Review by: Todd Brakke

Dragon Age is a wonderfully perplexing game. It’s easy to sit back and declare it the single best role playing game ever constructed. In a lot of ways it is exactly that. It’s also easy to focus on the ways it could have been better and conclude it’s a disappointment. There’s really no single element in this game that is truly innovative or original. There’s nothing here that you, if you’ve been around long enough, haven’t seen before. There are longstanding and outdated tropes of the fantasy genre that are sure to grate on players, especially those who don’t live and breathe the traditional PC RPG. Yet at the same time, there has never been anything quite like this wonderful game.

Dragon Age is a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Every little piece you pull out of the box has a shape you’ve seen before, loaded with familiar colors. But they’re all cut just a little bit different and, when they’re assembled, they create something that is not only epic in scope, but also utterly beautiful and totally unique. This is every bit the game fans of the old Infinity Engine games (Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Tormet) have been waiting nearly a decade to play. It’s also a game that Bioware hopes will draw a legion of new adherents to the genre, a goal that is not as easily reached.

Following a brief in-plot tutorial that serves as a jumping off point for your player character’s origin story -there are six different origins to choose from, ranging from human noble to dwarven commoner to elven mage- you’re introduced to the larger world as a potential recruit in the order of the Grey Wardens. This is an order dedicated to fighting back the world’s primary nemesis, the darkspawn, which have a nasty habit every few hundred years of raising a dead Old God and corrupting it, resulting in the birth of an Arch Demon to lead them. Putting an end to this world-threatening uprising, known as a Blight, is at the core of Dragon Age’s story, but it barely begins to sum up everything you’ll be dealing with while trying to unite several disparate groups of Ferelden’s community against this common foe.

Character creation is fairly standard RPG fare and utilizes a system of character attributes (strength, dexterity, cunning, etc.), classes (warrior, rogue, mage), skills (combat training, poison making, etc.), and talents (spell classes, fighting styles, lock picking, etc.) that is instantly familiar to anyone who has played a Dungeons and Dragons-licensed game. The system does its job in that points spent on attributes do impact what you can and cannot do in the game and every skill and talent has its place in the game world.

At the same time, however, it can be tricky figuring out how to build your character because there’s no sense of scale to the numbers. In D&D a ‘22’ in strength basically makes you the equivalent of Hercules, but in Dragon Age you’re expected to drive that number up from the teens to the high 30s or even low 40s just to wear “massive” class armor. What does having a 40 in cunning do for me that a 36 doesn’t? The world may never know. At the very least, it would have been nice if players, particularly those who are new to this genre, had some mechanism (even were it limited) that allowed them to respec their characters mid-game, allowing them to overcome character building mistakes made as a result of not understanding a brand new role playing system. I know there are a lot of reasons not to let players “cheat” in this manner, but if the goal is to bring in new people to the genre, you need to throw them some bones. (There is a user-created mod available to PC players that let you respec your characters.)