Review: Dragon Age: Origins
Game: Dragon Age: Origins
Format: PC
Developer: Bioware
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Traditional RPGs seem to have fallen out of favour of late. Whilst turn based games have almost certainly seen their demise on main stream consoles and PCs; replaced with their action-RPG counterparts, there seem to have been even fewer Baldur’s Gate style hardcore RPGs produced over the past few years. It’s somewhat refreshing, then, to have Dragon Age: Origins to bite into for a big slab of role-playing goodness.
Don’t get me wrong, Dragon Age can be as soft or hardcore as you’d like. The varying difficulty levels mean that you can simply stroll through the game, really soaking up the epic story on the easiest difficulty, whilst nightmare mode will really have you fighting for survival at every step.
Also, the nature of character development means you can spend hours poring over which skills to select and how to distribute skill points, or simply follow handy sub-categories. Spells, for example, are divided into Primal, Creation, Spirit and Entropy: Primal representing damage based spells whilst Creation, Spirit and Entropy contain revival, healing and status magic respectively.
The party’s mage cracks out a primal spell for some serious damage
There’s a lot of replay value to the game. And by a lot I mean LOADS. Looking at the character selection for example, you have three races to choose from; Human, Elf or Dwarf. You then have the choice of gender and whether you wish to be a commoner or nobility; as the story is different for each.
Finally you must choose which class you wish to be, the only limitation being that Dwarves cannot be mages. When you add all of that together you have an impressive 32 variations before you even begin play. Furthermore, these variations are more than superficial; characters within the game will treat you differently depending on your race and class as well as gender.
Male Dwarf commoner. One of 32 different options!
There’s an even greater depth once you get into the game: your choice of actions made throughout the game have an impact on how you are perceived by those around you. This is more than your simple good-neutral-evil scheme as seen in games such as Fallout 3. Here, one action, such as choosing to sleep with the morally dubious mage Morrigan, will actually upset another of your party, namely Leliana, affecting how well she will fight alongside you.
The controls present some confusion to begin with. The default mouse setup is perhaps the most problematic; right click to select seems counterintuitive to someone who is right handed. Whilst this can be inverted in the menus: by changing this setting, the uses of the mouse in-game and within menus do not correlate. Leaving the mouse at default therefore seems to be the best option as you will soon get used to the system.
The menus and skill selection are reminiscent of World of Warcraft, with the ability to pause the game and move into the menus to select which spell you wish to cast, or simply placing them on a ‘speed rail’ at the bottom of the screen to quicken the pace. The pause feature becomes vital within the game. On the harder difficulties, players will need to set the game to pause whenever facing up to an enemy, giving some breathing space in order to choose which action to take and hopefully reducing the number of times the party is completely decimated by enemies.
The camera controls are extremely robust. Players can choose whether they prefer the ‘top down’ aerial view to gain the full picture of any particular area, such as within the Baldur’s Gate series. For the added excitement however, you can pull the camera right behind your selected character, keeping the action up close.
Keeping the action up close...
In terms of difficulty, even playing on ‘normal’ presented quite a challenge; often taking several attempts to best a particularly difficult boss or, at times, get past a room full of tough mobs. Having found such a challenge at normal difficulty, I shudder to think what kind of a sadist you’d have to be to attempt ‘nightmare’ mode. The frequent bosses are satisfyingly epic in scale, with a real sense of size and power when one comes up against the High Dragon, for example.
Graphically, the PC version (played on a top-spec Alienware rig) is pretty good. There is little difference between the cut scenes and in-game graphics, but that’s not a bad thing. Frequently I found myself gawping at how beautiful the surroundings were when traipsing through Ferelden.
Attention to detail is astounding. Check out the grass!
Voice acting follows suit in fine form; with the vocal stylings of Tim Curry (of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fame) and Kate Mulgrew (from Star Trek: Voyager) as well as a wealth of perhaps less famous, but equally as talented, actors. Having played through a fair chunk of the game, I struggled to find any voice acting that I thought was stilted or out of place; no mean feat within a game of this scale.
If you don’t recognise these voices in the game you should be shot!
There were some glitches, notably a lighting issue in an early cut scene for the human noble origin, and the misplacing of an event trigger at Redcliff. However it must be said that such glitches were few and far between and I’m confident these minor issues will be fixed by launch day.
Dragon Age: Origins will be released on November 6th for PC and XBox 360, with the PS3 version following on November 20th at all good retailers.
REVIEW ROUND UP:
GRAPHICS: 4/5 With a top spec PC the graphics are truly astounding at times. Locales are suitably atmospheric, whether you’re trudging through the Dead Trenches or the forests of Ferelden.
SOUND: 5/5 The voice acting is superb with a wealth of established actors that really bring the characters to life. The soundtrack is suitably orchestral and creates real tension when you’re heading up to a particularly difficult boss battle. It would have been nice to find the Marilyn Manson track from the trailer along the way though…
GAMEPLAY: 5/5 Dragon Age seems to employ the best parts of Bioware games along with some lessons learnt from MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, to create a fantastic overall package. The story is immersive, with fantastic writing that twists and turns along the way. The difficulty settings provide a challenge to suit all levels, whether you’re something of a casual gamer or consider yourself amongst the elite hardcore.
LONGEVITY: 5/5 If I could have scored it six I would have done. It’s estimated a single run through, with little attention to side quests will take you over 40 hours. Add to that around 60 hours of side quest goodness and you’ve got yourself a sizeable RPG. That’s even before we consider the replay value of the 32 character variations and the choices you make as you go through the game. This is truly epic.
OVERALL: 5 angry dwarves out of 5. This is the best RPG I’ve played in a long time and will take some beating. Don’t be surprised to see this around awards time.
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