Dragon Age: Origins Review
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Questing Many players consider this the primary part of their RPG experience. I wouldn't go anywhere near that far, but quests are important, challenging a player's strategic thinking and reasoning abilities at least, when they're done well. Here, for the most part they are accomplished in a competent but unspectacular fashion. Most side quests are short FedEx types, run-grab-kill-return, and there are no puzzles that will cause even a pre-teen to break into a mental sweat. The major quests occasionally throw in what appears to be a nice curve, such as the time in the Fade when you have to learn and adopt new forms to proceed; but it quickly resolves into a simple, repetitive 1) take each room exit, and 2) free a captive mage you eventually find who then give you a new form, to 3) try further room exits, to 4) free more mages. Clever at first, it quickly becomes rote. Forget about quests relying upon knowledge of lore, or figuring out solutions by sifting through complex evidence. The lowest common denominator approach is sadly at work, here.
The Unreality of Game Reality
You can make the game beautiful, you can fix all the combat issues, but more important still for me in a computerized RPG is the ability to suspend disbelief over the new environment I'm witnessing. I make allowances for conventions such as endless day, no need for food, drink, sleep, etc, but I expect things in the game world to make a basic sense. Not within the terms of the real world, but that of consistency within any logical universe. It's where I have the most problems with DA:O. None of them are major by any means, but for me, at least, they all add up. Your mileage may differ.
This is where all those chickens hatched by the mix of 19th and 20th century furniture and Tudor frames, and the party tank running to the back rank where your mage party leader is during battle, come home to roost. Let's add some more. Why does just about every charred corpse and there were over a dozen of them throughout the many first level rooms of the multi-level Circle of Mages possess poultices and potions; and why are they all intact, if the corpses themselves are just extra large charcoal briquettes? Why if you suspect a piece of locked furniture contains something valuable, and your party isn't too virtuous, can't your tank who possesses a huge sword and an arm the size of a nuclear missile, reduce it to kindling? And what's with having skills that let every party member become an expert pickpocket, while only a thief can open a lock?
These matters might be shrugged aside, but then there's also the matter of the game's poisoning mechanic. In every other game I've played where you could engage in that venerable and delightful human practice, it was applied directly to a weapon. Not so, in DA:O: you apply it to a thieves' hand. If you move the weapon to the other hand, it will no longer be poisoned. If you give it to somebody else, it will no longer be poisoned. If you equip an un-poisoned weapon in that hand, it will now be poisoned. And somehow, poisons have acquired a timer. Which means stopping directly before entering a room where you know a battle will occur to poison a weapon for no evident reason, at all.
And what is the deal with your party's Codex? This is your journal, the collection of material on quests, party members, history, artifacts, etc, that you find throughout the game. There are literally several hundred of these sometimes large reference documents in a few categories; and to access them, BioWare offers only Mac-like note icons with little numbers, like the saucy (56,) not to mention the extremely expressive (223.) If you don't jump to one of these codex entries when the game informs you it has appeared, you can't easily find it later, precisely because of numerical anonymity. And the numbers themselves, and their plain graphical wrapping, certainly kill all that flavor some members of BioWare's team thought important enough to dish up in this great informational package about the DA universe. It makes no sense.
This leads naturally into DLCs, because BioWare engaged in some reality-breaking here, as well. They've literally stuck an NPC in your camp who informs you of a quest that, if you accept it, immediately drops you out of the game to purchase the download. He also shows up in your personal journal. It's certainly sensible to advertise DLCs on the developers' website, but a website is in the realworld. DA:O is supposed to be a game world, a place where you can go and experience something else. Sticking what in effect is an ad in your face in the camp where you regularly travel was another one of those inexplicably stupid decisions BioWare made in DA:O. Creating a new social site wasn't enough; free DLCs dependant on registering characters wasn't deemed sufficient, either. They had to break their own game world open to get your attention. Selling DLCs themselves is fine. Killing the game world immersion to do so isn't.
Again, none or only part of this this may bother you. Some players accept it all with a chuckle, or a shrug. I notice these things about settings, and characters, and stories, without thinking; as do others. I remember when the dragonflies whose corpses yielded books were among the many things pointed out by a variety of people about Might and Magic IX back in 2002. So if you're the sort that blissfully wallops the daylights out of anything without a care, that's fine; but as for me, I'll diss those dragonflies and their modern counterparts, and take the consequences.
Conclusion
If I had to come up with a single phrase to describe DA:O, it would be very professionally done, with numerous goofy exceptions. The game is smoothly executed. Everything fits together well. It looks good. The faces of the NPCs draw you in. The music stirs the heart. The voice actors are well chosen. The party dialog is vivid. There are strange anomalies, such as hand poisoning, and corpses loaded down with safety net products, and a walking, talking DLC ad in your camp. The latter are the price of the admission for the former, and if you want the game you just have to accept the bizarre flaws as the price to pay for everything else.
Yet at the same time, I get no sense from the game of a giant creative vision, or even a strong imagination. It is an exceptionally slick hack-n-slash, and a good example of what this new engine and system can do. The structure is there, with some tweaking, for an RPG that could do a lot more. DA:O's dull, obvious plot, unbalanced, boring combat, rote quests, pay-for-combat AI, and numerous reality breakers simply get in the way too often for me to regard it as superlative. Yes, I moderately enjoy it, but I'm frankly more curious as to where BioWare will take the DA franchise next. Hopefully, it won't be into the kind of cookie cutter mode that made those SSI gold and platinum games of the 1990s so interchangeable and ultimately forgettable. There's a great opportunity here to improve upon a first offering, and I hope BioWare rises to the occasion.
