Two nights ago I beat Dragon Age: Origins. Last night, I got the three remaining ends to the game and am now probably done with it. For those who are unaware, Dragon Age is a real-time party-based RPG in a high-fantasy setting. Plotwise, it goes something like this: your character has, for whatever reason, encountered Darkspawn. These Darkspawn are an ancient always chaotic evil horde bent on destroying everything for reasons that are explained by the game's backstory. Periodically, the Darkspawn rise up and actually attempt to assault the surface in number rather than running around just causing periodic trouble. This organized attack is what the game calls a "Blight". Your character (somehow) ends up part of the Grey Wardens, the ancient military organization whose sole purpose is to kill Darkspawn and to prevent or stop any Blights.

Generally speaking, it's a fairly straightforward "save the world" plot. The interesting parts come in when you get tasked to raise an army to defend against the Blight and quickly find out that everyone in this entire universe is a self-serving jerk who must be threatened, cajoled or bribed into saving their own skins. Nevertheless, I generally found it to be compelling and the twists and turns of the game kept me playing.

Gameplay wise, it is similar in form to Bioware's other RPG endeavors such as Knights of the Old Republic or Jade Empire. The game uses the standard four-man active party system and a level-based advancement system with each character coming from a specific class (Warrior, Rogue or Mage). Every level, you gain a few additional stat points and an additional skill.

I played the game on its "Normal" difficulty and found the learning curve to be incredibly steep. Although there are many skills open to players, there is an incredible disparity between the usefulness of different skills. Furthermore, the classes have a distinct lack of balance. If you're just beginning, expect to die quite often. The system is set up such that the enemies all have the same sort of skills that players have access to and have abilities based on stats in the same way that players do. This, coupled with the dynamic difficulty nature of encounters, means that the party never really gets substantially stronger than its enemies. As such, you have to win by superior tactics and skill choices. To create further difficulty, enemies usually outnumber your party at the two-to-one level and several encounters are at the three-to-one or even four-to-one level.

I mentioned above the lack of balance between classes. When I say this, what I'm really saying is that mages are the best class by leaps and bounds. Unlike the other classes, none of their spells have level requirements. This means that you can have a fourth-tier ability by the time you're level 7 or 8 (to meet the statistic requirements). Even worse, they have a near-monopoly on area-effect attacks. An archer has a single, fourth-tier area of effect attack. Considering only the "Primal" class of spells, the Mage has eight area spells (three cones, four spheres, and a "chain lightning" which is something unique). Mages standard attack (a blast of elemental energy from a staff) also never fails to miss. Although other classes tend to do higher damage, the fact that they miss periodically makes mages one of the most consistent damage dealing classes available. Of course, nothing can be said about the amazing power of mages without making note of the spell "Cold Cone". This is a third-tier mage ability. It causes everyone in its area of effect to take cold damage and have a chance of being frozen solid for up to 10 seconds. When I say "chance" however, I mean near-certanty. The only enemy that I've ever seen resist the effect twice in a row was an enemy who was otherwise immune to cold damage (a Revenant for those keeping score) and I've never seen an enemy resist it three times in a row. Couple this with the facts that the spell has a 15 second cooldown and being frozen makes enemies vulnerable to being shattered and that it interrupts ongoing attacks (like charing up certain spells or grabs and the like) and you've got a spell that is single handedly a game breaker. No other classes has anywhere near that kind of ability for control. In fact, I beat both of the optional bosses merely by throwing cold cones through them alternately using my two mages and having the other party members do additional damage via ranged attacks.

Balance issues aside, I think the game is quite well constructed and certainly worth playing. If you've liked Bioware's other entries, you'll probably enjoy this one as well. It is certainly more difficult than their other ones--I never remember having to pause the game to micromanage my entire party while playing KotOR for instance--but once you've overcome the learning curve, deaths quickly become rarer. I picked it up for somewhere in the neighborhood of $35. I think this was a fair price for it considering the amount of game available. I also ended up picking up the one DLC that is out that I didn't have (Warden's Keep). It was alright, but probably not worth the $7 price tag. The one that came with it--The Stone Prisoner--was substantially more interesting and I could imagine myself paying the $7 for it.

As a bit of an aside, the PC version of the game (the one that I played) incorporates an achievement system like XBox Live and PS3 trophies do. For whatever reason, however, rather than simply being a Game for Windows LIVE and integrating with their system, they've chosen to roll their own in the form of "Bioware Social". I can see how they might have their own reasons for wishing to do so (licensing fees, control, etc.), but frankly, I don't think we need yet another achievement system. The proliferation with LIVE and PSN was bad enough already, but adding another--and one which will add maybe two games per year at most--seems like the highest level of arrogance on the part of Bioware (or possibly EA). So, now I have yet another score to keep track of.

Published by XPost^curses