BioWare’s latest RPG, Dragon Age: Origins has hit store shelves, and your tireless gamer pal Tanith secured a Day 1 copy so he could provide his initial impressions of the Xbox 360 version of the game. After 12+ hours of gameplay, here’s what he thinks:
Story: The game sticks pretty closely to well-established RPG tropes. There are three playable races in DA: Humans, Elves and Dwarves. Humans fill their familiar niche as a numerous and adaptable people who are the dominant race in the world. The mighty Elven kingdoms are long-lost, and those that remain either scrape out a living in ghettos among humans or survive as elusive nomads in the wilds. The dwarves are an endangered species, bled white by centuries of unending conflict against monsters beneath the surface and reduced to a single remaining city.
Early in the game the player is recruited into the Grey Wardens, an ancient order of warriors sworn to defend the world from the threat of the Darkspawn – savage mutants who are occassionally united by a powerful Archdemon and boil up from their subterranean lairs to invade the surface in what is known as a Blight. The player must rally disparate factions to counter the latest Darkspawn invasion before all is lost. In this, the game follows the now-familiar BioWare RPG structure: after an initial warm-up period, Something Important happens and the player must subsequently travel to several locations in order to prepare themselves for the Final Confrontation. As in earlier titles, the order in which you tackle story quests is up to you.
Duncan is Leader of the Grey Wardens
BioWare aren’t taking many chances with their plot, but the story itself is told well enough to keep the player engaged. Part of this stems from the tremendous depth that exists in the world – entire histories and mythologies have been developed to breathe life into the world of Thedas. The game also draws you in through your chosen Origin story. There are six different Origins, though by the time you’ve selected your race and class you’ll only have one or two choices; regardless of race, Mages must play the Mage Origin, for example. An Origin story is a prologue that lasts just long enough to situate you in the world, establish initial contact with the Grey Wardens, and give you the motivation to move on. The Origins are generally well put-together (some are better than others) and to their credit not every Origin is equal in terms of what it teaches you about the world: the Human Noble Origin provides lots of information about your family and the politics of Ferelden, for example, while the Mage Origin goes into detail about the relationship of magic-users with the rest of the world. By contrast, the City Elf Origin highlights the challenges that elves face as second-class citizens in human society.
Naturally, the Origins also act as a tutorial, introducing basic gameplay elements such as combat and NPC interaction. We’re a far cry from Trask Ulgo, though – your immersion into the world is quite smooth, and your Origin doesn’t end when the prologue is over; the things you see and do during your first hours will continue to come up throughout the game, mostly in conversation with NPCs, party members and otherwise.
Gameplay: Character creation is handled very similarly to Mass Effect, and the facial construction system is nearly identical. Fortunately, the presets are much better in Dragon Age, and provide a stronger starting point for modification; this is especially true of the male faces (which were pretty bad in ME).
There are three classes in Dragon Age: Mage, Warrior and Rogue. While this may sound limited, it is important to note that within each class are 5 or more Talent trees that enable you to customize your character. For example, within the Warrior class there are Talent trees for fighting with a sword and shield, fighting with a two-handed weapon, two-weapon fighting, and archery – not to mention a Tree of general Warrior talents. It’s probably best to focus on a couple of Talent lines rather than spread yourself thin, but the depth means that two players who make the same race/class selection could nonetheless create very different characters. New Talent points are awarded every level. As you progress through the game, it is also possible to unlock two specializations within your class which grant additional powers. There are four specializations available to each class, including Berserker and Champion for Warriors, Spirit Healer and Shapeshifter for Mages or Bard and Assassin for Rogues.
In addition to Talents, there are also a series of Skills that can be developed over the course of play. Broadly speaking, Talents impact a character’s performace in combat, while Skills often have uses outside of combat. Any character can train up any Skill, but caution must be exercised: Skill points are awarded only once every three levels (or every other level for Rogues), so it’s important to determine roles for each member of your party and to ensure a complimentary composition. There are a number of Skills, including Herbalism (for brewing potions), Coercion (which unlocks new conversation options) and Combat Training (which allows the character to use higher quality weapons and armour).
There’s an abundance of side-quests to keep you occupied if you decide to take a break from the main sotry (or to level up if you’re finding a particular section too challenging). While they are largely of the “Kill X rats” variety, there are some exceptions that keep things interesting.
One thing that you won’t find is any kind of alignment or morality meter. There’s no Light Side/Dark Side or Renegade/Paragon dynamic in Dragon Age. You simply make decisions and deal with the consequences. Your companions have their own alignments and will let you know if they approve of your actions or not (it’s possible to infuriate a follower to the point that they abandon or even attack you), but otherwise there’s no system in place to tell you when you do the “right” or “wrong” thing. Frankly, it’s a refreshing change.
Controls: You’ll control the action from an over-the-shoulder perspective that will be familiar to veterans of BioWare’s other console games like Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect or Jade Empire. The player leads a party of up to four characters against all manner of foes in mostly-real-time combat. As in KotOR, the player is free to switch between party members on the fly, and issue specific orders to each. Managing your characters’ large repertoire of spells and special combat moves is handled through a radial menu similar to Mass Effect, as well as six quick-use commands mapped to the X, Y and B buttons. Holding the right trigger brings up a second list of quick-buttons, for a total of six hot buttons for each character. This is quite clever, but as the game progresses, players may find that this simply isn’t enough to manage the many abilities and spells they have, and have to spend more time with the radial menu, which is called up by pulling and holding the left trigger, pausing the game. Unfortunately, the radial menu has a couple of layers that can be a pain to negotiate, and it is only possible to give one order to a given party member at a time; once you’ve issued your command, the game automatically unpauses. Thus, issuing orders to several party members requires a tedious process of pausing, issuing an order, unpausing, switching characters, pausing again, issuing an order, unpausing, and so on. Mass Effect’s ability to issue commands to the whole squad from the radial is keenly missed, as is KotOR’s ability to queue up several actions per character.
This could potentially be a deal breaker, if not for the Tactics system. Similar to the Gambits in Final Fantasy 12, the Tactics system is a series of If/Then conditionals that you can set up for each character to help govern their behaviour in combat. While the system looks complicated at first glance, it is actually quite intuitive and very flexible. Initially you can only set up one or two Tactics per character, but you can open up additional Tactic ’slots’ as you level up. Using Tactics, it’s possible to develop fairly complex strategies that mitigate the need to micromanage your party. For example, it’s possible to tell your Healer to heal your Warrior if his health falls below 75%, and to heal anyone who is below 50% health. Your Rogue can be told to attack anyone who threatens the Healer; otherwise, he attacks whichever enemy has the fewest hit points. Your War Hound can be given standing orders to charge any ranged attackers, and to use its Growl ability against any Elite foes. Your Mage can be ordered to save powerful area of effect spells until a certain number of enemies are clustered together, and to heal himself with the most powerful potion if his health drops below 25%. The depth of the Tactics system is impressive, having presets for almost any eventuality. Tactics do not automate combat, however – the character you are controlling always ignores its preset Tactics and does only what you command.
Combat: Paced similarly to Mass Effect, combat is fast and furious, and you’ll frequently face large numbers of enemies. Initial battles are quite easy, and you’ll likely win simply by letting your party auto-attack their way to victory. Use these early battles to get the hang of your abilities, however, because the difficulty ramps up fairly quickly and careless or brash play can be brutally punished. While it’s nice to be challenged, the occassional spikes in difficulty can make for confusing or frustrating battles. Fortunately, the difficulty can be adjusted on-the-fly, so if a battle is giving you fits it’s a simple matter to drop the game down a notch or two so you can get through. There are no difficulty-related Achievements, so those of you who live to hear that little “bloop!” can rest easy. You also don’t need to obsess about keeping your avatar alive: characters are KO’d when their health is depleted, but as long as at least one member of your party survives a battle, the others will get back up, and health recovers quickly outside of combat. Beware however that characters who recover from a KO suffer injuries, which impose a variety of penalties. Injuries stack, and imprudent play can soon lead to you reaching the boss of an area with your party reduced to a battered band of ragged adventurers coughing blood and nursing open wounds, cracked skulls and broken bones. You’ll want to keep a steady supply of Injury Kits handy to treat these afflictions before they get out of control.
Ogres can mess you up.
Graphics: Dragon Age: Origins doesn’t look terrible by any means, but there are definately better-looking games on the Xbox 360. Some of the textures are flat, apparently compressed in order to improve performance. There has also been some minor slow-down during cutscenes, which clears up after a few seconds. Everything else has been quite smooth. Load times are a bit long, but the loading screen displays information on your current quest or on various abilities and game mechanics, so the wait isn’t that bad (apparently, installing the game to your Xbox HDD significantly reduces load times). Weapon and armor models are nice – I’m a big fan of the look of the heavy and massive(!) armour sets, and having weapons that actually look different is a nice change after Fallout 3 and (especially) Mass Effect. There’s not a Borderlands-level of variety, but the slection of kit is good. Combat animations are also solid: spells provide dazzling particle effects, special abilities look cool when you execute them and combatants get splattered with gore. Killing certain important foes will even give you a special “killing blow” animation. In conversation, the character models are comparable to Mass Effect, and there’s none of the irritating texture “pop” that plagued ME on the 360. Conversations are preceeded by a couple of seconds pause as they load, however – installing the game to your HDD apparently eliminates this. Animations in conversation are also on-par with Mass Effect - which is to say that they can look a bit stiff, but facial animation remains a strong point; the characters in Dragon Age have expressive faces, unlike the dead-eyed inhabitants of the Wasteland. One slightly silly thing is that people stay splattered with blood for a while, which means that you can enter into a casual conversation still covered in the gore of your freshly-slain foes. Doesn’t anyone have a hanky? Also, any combat results in a literal blood bath … even if you’re just smacking rats in the pantry.
This kind of thing happens all the time
Sound: Sound design is very good. The music is great and ambient effects are classy; the quiet echo of voices in a church, or the layered, out-of-synch whispers and growls when a demon speaks. Spells sizzle and weapons clash in a satisfying fashion. Voice acting is excellent. KotOR and Mass Effect spoiled us, and BioWare has wisely continued to invest in top-notch voice talent. Returning to classic RPG roots, the main character does not speak, but everyone else has been very good so far. The trope of almost everyone speaking with a British accent is present as well, though not as bad as in other examples of the fantasy genre: humans from the kingdom of Ferelden speak in the Queen’s English, but humans from other lands have French or Spanish accents. Elves do not seem to have accents, and the dwarves appear to have been spared the usual Scottish / Ale / Axes treatment.
GUI: Dragon Age: Origins is an RPG in the spirit of BioWare’s hugely popular and successful Baldur’s Gate series, which means that there’s alot to do and keep track of. A game as robust as this can be very hard to manage on a console, but the GUI designers at BioWare (with the help of Edge of Reality) have done as good job of bringing it all together as could be expected. There are a few areas where having a keyboard and mouse would be vastly better, but overall the controls are solid. Menus are negotiated by using the triggers, the bumpers and the control sticks. Generally speaking, the triggers cycle through menu headers (Map, Inventory, Quest Log, etc…), the bumpers switch between characters, and the control stick manipulates items on a given screen (equipping or using items, for example). The menus are quite deep, but sometimes feel a bit unwieldy. The Quest Log is divided into collapsible sections based on where you found a quest, which keeps things neat … but the actual log entries do not always provide adequate guidance. There is a “Set as current quest” function, but it does not appear to actually do anything. The Codex is similarly organized, with new entries highlighted for your convenience. A nice touch is that not all Codex entries are static. For example, when you first meet a party member, their Codex entry might simply say, “Alistair is a Grey Warden who once trained to be a Templar.” As you speak to Alistair and learn more about him, his Codex entry expands to cover more of his background. Sadly, the Codex is not narrated, and reading entries on an SDTV is a real pain – play in HD if you can!
On the main screen, information is presented with fair efficiency and clearity: The character portraits with current health and stamina/mana are displayed in the upper left. The mini-map is in its familiar place in the upper right, and in the lower right is a display showing your hot button layout. Under that are the health and mana bars of the character you are currently controlling. This puts a good deal of information at your disposal, without cluttering the middle of the screen where the action’s at.
Summary: Dragon Age: Origins on the Xbox 360 is not without problems: so-so graphics, unwieldy menus, uneven difficulty, combat that is sometimes clunky, and somewhat predictable plot progression are all factors that cannot be ignored. However, the abundance of side-quests, the richness of the game world, the excellent writing and voice acting, solid design of the main story arc and the moments when everything just clicks all manage to overcome the game’s shortcomings and provide a compelling experience that I’ve been hard-pressed to put down. If things keep up at this pace, I can definately seem myself playing through the game a second time. I’ll reserve final judgement until I finish the game, but at this point I give it a solid 8/10.
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