Paying Tribute to Dragon Age: Origins

Mike Rohde Says when I completed the Human Noble story line, and took my Rogue, Mage and ever-faithful Mabari war hound to battle the mighty Arch Demon, I felt how Peter Jackson must have felt when he completed the Lord of the Rings; it was that epic, awe inspiring and superb. BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins is at the vanguard of D&D-style RPGs and has replaced Bethesda Softwork’s Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls IV as the Crown Jewel of the genre.

My credentials on this subject stretch back to humble beginnings. In 1981, I played Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord on an Apple ][. The game was played on a green screen, some of you younger gamers should ask your parents what a green computer monitor was like… The monsters would appear in the top left corner, in 2D, and didn’t move. The characters were represented in text, with a name, number of hit points, and so on. You played the game by issuing commands in turn-based style. You’d hit one letter for your frontline fighter to attack, another letter for your thief to shoot an arrow or use a dagger, and another letter for your mage to heal or shoot fireballs. The action was depicted in text and the results were recorded in simple numbers.

Of course, there were dungeons, but no maps. If you wanted a map, you had to hand-draw them yourself. My dad provided graph paper for me to keep the lines straight. I can hear some of you laughing now as I type this and I can see others of you fondly remembering the same experiences. Within the dungeons there were treasure chests. If your thief had a high enough skill, the chest could be unlocked, if not then you had to come back later after leveling up. Outside of the dungeon there was a store where you could buy and sell things.

The hardware, graphics, game play and stories have changed through the years but the basic premise of Dungeons and Dragons have stayed true through the generations; and I’m sure those of you who play(ed) D&D using dice would have to agree. However, changes have been made, and they are for the better.

Some of the improvements made in Dragon Age are somewhat subtle and you might not even notice the changes were made. This is because the improvements speed up game play and don’t drag you down with mundane chores. For example, your characters will self-heal after battle. This saves on casting countless healing spells and drinking countless numbers of health poultices. After some leveling up, my characters rarely drank a health poultice during battle and instead saved them up for the final carnage. Another improvement is the shortcuts when leveling up. You can allocate your earned points manually or you can do it automatically. I still did this part of the game manually, as those experience points are hard fought and won, and I didn’t want the AI to spend them for me. But still, the option is there. Another huge, yet subtle improvement is the Junk category in your Inventory. If you’re good about moving acquired items into your Junk folder as you progress through a dungeon, then it’s easy-cheesy to offload all unwanted items when you visit the store. You can then use that gold to buy a backpack, which allows you to carry around even more useless stuff just to sell it later.

Speaking of the useless stuff… This is a part of the D&D-style games that drag me down. How many times do I have to inspect and pick up the same crappy mace, the same longsword, the same small wooden shield only to go and sell it for a few sovereigns? I know what you’re thinking, you don’t have to pillage every dungeon you visit. But if you don’t, then you’ll bypass some of the actually useful stuff. I’m hoping that someday soon the game developers will find a way to improve upon this. One idea is some kind of notification that an item you picked up is better than the one your party is currently using. For example, if you find some light leather armor, instead of having to compare and contrast the new armor to the armor your party is already wearing (and determine if having one more point of armor is worth the extra fatigue) you should see notification that this new armor is better than what your rogue is wearing; without having to flip through all the screens and compare the numbers and description. That could speed up game play considerably. More simply stated: when you find new equipment, the onscreen prompt could be as follows: “You have found Tier 2 Light Leather Armor, this will improve Leliana’s defense by 2 but will slow down her attack speed by 1. Do you wish to equip this armor now?” Personally, I would love this kind of improvement.

One more subtle improvement is that everything seemingly weighs the same, or at least, takes up the same amount of space in your inventory. In Oblivion, heavy armor would take up much more space than a dagger. Because of this, you could spend quite a bit of time deciding what to drop and what to keep, which isn’t exactly a fun task. In Dragon Age, you don’t have to make that choice. You simply drop the stuff that is obviously worth less than the new stuff that you found. That might not sound like much of an improvement, but it does lessen the decision making and gets you back to the action, which is the whole reason to play the game.

Is Dragon Age a game for everyone? No. Absolutely not. If you want a pick-up-and-play game and be done with it in a week, then skip this over and move on. This game is for dedicated gamers who are willing to learn, grow and immerse themselves in the world of Fereldon. You’ll need patience to learn the controls and the strategy. I’ve invested 60 hours into the game so far and after the defeat of the Arch Demon I immediately started formulizing how I could do better the next time through. Be forewarned: This game will steal your soul and own your console.

Dragon Age has an expansion pack announced, Awakening, coming out in March. Read the full review here on The Goozex Report.

Dragon Age: Origins | Review

Troy Benedict Says When I think of a "true" role-playing game experience, I think about the big daddy of all role-playing games: Dungeons & Dragons. It was a simple idea with a complex execution. With a pencil-and-paper game like D&D, your imagination was really the only limitation in the game.

It's no surprise that BioWare's new RPG, Dragon Age: Origins, feels like one of the most flushed-out and detailed RPG experiences on modern video game consoles. They've had a couple of tremendously popular PC-based RPGs using the Dungeons & Dragons licenses (Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights), and their storylines are so rich with details and character development that even secondary and tertiary characters, from their vast catalog of game releases, are still loved and talked about today.

As a disclaimer at the beginning of this review, the copy of Dragon Age: Origins for this review was for the Xbox 360 version and was provided by Goozex. The main quest was not completed at the time of this review, but I have logged enough time with the game, and feel comfortable sharing my praises and criticisms with Dragon Age: Origins.

The game begins, like most RPGs, with you selecting and creating a character of your choosing. However, Dragon Age: Origins really shines brightly in its execution once you begin the game with that character. There is no other experience quite like it! Most RPGs, follow the same storyline from beginning to end, where you play the hero who is destined to save the world, but the storyline really isn't impacted by the race and class of your chosen hero. Most of the time, choosing a wizard character type over a warrior meant very little in the overall storyline of the game. However, in Dragon Age: Origins, each race and class of character has a very unique opening to the game. Each origin story generally takes between 90 minutes and 3 hours to complete. I've even been told that certain characters in the game will react differently and offer different dialogue trees depending on the type of character you're using.

I began the game with a human warrior, and after playing with that character for more than a dozen hours, I decided to create an elf wizard. It was then that I realized that the two intro stories that I experienced couldn't have be more different. Apparently, there are about 5 or 6 different origin stories depending on the race and class of your hero character, which makes replaying this already long game even more interesting and exciting. Not to mention, Achievement/Trophy junkies will be rewarded for completing the variety of different origin stories.

There is no hand-holding in Dragon Age: Origins, which can be both rewarding and intimidating at the same time. Additionally, the game's story is long, with people reporting that focusing on the main quest took between 50-70 hours to complete.

My biggest recommendation to those who are playing Dragon Age: Origins? Always save your game!

Save and save often! The tides of battle can quickly turn against you at the blink of an eye depending on if the enemy characters can take out one of your support characters, and vice versa. There is a certain element of strategy that is involved in each battle that can dramatically affect the outcome. For example, while mage characters generally aren't strong in battle, they can cast spells that will immobilize your character, or heal up the strong warrior-types that are slashing away at your party. I generally try to take the mages out at every opportunity, and I try to make sure that my healers and spell-casters are at a safe distance and are constantly supporting my team.

Another intimating part of the game is establishing and setting up the computer-controlled tactics for each character. The battles play out in real-time, with you issuing different commands for the character with a simple button press. I generally focus on full-control of my hero character, and let the computer control the actions of my party. In order to tell the computer what to do, you have a certain number of query like commands that let you decide what a character can do. For example, you can tell a character to use a certain spell on the first enemy they see, or focus their attacks on a character whose hit point fall below a certain overall percentage, or even heal a team mate whose life falls below 50% or 25%. While there are preset tactical actions that a character can take, the most effective way to guarantee that they'll use certain abilities and attacks is to instruct set up the commands manually. The computer does a decent job of managing your party members, but it's not a bad idea to go through and tweak each member's tactics to your liking every few levels, to ensure that they're taking advantage of new abilities and spells, especially if you find yourself dying over and over during the same encounter.

Morality seems to be a big deal in more modern RPG-style games. Games like Fable II and Fallout 3 let you decide how you want to decide if you want to take the evil way or the good way. Dragon Age: Origins' way of approaching morality decisions is more interesting and realistic. There really is no "good" or "bad" way of playing through the game, it's all a matter of perception. What is good to one party member, might be bad or rude to another. You do build up relationships with the characters in your party, and certain actions that you perform can change how those characters will react to you. The old adage of "You can't please everybody all the time" is so true in Dragon Age Origins. Each character in your party's personality affects how they feel after you make an important choice in the game. There are even some choices in the game, that you can make that will turn a party member against you!

While on the subject of the party's personality, one neat little feature of Dragon Age is that at any time two of your members will begin chatting amongst themselves. Sometimes the conversation turns into an argument, or gives a deeper look into a character's history or their political point of view, for example. It all seems to depend on which party members you accompanying you at the time. The conversations are witty, too, and always bring a smile to my face.

Your hero is a silent protagonist and will never speak a line of dialogue during a conversation. I found this to be very confusing, because part of the character creation is the ability to choose a voice styling for them. This was also rather shocking after playing BioWare's Mass Effect, where the dialogue between your character and others made the whole cinematic approach to the conversation that much more interesting and appealing. I've never liked they way that games handle the silent protagonist. I've often felt it was a very lazy way of approaching the character design of the main character, and sort of puts in a very blatant disconnect between me and this avatar. It was just such a stark contrast to the exceptionally well-produced conversation system in Mass Effect. With the voice work of such a high caliber everywhere else in Dragon Age, it seemed sinful to not include a spoken response from your character.

The graphics, while decent, are also nowhere near the level of quality of Mass Effect. There are some really noticeable lower resolution textures, and characters will sometimes have an oddly plasticy-looking quality to their faces. I'm not sure if this was a difference between the futuristic stylings of Mass Effect, and the more earthy-natural look of Dragon Age's world, but it was a noticeable visual disappointment, especially considering that the screenshots and video clips of Mass Effect 2. The two games' release dates are only a few months apart.

Like I mentioned before, the game is hard. Sometimes frustratingly hard, especially if you don't save often. The real-time action of the game can often mislead your tactical decisions, making you think that rushing into the battle ready to button-mash the enemy to death will result in a victory. More than often, some strategy is involved in getting the upper hand. Also, I often found a lack of opportunities to quickly level up your character, but perhaps this was the result of playing the game for review and trying to work my way through this epic as quickly as I could.

Load times seem to be a bit long with the Xbox 360 version I played, which made restarting certain situations feel like ages. I'm not sure if this applies to the PlayStation 3 version or the PC version. I suppose copying the game to the Xbox 360 hard drive may have shaved off a few seconds here or there, but I can't imagine even doing this would have made much of an impact. Expect to have some patience with the load screen, especially if you die a lot.

As in most item-collecting games, the inventory system of Dragon Age had its strength and weaknesses, and unfortunately I found myself managing my items and constantly throwing away lesser important items to make room for possibly better ones.

There are a certain number of items and weapons that your party can carry at any one time, and for me that number was 70. During my time with the game, I was never able to increase the available slots from 70 to anything greater than that, nor was I ever able to find an item chest/warehouse at a party camp, for example, to store items that I wanted to hold onto, but didn't want to equip or use at the time. Games like Diablo II and Fallout 3 had extra storage options with which to store those miscellaneous items. Perhaps this inventory limit had nothing to do with increasing my hero's strength, but I was never able to find any additional storage or increase my already limiting party inventory, and I found that to be quite frustrating.

While a lot of the game involves some sort of skirmish, there are parts of the game where battles can be avoided by taking the right path during a conversation. There was a part of the main quest that I wasn't able to physically overcome - either my strategies were completely awful, or my characters just weren't strong enough. I must have attempted this scenario at least 20 times and no matter how I changed my approach, I could not defeat this group of characters. In order to win, I essentially lied to them during the conversation before the battle. I agreed to do something for this group of unsavory types that members of my party seriously disagreed with. This allowed me to pass to a new area where I not only betrayed the enemy in the end by not doing what they asked, but was I also able to physically defeat them because their numbers weren't as concentrated as before. Sometimes a quick wit and a little thinking can go a long way to avoiding those battles that can't seem to be won through physical feats!

Dragon Age does have its flaws, it's the detailed story, richly-developed characters, and the interesting dialog tree paths that make the game tremendously awesome. It is one of those games that you'll constantly be thinking about even when not playing it.

For anybody who loves action-RPG games, especially the more Western style ones like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Fable II, and Fallout 3, I really suggest checking out Dragon Age: Origins. It might not be the prettiest game, but for the richness in story line and the sheer amount of quests and characters you'll encounter, as well as the completely original and unique origin storylines, it's hard to find a deal like this for $60.

Dragon Age: Origins | First Impressions

Troy Benedict Says I really had no idea what to expect from Dragon Age: Origins a week or so prior to its release. All I knew is that it was made by BioWare and that it looked gritty, violent, and awesome! BioWare has had a track record of really awesome games with Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I've even heard a lot of talk that DA:O is the spiritual successor to the some of BioWare's earlier PC-based RPGs Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.

I cannot attest to this validation, because I've never played Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights. I always thought they looked really fun, and I heard about how good they were, but unfortunately never found the time to dedicate to either of those titles.

However, I have had a lot of experience with BioWare's more recent games, Mass Effect and KOTOR, and Dragon Age: Origins has a feel similar to those games.

Before I get too far, I should clarify that I am playing the Xbox 360 version of Dragon Age: Origins.

Dragon Age: Origins is bloody, but not in that gory guts-and-limbs-strewn-everywhere kind of way. It's bloody in that everything-is-covered-in-blood way. Even from the opening EA logo, there is blood drips and smears everywhere. In the game, when you're finished hacking away at the enemy, your character and the party will be spattered with blood - on the armor and on their faces. It's a nice attention to detail, and also kind of helps give the game a much more gritty atmosphere, separating its Mature rating from other similar Teen-rated games.

That's not to say that the violence is the sole reason for the game's Mature rating, as there has been much talk about the sexual content of the game, including partial nudity. If you're familiar with any of the issues that surfaced surrounding Mass Effect and its subtle nude scenes with possible lesbianism depending on the gender of your main character, then I think it's a realistic expectation to expect something similar with Dragon Age: Origins (including the over exaggerated non-gaming media reaction to such plausible scenes). But the sexual content and partial nudity are right there on the box. Whether or not it's a path you have to choose in order to witness this, is something that perhaps I'll be able to share in the final review. The overall story seems a bit grimmer and darker than other dragon-slaying stories.

Needless to say, the game is not for kids.

So, how does it play? I feel that I've only scratched the surface of the game despite logging an almost 3-hour session with it. Please note that in my limited time with the game, I may make assumptions that are not correct or are better implemented as I play further through the game.

I was actually surprised that it felt and played a lot like Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic. However, all of the battles I experienced were real-time, button-pressing skirmishes, similar to maybe World of WarCraft, and wasn't the turn-based strategy game like KOTOR. You have your standard attack (A button), but then you also have the other three face buttons which you can map certain actions to. Being a warrior, one of my special attacks was bashing the enemy with my shield. These special attacks take time to recharge, usually something like 10 seconds. This action in particular knocked the enemy to the ground, where I could get in a couple of slashes without any retaliatory action.

The only way that I would pause the battle was to bring up the game's radial menu to either remap actions to one of the controller's buttons, or to pause it. That's not to say that there are no tactics in the game. While you control one party member, the others are controlled with A.I. While you can jump back and forth between any member instantaneously and control them and their actions, you can set specific A.I. routines/actions for the computer depending on the conditions of battle. For example, if the enemy had a percentage of HP left, you could request that the A.I. cast a certain spell. I briefly looked at the tactics, but solely relied on the computer to control my other party members during battle.

Visually, the game is nice-looking, but textures seem a bit flat and smooth. Some facial features of some of the characters during cut-scenes seem a bit too polished and artificial. Compared to Mass Effect, the Dragon Age: Origins didn't strike me as being quite so visually impressive. Perhaps the styles of the game are to blame for that - technology/future style versus a more natural/fantasy setting. The trees are what stood out as being the most awkward, especially when viewing a wooded area from a higher and more distant vantage point. The gameplay seems to be the area where Dragon Age shines, and I've been hearing a lot of positive things about it, especially when comparing it to some of BioWare's earlier RPG offerings.

I'm enjoying it a lot, and haven't run into any extremely difficult situation that I wasn't able to hack and slash my way out of. I am hoping that there will be some more strategy involved, and am looking forward to unlocking new skills for my character to use.

Check back here for my review of Dragon Age: Origins, to see if the game continues to stand up after my first impression.