Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Once again, I find myself slogging through my PC games backlog and playing a game that was originally released late last year. Dragon Age: Origins was something I had looked forward to for a while but I had my plate full when it came out and so waited a while for it to go on sale before buying it. I’m happy to report that 40 hours in, with my estimated progress at a little over half of the game, this is easily the best party-based role-playing game I’ve played since the Baldur’s Gate series.

To be sure, one major reason for this is that party-based RPGs have fallen out of favor. The classic series of old, eg. Might & Magic, Wizardry, Ultima etc. are now dead. Many new RPGs have appeared to fill the void but most are either action games (e.g. Diablo and its innumerable clones) or RPGs based on a single adventurer (e.g. The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher etc.) In fact, Bioware, the makers of the Baldur’s Gate games, remains one of the few companies to continue to make games in this genre, so it’s particularly appropriate that Dragon Age is their newest baby.

Bioware did continue making party-based RPGs and I’m a big fan of their Knights of the Old Republic, set in the Star Wars universe, while the Mass Effect series has taken RPGs in an interesting new direction. But while I liked the Neverwinter Nights games well enough, I always felt that something was lost in the transition to 3D. The results were still decent games, but seemed to come with diminished ambitions and more mediocre stories. Due to a greatly diminished party size, the battles were also far less tactically interesting and tuned to be too easy.

Dragon Age: Origins fixes all these shortcomings and then some. For one thing, it’s huge with tons of stuff to do and people to meet. I can’t imagine how much work it must have been to write all that dialogue and then have everything voice-acted. The story so far is also suitably awesome with plenty of cool set-piece battles, and all this in a brand new setting free of the baggage and crud that comes with the Forgotten Realms world. Once again, there is way more lore here than the story actually needs and that’s no bad thing.

But what really surprises me is that Bioware has finally dared to once again make an RPG that is old-school hard. It’s so unforgiving that Internet forums are full of people complaining about how impossible it is to get through, even at normal difficulty. It’s still not quite as bad as the Baldur’s Gate games which all but forced the player to go for certain party compositions or otherwise use very cheesy tactics just to survive, it comes pretty close. Personally, I’m playing it at hard difficulty and loving how you need to position everyone precisely and make use of all of your items and abilities to prevail.

One thing I don’t like about the game is the crassness of the DLC system. Hey look, here’s a side-quest you can do, but only if you pay up for the extra content. It’s annoying, immersion-breaking and most people seem to think that the DLC packs are poor value for money. I do enjoy the game enough that I’m tempted to buy some of them but I don’t want to encourage more of this sort of thing. As for the Awakening expansion, I guess I will probably cave in eventually. Of course, by the time I have the time to play that, the next iteration in the series will be out already…