Dragon Age: Origins

[mithriltabby]

Dragon Age: Origins is a fine epic fantasy role-playing game, available for the PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3. It kept me interested all the way through; in addition to well-scripted interactions between the lead character and the stable of NPCs, there are lots of interactions between the NPCs that make it fun to just swap in different combinations of them as you go running around the world, just to see how they interact. You can see the various companions’ dialogue on the wiki, with examples on their own pages and links on those pages to collections of dialogue (e.g.: Alistair’s Dialogue). These are worth going over even if you’ve played the game, just to see things you might have missed.

The story is quite good, with options to play through as anything from noble and altruistic to entirely ruthless. There are definitely mature story elements (the game deserves its M rating), though I think if you edited scenes into a movie it would probably be PG, or maybe R if you have all the gore settings turned on. There are four possible romances in the storyline (for each gender, there’s one heterosexual companion and one bisexual companion); I played a female character on my first playthrough, and obsessivewoman enjoyed the romantic storyline with Alistair. This would be a reasonable game for a mature 14–15 year old, though they should have the opportunity to talk with a mature adult who is familiar with the game’s content.

I got through the game on Normal difficulty in just under 100 hours, though I had to downgrade it to Casual in order to deal with the final battle of the game without having to put in lots and lots of time figuring out the tactics. The artwork was quite impressive, clearly inspired by Earth history (the dwarven kingdom of Orzammar is Art Deco, and the Tevinter Imperium are very into Gothic architecture). The animation is pretty good, though the PS3 wound up creating a bit of a shimmer effect on complex scenes; they did a good work on the facial animations, but some of the ones involving bodily motion were quite awkward. I mostly relied on the Dragon Age wiki, though I also referred to the IGN walkthrough at times, and codrus’ lessons learned.

The game has no required grinding, nor even (as far as I can tell) opportunities for grinding, if you wanted to get enough gold to buy up more goodies to prepare for the big battle at the end of the game. It’s clearly set up for a player to enjoy multiple versions of the story— there are even trophies available for the major choices you can make when choosing which faction to back in a conflict.

Bioware have a social networking site for their games— basically like Facebook— but the code that’s supposed to upload your character’s progress so your friends can see it is extremely unreliable, and there seems to be no way to force a sync. If you’re on there, I’m mithriltabby.