Dragon Age: Origins is a traditional Role-Playing Game, complete with traditional governing attributes like “intelligence” and “cunning” and dungeon crawling quests. Is it a solid game? Well, it has a solid core, but people are making me angry with just how highly they praise this game because it clearly has problems a plenty.
GAMEPLAY
Let us start with the characters, which are a big part of the game, perhaps the biggest part. You meet many of them in your adventures and there are many conversations to be had with lots of variation in the dialogue based on your choices. You have various companions travelling with you, without whom you would quickly lose any battle, and there is a game mechanic whereby members of your posse will approve or disapprove the choices you make throughout the game, lowering or raising their disposition towards you, which in turn affects their performance and the storyline. There is also possibility to engage in romance.
A lot of the dialogue is amusing: well written and well-acted. However, the characters are ultimately messed up, especially in the early part of the game and especially if the main character is human (which is the default choice for many). Their behavior can be contradictory, poorly written and almost none of your companions are likable! That is kind of a big issue for a game that puts story and characters in the forefront.
A good example is a character named Morrigan who was clearly meant to be an independent cynic but she ends up making offensive comments where it does not make sense and disapproves when you do not make the “evil” choice, like on occasion when you decide to help someone, you know, like what you normally do in any role-playing game. This is an insane design choice for any RPG but it is especially crazy in this game where the whole story is based on you trying to acquire various allies for the final battle, whereby you need to assist them with their problems before they assist you with yours. Morrigan disapproves parts of the main quest line!! Yet she does not leave your company and even asks you for help with her personal problem. She does not like touching, even a handshake, yet she does not mind casual sex. This is poor writing, guys.
The game has a fairly high difficulty, even on a normal difficulty setting. A high level of strategy is required and your characters can be wiped out quickly. This is no doubt one of the main reasons why the fans praised this game, and indeed, the difficulty makes the game feel meaty. It is nice that the game does not hold your hand.
However, the difficulty can be handled poorly by the game sometimes. You can suddenly find yourself up against an unexpected spike in difficulty and you have to cheat your way out of a situation. You will be forced to try and lure the enemies one by one by slowly moving towards the group of AI characters and then running back. That is not strategy. That is exploitation of a gameplay bug.
At one point I received a quest from one of my companions. The game apparently decided it was the right time to give me that quest. I went to do it and discovered that the enemy was impossible to defeat at that time. The game punished me for following its advise…
Also, the game informs you from the start that you are meant to pause the game during combat often. You pause, give out commands to your party members, unpause for a few seconds, pause again to adjust strategy, unpause, etc. This is however not proper gameplay. This is how I cheat my way through difficult situations in games. It is how I play through the real-time battles in the Total War series because I am bad at games. Making pausing, a feature that normally exists in games so that you can take a bathroom break, into an almost mandatory feature seems like an insane design choice, even if I am glad it exists.
Staying on the subject of difficulty, an key element of an RPG is that you are supposed to feel stronger as you rise in level. Enemies you could not defeat before can now finally be defeated and enemies who gave you a challenge in the past can now be dispensed with ease. However, in this game it always feels like an uphill battle, which seems to indicate that the game comes from the Elder Scrolls Oblivion school of thought where the levels of many enemies are adjusted to account for the player’s level. It is nice that the game continues being challenging but it also takes out one of the main reasons for the leveling system.
Dragon Age is a long game, so the value is quite high. There is well over 40 hours of gameplay here, close to 80 if you want to be tactical, and as already mentioned, those hours are filled with fairly challenging content, so that you feel like you have really partaken in something.
Another good thing is that the story has a good dynamic flow. You get to make many choices that affect the game in one way or another and the effects of your choices are integrated into the story quite seamlessly.
GRAPHICS
The quality of the graphics varies. They can be this game’s strongest point, if you try not to look at the blemishes. Unfortunately, the game makes that very hard not to do. See, at its core the game is a dungeon crawler RPG, which is usually played with the camera zoomed out. From this angle the game looks very good. It is colorful and the textures are sharp.
However the game insists on adding a close-up third-person camera, often forcing it instead of the top view camera. All the conversations are filmed up close and personal. This is where the issues creep in.
First of all, many of the faces were badly modeled. One of the first things I did when I got the game was to install one of the most popular mods for this game, which changes most of the characters faces. This mod does not make heavy changes, mostly just reshaping the existing faces, which proves that the modelers just did a bad job.
Secondly, what the heck is wrong with the expressions on people’s faces?! The animations are so basic and extreme that it looks horrifying and cartoonish at times. Imagine a sad face emoticon from your messenger. Now imagine if a human face actually looked that way.
Thirdly, some of the meshes are very low poly and poorly textured. Chainmail that hangs off the back of a helmet is represented by just 4 or 5 shiny sides (polys) with chain links just painted on. It looks terrible by any standards! You can also see that the modelers just closed off the gap where the character’s neck is and did not bother with the textures there. It is as if the designers did not know that the game was going to be shown from close up, because a professional would never leave it like that.
While we are on the subject of looks, the game disturbs with its lazy habit of simply repainting the same armor meshes and calling it a new armor set. A high level Dragon scale armor that you get late in the game is just a recolored version of an existing armor from early in the game. That is pathetic!
PERFORMANCE
Perhaps the most glaring and popularly admitted issue consists of this game’s many bugs. Throughout the game I experienced several crashes and glitches. Characters get stuck in a particular animation or your character gets stuck in some room, which he was not supposed to be able to enter yet. You may end up in a situation where you spend almost 20 minutes fighting a dragon only to have the game crash (as it often does) in the last stretch. And this how the game is now, after all the patches. I am scared to think how it was like upon release. Since the game’s release the developers have also released at least 10 download content packs, and yet the game still has bugs! What were they thinking, selling so much additional content before fixing the main product?!
VERDICT
In the end it is two features that outweigh all the negatives: the meaty tactical gameplay and the dynamic storyline. Despite the problems, after the main campaign was over, I felt like playing through the Awakening DLC, and after I finished that (which took another 20 hours or so), I felt like I could still play some more of the same. The game is good…as long as you do not maintain that this is perfect, because misrepresenting the truth makes me mad.