Dragon Age: Origins – The Good Old Days of Dragonlance

We knew that when we got our hands on Dragon Age: Origins, we would not be able to do anything else for 60 hours except eat and sleep and basic lavatory needs, barely even that. Developed by Bioware, Dragon Age: Origins, is exactly what a cRPG fan would expect if he WAS a fan of Bioware, but what cRPG fan would not be a fan, because for a decade or so it seemed like it was the only company making quality cRPG ; unlike Square Enix of Japan, Bioware actually tries to release games with some kind of moral quality. As a spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series, Dragon Age is the first new sword and sorcery IP for Bioware; the setting with its folklore and legends is entirely new, but yet feels instantly familiar, like lifted out of a DragonLance novel — that dwarfs and elves and dragons and gods behave exactly as they are expected to be. While it might feel a little unoriginal after a full bookshelf of fantasy novels, the power of nostalgia and the amount of content with excellent writing and dedicated voice acting — it’s something you can’t find anywhere else. This isn’t to say this is Bioware’s best work ever, it sure is one of the most polished — something like the DragonLance movie that never existed (not the animation where Kiefer Sutherland stars as Raistlin Majere), made with the production value of the Lord of the Rings.

Anyone who knows what they are getting into will enjoy Dragon Age: Origin, but to fully appreciate its nostalgic value, you probably have to be someone like me — that I grew up with DragonLance and Forgotten Realms novels filling my bookshelves, which later ran out of space and spilled to occupy every walking space in my small room, even though I later stayed away from the series with their declining quality, my collection of fantasy and science fiction from other authors kept growing, and eventually that was how I began writing my own first novel, but that’s another story all together. Aside from reading, I played the Gold Box series AD&D computer role-playing games to death, starting from Pool of Radiance. Not that the Gold Box series were any good, they were in fact terrible games, thinking upon it, where a single turn-based battle would sometimes take hours, and you would die horribly without any chances to save, and none of the games had a better plot than the worst of the books. But those games sold nevertheless, just like how people nowadays would go see the Transformers movies, not that they are good, but they drew on that spark of imagination (pardon the pun) from our childhood, and letting us relive it feels like godsend.

Then there was Baldur’s Gate, Bioware’s first foray into the industry, and the re-imagined isometric gameplay on the infinity engine revitalized the dying genre, and gave birth to the Icewind Dale series and arguably the best game ever — Planescape Torment. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Baldur’s Gate series, thought it was restricted by its AD&D rule set much like Knights of the Old Republic was plagued by its Star Wars mythos, but to fans that may be a blessing, to me it was bane — that a writer’s creativity is restricted by the rules of the world he is imprisoned to write. Then there was Neverwinter Nights and its Aurora Engine, giving birth to the Planescape of this decade, the Witcher. Forgetting the original pseudo-Asian-theme Jade Empire (please don’t get me started) and the Star Trek-like Mass Effect, Dragon Age is the first original work based on the familiar sword and sorcery setting.

As a heavy critique of story, writing and settings, I have to say Dragon Age’s writing shined — the setting immense of scope, and the story truly epic, the prose fluid and literal reflected by professional voice work, the pacing of the plot  tight yet with amazing freedom. If I had to point out the blemish in this masterpiece of a canvas, it IS the double-edge sword that everything feels too familiar, exactly which is what feeds my needs of nostalgia, that there is a lack of originality, that it is too much like a Dragonlance story by Weis and Hickman, and perhaps mix that with the Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin, if you have read both of these, you will know what I am talking about. In Dragon Age, your main character is a Warden, and Wardens basically have power to draft anyone into service to defend the land, very much like the Sworn Brotherhood of the Night’s Watch in Song of Ice and Fire. And I can’t help but draw parallels between the character Raistlin Majere from Dragonlance Chronicles and witch/shape changer Morrigan. I am not saying Bioware’s writer plagiarized work of the others, just saying that if you stayed with the Tolkienesque setting, the writing is hardly going to feel invigoratingly new, kind of like the Greeks and the Romans telling the same set of folklore, just with different terms.

Bioware wrote a lot of back-story into almost everything you can interact with, which you would keep an account of it in the Codex, which came from the Mass Effect series, which you are most likely to not complete unless you are a completionist achievement whore, nor will you likely read most of it, not that they are bad or anything but sometimes reading the codex is just going to break up the gameplay, and I wished that I was forced to read it instead of having the option to brush it off, very much like if you look at an item in an adventure game and then the description is entered into the notebook, you are not really going to read it later, unless you were forced to read it right now, and I find myself picking up important documents which will later solve quests instantly without me knowing why.  And I wished the codex was a little better organized and the quests pointed you where to go but it didn’t, and I found  myself mostly relying on my head where I needed to go and just completing the quests on the way instead of relying on a waypoint, which is again, maybe a good suspension of disbelief thing which I am pretty big on, unless it gets in the way.

The PC version is really the only one you should go with, even if you had to play the game at the lowest graphical settings (which still look pretty damn good), because it is the only one that lets you play it at the tactical isometric view which I mostly played the entire game on, which is reminisce of the Baldur’s Gate series, and only zooming in the behind the shoulder 3rd person camera occasionally in tight corridors or when something blocked my view. The PC version is really the only version that comfortably lets you control all your characters with hotkeys and space for pausing and the bottom screen for selecting abilities, very much like an RTS, which you need to play the game because the in-game AI doesn’t really work as well as it advertises it does, and you are much better off letting AI fills the gaps of your shoes instead of letting it rule your life, if you get my meaning, your characters will run into their deaths and waste their ability points in thin air more often than not. The in-game AI is programmable just like the gambits from FF XII, but instead of buying pieces of that programmable snippets, you gain tactical slots when improving certain abilities during level-up.  This is much more believable than buying “allies less than 25% health” with in-game gold so you can program your ally to heal someone (sometimes you got to question that Japanese design choice, so much for the suspension of disbelief), every criteria you can program is opened from the start, but the AI fails at the worse moments and more often than raindrops hitting your rooftop during a storm — so you are better off with the PC version where you can play this tactically — as if you were playing an RTS where you treat all your allies as mindless grunts.

Breaking off from the AD&D rule set worked well because mages no longer have to memorize spells prior to a fight, and everything is based on mana/stamina like Diablo and WOW. I can’t help but was reminded of the days i played the Goldbox series when a delayed-blast-fireball spell would be the life saver, because you are constantly swarmed by enemies, and you have to camp after the skirmish and allocate that many hours for your mage just to memorize spells, and hope that you don’t get ambushed within camp, those were the days you spent hours and not being able to advance and you would hold your breath while you walk along the corridor hoping the encounter doesn’t happen — that or perhaps you can parley your way out. What was done especially well in Dragon Age was that it did away with the complex AD&D complex character creation and gave you 3 base classes to work with — warrior, rogue, and mage — the result of that works so well that I lack the words to describe it, because the 3 different classes can be built in such a way that is interchangeable, that they are strong enough to stand on their own. If you have any experience in an AD&D game you know you must have at least 2 to 3 tank fighters in the front line, you may or may not have a rogue since the game lets you bash locked doors and chests with pure strength, and since the rogue is mostly entirely useless in a fight if he’s out of shadow, then you have clerics and mages which you will need in the back to support or deal the deadly wide area damages which your life will rely on, then you get useless jack-of-all-trades like the bard — I remembered using a bard in Icewind Dale and I totally had to restart the game. In Dragon Age: Origins you will mold your character and your companions as you progress and grow and every ability you will utilize like your life depended on it. The least interesting is the Warrior class which is the easiest to be built into a tank which attracts enemy attention, none of its specialization is drastically necessary, with the Templars mostly excels in dealing with mages, Champions more like a knight that buffs your other characters with auras, which I thought would have been useful if there was anything healing related, but at the end of the day, none of the warrior specialization I had to rely on. Rogue is the more interesting class which you can specialize in assassination or a duelist, which you can more or less stand on the front line or fight hand-to-hand combat from the shadows, but you can also specialize in being a Ranger, which lets you summon creatures, or be a bard — whose songs are surprisingly  useful in stunning or buffing your other characters. The Rogue class is infinitely more interesting than the fighter because you can specialize in range combat and grow critical skills like trap finding and lock-picking which are necessary in this game. Traps will decimate your party if you can’t detect and disarm them and you have no other options to grab the goodies if you find locked chests. The Mage class is also extremely well designed because as an arcane warrior or shape changer, he can stand on the front line like a fighter (with some obvious penalties), and the spirit healer is the necessarily cleric class you will depend your life on, and the interesting blood mage if you are to go that route you will sacrifice your party’s life for your own power, but since each character can specialize in two sub-classes you can create very interesting characters  (think of spirit healer combined with blood mage), and not locked in right from the moment you start the game, and your mages won’t die in 1 hit like they would in previous D&D game.

It is almost too bad that the design of the game has to accommodate its consoles counterpart and only let the player have a maximum of 4 members in the party, and I thought I at least needed 5, if not 6 — which I found myself sacrificing my attack-spell mage position to have 2 fighters , a long-range bard/ranger, and a spirit-healer / arcane warrior, but everyone’s playing style is going to be different.  I was not absolutely sure whether the enemy difficult scaled at all with the party, I am sure it doesn’t scale methodically like Oblivion — which is some of the worst design decisions I can think of because it entirely eliminates the point of level progression. At the very last stage of Dragon Age felt extremely easy, that enemies were dying with 1 hit, but prior to that, the areas which you are supposed to be tackling on your own terms, some areas would feel a little bit challenging even in the easy difficulty, because once you get swarmed your party would get decimated in a blink of an eye, but there was never a time which I felt that the enemies here were too powerful and I needed to come back later, I was simply always living on the edge  — which led me to think that some kind of loose scaling of enemy levels were done depending on how you tackle the different areas. On a whole I have no complains how the game still manages to pit challenges at the player constantly even at an easier setting but never wastes the player’s time on exploration and story progression. It is core game design done just right, and that is a skill that takes years to master, and some companies never get it right in their lifetime — and that is also because most players and reviewers don’t manage to identify these problems.

Finally, what really mesmerizes  me are really the choices, at AGG we are big on good writing and choices — like how we appreciated the Witcher, we respected every choice Dragon Age: Origins threw at us, and recognized every small choice was life-changing (or ending-changing), there are many different ways to play the game, not just going on a good or evil path, but sometimes choosing neither or simply choosing a political side, which impacts the game in a profound way, almost like when you are at the end of your path when someone is pointing a gun at your head demanding retribution, that was the kid you saved 10 years ago out of your fleeing compassion, you can’t help but wished there was some kind of reload game function in real life — which we found we reloaded the game a lot at key decisions, just to want to see the in-game different game response, but some decisions impacted events that are much later — Dragon Age IS a game that is meant to be replayed and replayed again. Like one of those choose your adventure books, except that it is well written, and not reading every page of it seems like a disservice to the writers.

Dragon Age: Origins is not the best cRPG ever, but it is one of those rare gems that come by maybe every half a decade or so, like Ultima Lazarus and the Witcher that came before it, these games will suck the life out of you but you will end up cherishing every moment of it, more so than that real-life night at the nightclub in Paris where you scored the two hottest harlots you have ever laid eyes on and perpetually and relentlessly fornicated till the morning… ahem…, this is not based on real-life experiences but my inborn ability to colorfully produce a metaphor. The amount of dialogues in the games are staggering, and your companions feel like real being with their distinct personality, and the romance with them feel bittersweet (while the sex scenes should be brushed off as contrived — that the journey, is better than the culmination of the ending), and the epilogue of Dragon Age: Origins, by no means mind-bending, yet sanguine like a glass of fine scarlet wine — best to be experienced, savored, revisited again and again, and each time that tale will be told a little differently.

Confession: We clocked in about 60 hours of the PC version of Dragon Age: Origins playing through the main campaign and a majority of character-specific sidequests.

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