Dragon Age: Origins
It’s funny how some things work out. I was battered into buying Dragon Age Origins by multiple friends telling me I’d love it. Turns out my friends know me too well. I’ve spent longer playing it than most of them and only Disgaea 3 has cost me more of my life (well apart from when I was young and games didn’t track how long you played them).
Anyway, the first thing about Dragon age: Origins is the choices available. You have the usual choice between 3 races, humans, elves and Dwarves and 3 classes, Warriors, Rogues and Mages (unless you’re a Dwarf) and there’s plenty of customization to be done once you pick.
Initially you play through one of 6 different origins stories depending on your race and class. From here on the real choices that affect the whole Dragon Age world begin.
Tough Choices
Throughout the game you are presented with a number of choices which will determine your allegience to one party at the expense of another and a whole bunch of seemingly low importance side quests that appear to have little impact, many of which do have little impact but some of which you just won’t appreciate until you finish game, and it tells you what happened to the dwarf who asked for your help. Over the course of the game, a King dies and you will have a big say in who the new monarch is. Play your cards right and it could even be you as King or Queen but again, that depends on if you’re eligable – race,class and background and choices made.
Combat
Combat in Dragon Age Origins runs in realtime, but depending on your style of fighting it may seem a straight forward slugging contest, especially if it is a fight between warriors but it is quite possible to run around as a rogue and stab people in the back. You can bring up a menu and pause the action and assign each of your squad members a target and action. It’s not until you play another game that doesn’t give you a chance to pause that you realise how awesome that is (White Knight Chronicles I’m looking at you!).
The difficulty is well adjusted. Normal provides an enjoyable challenge without really causing any times where you’ll hit a point and go I can’t do this. The difficulty can be changed at any time and the console versions don’t differentiate between difficulty when handing out achievements/trophies. Easy is just that, easy. A useful way to burn through the game if you are more interested in the story but you may feel a little unsatisfied. You won’t be up against as powerful foes and things like potions will rarely be needed as opposed to vital. It is much faster though as you won’t need to pause the action to dish orders as enemies will fall sooner.
Hard and above introduce you to friendly fire, the number of times I’ve been hit in the back because I gave the ai mage access to the biggest spells in the game is a lot but in fairness much of the time it was following orders – if a group were attacking the healer, burn them all. Of course that was me being cheap and abusing friendly fire not being on. On higher difficulties I’m sure you order them around more or don’t give the AI orders to use the big spells and then you manually switch to the mage and use them yourself when the time is right.
Allies
Building up your allies to fight the Darkspawn invasion is the main aim of most of the game, these allies will be useful fodder/footsoldiers in the final fight and along the way you recruit members for your party (or not in some cases depending on your choices). Even once you recruit members, you have choices in how you deal with them which can result in them hating your guts to ultimately challenging you or at the other end of the spectrum, getting romantically involved. Allies perform better if they like you and cheap gifts only go so far, you may end up going off on side quests for them or coming to a decision and thinking twice about if you really want to do that because you know that they are going to go mental over slaughtering innocents (of course a couple are the opposite and rage at you for going out of your way to help people).
Sidequests
On the subject of sidequests there are many, many of which offer little reward other than a token reward but a clean concience. Others provide more substancial rewards in XP, gold or loot. And there is a lot of loot to be had in this game. Some people may get annoyed that they can’t carry it all and at times even if you buy every backpack you can, you will still end up passing over some although as you get further through, you don’t need to worry as much about looting as your gold rewards get bigger and some of the loot gets far more valuable than others so that you can dispose of without real fear of needing that 5 silver seeing how that helm was 3 gold. If you gotta get them all then if you buy the Warden’s Peak DLC you can store items you won’t need for a while there once you have completed it. The DLC has also some nice equipment and is a good buy.
DLC
On the subject of DLC, it’s been confirmed they will be providing DLC for 2 years! From what they have done so far, it integrates well. The Golem Shale is well worth getting and not just for his brilliant rants about birds (spend years as a statue outdoors and you’d probably feel the same), anyway he is awesome. There is a big expansion pack scheduled for March but apparently DLC doesn’t work with that, I’ll post an update once it’s out but even if that’s the case, with new NPCs, equipment and areas I expect it will turn out to be worth it, if there’s one thing I can say is that more Dragon Age is always a good thing.
So with so much more DLC to come, the potential for certain choices to affect things could be somewhat daunting but there’s no use guessing what will come. If all else fails and you don’t like how a choice ended up comes the end of the game or when a new DLC is released then you can always play through again, and you won’t mind either. I’ve been through three times and found new things each time. Using different team members at different times can give different choices and dialogues and can make fights far easier or difficult. There are still endings I haven’t seen and ideas for characters I’d like to try out.
Which Version?
If you are in the slightest bit interested in RPGs, you have to get this. Then you may have the choice of what to get it on. Well the 360 loads faster than the PS3 and the PS3 is behind on DLC because of the Sony testing program or Bioware being lame depending on who you listen to. On the flip side, the PS3 looks a bit better than 360 and is less likely to die from being on for long hours. Nikobe’s 360 started dying during DAO and my 360 started dying from Mass Effect 2 so if possible you should probably go with the PC, its better than both and has tools to let you do all sorts of modding. For the record I got the Collectors Edition on PS3. The bonus DVD wasn’t great to be honest but it had a code for more Dragon Age goodies and an armour for Mass Effect 2 which as it turns out is by far cooler than any of the other armours in the game even if statiscally it isn’t better than the pre-order bonus ones. Yes it is weird unlocking 360 content with a PS3 but well done to EA for getting it to work.
In Summary
Massive replayability with a great storyline and more content coming makes Dragon Age Origins an easy recomendation to anyone with any freetime. Actually it doesn’t matter if your time isn’t free, this is a game that you make time for. While playing you think I’ll just finish this sidequest, which leads to this and another well I’ll do this… before you know it you’ve been playing for hours more than you intended.
