Dragon Age: Origins

Bioware and RPG’s have the sort of bond that is nigh on inseparable, so when Dragon Age was first announced it quite rightly sent shivers through the gaming community. It’s been a while coming and being granted the title as “successor to Baldur’s Gate” expectations were obviously rocketing to over hyped sensations.

Starting off is as simple as making your character, selecting race (Human, Dwarf, Elf) and class (Mage, Warrior, Assassin) and adding some personal touches to it by using the rather detailed customization tool.

Once the standard fare is out of the way you’ll soon find yourself thrown straight into the action into a tutorial styled intro. Tutorial levels are pretty generic for the majority, but for Dragon Age it’s just the perfect place to crank the story into gear. The depth of the game really starts to shine through straight away as each race gets their own personal starting tutorial that helps portray not only your own back story but also that of the epic tale that lay ahead of you.

One can’t help but think that the conversational system in Mass Effect was a sort of trial run for Dragon Age, as Bioware have built upon the basics of that system to create something that offers such a wealth of conversational output and multidirectional story that I don’t think many games will rival it in terms of its sheer depth.

Talking with your own companions opens up various situations, where if for example one of them decides they don’t like you, they can in fact just pick up sticks and move on leaving you out in the cold. On the other hand if they decide you’re a top notch kind of person then they can even jump into bed with you, although Bioware keeps underwear on this time around (I know you were thinking it).

Combat is a fairly solid experience, and with the ability to pause the game and give orders to your party there shouldn’t be many moments when you feel you’re losing control – which is quite a feat considering some of the fights do get quite high on the body count. Aiding you in this is a tactics system which runs along the lines of built in macros, where once set for all the characters they will follow them to the best of the AI’s abilities. It is actually rather good and my results with it have been successful, however it can take quite a while to set up each character to act just how you want – but in terms of adding to it bit by bit and more in the terms of a ‘filler’ for when you’re not in control it does its job fine.

Another thing you have at your disposal for combat is the ability to zoom your camera from a 3^rd person perspective to an isometric view, which is superb for issuing orders on the battlefield.

The isometric view (which is available to the PC version only sadly) also shows off the game’s graphical prowess, and yet while there can be the occasional bit of scenery that just doesn’t look right, the overall experience is a very pleasant one. It’s quite the technical feat to have a game of such size to look so good, and while I found the detail in the wilderness / open world to be a bit bland at times, it’s when you stumble into a city that it really cranks up a gear, especially with the interior of buildings looking superb and atmospheric.