Dragon Age: Origins Review
I was among the doubters when Bioware promised Dragon Age would be the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate, but consider me a believer. Dragon Age is not without its flaws, but if you have ever enjoyed a single player Role Playing Game, you must play this game.
I have long considered Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn to be the finest offline RPG. Bioware seamlessly streamlined the unwieldy Dungeons & Dragons rule set into a beginner friendly game system and layered a still impressive and non-linear story over the top. The scope of the game was unlike anything experienced up to that point, and it has long been the barometer against which all CRPGs are judged.
It is surprising then that I can claim without hesitation that Dragon Age: Origins is better in nearly every respect. The only checkbox in the Shadows of Amn column is that it had Minsc (which was nearly enough for it to keep its title of greatest ever according to my ‘Minsc is God’ adage).
There are a surprisingly small number of dragons considering it's their age. It should have been the Hurlock or Giant Spider Age
What went right?
Combat: Combat in Baldur’s Gate had so many problems. It was stilted, it was uninvolved and sometimes I had to depend on glitch solutions to tough fights instead of strategy. While not everything has been fixed, combat in Dragon Age has adopted many combat mechanics from MMORPGs and it is a big step forward.
First and most important is the aggro mechanic long used in MMOs incorporated in Dragon Age. Functionally this means that enemies will attack the player they deem to be the greatest threat (usually the one doing the most damage to them). Warriors have talents to gain the attention of enemies, and therefore battles take on a more traditional tank / healer / DPS dynamic vs. the free for all battles from Baldur’s Gate. I hardly ever felt like battles were spiraling out of my control, and effective use of crowd control abilities can transform a seemingly unwinnable battle into a manageable affair.
In addition, abilities are no longer limited by resting; they’re limited by a mana/stamina system and cooldowns. In Baldur’s Gate, there was no incentive to do anything but use abilities as fast as possible. In Dragon Age, especially in larger fights, there is a big tradeoff between resource management, cooldown management and threat management.
Furthermore, while many of the boss battles are reminiscent of MMO raid bosses in their infancy, heavy on ‘tank and spank’ fight types, there are a few that are more detailed and become pattern management more than fighting a big life bar. Finally, there are few ‘game changing’ abilities like Greater Whirlwind or Dragon’s Breath from Baldur’s Gate that are simply superior to everything else and my active ability repertoire was quite extensive by the end of the game.
Comrades: A significant improvement in Dragon Age is the party system. No longer are you forced to choose between interesting companions. You now take them all with you in a Final Fantasy esque manner, and can substitute them in and out as you choose. Most importantly, they receive the full experience that you’re gaining even when they’re not in your party, so even if you don’t use them for a while they’re never underpowered.
More significantly, each has their own distinct personality and their spontaneous interactions with your other companions are hilarious and fascinating. While in Baldur’s Gate you could annoy your party members to the point of leaving you, it was almost impossible to do unintentionally. In Dragon Age, on the other hand, there is incentive to create a harmonious party as companions gain abilities the more they like you.
Finally, there is significance to your decisions both for party members and in general that isn’t seen in most games. You can get in disagreements with your companions to the point that you fight and kill them. If you do so, they’re gone forever. You can disagree with them on a decision so important that they leave you, forever. In addition, no matter how much you think you’re not going to be interested in a character, give them a chance and they will grow on you.
The blood in the game can be a bit over the top. Bioware should have done more market research by murdering some hobos
Choices: I have long claimed that realistic moral choices in games were a pipe dream. I was way off base. There are many decisions in Dragon Age, but no ‘right’ decisions. Even games like Bioshock that claim there is a fair tradeoff between the good and bad choices, the game betrays that promise in the end when one path is revealed as superior.
In Dragon Age, on the other hand, there are over a dozen significant gameplay decisions where I still don’t know whether I did the right thing. I don’t even think there was a right thing, there are only different things. While the broad strokes of the game would be the same on a second playthrough, choosing a different origins story and different solutions to game problems would create a significantly different experience.
Story: Don’t listen to critics saying ‘the story is cliché and repetitive, it’s just a Lord of the Rings spinoff!’ Have these critics ever played a Middle Ages era fantasy RPG? That’s like saying ‘Battlestar Galactica is just a cheap Star Trek rip-off because they both take place in space, in the future, with aliens!’ While I would struggle to find flaws in your argument if you want to make it, I believe that interesting stories are in the details and not solely in the setting.
It is in the details where Dragon Age excels. The origins mechanic where you start the game in one of six potential scenarios all feel completely different, but as you progress through the game you realize they’re fully consistent with the game world. You will encounter each race and player type and realize how your experiences coming to terms with the game world correctly set your expectations for how NPCs will react down the line.
The only thing the Ogre can't understand ... is love
Open-ended: I’m not going to pretend that Dragon Age is non-linear. It has a very traditional area system where each area has an overarching quest but you can tackle the areas in the order of your choosing.
That being said, there are huge dungeons to explore, and significant chunks of them are not necessary to progress. While you’re going to run into enough of the optional segments just wandering around looking for the next area, there are also times when you find the exit door and choose to backtrack to that fork in the road and see what you missed. Frequently it’s more than just trash monsters and there’s a minor quest or named enemy you almost skipped.
Customization: While Dragon Age doesn’t have more customization than the Baldur’s Gate games, and certainly no more than most MMOs, the loss of the D&D license was for Bioware a blessing in disguise. While there were many aspects of the D&D ruleset that were impenetrable unless you cracked out the rulebook, everything in Dragon Age is clear and progressive.
You choose an overarching skill area such as damage spells or control spells as a mage, or tanking vs. DPS as a warrior, and then there is a clear connection from weaker abilities in a 4 ability tree to stronger abilities. At no point do you encounter non-sequitur skills. If you take the weaker frost spell skills, it unlocks the stronger frost skills. Given Bioware games’ inability to respec, knowing what you’re getting into is a welcome development.
Presentation: If a character is more than throwaway place filler, and they have dialogue trees, their lines are fully voiced. While your character is silent, the voice acting for the NPCs is fantastic. A few of the conversations are cliché, but for the most part the emotion really comes through and adds to the experience.
The dwarves, surprisingly enough, live underground and are miners and blacksmiths, a substantial departure from prevous dwarven lore
What were they thinking?
Imbalanced: Some of the combat mechanics in Dragon Age are imbalanced to say the least. While a well rounded group is necessary, all that really means is you’re going to need a mage, the big hitter of the party. Combat assignments usually went something along the lines of ‘warrior 1, you take that guy, warrior 2, you take that guy, healer … heal, and mage, you handle those 18 guys over there.’
Some spells, such as cone of cold, are so overpowered you wonder if Bioware even tested them. It ‘freezes’ enemies in its radius, completely incapacitating them with a near 100% success rate. Any enemy can be frozen up to and including the final boss. The effect lasts for 5-6 seconds, and the cooldown on the spell is barely longer than that, so as long as mana remains you can keep a boss permanently frozen. Obviously this makes fights far easier.
In addition, area of effect spells are so powerful that I could frequently kill 10 or 12 enemies in a pack before they even reached me using a combination of damage over time and knockdown effects. I imagine the developers thought friendly fire on mage spells would prevent their abuse, but I rarely found it to be a problem.
Mage vs. melee ... in Dragon Age this fight is no contest
Copout: In a game all about choices and living with the consequences of your decisions, it is frustrating that Bioware chose to implement a gift system with your companions. Small decisions increasingly annoy some party members, decreasing their affinity towards you. To counteract this, you can give them huge numbers of trivial gifts to move them back into the friendly category.
While there are some story-related gifts that make sense in context, I question how many throwaway trinkets a companion really wants before they stop caring. Also, why would a character that hates me want to accept a gift from me in the first place? The system is only slightly redeemed by different gifts being more appropriate and having a greater effect on certain characters compared to others, adding a marginal layer of realism and complexity.
Difficulty curve: It’s likely that Bioware didn’t play through this game too many times, because the difficulty is greatly skewed from beginning to end. In the early parts of the game, I found myself struggling with most of the fights and a few of my characters would die each time even on the ‘normal’ settings. Later in the game, however, I would power through all but boss fights as I had become an unstoppable juggernaut. There was a real difference between fights before and after you have a well equipped healer and tank in your party.
In addition, while the mechanic where your dead (unconscious) party members resurrect automatically at the end of the fight was a great one, the regeneration rate of your health, mana and stamina between fights is frustratingly slow. I didn’t want to progress until at full strength, so most of the time I would just sit around. It’s not like there’s the risk that enemies will stumble upon you when you’re still weak, there were no mobile foes. Sometimes I would make a sandwich while waiting the 60-90 seconds for my bars to fully refill.
Finally, potions make the fights trivial as long as you have enough of them. In most MMORPGs, the cooldowns are such that they become emergency use only items. In Dragon Age, on the other hand, they can fill in for a healer entirely as you commonly pick up potions from trash mobs potent enough to refill your entire health bar.
This was, at least for me, by far the hardest battle in the game. And it is also extremely early on. I had to use the 'run in circles like a baby' technique
Crafting: Dragon Age has an extensive crafting system, with recipes and reagents required to create what turn out to be very helpful items. Unfortunately, the requirements are far too high and reagents far too difficult to find. I focused in herbalism to create potions for my characters, but ended up never making anything. While I could find potions off monsters left and right for free, creating just one comparable item required four reagents and an expensive recipe. It just wasn’t worth it.
Rushed ending: It’s clear that despite the delay in the game’s release date, Bioware was rushed to get the game out the door. The first 80% of the game feels well paced and epic. Once you begin the final sequence, however, it feels like everything happens too quickly and some of that ‘grand final encounter’ feeling is lost.
Tactics system: The tactics system for your party is helpful in theory, allowing you to set up situation contingent actions for your party members to minimize micromanagement. In practice, I still told them what to do most of the time. Unfortunately, once you’ve given a single command such as ‘attack this enemy,’ they won’t do anything else until that enemy is dead. There should be a ‘return to scripted action’ button, or something along those lines. I would frequently forget my healer wasn’t automatically healing until after it was too late.
Quest confusion: The quest system could have been significantly streamlined. You pick up multiple quests along the way, but the journal merely records actions you’ve taken instead of clearly delineating what needs to be done. It’s easy to forget what the mage guild is asking you to do, and it’s frustrating to re-read a multi-paragraph summary instead of scanning a bullet point that says ‘kill this man.’
Dragon Age is an epic game. I didn’t go out of my way to finish every quest, and there were four or five non-trivial ones that I passed over. Even so, the game took me over 40 hours to complete. This isn’t a measure of the Final Fantasy ‘grind for 20 hours in the same place with random encounters’ filler length, either. While there are extensive dungeon crawls, there are no random enemies and all actions contribute to progression.
The dialogue is the most involved of any RPG to date, and the satisfaction gained from conquering some of the later multi stage scripted boss fights is incredible. I felt a connection with my character by the end of the game, and would love to see where his adventures next take him.
Hopefully that is wherever Minsc is. That is potentially the only addition to this game that would make it even more epic. Hamsters and rangers everywhere, rejoice!
