The Dord of Darien

This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius and also dragons

So I finished Dragon Age: Origins. It was okay. Combat is stupidly unbalanced; it’s lame and boring for the first half of the game, when you have no skills and no stamina and basically just autoswing everything to death, and then by the end of the game you have so many skills (and for some reason it starts pitching you hordes of low-level mobs all the time) that you just dominate every fight. There’s a small window of time in the middle where it evens out a bit — where you have enough skills and enough stamina that you have meaningful strategic choices in battle, but you’re not yet completely overpowered — and that’s fun for a little while, but even then it gets repetitive really quickly.

The skills are also boring. Apart from the Combat Training skill (which warriors and rogues need to put points in to get their actual abilities) and the Coercion skill (which enables the Persuade and Intimidate options), I often found myself just putting points wherever because I didn’t care about them.

Talents are fun, but they’re a very mixed bag. Some are great and some are lousy, and it can be hard to tell which is which before buying them. This problem is helped not at all by some of the descriptions being inaccurate — Cleansing Aura in particular sounds incredibly badass if you just read the tooltip, but that’s because it has a Dark Secret that the game doesn’t want to tell you.

The game often creates phony tension just by not giving you the right dialogue option; that’s really frustrating. Sometimes you’ll be forced into making a choice you don’t want to make simply because the option you want wasn’t provided to you. It’s also sometimes ambiguous exactly what your choices are; it provides you with the words, but not the tone of voice, and sometimes what you think is a totally innocuous question will turn out to have been sarcastic or rude or in some other way obnoxious. It also often "railroads" you by causing the mob you’re interacting with to assume you mean something you didn’t say.

The final battle is kind of lame. I’m not going to spoil anything here, but it sort of seems like a big dumb gimmick fight. Not as bad as the final battle in Shadows of Undrentide, mind you, but pretty bad. And it’s really easy. There were several earlier boss fights that were a whole lot harder than this.

The game’s plotting is pretty straightforward; this one won’t be winning any prestigious internet awards for having an awesome plot twist. The plot is, if anything, less twisty than you think it is; you’ll probably be expecting complications that just never arise.

It seems to my Designer’s Eye ™ as though the Bioware crew really put their hearts and souls into Orzammar. It’s a much more complex and nuanced area than anywhere else in the game, it’s absolutely packed with things to do, and it’s definitely the most intricately plotted. This is the closest the game comes to having plot twists, and there’s stuff near the end of the main quest that’s positively unsettling. It’s very well done on the whole.

In contrast to that, the Brecillian Forest mainly seems like it was thrown in because somebody was like "oh shit, we need an elf level." It’s short and simple and direct, it has very few quests or NPCs, and there’s a very easy resolution to the complications, which isn’t often the case. It also doesn’t seem to know what it’s about, since it gave me a HACHIEVE for "siding with the elves" when I’m fairly sure I did no such thing. But, hey, what are you going to do?

There are two major binary choices right near the end of the game, and they illustrate beautifully what I was talking about in this post about The Witcher. The first one seems forced, since there are clearly alternatives that could be explored except that the dialogue options won’t let you. That’s the kind of frustrating binary choice that leaves the player arguing with the game. The second one, though, works brilliantly — it’s a difficult, meaningful choice with no potential third option.

I liked the henchmen much better in Mass Effect, but I kind of think I was supposed to. Mass Effect is basically a hero story, where the good guys are super noble and flawless and shiny. Dragon Age is a darker story, and all the characters are supposed to seem fatally flawed. For myself, I prefer the Mass Effect-style noble hero characters, but it’s down to preference.

Now, just for fun, here’s a brief screenshot tour of the awesomeness that is me. No significant spoilers.

This is me. I’m a rakish sonuvabitch, hey? I’m even dramatically off the side of the frame like it’s Dragon Ball Z.

This is me with my woman. I’m giving her a little bit of the sweet lovin’. Hey baby, is it getting hot in here, or is that just my flaming sword? Hmm? Oh, it is the sword? Hey, watch out for — shit. Dammit! Wait, I’ll get some water. Here, hang on — dammit. Well, they’ll grow back. No, you look fine that way! Really! You’re still coming to bed with me, right?

Here’s an elf who doesn’t understand pronoun usage. Normally I wouldn’t call him out just for fucking up who/whom, but this case is particularly egregious. Same verb, same sentence, and yet he doesn’t seem to understand that he needs the same pronoun. Fucking elves. This is why we keep putting your kind down.

Here’s a door with the texture applied wrong. Don’t forget to test all the areas, guys! While you’re QAing that door texture, maybe you could also adjust the doorways that large characters — like my Great Bear — can’t fit through? That’s kind of a pain.

Last stop on the tour. This one I only published because I didn’t take it; this is one of the shots the game’s automatic significant-moment screenshot grabber pulled all by itself. Well done!

December 5th, 2009 Posted by Darien | Games | 3 comments