This game is good. Really good.
That probably won’t come as a surprise to people who have been playing Bioware’s games for over a decade. No, they’re not all perfect, nor will Dragon Age be, but when it comes to RPGs, even the less commercially successful efforts, like Jade Empire, have a rabidly devoted fan base. Indeed, no group of players has more to look forward to from Dragon Age: Origins than Bioware’s oldest fans, those gaming graybeards that helped put Bioware on the map with their enthusiastic support of the two PC-based Baldur’s Gate games.
Bioware has long talked about this being a spiritual successor to those games and that’s no exaggeration. Any fan of the old Infinity Engine-based games that sits down to play this will be right at home and not just because Bioware is bringing back the heroic fantasy of its D&D-licensed days. The controls, particularly when using the tactical camera view, are instantly familiar, whether it’s how you strategically direct your party’s characters during combat or the way you can hold down the Tab key to highlight all clickable objects on the screen. It’s like coming home again after spending years abroad. Everything is familiar and yet oh-so-different. Of course, the scenery in this case looks just a shade better than back in the day.
Granted, the graphics in Dragon Age are not likely to blow you fully out of the water, but that hardly stops the game from being a marvel to take in. One need only look at the fantastically detailed architecture of the fortress Ostagar to appreciate the effort that went into the art direction. Towering but crumbling spires, heroic statues that invoke memories of an age long gone, all generate a sense of awe and wonder I’ve not felt from a work of fantasy since Peter Jackson brought to life The Lord of the Rings. If anything stuck out to me from those first few hours of play it’s the attention to detail the world has to offer and I can only hope this game carries that early promise through to the end; a tall order considering it’s said to offer in excess of 100 hours of gameplay to those who explore every last nook and cranny.
The other aspect of the game that clearly stood out is just how fully realized the world’s history and characters are. When you start out, the type of character you build – human, elf or dwarf; rogue, warrior, or mage- determines the type of origin you experience. Each of the six origin stories, which themselves take a couple of hours to complete, are wholly unique and each serve to bond you to the character you have created, while introducing you to the world you now inhabit. I elected to go with the human noble origin, which placed me as the younger brother of a noble family ranked not far beneath the king himself. It’s not easy to invest a player in a story in just a couple of hours, but by the time my character’s origin had fully played out it had me sucked in hook, line and sinker.
From there, regardless of your particular origin, begins the main story in which your character is adopted into the Grey Wardens, an old order pledged to unite and defend the world from an apocalypse known as The Blight. The key to this aspect of the story is that a Blight is a very specifically defined event and not everyone in the world of Ferelden agrees that one is occurring. Darkspawn, twisted and evil creatures that represent Ferelden’s primary menace, are ever present, but only when they raise up an Old God to become an Archdemon to lead them does it become a Blight and threaten the world. And because not everyone thinks this is actually happening, there are several prominent characters –even early on in the game- who are far more interested in fortifying their own base of power rather than worrying about such pedestrian things like saving the world. In the end, it’s going to be your job to bring not only disparate groups of humans together, but also the likes of dwarves, elves and others.
