Od Studios -- Dragon Age: Origins
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Dragon Age: Origins -- by sector24, 2009-12-05 |
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Developer: Bioware
ESRB Rating: Mature
Genre: RPG
Platform: PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: 11/3/2009
What is Dragon Age: Origins?
Dragon Age: Origins is the "spiritual successor" to the Baldur's Gate series, only without the adherence to the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset. Much like Mass Effect broke away from Knights of the Old Republic, DA:O was able to retain the gameplay aspects while creating a whole new game universe. It is a single player role playing game that will take between 50 and 100 hours to complete. My first playthrough in which I completed all of the sidequests and played in a decidedly non-optimal way took 115 hours not counting reloads.
What could this game have done better?
Normally I sing a game's praises before tearing it apart, but I'm going to do this review in reverse because to be honest after five hours with this game I was ready to put it down and set my computer on fire. There are just so many gameplay and design flaws that hamper a player's early game experience. I played on the PC version, which allows you to move by clicking on a destination with the mouse, or by moving with the WASD keys. However, I discovered quickly that you cannot rely solely on the mouse because not all of the areas have pathing programmed so your character will stop short and be unable to move any further without the keyboard. So you are forced to use a hybrid control scheme that involves a lot of hand movement between the mouse and keyboard.
The console versions of the game are played in a World of Warcraft style third person behind the shoulder. Another PC exclusive feature is the ability to zoom out to an isometric view and play the game from an "old school" perspective like its predecessors. The problem is that the game tethers the camera to your party, and the tether is so small that you can't even see the enemies that your party is fighting. So the isometric view is only useful for placing area effect spells, it cannot be used to play the game exclusively.
Combat in general is more frustrating than it is challenging. I used the auto pause feature which automatically pauses the game when combat begins in an attempt to gain a tactical advantage. So then I would issue orders for my four characters, unpause it...and they would ignore the orders and move into formation or just stand there like idiots. If you tell your character to attack an enemy that is running past you, your character will run up to them, then the enemy will run out of range and your character will lose his order and just stand there. Often the combat animation doesn't match up with the actual damage roll so you will issue additional orders to attack enemies that are already dead but still standing. The game allows you to queue up your next action but it's difficult to tell when the current action actually finishes and the next action will take place. Battles are very fluid with lots of movement so it can be hard to use area effect magic tactically.
Dragon Age: Origins has a robust tactics menu that lets you automate your characters based on basic programming statements like "IF self HP < 50% THEN use ability Heal." It sounds great and for some things it is, but the tactics are at best a light supplement to your strategy. They cannot be relied upon no matter how carefully they are set up and micromanagement is required in every fight. In particular the tactics cannot account for area effects and friendly fire, nor can they compensate for situations where your character is physically blocked from attacking its target. Other times they just won't do what you think they will or they won't work at all. Even if they all work exactly as you envisioned them, the tactics are incredibly inefficient and in long fights you find yourself out of mana/stamina without much to show for it.
These combat quirks alone are not that bad but the encounters range from incredibly difficult to laughably impossible. Encounter design usually consists of putting you in a situation where the enemy outnumbers you 3 to 1, or making you face 1 or 2 enemies that can knock off half your health in a single attack. Casual players really ought to play on easy and even on normal veteran gamers will probably have sporadic difficulty where you have to play the same encounter 3-5 times before you beat it. Perhaps this is a nostalgic throwback to the days when games were actually hard, but with DA:O the difficulty feels cheap rather than challenging. The only way to level the playing field is to resort to exploitative tactics like kiting and aggro juggling or to level up and grab some unbalanced skills and spells for yourself.
With the ability to break free of the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset, Dragon Age: Origins went with their own leveling and skill system. The warrior and rogue characters are very straightforward; you get some stat points when you level and use your skill points on new combat abilities. If you've ever played a role playing game it should be immediately identifiable to you. Mages are a slightly different story. There are no "wizards" and "clerics" in DA:O, there are just spell schools that any mage can choose to invest in. The primal school contains your typical fire and ice direct damage, the creation school is healing and buffing, etc. The problem with this system is that there is no incentive to experiment because you can just choose the best spells from all schools. The fact is that there are some must have spells that regardless of playstyle you will want to have. Even if you are role playing a cleric, a cleric with cone of cold is infinitely better than one without. At least with melee classes you can choose between sword and shield, dual wield, two handed, or bow/crossbow. Since the most powerful spells are available to all mage characters, every mage build is essentially the same.
Gameplay quibbles aside, the most disappointing thing about Dragon Age: Origins is that it is ugly. I'm talking sinfully ugly, especially for a 2009 game. While the dialogue scenes look just a little worse than Mass Effect, the actual gameplay looks worse than Neverwinter Nights, a game that came out in 2002. The game is technically playable at 640x480 but anything less than 1024x768 is poke your eyes out offensive. Turning up the graphical detail exacerbates one of the game's other problems, that it runs like crap even on machines that meet the recommended requirements. I had to restart my machine at least once an hour due to memory leaks, and larger areas are just plain laggy no matter what. Although the consoles are stuck at a certain graphical level, at least they run smoothly for the most part. The most amusing part about the lag is that it makes the combat even more ridiculous than it already is. The timing of non-instant skills is somehow not tied to anything else you do, so when the game is laggy you can cast a spell like cone of cold, and then move to another location and cast another spell before the cone of cold will actually take effect (usually in the wrong location and the wrong direction). Ranger specced rogues can summon multiple pets due to the lag, at one time I had 4 giant spiders running around simultaneously. Any sense of immersion is lost when you have to take frequent breaks to restart your computer so the game will run.
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Neverwinter Nights
Dragon Age Origins gameplay |
Leliana through [epic beer goggles] |
Leliana after you sober up |
Continued on Page 2
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