Review | Dragon Age: Origins

That’s partly intentional, and partly down to the general incompetence of the friendly AI.  Your party members are curiously prone to wandering into traps, even straight after they’ve identified them.  They’ll charge en masse at a single enemy while an implausibly big group chips away at them from behind.  And while you can tweak their tactics, they never seem too eager to heal themselves or use many special moves.  You can queue up orders without having to switch to each character in real-time, but I found myself doing so anyway, just to ensure everyone was fighting at the top of their game.  Even so, the console versions’ enemy lock-on system makes it occasionally difficult to adjust your own combat on the fly, especially when switching between targets with the analogue stick is so fiddly.

For these reasons, the PC seems to be people’s preferred version of the game by early consensus. But I still consider it a fairly unimportant distinction.  Dragon Age is so much more than a graphics engine and a control mechanism.  It’s a huge, dramatic story spanning four lengthy strands, with some of the most astonishingly fleshed-out characters in the whole of gaming.  It’s a huge chain of moral and practical dilemmas, and a vast universe in which to battle against a hideous evil, one which threatens to bring about the end of all that is good, once and for all.

//Talkin’ about an evolution
It is quintessentially a BioWare game.  Perhaps too much so.  It’s difficult to escape the feeling that their epic, sprawling RPGs are struggling to escape from their own formula, no matter how impressive that formula is.  Both structurally and thematically, it’s a game that never quite breaks free of the company’s standard vision.  The main quest’s split-strand approach is especially familiar post-Mass Effect, and the focus on morality and relationships has been at play for the developer’s last few releases.  There’s certainly the feeling that BioWare could do to take more risks in the future.

Then again, Dragon Age never did profess to be an innovator.  Instead, the developer’s approach of evolutionary steps within the genre means this is a vast, spectacular and dramatic epic, one that follows the approach of previous games while consciously trying to improve upon them on all fronts.  Its cut-scenes are cinematic and intense, its dialogue clever and nuanced, delivered by actors that – aside from a couple of shaky performances – convey real humanity and emotion.  And while its story and setting fall uncomfortably close to fantasy cliché, the historical, social and political depth to Dragon Age’s world is nothing short of astonishing.

It’s difficult to know how to begin discussing the land of Ferelden, a sprawling nation of conflicting races and classes, a country torn by the omnipresent threat of civil war and a history of oppression.  No game in recent memory has offered a universe of such miraculous detail.  From the backgrounds of individual characters to political rifts stemming several thousand years into the past, each area of the game’s lore drips with thought, confidence and – importantly – credibility.  Perhaps most impressive is Dragon Age’s refusal to spell anything out, or expose too much of the story without reason.  As a human noble, I knew nothing of my race’s past deeds, and only paused for thought when I noticed the Elves were acting suspiciously around me in the second half of the game.  Checking the Elf origin story for clues, I immediately discovered humanity had enslaved the race for centuries, finally offering them emancipation but confining them to The Alienage, a mysterious area of the capital city locked away from the otherwise human population.  In my game, no one had spoken of The Alienage’s contents.  It was simply out of bounds.

Similarly, during my first great number of hours, it had been commonly understood that the Dwarves residing in the underground region of Orzammar lacked the politics and social order of the topside world.  The feeling, then, of arriving there to discover the most enormous and bustling of cities, locked in conflict after the death of its king, a complex social order segregating those of different castes… it’s difficult to convey.

//Dwarfing the competition
Orzammar is a fascinating place, easily Dragon Age’s best.  A vertically sprawling city embedded deep within a mountain, it’s the home of a highly imaginative Dwarven race, one in which it is deemed an excommunicable offence to leave for the outside world.  The city itself is marvellous, with a tiered structure that mirrors the strictly enforced class system, and rivers of lava flowing by the streets, cascading over the rock as glowing, molten waterfalls.

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