It took some time, but EA eventually sold a Dragon Age pack at a decent price during a Steam sale. It took me even longer to play through it.

Metacritic gives it a 91.

After the jump, I write my thoughts on the game.

The Good

  • Excellent Story
    The best thing about Dragon Age Origins is the story. You feel as if you have a real effect. It’s not just an illusion either — I was staggered when I read about all the permutations the epilogue (warning, that link has spoilers) can involve.
  • Moral Ambiguity
    Most fantasy games are fairy tales. If you play the good guy, everyone lives happily ever after. Not so in Dragon Age Origins. Don’t get me wrong — this isn’t some dark Tarantino-style affair where you’re damned no matter what you try. The majority of the time, if you try to do good, you’ll make the world a better place.
    Just not always. Sometimes decisions are morally ambiguous — there is no clear answer. But more importantly, sometimes your good-intentioned actions have surprising (yet believable) not-so-good consequences.
    As an example, my fairly morally-good choices led to a few unhappy things. Had I been more cold and calculating things would’ve been better.
    It’s realistic, in other words.


I can haz human souls?

  • Solid, Plentiful Dialogue
    The other great thing about the game is the dialog. Apart from the quantity — you can talk with NPCs for hours — there’s the quality. By that I don’t mean to imply that it’s Shakespearean but rather that it doesn’t pull any cheap tricks. You are very rarely railroaded into certain decisions. The dialog almost always includes choices that mirror your own thoughts, even for those of us who like to ask a lot of questions. And not once did I click on a dialog option and find it said anything drastically different to what I thought it meant.
    A final thing about the dialog. Although it uses fairly standard stand-and-talk looped animations, it’s done really well. It’s not as good as motion-capture, but it comes mightily close considering.


The camera’s positioning inside the empty cage tells us that the character is feeling trapped, helpless and afraid of the impending battle. Or that the canary is dead and the castle is full of deadly gas!

  • Decent Combat
    The combat system in Dragon Age is pretty average. But if you’re looking for the kind of RPG where you can pause and plot your next moves, you haven’t really got many alternatives nowadays.
  • Interesting Tactics System
    Each character you control has a tactics screen. A set of instructions that, if used well, can make them mostly independent in combat. Maybe it’s just because I’m a programmer, but I liked this. There’s something satisfying about seeing your tank character purposefully interrupt an enemy spell-caster just as you instructed. I would’ve liked to see more complexity in the tactics screen. But I can see that putting it out of reach of more casual players.


It should be called “Dragon Slay-ge”, am I right guys?

  • Well-Crafted Setting and Lore
    It’s not radically original, but at least Dragon Age has some new fantasy concepts. It’s the small touches I like. The way that certain nationalities and races have different accents. A history that explains why things are they way they are. It feels natural and consistent. Best of all, a bare minimum of it is shoved in your face with clumsy exposition. You experience it by living in it, not by having it explained to you.

The Bad

  • Backwards Difficulty
    I played on Hard. Which started out really hard, but generally got easier as the game progressed and I optimsed my characters.
  • Simple
    One can describe Dragon Age Origin’s RPG-ness in two words: slightly simple. The combat system is simple. The character progression system is simple. The crafting system is simple (if not near-useless). The overland travel system is simple. Thievery (lock-picking and pick-pocketing) is simple. The inventory system is simple. None of these things are bad or flawed. Just not as brimming with stimulating complexity as some other RPGs.


Taking fashion tips from Biggles may not help woo the ladies.

The Ugly

  • Inconsistent Encounter Difficulty
    It seems there were at least two dungeon designers. One likes to make fairly simple encounters where you mostly can run in and fight. The other makes every encounter a trap, an ambush or some other ploy, where you’re pretty much destined to die the first time and can only eventually win by doing dodgy things (luring enemies around corners piecemeal, being tricky with line-of-sight and ranged attacks, or exploiting the enemies’ near-total inability to give chase to stealthed rogues).
    I like brutal fights, I like easy fights. I just wish they were mixed together rather than having whole areas of one or the other.
  • DRM
    Dragon Age has DRM. The system broke — this happened to me. I managed to tweak some files to get around it, but not without some time spent Googling. Time that, if it weren’t for the DRM, I would’ve been playing.


Pictured: Orcs Genlocks and zombies hurlocks. And an ogre.

Conclusion

  • Rated Good (on the Amazing, Good, Ordinary, Marginal, Critical scale).
  • A mediocre RPG redeemed by excellent story-telling and a dearth of similar modern competition.

See all Good, Bad, Ugly reviews by clicking here.