Dragon Age: Origins (PS3)

Dragon Age: Origins

BioWare / EA

Anthony: Okay. Considering “Western RPGs” have only existed for a few years now and have been outside of my personal console choices, I guess that makes me a JRPG purist. Because of that, despite what the gaming world would want from me, hearing the phrase “BioWare RPG” has no more effect on me than “RPG” does. But considering many consider BioWare saviors to the gaming industry with a Midas touch, combined with the fact that hey, the game looked pretty cool, I decided to give Dragon Age: Origins a try. And sure, it’s good; of course it’s good, but I’m coming out of the experience with no loyalty towards BioWare and no sudden desire to try more WRPGs either.

Dragon Age has you create a dwarven, human, or elven hero warrior, rogue, or mage that will start an origin story that ends with him or her joining a group called the Grey Wardens that fight an evil plaguing the land on a grand scale. Basically, think “Lord of the Rings” with funny characters and a lot of M-rated exploitation. Battles are almost hack-and-slash but tend to take place more like traditional RPG encounters.

What’s good:
- Good lord. Dragon Age very well may have set a record for the most recorded voice acting in an RPG ever. Beyond that, they got fantastic voice actors all around... vocal talent that often get starring roles in many games are but minor NPCs or characters that are in the plot for a whopping 20 minutes. It’s absolutely to the point where it gets daunting to listen to it all, and you could likely spend tens of extra hours in the game if you listened to everyone speak without skipping.

- If there’s one true thing I can take away from my first experience with a BioWare game, it’s that Bioware has exceeded any RPG I’ve played on one level... they truly created an entire world with this game. Most RPGs have a few towns, a planet, a brief bit of history and some backstory on the characters you meet. Dragon Age has extensive backstory on just about everything... characters, NPCs, minor incidents in the past, certain weapons, locations you’ll never visit, characters you’ll never meet, the history of organizations... it’s truly staggering. Clearly the time put into this development was enormous.

- There are some very enjoyable characters and dialog in the mix. Shale, Alistair, Zevran and Oghren will all provide some very amusing lines throughout the game. Beyond that, having certain characters in your party together will make various bits of dialog crop up as banter between each other. There are several of these for any combination of party members you can come up with, and sometimes even dialog among three characters at once. Some of these are for comedy, others give back story, and in general it really helps make them feel real. It’s a unique inclusion that I really appreciated.
- One thing the game has in spades is replay value. Each of the three job classes has multiple branches of magic, weaponry, specializations etc. that can be explored, and most party members are pretty unique and may make for combinations you’d enjoy tinkering with. Although it doesn’t affect much, the six potential origin stories provide different levels of background that can affect dialog later in the game. So in a sense, you can pick the same job and same race, and still have an experience that feels different; that has to count for something.

- They did a great job of making the game user-friendly to play. For people that aren’t into character building, they have auto-level up options. Every skill, stat, and ability has very detailed information for you to peruse such that there’s no mystery into what you’re doing. Further, though Quests sometimes have extremely detailed information involved in them, the game marks them clearly on your map and at locations so it’s not a Myst/Monkey Island-like scavenger hunt to complete.

- They scale enemies’ levels/equipment drops up and down depending on the timing in which you do events in the game, not by their areas alone. That’s a good way to keep a game both non-linear and reigned in simultaneously, giving you freedom to choose the order of events without being an overly open-ended “what next?” situation.

What’s neutral:
- Graphics aren’t bad, but they’re not great either. Environments are often bland, and though the character models are very good, the movements and gestures are very stiff.

- I’m fairly unimpressed with the battle system overall. I’ll start by saying that as time goes on, it gets a bit more enjoyable, as having a wealth of skills to use is a lot more fun than trading attacks and using one or two skills over and over. But in my mind, there are several problems with it. For one, it’s very, very repetitive. Strategy is basically a complete wash, as there’s no parry/guard system, and pretty much every single battle will be approached the same regardless of the enemies... the only real deviation from that was to run away from exploding enemies or attack the mages first if they exist. Character AI is surprisingly obtuse, requiring you to either switch to a character and issue commands individually, or to attempt to get them to follow a set of commands (see “gambits” from FFXII) you’ve set up. They have some basic AI you can adjust, but the only party command you can give in battle is to not move. This unfortunately means there’s a lot of “babysitting” you need to do to make sure your characters don’t kill themselves and do actually help remedy the “monsters on all sides of us” situation.

- Speaking of, the commands are both limited and frustratingly flawed. You’ll either need to waste the few command slots telling them to activate sustained abilities they should always have on, or you’ll need to check and activate them manually to not waste those slots. Further, some really dumb oversights exist, like the fact that it actually takes two separate command slots to tell a healer to heal an injured party member and heal him/herself if injured. Really? It’s also impossible to set a command for a healer to revive a dead party member. Aside from limiting the commands issued, you can’t tell a character to hold back on his/her skill use, so it’s very easy for a partner mage to burn through his/her MP in an instant, and either sit helpless or constantly chug your potions to fix it. Some commands are vague too... telling you to activate an ability if a target is “Elite” or “Boss” or “Elite Boss” or is a certain level despite that information not being readily available.

- Okay sure, most movies have schmaltzy moments that can make your eyes roll, but with such a deep and extensive world/story created, I really thought this would be kept to a minimum. Boy was I wrong. The word that kept coming to mind with Dragon Age’s scenes was “contrived.” Basically, characters will die and characters will betray you, and it’s generally painfully obvious that those things are going to happen. It becomes a bit silly after a while... if a character seems noble, he/she is going to betray someone. If a character seems to be in great spirits, he/she will soon violently die. It seriously got to the point where when reuniting with a best friend from the origin story, I said “at least they didn’t pull the obvious emotional ploy where he betrays me.” - only for him to betray me moments later. Sigh. It became very hard to take seriously.

- Characters have affection ratings for the main character based on interactions, decisions, and gift-giving within the game. However, it’s a surprisingly shallow affair for such a deep game. Some characters can be talked to a few times, given a few trinkets and wham, they’re in love. Sometimes characters will disapprove of actions, but you can just take them out of the party before doing so to keep from losing affection. I had a character get mad at me for letting someone out of jail, and I had to reload and talk to the jailed character more extensively to find out that he was a racist before I even understood why that happened. Characters are completely indifferent whether you’re sparing an orphan and sending him off to college versus stabbing him in the throat. Even some major events can happen where a longtime partner will leave or even fight you to the death. In one such event, I literally decapitated a party member we’d had for ages, and not a single character had any problem with it or even mentioned it. Odd!
- It’s worthy of note for a game that can easily run someone 40-90 hours of gameplay, there really is nothing to do in the game other than either fight things, talk to people, examine objects, or some conglomerate of those. Every quest in the game is some combination of those elements. There are a few inspired moments (shapeshifting in the Fade was pretty cool), but otherwise it’s smash/talk/check ad infinitum.

- Load times are very long. It’s a nice effort that they fill the load screens with information about the world and skills, but it doesn’t nullify the problem.

- Often you’ll have several dialog choices to choose from, sometimes several times within a conversation. Oddly, because there’s no karma system, most of the time it makes almost no difference whether you’re saying “Here’s all of my money; I wish you the best in life!” or “You are hated by everyone and will die alone, you lecherous slut.” to an infant. Sometimes it means the difference between money/items which led to a number of reloads for me, but other times it’s just pages of text and actions after actions with no result. It makes it feel somewhat pointless at times; I’d rather the story just advance than it have me give frequent input that doesn’t matter.
- Minor, but I felt a certain suspension of disbelief was necessary to go along with the story. If being a Grey Warden is such a noble thing, why is it that most of the game has me constantly murdering, committing treason, stealing, working with shady organizations, and threatening my way through the story? Similarly, many NPCs will act like their world has been instantly changed just by you delivering an item or even just saying a few words to them. Sometimes I had praise showered on me as though I’d given them a kidney, for saying a few words alone. They really drive points home!

What’s bad:

- There’s some surprising issues with poor balance among some of the job classes. Certain specializations like Shapeshifting are bizarrely useless, and in general, mage enemies are far too lethal in comparison to their melee counterparts. Not only can mages cast painful area of effect spells on your party, they can very easily render melee characters unable to move, unable to attack, or unable to be healed, all from a distance, all of which are potential death sentences. Further, to open chests and disarm chests specifically requires a Rogue, and they have to take points away from learning battle skills to be able to adequately do so... meaning if you want to open the numerous locked chests, you’re towing a theoretically weaker character around, or will need to take a return trip with the weaker character once the battling is over with.

- Inventory space gets used up very quickly and there’s no warehouse to store items, despite many one-time-only and/or unique items. Apparently a warehouse is given if you download $7 worth of bonus content, but that’s absurd. Having to pay extra money for a more manageable inventory system is an inexcusably dumb design.
- Similarly, having a character talk to me at length in game about a quest to undertake, only for it to require paid downloadable content was ridiculous. That’s especially bothersome considering this content was available when the game was released. So you’ve literally just purchased a partial game for full price. Awesome.
- Unfortunately, it’s clear the game was rushed to production a bit. Several exploits, bugs and glitches exist throughout the game. This includes some terrible slowdown at times with the PS3 version.

- There’s an annoying amount of items that can be missed permanently in the game for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s a situation where you’ll just want to reload to see if it’s worth killing someone versus scaring them off. Other times, it’s a very frustrating situation where you turn in a quest and are thus barred from obtaining another item. No question this is a way to boost someone’s likelihood to replay the game, but making it easy to miss a bunch of items is not the proper way to encourage replays.

Wow am I ever torn on a game like this. On the one hand, it’s true, playing a game like this is akin to experiencing a whole movie-like world come to life, and is certainly more grand and bombastic than the average RPG. The dialog is fantastic, and you could play the game ten times through and get a different gameplay experience every time. It’s clear BioWare knows how to make a game.

But none of that changes the fact that the story never truly gripped me, or that most RPGs I’ve played have much better party AI/command options, or that the battle system was pedestrian, or that the game had a surprising amount of glitches, or that 40-90 hours of gameplay is always killing things/checking locations/talking to characters, or that character interactions are pretty shallow, or that the most fun we had with the game was screwing with the character creation screen. None of those are deal breakers or particularly terrible issues; it’s just for a game that’s trumpeted as being a pinnacle of western RPGs, I didn’t expect so many design flaws to come with it.

Yet as I said, of course it’s good. There’s tons of character customization, the characters are very good, there’s plenty of questing to do, and it’s a mostly friendly design to people who don’t typically play RPGs. I just don’t buy for a second that this is somehow a game that should go down in history as a piece of legendary RPG excellence. From a longtime RPGer as myself, it’s a perfectly decent one that’s just bigger and louder than usual.

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Lauren: I'm not as experienced with western RPGs as I am with every other type, but Dragon Age sounded intriguing enough for us both to give it a shot. It's certainly expansive, from its areas to the depth of the virtual world's history, and it provided a lengthy playthrough.

I will start by saying that the voice acting is fantastic. Many, many famous voice actors are featured in Dragon Age, in both big and surprisingly small roles. The music was generally pleasant as well, always fitting with the atmosphere. The whole experience has a movie-like "Lord of the Rings" feel. That similarity continues through the game's background, history, and character races. But of course, Dragon Age was considered a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, and Dungeons & Dragons was arguably inspired by Tolkien's creations, so I won't make any judgments on the subject of originality.

The depth of the character creation system is very impressive, allowing for many subtle changes in even the location and size of facial features. Although we had no interest in pursuing Bioware's signature "romance" side of the game for our main playthrough, the most fun we had with Dragon Age was making the most unbelievably hideous female character we could, then getting her intimacy scene with Alistair. Though hilarious, it was also disappointing to see how easy it is to charm a character. We just talked to him repeatedly and crammed his hands full of jewelled gifts, and got the scene within a surprisingly short amount of time. Not the most realistic approach if we're supposed to take this part of the plot somewhat seriously. Though on the bright side, I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard.

When I gave the game a go, I played as an elven mage. I found the battles and abilities to be fairly fun, but they grew tiresome quickly. The introduction also felt weaker than what we saw in the dwarf playthrough - specifically in the explanation as to why your character is given the title of Grey Warden. That said, the main plot of the game was quite good. BioWare has an excellent writing staff, and they certainly do not disappoint in this department. There is plenty of witty dialogue as well, especially from Shale and Alistair.

We played the PS3 version, which was unfortunately filled with graphical pop-ups and slowdown. I've heard that the PC version is much better when it comes to this, so you may want to lean that way if you have the option.

Objectively, I can say that it's a great western RPG. If that genre isn't your cup of tea, you should probably steer clear. I'm relatively neutral toward them, so my personal experience with it can be described in the same way. If you like BioWare or D&D, you'll undoubtedly fall in love with Dragon Age.