Dragon Age: Origins

Bioware loves its fantasy settings Lionel likes a security blanket. If they’re not enraptured with dragons, dwarves, demons and debauchery, then its spaceships, science-fiction, strange aliens and…well more debauchery. Mass Effect was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic with hot alien sex, and now we have Dragon Age: Dungeons and Dragons with hot interracial elf/dwarf action.

I kid. There’s more to Dragon Age than underwear-sporting intercourse, just like Mass Effect had more to it than LSD-induced sex with the blue alien chick. I’m just a bit surprised that Bioware has made little effort to stray from the all-too-familiar paths of either sci-fi or Tolkien fantasy. It’s as if fifteen members of the team died during the development of Jade Empire and the staff is scared of peeving the gods of pen and paper RPGs. Of course, my surprise could also stem from my constant attempts to woe over Morrigan, the slutty evil mage, only to discover later that she only goes down for male characters. Alas, my female elf character was, at best, “friend material” for her. (Yes, I’m one of “those guys” that always makes female characters in RPGS and MMOs. If you’re going to stare at something’s ass for 40 hours…)

So the Dragon Age experience starts with you crafting a character. He, she or it can be either human, elf or dwarf, and can run the occupational paths of either warrior, mage or rogue. Your race and career path determine your run through one of six origin stories. I am fairly certain that, after playing though two of these origin stories, that they all involve a whole lot of killing. After said loss of life, your character finds him/her/itself in the ranks of the Grey Wardens, an order of Fighting Irish ass-whooping machines determined to oppress evil demons.

Okay, there’s a lot more to the plot than that. Oodles and oodles and oodles more. You’ll pick up many books, letters and stray articles about the fiction of the land of Fereldin for the player to ignore. Much of the game is spent travelling all across this fancy, fictional, Tolkieninian land, where you’ll do such D&D-like acts as: talking to villagers, engaging in conversation trees, doing quests, doing side-quests, looting the corpses of your deceased enemies, looting the property of your living villagers and selling all the crap resources you’ll never use because herbalism without pot is no fun.

For the most part, the story as a whole is interesting (or at least the main bits. I can’t speak on whether or not the sheer quantity of tomes I picked up about the lore of the land are potentially gripping. I wish I could sell those codex pieces, turn my mage into a travelling World’s Largest Bookstore.) Like other Biogames, there comes a point where your journey splits into 4 different sub-quests, built around recruiting for a makeshift army, which can be tackled in any order. During these sub-quests, you’ll get the vibe that the developers were hellbent on shoving every human injustice, political controversy and sociological issue in the game short of Apartheid...and there’s always the sequel. Elves are the segregated Afro-Americans that can’t drink from the same water fountains or urinate in the same restrooms as their human counterparts. There’s a religious order that forces their beliefs (and swords) down the throats of all the land. I laughed uproariously when I heard that dwarves were governed by a caste system. Castes! With dwarves, the least Indian of the Tolkien tribes. But the overabundance of morality plays actually makes Dragon Age work from a story standpoint.

Gone is the forcefully black and white “good or evil” system of RPGs past. Your character no longer has a “good/evil” meter like in Knights of the Old Republic. You are free to make moral decisions based on how you personally feel about a given issue, instead of forcing yourself to side to just side with either good choices to get the “good guy ending” or vice-versa. (And none of that nonsense from Infamous that FORCED you to play one side or the other in the name of unlocking abilities. Therein is a sigh of relief.) Rather, each of your party mates has a “relationship meter” that affects how much they like you, dislike you, or are willing to fornicate with you. And even if your partner is upset that you slaughtered his or her entire race, you can always win them back over with them presents. The Dragon Age world is realistically shallow indeed. It also helps that your decisions have a sense of weight to them, affecting the storyline in their own ways. (And I assume affecting the storyline of Dragon Age 2, which is kind of neato if you think about it.) In particular, you’ll often come across factions in conflict, and the decisions you make will affect which party aligns with you in the final battle. You’ll be made to choose, for example, whether you want the aid of an army of Elvin archers or werewolves, and I think that decision will be a no-brainer.

You know how in real life, people generally befriend people with similar interests, styles and personalities? And you know how, in RPGs, the opposite is always true? Dragon Age is akin to every RPG in history in that your character builds a party of eclectic characters whom would never, ever band together in a real life situation. You’ll recognize certain Biowareisms in your cast of characters; the straight-as-a-pole male, the innocent, promiscuous school girl-like figure, and the obligatory monster figure that seeks comedic relief through psychopathic tendencies. Shale, the golem that you need to download (and potentially pay for) will get some laughs with his odd quirks but I was just waiting for him to call my dog a meathead. Actually, this is a small complaint, they’re largely a likeable bunch, in particular said pet dog…mostly because he is a pet dog and you can win approval points by petting him. I may have treated my dog better than I treated the entire kingdom of Fereldin.

I guess I should talk about the gameplay at some point. Dragon Age is like any Bioware game in that your true gods are not deities or mythological figures but rather behind-the-scenes dice rolls. Battles occur in pseudo-real time, with your characters casting spells, attacking enemies and being attacked in a rhythm and flow akin to that of those pesky MMORPGs. At any given point, you can freeze the battle to assign specific orders to yourself and your team, though I would have rather not. I can’t call this a flaw with the game so much as it is a flaw with me losing the patience to strategize, but I’d rather focus on what my character is doing than any of my teammates. Hence, I found myself occasionally tweaking the Gambits…I mean Tactics settings of my teammates, which affect how they behave in combat situations (like, for example, HEAL when you’re about to die so that you don’t freaking die.)

Really, the only times I wasn’t enjoying Dragon Age was when I was forced to micro-manage. And it’s not quite heavy micro-management, either. It’s not like there was a pesky sphere grid or one of those needlessly convoluted leveling systems that so many JRPGs like to confuse me with. (The leveling up process is rather traditional, easy to interpret. More in line with other Bioware games or World of Warcraft than some kind of Junction nonsense from Final Fantasys past.) That said, I hated trying to figure out the inventory system of the game. You can’t assume that the next town you go to will be selling the next best set of armour like most RPGs defy real marketplace logic with. Rather, like Mass Effect, you have to examine every bit of armour, and wrap your mind around what all the fictional buzzwords mean in relation to each other. How am I supposed to know if Red steel chainmail armour is better than Veridium chainmail armour? All I got going for me is the prior knowledge that Red Steel was a crappy game. I ultimately gave up on the concept of armour altogether, through using a party consisting of two mages, my dog, and the stone golem, all of which can get by just fine fighting in their birthday suits.

So my biggest issues with the game were more to do with the re-education process of learning to play an RPG than in-game faults. But there are a handful of flaws that beg to be picked at like a scab. Some of the game’s dungeons just seem to last longer than Everlasting Gobstoppers, breaking both my jaw, my patience and my inventory; far too often I would run out of space from collecting loot I intended to sell, often right before a boss fight (and the subsequent treasures that come with.) There is one particular NPC that should wear a striped shirt and be labeled “travelling salesman”, for he follows your party around, begging you to go on particular quests that involve buying downloadable content. Also, this being the console version, you’ll have to adapt to the radial menu for in-game attacks and clumsy fumbling with the shoulder buttons to navigate your management menus. I imagine the PC version of the game being easier to comprehend, but I’d rather adapt to these quirky menus and play my 40 hour RPG on the comfort of a sofa anyways. And finally, you can’t have a Bioware game without glitches and bugs. The game froze on me twice…which I guess gives it a better track record than games of past. Who else encountered that save-erasing glitch from Knights of the Old Republic?

But ultimately, Dragon Age is worth getting for several reasons. It’s a big game that you’ll (mostly) enjoy from your bloodstained beginnings to the ending that you’ll choose based on your whims and not the whims of a good or bad meter. It took me 30 hours to finish on the first playthrough, missing several sidequests, and I’m already toying with the possible crimes against humanity I’ll commit on my next game save. It’s an evolutionary RPG that intelligently matures the genre without mucking it up through convoluted gimmicks like too many other contemporary releases. And finally, Dragon Age is the game that convinces me that Bioware is amassing a real legacy of RPGs. Where I used to dread the monotony of seeing sequel after sequel, I now find myself intrigued by what awaits me in Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2. A rare feat.

4 ½ stars