Knights of the Cardboard Castle

According to Steam, I’ve spent about 86 hours on Dragon Age: Origins. That’s nearly twice as much as any other game in my Steam account. Despite my initial enthusiasm, spending this much time on a single game is enough to wear anyone down. Part of this is of course because I’m such a completionist and insist on doing every quest available, plus playing on hard difficulty means repeatedly banging my head against some of the difficult bosses. But overall it’s still a surprisingly long game. I guess I’ll be skipping Awakening then but I’ll probably still pick up Dragon Age 2 when it comes out.

Being long isn’t a fault in of itself of course, if the game has the content to match. This means enough locations, characters, quests etc. Unfortunately for this game, it doesn’t have quite enough of all that and instead achieves its length by making each combat section much longer than it needs to be, causing it to feel like a slog after a while. Anyway, my thoughts:

• The combat is excellent and very satisfying. One QT3 poster called it a love-letter to old-school RPGs. I also liked how they updated it with concepts from modern MMOs. Class and abilities balance are all over the map however. Mages are way too powerful compared to the other classes and it’s crazy how much more useful some early spells are compared to later ones in the same tree. Of course, balance doesn’t matter as much in a single-player RPG, but it’s still annoying.
• Basic combat mechanics are good and demonstrates that Bioware can do a good fantasy RPG without relying on the Dungeons & Dragons system. Armor reduces damage instead of making you harder to hit while making your abilities cost more. Melee hitting ability depends on dexterity while damage depends on strength etc. I do wish that they had kept a separate healer class instead of combining the priest and mage roles into one.

• I really, really wanted more party members. You absolutely need a rogue with you at all times or you’ll miss out on all the chests in the game. Forget the loot, lockpicking chests and disarming traps are worth a ton of experience points! Because the combat here is all about tanking and spanking, you definitely need a tank and a healer as well. That leaves just one space open to experiment different party combinations with! Include all of the times when you need to include one or two companions in a particular area for plot reasons, and the choice becomes agonizing. Please just give me one more party slot, I’m begging you.
• I don’t like how the game tries to hide key statistics from the player, such as exactly how much damage spells and abilities do. The reasoning is that the developers don’t want the players to get into the min-maxing game too much but this is contradicted by how finely detailed the weapons are, including damage calculated to the first decimal, armor penetration values etc. If they’re going to make a tactically rich game like this, they’d better be prepared to put all their data out in the open and let players chew on it. I also hate how the game hides critical information about many abilities, like the fact that Mind Blast wipes threat and that lightning damage also drains mana.
• Combat is hard, maybe a little too hard at the beginning. It gets much better later but I did cheese my way through a lot of encounters using the Storm of the Century combo to wipe whole groups of enemies without much threat to my own party, which is probably not in the spirit of the game. The game really needs a combat log however. It’s way too frustrating to tell what works and what doesn’t without a log. And why the hell do I need to manually switch to each party member to see what status effects are active on them? Couldn’t they put the icons next to their portraits?

• As always, Bioware’s worldbuilding is fantastic. Their writing isn’t great literature but works very well within the context of a game. Modelling the various nations of Thedas after real-world nations sounds cheesy at first but ended up working very well. I’d have preferred it that they did away with the elves and dwarves entirely. The different varieties and cultures of humans in the game are more interesting than the fantasy races anyway.
• The in-game story is so-so. I liked the origins stories more than the main storyline. The main quest shares the same basic structure as Mass Effect 2 as it’s all about helping allies solve their own problems so that they can help you with the Blight. The Archdemon is barely present as a villain at all. It feels very odd that most of your time is spent dealing with relatively small potatoes and the huge threat of the Blight is dealt with very summarily at the end. Also, isn’t it awfully convenient that all of your potential allies have such debilitating crises of their own just as the entire nation is under attack. They could have at least made their problems related somehow to the darkspawn.
• Some companions are more talkative than others but I liked that not every companion side-quest needed to be a drawn out, elaborate affair. There were still too many warriors and not enough mages and rogues. Even the DLC companion is a warrior, albeit one with the nifty ability to switch between a few different roles.
• I loved the graphics. Once again, the map isn’t busy enough. It’s laughable how empty Denerim feels. But I really like the relatively gritty, realistic art style they went with rather the high fantasy style of something like World of Warcraft. I turned off the permanent gore on the characters’ bodies pretty quickly though. The animations are also surprisingly good for a Bioware game. I missed the improved conversation system of Mass Effect 2 but the voice acting is still excellent.

My verdict is still that this is an excellent game well worth the time I spent on it. Like everyone else, I’m concerned that the sequel seems to be moving in a different direction. I don’t really mind it being made into a more action-oriented game but that means that Bioware will have given up on the Dragon Age series being the spiritual successor of the Baldur’s Gate games. That just makes me sad.