinely funny and touching with the exception of some occasional artificiality. My only gripes with the voice acting (besides the lack of a fully-voiced protagonist) are some infrequent, yet really annoying glitches. It just breaks the immersion when you’re in the middle of a major plot-conversation and the person you’re talking to starts moving their lips with no words coming out. It happened to me a few times, so I’d suggest playing with sub-titles on. There are some minor lip-synching issues as well.

As for the rest of the audio design, the clash of steel on steel sounds just as it should, magical effects have an appropriately booming quality to them, and the sound of tearing flesh that proceeds gory spurts of blood is immensely satisfying. The score enhances the action just as well, with symphonies that always seem to fit the situation. The audio in this game easily defeats the feeble and out-dated visuals, like a mighty warrior beheading an ancient dragon.

When it comes to the gameplay in Dragon Age, things are a bit uneven. On the one hand, a constant flow of useful loot makes exploring every inch of an area and slaying every last foe irresistible. The variety of enemies is nearly as vast as the number of ways you can outfit and upgrade your party, and the bosses can be punishingly difficult, but always manageable and extremely rewarding given you properly adjust your tactics. Plus, a wagon-load of different side-quests ensures that you’ll always have something to do and that you’re always progressing.

But the actual combat feels like it was ripped straight out of D&D with no real regard for the strengths and weaknesses of the video game medium. Perhaps the grander control-scheme offered by the PC negates some of my issues with this, but on the Xbox 360, I couldn’t help but think how sloppy fighting feels in comparison to recent RPGs like Fable II. I suppose the game’s multi-tiered radial menus do as good a job as they can in managing a character’s skills, talents, and special abilities, but it really just feels like too much is going on at once. You’ll undoubtedly get used to the complex system after a while, but it just isn’t intuitive.

What’s even less intuitive is trying to manage your comrades in combat. Forget about real-time coordination like in Mass Effect because that would require constantly taking control of individual party members, issuing commands through a series of radial menus (assuming you’ve memorized all their talents etc), and trying to maintain a coherent picture of the battlefield as you juggle four different characters, all the while leaving your personal character at the mercy of the AI. Instead, Dragon Age offers a special “Tactics” section for each party member that you can calibrate before battles. This section gives each character a specific number of action slots depending on their stats where you can essentially program what you want said character to do in a given situation. And when I say program, I mean it. It’s pretty much all “If/And” statements. I thought I was supposed to be playing the game.

What’s worse is that the menus involved with the tactics menu are bad. Unless you’ve memorized all of your party members dozens of abilities, you’re forced to constantly switch between different tabs in search of information before you finalize your tactics. There are a few pre-set tactics options, but they don’t seem to adapt to the greater abilities a character gains through leveling up, leaving custom tactics as your only option if you wish to utilize a character’s full potential. Confused yet?

Yet another interface faux pas is the inexplicable nature of skill use. For example, I couldn’t figure out how to use my herbalism skill until many, many hours had passed. Instead of allowing me to simply access the potion creating menu by selecting the herbs in my inventory, the game hides the skill in one of the character’s combat radial menus. Considering my main character didn’t possess the skill and I was trying to use a party member for the potion mixing, it was some time before I discovered this secret. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so lost had I read the dozens of tutorial codexes hidden in yet another menu, but I’m just crazy enough to assume that a game should convey any important information through in-game tutorials rather than digital pamphlets.

Luckily, all of these interface issues are things that you get used to. Once you’ve devised your own little ritual for properly outfitting your party members in the best equipment and organizing their tactics in a helpful manner, you’ll finally be able to appreciate the superb mission-design. The side-quests aren’t quite as deep as the main ones, but they’re certainly fun to pursue and have some interesting fiction behind them if you’re willing to read. What really shines are the core-quests though. Not only do the narratives deftly deal with relevant social issues like religion, racism, slavery, politics, and so on, the actual objective structure comes together to make for some truly memorable journeys. One quest in particular, through a masterful mix of dialogue, puzzles, combat, and the most beautiful stream of permanent attribute upgrades you’ve ever seen, stands out as a stroke of true genius. The final quest is almost as innovative and even more intense.

Now even though I’ve thoroughly bashed a lot of Dragon Age‘s core gameplay, and rightfully so, I can’t tell you how much fun I had with this game. The fun comes from the deep and mature world BioWare has created, with an epic story full of despisable villains, scandalous plot-twists, and a totally satisfying conclusion. Most importantly, your actions throughout the game radically affect the conclusion’s outcome and make your story feel unique. The characters you encounter along the way are interesting and multi-dimensional people who make something as under-appreciated as background party-chatter a joy to listen to. The petty and judgmental morality meter found in so many other WRPGs is replaced by a system of individual party-member approval that makes actual role-playing a much more realistic possibility for those of us who are swayed by meter-specific achievements or powers. Overall, the story, characters, and world BioWare has created in this game are so deep that the mechanical short-comings are easy to over-look.

The total package is a very lengthy one that stays fun throughout, making it worth every penny you paid (although the $40 I got it for made it extra sweet). I sought out as many side-quests as I could and ended with around 65 hours of play-time, so I’d estimate that the main story-line alone probably clocks in around 25-30 hours. And that’s only one play-through. The six different origin stories make this a game with a ton of value that you won’t regret buying. That’s not to mention what looks to be a steady flow of DLC that will hopefully answer some of the questions left by an ending that wraps things up in the perfect way, by resolving enough disputes to feel satisfying while leaving enough loose-ends to make you want more.

Dragon Age: Origins is an incredibly deep game that’s fun to play because of its fantastic sense of progression and a memorable story inhabited by charismatic characters. The moral situations are still a little too black and white to constitute an evolution of story-telling in video games, and BioWare still insists on including poorly executed romances, but the whole of the experience is simply engrossing. If you can look past some technical short-comings and out-of-date combat mechanics, you’ll be treated to a deep and engaging RPG that encourages real role-playing and introduces a great new concept with “Origin Stories.”

Author: Cody

Tags: bioware, dragon age: origins, ea, review