Dragon Age: Origins

System: PC
Release Date: 2009
Published By: EA
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

For me, the biggest single letdown in Dragon Age: Origins happened shortly after I got to Ostagar. I'd been hearing since I started the game about this major darkspawn menace. Creepy stories about the darkspawn and how they were created -- basically it was a Tower of Babel story, but, hell, they presented it well -- saturated the early game, and I was getting ready, finally, to face a darkspawn patrol while I was looking for, I dunno, some legal documents my secret society accidentally left in the forest a thousand years ago. As you do. I get into the forest, and I go through all the creepy foreboding parts where I see the remains of a battle with darkspawn, and I meet the survivor of a fight against the darkspawn, and I'm starting to see signs that there are darkspawn right around here somewhere. Pretty intense, right? Then I meet the darkspawn, finally, for the very first time.

And they're goddamn orcs.

Oh, right; and there's the orc spider variety, too.

I mean, the problem isn't just that they're orcs. Yes, I'm sick and tired of orcs, and, yes, I'd like to see something new in a fantasy RPG sometime, but orcs are one of those fantasy staples, like elves and dwarves and magic crystals and ruined temples and spiders, that you just kind of have to endure. What upsets me is that they built up this "darkspawn" conceit like it was something new and original, and they got me all excited about having a new type of monster to deal with, and then they completely shanked me with their stupid orcness. Roughing my expectations like that isn't a great way to make your initial impression, game.

Of course, my impression did not much improve upon playing more of the game. The game consists of four major components: tedious walking, tedious menu-based micromanagement, extremely tedious combat, and not-very-tedious-as-these-things-go cutscenes. It definitely seemed to me that I was spending most of my time either waiting for the game to be fun or dealing with some nonsense bookkeeping that was interfering with my waiting.

Combat is very boring. There are desperately few different types of mobs in the game, and almost all of them are just variants on the PC classes anyhow, so pretty much every combat seems exactly the same as any other. Warriors and rogues get a "stamina" resource, which works exactly like rogue energy in World of Warcraft except that it takes nine years to refill once you've spent any. Basically, you enter combat, perform two actions, and then autoswing until it's over because you'll never have stamina again. Mages get a little bit more play, since their spells cost less and there are lyrium potions for restoring magic points, but you still run dry pretty quickly if you cast much. Every pull is basically the same: the mobs run at you, and you try to get them all focused on a tank-type, which is hard, since your one snap-aggro ability costs a shitload of stamina and has a long cooldown, and you don't have the time or the stamina to grab everything single-target-like, so you settle for making sure the one with the yellow name is on your tank. By this point all your warriors and rogues are on autoswing-mode, since they've used up their stamina, so now you mainly wait until the fight ends.

There is an alternative way to play the combats. You can pause the game every two seconds to micromanage your entire party's movements and actions. If that sounds like the sort of thing that appeals to you -- even knowing that, whenever the game is running, the AI will be attempting to undo whatever tactical plan you're forming, in some sort of bizarre monkey's paw kind of fashion -- this might be the game for you, since, honestly, I've never seen anything that can compare in terms of raw volume of micromanagement. But while we're talking about the AI, here's the executive summary: it's terrible. If you don't want to micromanage every character's actions, you'll need to let the AI run them. And the AI is not capable of running a cell in the game of life, much less actually navigating through combat. And, as an added bonus, you get to program the AI yourself, since the designers didn't really seem to bother. So you choose a style (like "aggressive" or "cautious" or whatever) that comes with a set of descriptions about whether or not the character will stay in melee, chase fleeing mobs, stand in AOE damage zones, and whatnot. Really, pick based on which name you like best, since it will mostly be ignored in practice -- I have never seen a character willingly move out of AOE damage or out of melee with a mob, no matter what style I have him set to. Nor have I ever seen a character not attempt to chase a fleeing mob. Once you have that sorted out, you get to program when your characters will use certain abilities; it's even more annoying than it sounds, mind you, because there are a lot of key options you don't have access to (no "entire party" target even for AOE abilities, no "is dead" flag, etc.), and there's no such thing as a compound statement, so forget using any ANDs or ORs. And then, once you finally, painstakingly get all your actions programmed, you get the fun of finding out whether or not the game feels like following your commands at any given time, since it appears to get confused easily and enters a "do nothing" loop whenever that happens.

When you're not tolerating your way through boring fight after boring fight, you're probably trying to decypher the game's inexplicable codex so you can figure out what you're doing. You get a bunch of quests, which aren't tracked in any useful way and just get dumped, barely sorted, into a journal. Except that sometimes they go into the "quests" section of your codex. Except when they go in the "notes" section instead. So, for any given quest, you may have a journal entry, a codex entry, and a quest item with mouseover text. None of those three sources will say the same thing, and sometimes they will be directly at odds with one another. As bad as the codex is when you're trying to figure out what to do for your quests, it's even worse at other times, since the game presents it as a giant graphical list of numbers. No, I am not kidding. If you're looking for a particular codex entry, you get to page through all the numbered -- and not named -- entries in the section you think it's in until you find the right one. It's the most completely insane and unusable interface design I think I've ever seen.

The inventory's not a whole lot better. By default, it's just a big list with all the items you have dumped into it. There are filter buttons, so you can look at, say, just weapons, or just crafting reagents, but it's not searchable in any way and you can't set up custom filters. All this wouldn't be so bad, except that, whenever you get a new item -- say, as part of a quest -- the game won't tell you what it is. It just says "item received." So, no big deal, right? You just open the inventory and look at what the new item is. Only you can't, since the inventory's just a big list that doesn't sort in any logical way -- the new item may have appeared at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of its section. No way to tell. It highlights (in yellow, the very least visible colour possible against the tan background) new items, but that's of limited use, since it also highlights items that have changed in quantity (if you picked up a healing potion, it highlights your healing potions even though you've damn well had them), and the highlights don't clear until you actually click on the item. They don't clear automatically so it's only showing you items that are new since the last time you opened the menu, and there's no "clear all" button to mark all of them viewed. You have to pick the item out and click on it to get the highlight to go away.

The weirdness doesn't end there. You have a maximum inventory limit, and it's expandable throughout the game if you're willing to part with a decent chunk of cash for "backpacks," which, mercifully, just increase your overall capacity rather than adding like another seperate inventory pane. But your inventory space will also be dropping as the game progresses, because it's a bit buggy; periodically, see, when you complete a quest, the game will fail to remove the associated quest items from your inventory. And when that happens, hey, those inventory spaces are lost forever, since there's no other way to get rid of those quest items. The game's also not entirely consistent about when items do and don't take up space; some items never take up space, some take up space only once but multiple copies will "stack" and take up no additional space, and some items will "stack" but still take up space for each one. It's also possible to go over your inventory maximum; if an item is added to your inventory by the game -- say, in a cutscene -- it won't cause havoc if you're full. It just puts you at, say, 126 / 125, and you'll need to clear out two spaces before you can add anything new.

The talky bits are hokay, even though the story is an utterly standard fantasy tale with exactly no meaningful plot twists ever. It's mainly riffing on Le Morte d'Arthur, which is an excellent story that doesn't get a lot of play in video games for some reason, and crossing it through The Witcher. There's enough interactivity present in the dialogue that it doesn't get too dull, which is especially nice because there are eight shitloads of it. There are a bunch of NPC henchmen / party members you can acquire, and each of them has reputation that you can build through various means, and each of them has exactly one quest. The henchmen seem pretty interesting at first, but, as the game progresses, you realise that they're all actually exactly the same, and you jump through the exact same hoops to raise their meters and do the quests.

Graphically, the game is kind of bland. It's going for "realistic," which mainly means everything's brown. The brown is covered with copious amounts of blood, though, and even more so if you leave the game's ridiculous "persistent gore" option turned on. This option would be kind of cool if it just like bloodied your sword and whatnot, but it's totally absurd watching talky-man cutscenes where everybody's face is just smeared and stained with blood. I'm thinking, hey, maybe get a tissue? We can use one of these old letters the quest mobs never took when we finished the quest. The models are okay, but the faces just aren't animated correctly, and often make screwed-up grimaces that look really weird. The internet seems to hate that the teeth are yellow and crooked, but, hell, it's a medieval fantasy set in Britain. What do you expect?

The voice acting is mostly okay -- it suffers from a minor case of tone not always matching, but the dialogue is dynamic enough that that's probably impossible to avoid. The accent work, however, is outrageously bad. Characters fall in and out of their accents while speaking as a matter of course, and some characters -- I'm looking at you, Leliana -- garble their accents so much you can't even tell what they're supposed to be. I'm sort of a "do the accents properly or just talk normal" kind of guy. What can I say? The sound design is exceptionally strong in all other respects however; the soundscape is good enough that I frequently don't realise it's coming from the game, and, on more than one occasion, asked the wife to speak up because I can't hear her with the headphones on, only to be informed that she wasn't talking and I was hearing the game's rhubarb again. The music also is excellent, and, in fact, the game contains maybe the only instance in video game history of a party member doing a song that I didn't hate.

Overall, Dragon Age: Origins is a promising game that suffers from weak execution. It does feature a full mod-creation suite, and has the potential for user-created content that's much more enjoyable. Should Bioware expand on the base they have here, but maybe get the kinks out of it a bit more, there's a possibility that the sequel will be good. But I'd say unless you're a die-hard mod-making fanatic or really think the concept of incessant micromanagement appeals to you, this one's probably a miss.

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