Thursday, December 10, 2009

Dragon Age Origins: The Origin of a new franchise


RATING: 8/ 10

PLATFORM: PS3, XBOX 360, PC
GENRE: RPG
RATED: Mature
PURCHASE RECOMMENDATION: Buy (for PC)


SUMMARY: BioWare has done it again. Dragon Age fits nicely into the long line of well done story driven RPGs produced by BioWare. If you like BioWare’s take on RPG you will love Dragon Age. Dragon Age places you in the shoes of the epic hero and then lets you play the story how you like from there. This games content is off the charts so expect an average play through to take about 50 hours. Minus some blatant art issues this game strives close too perfection. Good luck finding a game that has a more in depth story then Dragon Age. Unless you have completely unreal expectations this game is going to amaze you.


GAMEPLAY: Dragon Age follows the tradition of the past BioWare RPGs by creating a very flexible gameplay mechanic to meet a variety of play styles. Players can choose to pause the battle at any time and issues command to there party or players can simply issues command on the fly mid battle. This flexibility gives you a wide range of playing the game as slow as a turn by turn RPG similar to old school final fantasy or dungeons and dragons all the way to playing as a real-time RPG similar to WOW. Normally I would advise against the variety of play styles as it leads to no focus on one particular style by the developer. However since BioWare is simply allowing you to control in game time the end gameplay is essentially the same. So Dragon Age has only three classes Rouge, Mage and Warrior. At first I was disappointed about only three classes because I made the assumption that tailoring ability sets would be limited. The opposite is actually what happen by reducing the base classes to only three allowed for a wider range of ability sets. For example a Mage could cover all or specialized in all the following typical classes; healer, warlock, elemental, combatant. So in essence I could be a max buff healing mage that can summon undead warrior to fight along side them. It is these small details that bring great satisfaction to players. Gameplay wise Dragon Age only really disappointed when it came to having progressive difficulty. All too often would I get easily defeated by random mercenaries after just easily defeating a much more worthy and difficult boss. An open ended game like Dragon Age must take special care when it comes to difficulty since there is no linear gameplay. The high flux in difficulty at in appropriate times just broke the immersion of the game. I expect the crazy demon boss to be a longer and more difficult battle then unnamed pick pocket I face around the next corner.


Dragon Age and BioWare also still have a way to go with AI. AI heroes in Dragon Age were sometimes not only useless but they were counter productive. I think the addition of more in depth formation controls would have easily fixed many of the AI combat issues. Playing on the PC gave you some of these features but for console players you are out of luck. The biggest issue however was the final boss battle which is becoming an all too common disappointment in big AAA games. The Final boss battle should be the climax point of the gameplay. If not the most memorable battle it better at least be extremely engaging. Dragon Age’s final battle was an over drawn out stick poking contest. There was no challenging just me sending countless AI’s off to there doom while my character pulled up a lawn chair, pull out a chilled beverage and attack from a safe distance. There was no threat no excitement no trying to fight for my life.


STORY: Dragon Age does a great job of sticking to high fantasy roots, humans, elves, orcs and dwarves, yet adding a fresh new out look to the world and its inhabitants. The World of Dragon Age is completely morally gray. This makes the world a lot more interesting because you have to make tough choices that matter. Minus the main evil threat of the story no one person or race is either completely good or bad. Your choice will greatly affect the entire game story which means your actually writing you own story. Many times pass choice will pop up in way you never expected and that’s satisfying. There are six different beginnings in Dragon Age each of them are uniquely different and each gets revisited no matter weather you choose them or not. I played through all the beginnings and I can see how each one greatly affects the overall story in its own way. It is pretty much impossible for two individuals to have the same exact experience because of all the choices and storylines. This really hits home the point that Dragon Age is your story and no one else.


The Story elements of Dragon Age however are not without flaws. Towards the end of the game many of the characters personalities seem to be wedge to fit the ending. In many cases it felt like shoot we need to fill this hole in the story so let’s do this quick dirty fix. After so many hours of Dragon Age not doing that it was all too disappointing to have the unnatural quick fixes in the stories climax and ending.


ART: Normally I don’t cover game art in these blogs because lets face it art is opinionated. What I think is a genius you might think is crap and vice a versa. However Dragon Age forced me to bring art up because they screwed up. So first to be fair Dragon Age overall is artistically amazing, some times I would forget that this was a game and not a movie. Multiple times while playing people walked in saw the screen and ask what movie I was watching. However character model bugs and glitches were so shockingly bad I have no idea how they let the game release with them. We are talking about blatant cropping of armor into skin textures, hands going right through forearms, visible texture boxes. Really come on BioWare Dragon Age is a AAA game project not your senior project you put together the night before it was due. Honestly these blatant art issues is just like taking a beautiful piece of art and dipping it in a pile of crap. Anyways it is what is.

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