A couple of you have been anticipating my Dragon Age: Origins review, and I’m glad that I finally was able to find some time this past winter break getting through its 50+ hours. Having now completed it once (still debating whether to go through it again so soon after), I wanted to share my thoughts primarily for the Xbox 360 version of the game. I also had a chance to check out the PC version, as I ended up deciding to play through some of it after the 360 version since I heard the PC version was better. Read on for my review on this epic adventure. Warning – this is a long review as I have a lot of opinionated thoughts on the game.
For those of you that are not aware, I love RPGs. I remember playing the first Dragon Warrior when it came free with my Nintendo Power subscription when I was a kid. Then I tried Final Fantasy, and the rest was history. Suffice to say, this review of Dragon Age: Origins is from a serious RPG fan. Nowadays, I find myself having less and less time to seriously put into RPGs due to their length, but I’m quite glad I was able to find time for Dragon Age: Origins.
Storyline & Scope
To me, in order to enjoy an RPG, you have to be in it for the long haul. The primary way you’re going to be drawn into one is if you grow attached to the storyline and characters. Dragon Age: Origins definitely delivers on this. If I had played this game in time for our 2009 awards, I would have probably tried to override cmfl3x’s awarding of Batman: Arkham Asylum as our pick for the game with the best story of 2009. Dragon Age: Origins is epic – think Lord of the Rings epic. In fact, it may share a bit too many similarities to Lord of the Rings, but it’s still an amazingly crafted world with detailed characters that I wouldn’t mind revisiting in subsequent sequels. I don’t even really want to talk about the actual storyline at all because I want those of you that do end up going out to play this to just go in fresh.
Dragon Age: Origins does what past RPGs on the 360 failed to fully deliver on. It provided the depth and scope that I expected out of Mass Effect. Mass Effect started off so well as you became a Spectre, but then it just became a few levels on a couple planets. Where was the scope where you could travel the universe? Surprisingly, while Dragon Age: Origins’ world is so much smaller, the game world feels larger, there are more characters, more sidequests, and generally more everything such that it crushes Mass Effect’s level of depth. Dragon Age: Origins also puts to shame Fable II’s morality system. I remember hearing how Peter Molyneux was claiming how he wanted all the choices you made in Fable II to have consequences, and I would say that he didn’t even really deliver on that aspect. Dragon Age: Origins fleshes out living with the consequences of your decisions so much further that you honestly have to make some difficult choices throughout the game. I’ve never played a video game on the 360 that has made me sit there really thinking which option I would go with. I commend Dragon Age: Origins for giving me so many decisions to make and dialogue options. If you enjoyed Mass Effect’s dialogue options and choices, you will be enamored with what you will find in Dragon Age: Origins.
Dragon Age: Origins handles morality better than any game I’ve played. Each of the characters in your party have their own moral standards as well, and the decisions you make when they are present in your party affect their relationship with you. If you choose to perform an option that they would not stand for, they like you less. Do what they want and their fondness increases – even to a point where they can fall in love with you if you keep aligning with their personality. The amount of dialogue in this game is just mindblowing. Put any random characters in your party and after a while they’ll start conversing with each other. Things even got so bad between two of my female party members (since they were fighting over me) that I just had to stop keeping them in the same party since I grew tired of the arguing. But that just goes to show you right there the amount of depth there is to the storyline and character development. Your main character can spend a lot of time talking to each of your party members, and by doing so you not only learn more about them, but if you are compatible, they will like you more, get inspired by you, receive stat bonuses, and even tell you more about themselves (which often lead to new quests).
The game lasts a good 60 hours if you want to pretty much do everything you can in a playthrough, and the way the game opens and ends are truly epic. I was inspired by the end of the game and did not want to go to bed when I was moving closer and closer to the end. It was so riveting and and a fitting end to the game but that’s all I can really say about that. There are some negatives though with regards to its length. With the beginning and ending so strong, the middle sometimes drags a bit. In fact, I found certain questlines (the whole dwarven one) to be somewhat soporific and nearly fell asleep at times since I didn’t care much for all the politics involved in those quests. I also didn’t like how there are several endings to the game, but that they are all pretty much determined by the actions you perform at the end of the game, as opposed to all the decisions you make throughout the game. Other than that, this game basically felt like a 60-hour Lord of the Rings-scope video game. That can be good or bad, depending on the person and how much depth they want in their storyline and character development. For me, it was awesome and I couldn’t have been more attached to the world that Dragon Age: Origins has created.
Attributes of an RPG: character customization, leveling, and gear
The next major areas of importance to me for an RPG revolve around character customization, leveling and gear. Dragon Age: Origins handles character customization and leveling quite well, as you can assign attribute points, talents, and skills every time you level up. There is a lot of flexibility in what you want to create for your characters, since you can only pick a handful of skills/talents for each character. If you don’t want to choose, there’s an auto-allocate feature that you can use to auto-allocate points into everything to any character that levels up. This is useful if you don’t feel like figuring out what the other members of your party should be specializing in and just want to get on with the game.
Gear is good and bad. I would say that the gear in this game is improved over Mass Effect’s gear system, but it still has a way to go to fully impress me. Youll come across a good number of unique named items in Dragon Age: Origins, but there are also still plenty of Leather Armor I, Leather Armor II, Leather Armor III, type items that plagued Mass Effect. I liked seeing set bonuses for the armor pieces, and the fact that many unique weapons were socketed so you could equip them with runes (that give bonuses) that you preferred. There’s a crafting system based on ingredients you can come across and a whole gifting system since you find items to gift to your party members. Giving the right gifts to the party members that love them increases how much they like you, and some even lead to new quests.
The loot is not really the problem in Dragon Age: Origins. If I had to call out the worst aspect of the entire game, it would be its inventory system and the stupid bag limit. In Dragon Age: Origins, you can only carry a certain number of total maximum items at a time. Throughout the game you can find vendors to increase your bag size a few more spaces, but it’s never enough. Also – get this: there’s no place to store your gear outside of your own bag. The most DREADED aspect of the game is when you’re several levels deep in a dungeon and then you want to pick up an item you see the message “Bag full”. You have to run all the way back out of the dungeon in order to sell your items to make room in your bag. What the heck is it with Western RPGs and their limited bag space? Why can’t they just make bags unlimited like Japanese RPGs? Does it really provide any sort of enjoyable feature that I have to stress out about the number of items I pick up? Even in games like Oblivion and Fallout 3, you may have a bag/weight limit on the total amount of items you can carry, but at least you can go back somewhere to a house or something to store anything you might want to use later. Out of the box in Dragon Age: Origins, there’s nowhere for you to store your stuff.
The lack of unlimited bag space or a place to store your items means that you will generally have to spend A LOT of time organizing your inventory before, during, and after every dungeon. It’s like every twenty minutes I need to go back to camp and figure out what I need to keep and what I need to get rid of. It’s terrible and it really detracts from the pacing of the game. It’d be like being told I have to clean my room every twenty minutes when I’m in the middle of something a lot more important. And it’s not like it’s quick either. You have to really sit at that item menu scrutinizing what is an upgrade for each party member so you go through every party member’s gear to make sure that the one item you have in question can be sold. Repeat that for 40-50 items every twenty minutes and you can see now that you will be spending a large amount of your time just in the item menus. I think BioWare really needs to figure out how to make item management much less a chore. I would rather no bag limit, so that I could decide on my own when I want to go through and figure out what I want to keep and throw out. BioWare decided to release a storage chest or something if we’re willing to shell out $7 for the Warden’s Keep DLC, but that’s another argument in and of itself with regards to why something so vital to enjoying the game is being charged for.
Gameplay
How does the game itself play? On the 360, it’s only playable from third person view, so in a sense, it plays almost like a fantasy-based Mass Effect. In my initial playthrough, I played as a warrior so it was easy to just run to enemies and hit things. It’s hard to target individual enemies when you’re melee based, but I guess that sort of comes with the territory. As a melee fighter, there’s not going to be as much strategy involved since you have to run to engage everything anyway. I also tried playing a mage a little bit, and that seems to be a little more difficult but it’s quite possible to play. The game automatically pauses when you’ve quick-selected a spell so that you can choose who you want to cast it on. Once you select the target, the game resumes. It may be jarring to see the game pause and unpause so often, but it works.
The gameplay is similar to Final Fantasy XII for anyone that’s played it. At the beginning of the game, you create a character, and throughout the game you meet others that you can recruit into your party. Up to four members can be in a party out on the field (one spot always has to be yourself). As you control your character, the AI controls the other three characters based on a set of conditions you can set up for each one. For example, you can designate one to be a healer such that if the condition “Party member HP < 50%” occurs, then “Cast Heal”. There is a lot of customization to be had with how exactly you want all the party members to play. You are also able to switch to any other character in your party at any time by clicking one of the left or right shoulder buttons. Unfortunately as a warrior build, I had no idea how to manage mages and rogues so I would only switch to them to pull them out of danger before going back to my main.
Differences between PC & 360 versions
Inevitably, anyone that plays the 360 version is going to wonder how it stacks up compared to the PC version. My summarized comparison to the two is this: the PC version is better if you have the choice, but the 360 version is still quite a good game if that’s the only way you can experience Dragon Age: Origins. The PC version’s biggest strength is the ability for you to zoom out on the battlefield, and thus play the game more at a tactical level akin to the original Baldur’s Gate games. The 360 version forces you to play the game from third person, and almost makes the game feel like an action game. My brother claims it looks like World of Warcraft, which isn’t quite off the mark.
The PC version also has the benefit of the mouse, allowing you to choose several party members at once, and you can pause the game at any time by hitting the space bar. This allows you to control how you want each of the four party members to fight, instead of just controlling one character on the 360 and letting the AI hurl the other three characters at the enemy. In short, the better way to play the game is to control the party at the more tactical level, but the PC version also allows you to play in 3rd person just like the 360 version. Amusingly enough, when I tried playing an hour or so of the PC version after completing the 360 version, I could not stand the tactical view and had to keep going back to the 3rd person camera! I think I got annoyed not being able to see further away on the map to know where I was going. Still, even if I ended up preferring the 3rd person view, the PC version wins points for allowing players to play the game more traditionally like past PC RPGs of this type.
At times I also felt that the text was a bit too small on the 360 version, as there was just so much of it to read all the time. The loading is also among the longest I’ve seen for a 360 game, although on my PC the loading seemed to be just as bad. I tried installing the 360 version to the hard drive, but it didn’t quite make it any faster so I went back to running the game off the disc on the 360. My PC version was already fully installed on the hard drive but definitely took a lot of time loading.
More Annoyances
Here are some more nitpicks that I just thought of. The first one is that for some reason, anytime during or after battle when you talk to one of your party members, they’re splattered with droplets of blood everywhere on them. Besides it not even looking realistic (looks like it was drizzling blood on them from a cloud above), it gets downright comical. You choose to speak to one of the party members that is your “lover”, and she’ll almost be winking her eyes at you adoringly but still be covered in blood. I realize that the developers probably wanted to give it a more realistic violence angle, but this was overboard.
The spoken audio is great in this game as it seems like everyone has spoken lines – except the main character. You can have a 10-minute conversation with another party member, but every dialogue option you choose is not spoken. Only the other party member speaks. Your character might as well be a mute! I realize that BioWare did this because they allowed for a choice of several voice types when you create your character, so they couldn’t get every voice style to record the main character’s every word. Still, I would have preferred no choice in voice type just to hear my character speak during conversations. The only time he talks is when he shouts out his pre-recorded lines during battle, like “To battle!!”
I’ve saved my biggest annoyance for last: the DLC whoring. I feel like it’s just gotten out of control for this game. When you buy the game, it comes with one DLC that gives you a new party member, his questline, and a couple of Achievements. This DLC, titled, “The Stone Prisoner” retails for $15 on the Live Marketplace. Then there’s another DLC that was released at launch called “Warden’s Keep” that has another questline, 2 Achievements, and a storage box for $7. Earlier this week, BioWare was supposed to release a third DLC called “Return to Ostagar”, which contained another questline and a single Achievement for $5. BioWare also recently announced that an expansion pack to the game would come out in March and retail for $40 – this was not related to any of the DLC that has already been released or pending release. I honestly can understand DLC for multiplayer games – new maps and gameplay modes add for more content that you can enjoy online and keep things fresh. I would even understand extensive content like Fallout 3′s raising of the level cap from 20 to 30. But simply adding a new questline that takes only a couple hours in a 60 hour game? Ugh…just finalize the RPG before you ship it. It doesn’t seem like much value is being added at all, and of course people are gawking at the $40 price tag for the expansion. It’s just too high for what it can potentially offer. But with EA/BioWare charging $5 for a questline that only lasts a couple hours, why not charge $40 for a bundle of questlines? Where does this end? Sadly, people are buying so “Nickle and Dime Age: Origins” is here to stay. Granted, I’ve yet to really play through any of the DLC, but I got “The Stone Prisoner” DLC for free with my purchase so I’ll check it out one day and share my opinion on it.
Final Thoughts
To be honest, Dragon Age: Origins did not enthrall me as much as the Baldur’s Gate games, but it is a significantly awesome RPG. I seem to have had a lot of nitpics with the game, but I still loved it as a whole and am already desiring to go through it again. cmfl3x and I agreed to go back to giving scores in our reviews, but I can’t in good conscience give the game a perfect score.
If you have any sort of liking for fantasy based games or Lord of the Rings, this is not a game you should skip. I’ve been playing too many mindless action games as of late so this game was a perfect change of pace for me. The good far outweigh the bad in this game, as the storyline, characters, scope, and presentation practically knocked my socks off. Unfortunately, several annoyances like the bag capacity and insistent DLC are putting my socks back on. With the game taking about 60 hours to beat in just your first playthrough, it’s well worth its retail asking price. The game does have a fair share of problems that could have been corrected, but it’s still remarkably excellent. I’ll be curious to see whether or not Mass Effect II will have benefited from coming out after Dragon Age: Origins, and if it learned a thing or two.
I’ll score both the PC version and the 360 version with A-, but the PC version comes out slightly ahead with giving you the option to play the game in tactical mode (it just doesn’t have enough perfection to get bumped up to an A).
Score: A-
Ugh, my feelings about Dragon Age are so mixed. I want to play the game and enjoy it, but every time I go to put the disc in, I think about what playing it will be like and quickly switch back to Forza or Modern Warfare 2.
The main thing that is keeping me from enjoying the game is the horrible map. I just got four quests from the Chanter’s board in Redcliffe, and each of them say “go to the marked place on your map and…”, yet nothing is marked! Sometimes they are nice enough to give you an arrow indicating where to go, but not here! So I go to the world map, and four cities are blinking gold, and the other is strongly shining gold. No idea what any of this means. I headed to the strong-shining-gold city, and get ambushed. Which brings me to my next complaint: Difficulty. For me, it’s just too hard. I’m playing as a mage, and my party members just seem to go into a cluster of enemies and perform standard attacks on one enemy, which, of course, leads them to die. I’ve died way too many times. Especially since I’ve only played the game for three hours. My last complaint is how convoluted the tactics system is. I decided to go in an set the tactics for my party in the middle of a dungeon. It worked out well, and the battles were significantly easier when I played as the warrior of my party and set my mage to auto-heal everyone below 50% health. I only died once while using that setup, and all was good…Until I leveled up. Then, you have to go and reevaluate all your tactics for all four characters and how they are used in combination with one another. If (and I suppose this could be very, very minor spoilers for those reading) Morrigan levels up, and learns a new spell that takes time to cast, I need to go into her tactics, set that up, go into Allistair’s tactics and put in taunt so he can distract the enemies, and then go and see if my person or my other party member’s skills can lend anything to improve the combo. I don’t want to spend 25 hours of a 60 hour game in menus, I want to play the game.
I also agree with all of your nitpicks, but I thought I’d type up a couple more I don’t like.
Overall, I’d give the game a C+, for me. It’s almost like Bioware made the game, and then played a metaphorical game of Jenga with it, removing little bits and pieces until it all fell apart.
i hear ya on some of those complaints. the difficulty can certainly be quite tough, and i never really play RPGs for the challenge so i tend to put the difficulty slider on the easier side. try changing it to casual difficulty (i think you can at any time) and see if you enjoy it any more? on casual for me, even certain bosses were still quite tough so I can’t imagine what it would have been like on the harder ones.
with the quest tracking, you can actually choose which quest you want to do, so for example, if you were in Lothering and had 5 of those Chanter board quests, go to your quest management menu and highlight one to “Mark as Active Quest”. It will then show you where you have to go exactly if the quest you are looking for is in that zone.
i agree that the world map is a bit confusing and i wasn’t quite sure what was going on at first either. just keep in mind that all the random encounters/ambushes that you come across when traveling on the world map are often times either a vendor or quest related. For example, if you pick up some board quest that is like “Kill this guy” but it doesn’t say where he is, you may suddenly come into a random encounter moving between two cities and discover that that’s the guy you’re to kill for a quest. You wouldn’t get that “random” encounter otherwise.
I have to admit though that I’m certainly a fanboy for RPGs like this which have enormous scope, and am more than willing to forgive the game’s many “technical” faults if the game is just plain fun for me (which it was). however, i think your review is definitely welcomed, since it gives the readers some perspective that the game is not going to be as remarkable for others as it was for me.
if you’re lost and stuff, i recommend checking out dragonage.wikia.com. it’s very useful if you need help on a particular quest or are wondering what a particular item is used for (and consequently, what you can just unload at the vendor). also VERY handy for gifting and learning which item is best gifted to whom.
Heh, yeah, before starting the game I had originally selected Normal, only to run into a brick wall and die before my Origins story even ended. XD (Goodbye achievement!)
Thanks for all the tips, too, I had no idea some ‘random’ encounters would only happen if you had a quest. So far I have been marking them as my active quest, but maybe I’m supposed to be going somewhere other than the area I’m in, so it doesn’t tell me. I’ll have to go back and try it again.
Also, just bookmarked that site as when I play RPGS I like to have a guide alongside (I don’t like paying twenty bucks for the official guide, though) me in case I run into a bit of trouble.
For anyone else reading, even though my review was a bit on the negative side (I don’t think the game is bad, just about average, or maybe a bit above average. Since you stated all the good points I just talked about what I didn’t like since I agreed with a lot of what you said), keep in mind I have a love/hate relationship with RPGs. They seem really great when I see them on a shelf, and sound really fun, but for some reason I haven’t been able to get into any RPG (especially JRPGs) this generation, but there is nothing more satisfying in a video game than leveling up and assigning skill points (and to an extent, equipping armor…Just so long as you don’t have to do it every ten minutes). When I think about it, that could be the reason why I love and am so into Modern Warfare 2…
I just got done with a two hour session of going back to Dragon Age, and I have to say I like it a bit more than I did previously, now that I have the wiki you suggested. It just made things so much simpler for me and cut out a lot of the parts I hated about the game. I’m still having a bit of trouble with combat, and I still think the inventory is messy, but otherwise I’m beginning to take a liking to it.
So, yeah, thanks for suggesting I use the wiki
(And also, I noticed via your achievements you haven’t done the Stone Prisoner DLC that came with the game. I just did the quest about fifteen minutes ago, and I’d highly suggest you and anyone else reading make that a bit of a priority, if only to see something new. Shale is definitely an interesting character, not only in his personality but the way he works…)
glad to see you enjoying it more…and hopefully you’ll become as big of a fan of the game as me!
in any case, based on your recommendation i will check out the Stone Prisoner DLC tonight, since I’m playing as a rogue this time around and wouldn’t mind an extra tank in Shale. Apparently Alistair and Sten don’t get along too well when I take them out on the field haha