Dragon Age: Origins

The first game I have decided to review is Dragon Age: Origins. Why is it first? Because it's the most awesome game ever? Because it's the most recently played? No. Because it's the game I really feel the need to say things about that I haven't seen anyone else saying. I won't intentionally spoil the game for anyone, but all should be warned that talking about a game from a story-telling perspective means it might happen.

Rating: 8/10 (This rating is an attempt at objectively analyzing the game as if I had never read or heard anything about it)

Expected Rating: 4/10 (This rating is based on how the game fared against everything I had heard, read, watched, or assumed about the game before playing)

Pros: Fascinating world, diverse starting plot, good combat mechanics, interesting party members.

Cons: Overarching plot vanishes for a large portion of the game, soundtrack is repetitive in the extreme, main character is dull as a rock, complicated skill point system.

Dragon Age: Origins is a good game. No question about it. If you're looking for an RPG fix, you can do a lot worse. That said, I found the game to be a large disappointment; hence the expected rating bomb. I can identify two things off the top of my head that lead me to have much higher expectations for this game. First of all, this is a BioWare game, and in my experience they are the top RPG creators, as good or better than the folks at Square. The second thing is that I had just finished playing Mass Effect when I first popped this game in. That being another BioWare game, and from several years ago, I expected Dragon Age to top it in every way.

My biggest disappointment is that the main character doesn't speak, ever. Mass Effect had raised my story-telling standards so that I now always expect my main character to vocalize the dialogue choices I make. But Dragon age definitely let me down on that point, the main character never speaks, I'm pretty sure he never even had a facial expression change. I played a Dwarf Commoner Rogue, and from the very beginning of the game while being berated by his drunken mother, to slaughtering hordes of undead and Darkspawn, to flirting with the love of his life, he wears the same grim expression he had when I was creating his face before beginning the actual gameplay.

The origin story for my character was actually a good combination of telling the story of the world the story takes place in, introducing the player character's place in that world and teaching me how to control my character. Once I finished the origin story, I felt confident I could play the game successfully and that I knew enough about the world that I would be able to teach myself the rest as I went and I was thrust into the main plot of the game.

Again, the main plot started out quite well. I was recruited to go fight the Darkspawn and hopefully help save all life in Ferelden, the name of the country I was currently inhabiting. The primary threat, or so I was lead to believe, was was a dragon, an old god turned into an Arch-Demon by the hordes of Darkspawn. Unfortunately, I didn't have any interaction with this dragon until quite late in the game. In the mean time, my leader is betrayed by his general, and I vowed vengeance.

Unfortunately, he controls too large an army for me to attack him directly. So I have to go around the world recruiting anyone I can find to my cause, and that's what I spent the majority of the game doing. As interesting a premise as that is, it wasn't effectively implemented. The recruiting missions required going to different areas and convincing the peoples there that they should follow you. For the most part these missions functioned completely independently of the rest of the game. If I recruit the elves, it doesn't mean anything to the world I'm supposed to be engrossed in except that I've completed one more objective towards ending it. This resulted in me feeling that instead of watching a long and interactive movie, I was being given a collection of static pictures. Instead of flowing the story skips and jumps, leaving me with a highlight reel of the important information I needed to complete the game instead of an interesting story weave that made me want to see where the game was going.

The soundtrack was engrossing the first time I heard it. Once every song had repeated seemingly 20 times, it no longer fascinated me. Again, the music probably suffered here in my mind because I had just finished playing Mass Effect. I actually originally became interested in Mass Effect when I heard it's theme performed at a Video Games Live concert, and the rest of it's soundtrack did not disappoint me.

The game does have strengths, the party members you can recruit have very interesting and diverse backgrounds and are quite entertaining to talk to. They're given good dialogue and are well-voiced. The actual game-play as well was quite fun. The inventory system is interesting and diverse, allowing min-maxers quite a bit to do. Though it didn't really seem to scale well and many of the best pieces seemed to be purchasable rather than looted from corpses and towards the end of the game you may find yourself overwhelmed with the amount of loot you've picked up and don't know what to do with. The skill system is very complicated, for RPG veterans this means that there are lots of choices to make that will lead you down many paths. There are only 3 classes, but each class can have points allotted to it in different ways that make them widely different. For relative new-comers the skill system will likely be very intimidating in the large number of choices you have to make, none of which can be changed later.

All in all, Dragon Age: Origins is a good game if you're primarily concerned with the game-play mechanics. Even if you're primarily interested in the story, it's a lot better than many other RPGs out there. It just doesn't seem to quite measure up to BioWare's other creations. I intend to play through it a second time to see if things seem better a second time around and I would still recommend it to anyone who asked me.