Simple, but Solid, Origins – Dragon Age: Origins Review

“Dragon Age: Origins” is a good game, but it is overhyped at the time of my writing this.

Mind you that I jumped from Icewind Dale 2 to Dragon Age: Origins. the game is made in the spirit of the Infinity Engine games of old, and it at least carries on that tradition superbly.

Like in Baldur’s Gate 2, an array of colorful characters join the party. Colorful, but not all enthusing. I am a bit biased, and I am certain everybody has their own favorites. I greatly disliked about half of the cast which can join the party. I don’t mean that they lacked depth, but I suspect some characters are universally unpopular with players because of their personalities. To the contrary, even the characters I dislike have interesting backstories. Their tales are interesting, if not the people themselves. Thus I can’t bring myself to be too harsh on the companions overall. Beside, every companion has dialogue with almost every other companion, and often many dialogues. It’s practically impossible to see all the dialogue on a single playthrough, which can make subsequent playthroughs more interesting.

With a little imagination, it is easy to predict how the game turns out if the player makes different choices. The main body of the quests remain the same and little gets unlocked for subsequent playthroughs. Some things change based on which origin story was used, but these are minor differences. Playing the game differently can result in an accumulation of minor differences, but they won’t add up to anything significant if the player is looking for a completely different story. In many cases, the differences are just different plugs for the same slots. I cannot imagine the game’s alternate material being so exciting that it deserves a second playthrough; the most exciting events are basically the same.

Speaking of which, the enemies are uninspired. Most opponents are either generic soldiers and mages, humdrum forest animals, or goblin and ogre rip-offs. Even the game’s supposedly most fascinating enemies, the dragons, all look the same and appear to be ripped-off from the a certain chaos dragon of Warhammer Fantasy lore. Expect to fight the exact same handful of enemy types throughout the entire game; it is almost as bad as Ar Tonelico.

At least they are pretty rip-offs, played against some beautiful, if not creative, backdrops. The game is set in a Late Medieval Fantasy world, played to the hilt. People aren’t pretty: most people have bad teeth. The monsters are hideous. Most things are neither shiny nor clean. A hereditary system of human nobility oppresses a race of elves. Also, blood. Lots of it. If you don’t like blood, stay away from this game or turn off the gore. No knights in shining armor and riding white horses present here. It’s a depressing world. And most people look the same (seriously, many of the character models are too similar to each other.

The fantasy races, the elves and the dwarves, aren’t very different from their stereotypical counterparts in other settings. The dwarves are fine, stout craftsmen; most of the men are bearded, they venerate their ancestors, and live deep in the earth, mining. The forest elves, called the Dalish, are xenophobic, but I will grant the setting this: it makes more sense in a setting where the elves have been oppressed by the local dominant race. They’re the classic woodsy elves, but they are trying to rebuild a forgotten culture that was destroyed by humans. The city elves are different, but only in that they don’t have a real identity: they are just oppressed people with no better definition than that. I’ll give DA a couple points for not having a classic dwarf/elf warfare, but subtract another for the classic race apportionment: humans have the most land and people; dwarves and elves have relatively few people and little land, and the dwarves in particular are on the decline.

I really like the music. The battle music never feels intrusive; a considerable improvement over the Infinity Engine games, where the environment music seemed better for battle than the battle music. I can’t call any tracks to mind, but there isn’t anything wrong with a game where you can’t remember the music; better to not recall it than to recall it as being poor.

Combat is sort of fun. Something is missing. It was challenging. I died plenty of times. But I didn’t really enjoy the battles; often times, I didn’t try terribly hard and I didn’t really want to fight. The problem is diversity. I mentioned before that most of the enemies are the same. I didn’t really notice a difference in enemy tactics for most of the game. Nothing was so exciting that I ever took control of my other party members (which would have made battles significantly easier). I wanted diversity. I wanted every battle to be something creative. A few battles actually are creative, involving games of dodging, or careful movement, or some other quirk. I wanted more of those. I think we have advanced AI, graphics, and scripting enough that games like this can afford to make most battles very different from each other. Really, the game could have just cu tout most of its battles and left us with the boss fights. The lack of combat creativity is what really bothers me in a game in the Infinity Engine tradition. The IE games were heading in a direction of increasing complexity in battles, or so I thought, but I did not see that followed through in DA. Disappointing.

I can at least give the designers credit for the combat system. The three classes; warrior, mage, rogue; get a variety of cool abilities. Mages are probably the best of the three, but warriors and rogues can do more than just swing a sword and stab with a dagger. They are still geared toward combat, but they have a lot of options in combat, including various stances and interesting martial techniques. Because techniques and spells are bought in trees, characters won’t run out of abilities to pick by end game. If there is some replayability in the game, it’s in how players can build their parties. By the way, there isn’t much difference between characters based on their race, or even between party members of the same class. Party members have their own inclinations, and some things are preset, but different characters of the same class can be built the same way, so party members are relatively interchangeable.

The story isn’t very complex. Players expecting complex political drama will get some of that, but it boils down to “Monsters are invading and only you can unite a kingdom against the threat.” Some of the individual scenarios are really interesting, and the personas dramatica are often entertaining and rarely head-scratching, but as I suggested above, the game plays out basically the same from start to finish. Some people laud DA for the complex moral decisions, but I didn’t find many. Oh, there are decision points, but there is usually one right answer: even though I was playing a selfishly evil character, most of my decisions were the same that a good and noble character would make. Often, things I said out of selfishness did not have an actual effect: saying, “I expect to be paid for this” would elicit a “Oh, yes, you’ll be paid” – it just turns out the same way. Worse, in at least one situation, I tried to be quite evil, hoping for a really dark twist in a certain area, but nothing came of it. I wasn’t allowed to pursue the path I wanted. At certain points, if the player is using meta-thinking, dark paths can be pursued. They don’t change much about the game, and they would be out of character to choose no matter what archetype the player chooses, so they feel awkwardly placed. I won’t deny that a couple situations made me sit back and think for a while, but ironically those situations did not have much impact on the outcome of the game, or the game hand-waved the consequences.

If you play Dragon Age, play it for the story and the atmosphere. It’s a cool setting, and the designers put some thought into it. Enough choices are presented that any two given players will probably have significantly different experiences, and the game’s cinematics and pacing are impressive. Combat is smooth and battles can be tough unless players are being attentive. Just don’t expect a second playthrough to feel significantly different; things can change, but the core game remains the same, and some stretches are particularly boring. Beside that, the combat situations themselves are usually not very clever and most enemies look and fight the same. Dragon Age: Origins isn’t a complex or highly innovative game, but its quick-paced storyline and interesting characters, backed by a solid game mechanic, are enough to please most gamers.

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~ by The Sword Emperor on December 28, 2010.