Dragon Age: Origins
Reviewed by Z

Wow this game had a lot of hype, it’s almost unreal. I guess I hadn’t realized this until this game came out, but BioWare has some seriously cultish fans. I’ve never played KOTOR before, but it’s my understanding that it’s their only good game. If that last sentence made you shit your pants in anger, then I’ve got some more bad news for you, I didn’t particularly like this game either. The Baldur’s Gate series was utterly forgettable, only slightly less so by the fact that Planescape: Torment rocked and pretty much cockslapped all of Baldur’s Gate in the face, beating them in a genre that they basically invented. Neverwinter Nights got my attention for a little while due to the multiplayer, but the game itself was pretty terrible. And of course Mass Effect, which I think I managed to enjoy for 10 hours or so.

Allow me to present you the basic BioWare formula, as I understand it. The game must be about story, but it shouldn’t be original. The best idea is to take an already existing story and universe and expand upon it, but failing that we can always make a generic world with nothing particularly interesting about it. Now since the plot isn’t going to be good in any meaningful way, we should probably make it big! What we lack in interesting, we can make up for in epicness right? Well in that case, the WHOLE WORLD IS IN DANGER! There’s darkspawn invading (don’t ask what they are or where they come from) and even though they’re going to destroy the entire planet, for some reason it’s my responsibility to deal with them! Ah, but we can’t forget the last piece of the fomula, no BioWare game is complete without a completely terrible combat system. Dragon Age: Origins, which I’m just going to call Dragon Age from now on because there’s no god damned reason for the Origins at all, follows this formula to the letter.

In an attempt to be a tiny bit fair to this game, I’m going to treat it like two different games. One game is the combat, and the other is everything else. So let’s talk about the first game.

Get used to it.

Do you like tactical pausing? Of course you don’t, no one actually likes it, you have just come to accept that it’s the only way to efficiently control an entire party full of morons. Well, that is no longer the case. This is a party based game, and I’m having a hard time imagining how much cocaine was flowing through their systems when they made that decision. You control your dude, you form relationships, pimp out your shit, you can fuck people, get married, make people hate you, make people try to kill you, but as soon as combat starts all these other characters with their individual personalities and such become walking coma patients. There are predefined actions you can tell characters to do with tactical slots, things like if ally health is less than 50% then cast heal, or if enemy is a boss then taunt, other than a couple you get automatically as you level, you have to purchase these tactical slots for your party members in lieu of actual skills.

The tactical slots help a little, but as I said, coma patients. I want to say that your party will just stand their with their sword hilts up their asses unless you tell them to do something, or their tactics do, but that just isn’t the case. Far too many times did I find myself wondering why the fuck my healer wasn’t healing, only to find her beating on some archer with her sword, or even worse, casting some other completely unrelated spell like replenish, which I can’t even fathom why she would be doing it. You can take individual control of characters and tell them each to attack certain targets, but as soon as you unpause they’re just going to keep doing whatever they feel like. And oh sweet Jesus the traps. Unless you have your rogue charge in first like an idiot to cut the wire on the floor you can be damn sure that your party is going to trigger every single trap in a 10 mile radius as soon as you’re not controlling them. Here’s a bit of advice for anyone that hasn’t made it this far: in Redcliffe, don’t set up the burning oil. I did, and watched in awe as my entire party charged into the blazing inferno and died, only to stand up, not move, and die to it again.

Horrible AI(term loosely used) aside, the combat just isn’t fun. The amount of pausing and reloading of saves is directly proportional to the difficulty. On easy you can expect to spend 1 second paused for every 10 or so unpaused, where as on hard and nightmare you can expect at least 10 seconds paused for every second unpaused. It’s micromanagement at its absolute worst. Couple that with the fact that everything save a few bosses level with you, and some of the fights are just plain infuriating (see: Broodmother) and you begin to see shitpile that is this combat system. Expect almost all of your aoe spells to do friendly fire, to have nearly every fight with humanoids to be an ambush on their end, to have stealthed enemies that there is no way to detect, to have traps that enemies can walk over without setting off, and of course to kill an enemy with a massive sword and a full set of armor only to have them drop a health poultice and 5 silver.

This is a comment.

The thing I can’t wrap my head around is how fanatical some of the people that play this game are. You have to really hate yourself to play this game on nightmare. I see people on forums bragging about how hardcore they are, it just blows me away.

The items in the game are pretty lackluster as well, which I was surprised at. I figured like every other game ever that has a dragon in it anywhere that items would be a big part of it, but they’re not really. For the most part I ran around in heavy chainmail. I went from Iron heavy chainmail, to grey iron heavy chainmail, to steel heavy chainmail, and so on. It wasn’t until the last 10 hours or so of play that suddenly good magic items started dropping. Oh, and let’s talk about fatigue for a second. So as it turns out, as long as your strength is high enough, any class can wear any armor (with a couple exceptions). To make up for this, there’s a fatigue system. Heavier armor incurs more fatigue, which makes every thing you do cost more. So as you upgrade armor, you’ll be getting more armor, which has more fatigue, making it not feel so much like an upgrade at all. The idea here was to force you to find a balance between armor and fatigue, like that’s supposed to be fucking fun or something, but it really just means that your tank is only going to be able to shield bash the final boss twice before he runs out of stamina.

So in the end, shitty AI, terrible combat set ups, an uninteresting and rather unlikable item system, oh and did I mention that there are RANDOM ENCOUNTERS? You have to waste an entire party slot on a rogue or else you’ll miss out on most of the loot in the game due to locked chests, but mine was so worthless that my Ranger/Bard would usually resort to punching things with her fists over actually just shooting her damn bow. A tactical combat system that is not fun at all, copious amounts of loading screens, and a world map / fast travel system that should be taken out back and shot, and you have one of the worst games that I’ve played, ever.

Wait, there’s more to the game than the combat system, thank god. Let me talk about that stuff.

Rule the world! Or don’t.

This is a game that basically takes the word choice, engraves it in the front of its boots, and proceeds to kick you in the head with it repeatedly until you stop twitching. I figured this game would pretty much be Baldur’s Gate 3, so the first skill I got up was persuasion. I was not wrong. Most NPC encounters can be boiled down to:
NPC disagrees, do you …
  A) relent
  B) pointlessly argue your point
  C) [persuade] say 3 words and change their mind
  D) [intimidate] threaten them which they will promptly forget you did, same results as c
  E) kill them

The voice acting is top notch, and the character models are generally pleasing to the eye, which is especially good because you will be spending several hours talking to people in this game. The writing is okay, nothing spectacular, with the possible exception of Alistair. It’s probably because he has the same sense of humor as I do, but some of the shit Alistair says in this game is pretty funny. Everyone else is boring in their own special way.

Each party member has their own personality, and likes and dislikes certain things, including each other. For instance Wynne and Leliana really get along, but Alister will actually say ‘fuck you’ and leave if you have Teyrn Loghain in your party. So you will have to kind of choose how you’re going to act, then build your party accordingly. You have a reputation with each person, up to 100, and decisions you make, quests you do, and gifts you give all affect this. For the most part the number is just arbitrary, at a certain point they gain little abilities if they like you more for example. But for some things, such as romance, it’s a big factor. I didn’t do much with the romance in game because it’s pretty pointless, and it’s hard to get into Leliana’s pants (I had sex with Morrigan, but that’s not exactly hard). There’s 4 possible relationships in the game, 3 for each gender (see what they did there?) and a couple of other spots where you can have sex with random strangers, up to and including a foursome. Why they did this, I haven’t the slightest clue. It’s not like it makes the game feel any more mature, quite the opposite, and there’s no nudity or anything for a cheap thrill, it just seemed altogether pointless to me.

One of the various denizens of the world you can fuck.

There are 9 (10 with DLC) party member possibilities, but don’t expect them all to get along, hell by the end of the game I had killed 3 of them. The classes are all pretty run of the mill, Warrior, Rogue or Mage, with everyone getting 2 specializations, like berserker, ranger, spirit healer, etc. Some of the choices are overtly evil, but none of them are especially good (as in the alignment, not the quality). Most likely you’re going to end up with a rogue in your party, a healer, a tank, and then the 4th will be some kind of a damage dealer, in my party that was a 2handed warrior berserker.

I’m going to try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, but as I mentioned earlier, the plot is grand in scheme, but mediocre in quality. But where the game lacks in originality, it tries to make up with in a metric shit ton of other plot. Everybody has a story to tell you, and I mean everybody. By the end of the game I must have spent a good 5 hours just talking to people in my party, but so much more talking to everyone else. The blacksmith who’s daughter is trapped in the keep, the crazy gospel lady that replaces holy terms with food items, the little dwarf girl who wants to study magic even though she can never cast it herself. Pretty much everyone you bump in to is ready and eager to dump their life story on you if you give them the chance. But anyway, the main plot is about the Darkspawn invasion, and you, as a newly minted Grey Warden have to stop it. So you raise an army and, surprise, save the day (well I did anyway). How you go about this is almost entirely up to you.

After what I consider the intro, the game breaks off into an open world and you have the goals of gaining allies in the elves, dwarves, humans, and mages. So you go to each subsequent place, realize that they’re all pretty much worthless and you’d be better off on your own anyway, but decide to help them each out with their insignificant problems so you can proceed with the saving of the world. But like I said, it’s all about choice, the philosophy of the Grey Wardens is apparently whatever you have to do as long as the Darkspawn die in the end. This is a game that, from my perspective as a good character, really seems to reward being evil. There are 2 classes that you can’t be unless you barter with demons, there are special powers you can’t access, there are several quests that you can circumvent, and you can even bargain with fallen enemies for better loot or other such things. Early on you will encounter a big dude in a prison cage thing who confessed to the murder of 3 families. Then you have the option to force the elder to free him. I found myself wondering, why the fuck would I want to free this guy, he killed 3 families, why would I ever take that option? Turns out he’s like the best tank in the game, I just let him die, oh well.

You dead.

There are hundreds of quests in this game, pretty much all of them side quests. They’re easy to spot, a huge arrow above the head, your journal tells you where to go, and turn in’s and quest updates are clearly indicated on the map. The problem I began to run in to is that I don’t care about these people and their problems. It gets a little retarded some of the shit people ask you to do. When I’m asked to find the artifact forge that can make sentient golems to turn the tide of the war, I understand. But some dumbass lost his cat-rabbit things and wants me to wander around town looking for them? Fuck off. It doesn’t help that most of the quests rewards are either utter shit, or completely non-existent. I turned in too many quests where I got no money, no items, not even any damn experience, so I stopped caring about them by the end. Considering how involved some of the quests can be, I doubt anyone can feel overly satisfied with most of the quests. Unless you get a warm fuzzy feeling in your belly from knowing you helped an imaginary person in a video game, in which case you have issues. Quite frankly the only thing that stopped me from going off the deep end at points and just slashing people open was the fact that my party was all good people, and they’d be mad at me.

This is a longer game, there’s no doubt about that. For having no multiplayer at all, a 40-50 hour game is on the high end in my mind. I read a review of one guy saying he was 150 hours in and still had a ton that he wanted to do. Playing on a harder difficulty tends to make fights that should be 30 seconds last 10 minutes due to all the pausing, which is a cop out for extending play time in my opinion. But even with the difficulty, 150 hours is at least 2 full playthroughs, if not starting a third. If I started over and played through the game again it’d only last 20 hours, but I wouldn’t be doing much of the side quests.

This is a game where everything scales to meet you, which is a real double edged sword, and I don’t think it was executed well. The issue here is that no matter what you do, you never really feel epic. Everything you fight is your level, so even though you’ve left a pile of bodies that could plug the Mariana Trench in your wake, fighting 4 wolves could be tough. It means that with the notable exceptions of the High Dragon and Flemeth, nothing is ever too hard for you, which saves on frustration, but nothing is ever so easy as to be considered trivial. And quite frankly, what the hell do I want to run around doing a bunch of side quests and getting super awesome gear if it just means everything I fight is going to level up with me and get better gear as well? I realize that with the openness scaling is a necessity, but I wonder if this game might not have worked better with a linear story.

Group photo, everybody smile!

Despite a combat system that makes me want to hurt people, I found myself enjoying pretty much every other aspect of the game. The characters pulse with real personality (well, except Morrigan) and the world seems alive. I try to shy away from the immersion aspect of games, as I don’t generally place as much stock in it as many of the other reviewers I’ve read, but this game is completely bi-polar with it and it’s impossible to ignore. Other than the weird way that characters only talk with their lips, not their tongues or jaws, the models and animations are pretty amazing. The voice acting is very good, and there are tons of different voices. You won’t run into any repeat models like in Risen, and definitely no instances of 2 characters with the same voices talking to each other like in Oblivion. Combined with the lush environments, the cities full of people, the strange dream-like journey into the Fade, and it’s an incredibly immersive game. Which just makes me question all over again why in the hell did they make this a party based game.

In the end this is a very niche game. It has aspects that many people will like, but unless you thoroughly enjoy the tactical combat system, you’re not going to like the game that much. Odds are that unless you have already played the game and enjoyed it, you’re not going to like it.

The Verdict:

Gameplay: This game suffers from some serious flip flop, loving it one minute it and bored out of my skull or hating it the next.

Looks: Overall impressive, nothing overly grand, no real wow moments. Characters look good and are diverse, armor works well but tends more towards the practical as opposed to looking awesome. Environments work, but aren’t going to blow you away.

Noise: The voice acting is top notch, and the sheer number of good voices in the game sets the bar for sure. While I still found myself skipping through some conversations, or not paying attention, I have to fault the writing more than the actors. The music is okay, pretty stereotypical, lots of strings and grand compositions, Lord of the Ringsey music.

Addictiveness: Varies wildly along with the gameplay. When this game is good it’s impossible to put down, when it’s bad it’s hard to keep going.

Replayability: I’m giving the game the benefit of the doubt here. If you play this game, and enjoy it, you’re probably going to want to play it again. With various difficulties, different classes, party members, moral choices, and quests, there is likely a lot you didn’t do the first time around. Just don’t expect what you have to do to really be any different. That being said, most people will not be replaying this game, if even beating it at all.

Overall Rating:

Um… don’t ask.