Dragon Age: Origins
Bioware have a history of making good RPG's and Dragon Age: Origins is no different. Bioware opens up a whole new world and fill it with monsters, quests and role playing goodness. Set in a small part of the world known as Ferelden, your character is torn out of their life to fight off a 'Blight' of twisted beings called the Darkspawn. The game doesn't throw you head first into the action though. The opening cinematic gives you a brief history of the world and a background of the 'Grey Wardens', a group you will get to know quite well as you progress, given that you join them fairly early in the game. What makes this game so special is the open-ended nature that Bioware have gifted it. There are so many choices and so much immersive story that you will be playing through several times and still find something new.
The story is told and progressed by stunning cut scenes at crucial points. The player almost feels like they are living a movie through their character in these cut scenes. I sat in awe as I watched the cut scene at Ostagar where the King's army battle the Darkspawn. I still love watching it every time I play through with a new character.
If it's immersion and freedom you are looking for, you just struck gold. DA:O has no less than three different races for you to choose from, each with highly customisable appearance and gender. You get to choose between three classes; Warrior, Mage and Rogue. The classes don't end there however, as you have talent trees that allow you to advance in different directions according to your wishes. Each race has two different “Origin” sequences that give your new character a background story. Each one is unique and leads to different reactions from NPC's and can even impact on the ending.
The character creation is not the end of your customisability. As with most RPG's you interact with NPC's in the world by way of a series of questions and replies that your character can use. You may have several variations of the same reply that reflect differing attitudes for your character. If you want to be a hard ass you choose the more biting responses and so on. This helps the immersion because you really get involved with your character and their development through the game, making choices based on how you think they would react. However, your character does not receive voice acting like your companions and NPC's, and the facial expressions are often less reflective of the response you give, adopting a rather wooden feature. This is not true of the characters around you, only the Player character. This is only a minor issue in the immersion, but little things tally so I'm told. You might be thinking that any RPG out there has exactly the same or similar features. What makes Dragon Age so special? What puts this game a cut above the rest is that your actions and responses have direct consequences on the story. If you annoy a party member for example, they will leave you and that process is irreversible. It also impacts on one of the five unique endings in the game. These endings are then later used to influence the DLC content and even the sequel in March.
Dragon Age implemented an interesting concept of party combat to entice both the strategists and the adventure RPG'ers. You can either control a single character at a time and let the rest just get on with it, or you can program each character to do certain things based on many variables in the tactics screen. Both options are viable play styles meant to give the player more freedom in how they fight battles. However, the tactical combat is somewhat sloppy in that there is only so much you can program each character to do, and often without intervention they can still run for the furthest away enemy and either pull a huge extra group or leave your more vulnerable characters to a grizzly death-by-ogre. Actions such as placing ranged characters on a hill does increase range and damage, but does not guarantee that said characters will stay on the hill unless babysat, which can be frustrating in the middle of a taxing fight. Despite this however, the combat is manageable and any AI wrongdoing can be rectified by player intervention. The combat animations are somewhat limited and could be better sequenced and fluid.
Visually, Dragon Age: Origins has been critiqued to be a “dirty” game, but honestly the world is not that bad looking. Sure it's not High Def graphics and could be a little better, but if you compare it to oblivion and some of the other RPG's out there, this game is a stunner. If you are still displeased with the aesthetics, there are several mods on the Bioware Social site amongst others that have done a rework on the visuals. The only disappointment is the lack of varied armour in the game itself. Without mods you will find that though some of the plate armour looks quite good, it is repeated several times in different colours, and that it is not available until the higher levels. If you are a cloth wearing class, you may as well find some armour mods before you even install the game because good looking robes are hard to come by. And the hats...lets not talk about caster hats... You will find out...
As a bonus though, if you are not deterred by any of the minor negativities in this game, there are plenty of side quests and spin off missions to keep you happy for months. If you have not played this game, you still have time before the sequel Dragon Age II arrives in March, so get playing! It is available on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.
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