Review | Dragon Age: Origins

But the stories the place tells are what truly impress.  In the suburb of Dust Town, the casteless Dwarves – those who strayed topside, otherwise offended the race’s principles, or were simply born to casteless parents – reside poor and broken, frowned upon by the masses in the city proper.  They beg for coins to purchase food, and refuse to talk about the region’s politics for fear of further punishment from the ruling classes.  While it’s those higher classes, the Dwarven royalty, that you eventually need to impress, it’s the casteless that left the biggest impression on me.  Being ultimately unable to do much at all to help them is tragic.

It’s a shame, then, that few other areas of Ferelden capture the imagination so impressively.  Dragon Age sports a largely typical fantasy aesthetic, and after the creativity displayed in Orzammar, it’s disappointing not to see it replicated elsewhere.  Ferelden’s opposing cultures and the constant undertones of racism and suspicion of “otherness” provide a strong backbone for the narrative, but the design of the world largely underwhelms, and never seems to find its own distinctive image.

Whereas the creature designs are tremendous.  Foes start typically enough – a human army, followed by lightweight Darkspawn that pose little threat.  By the half-way point you’re battling horned ogres that tower multiple times your height, sturdy stone golems that rip themselves out of their concrete bases, unthinkable creatures that attack by emitting an ear-piercing scream, giant trees that slash with their branches, and – on one memorable occasion – even spectral forms of your own party members.  That’s part of a test to prove your worth in a certain quest.  To so meticulously craft your party to be as strong in battle as possible, only to find yourself up against mirror images with the very same stats as your own, is a rare joy.

//Showing who’s boss
Levelling up works in such a way that it remains perfectly functional and never intrusive.  To begin with, the alarming range of specialities seems overwhelming, but you quickly learn how best to train your group for maximum effect.  Each level attained grants you three skill points to invest in areas spanning from ranged attacks to cunning, and a further point with which to purchase a new special ability – particular offensive, defensive or magical moves that can be activated and recharged during combat.  In seven-level intervals, a new skill set opens up, ready to be further unlocked as you progress up the chain.

Quickly, you’ll learn to use these skills effectively in combat, but Dragon Age’s uneven difficulty sticks out as a major problem.  Playing on normal, the first few hours posed very little challenge.  But by the end of each strand of the narrative, you’ll be stacked against unfathomable odds, and death is commonplace.  Micromanaging every inch of your party’s moves becomes a necessity, but even then – and even when scaling back to easy for certain encounters, as it’s wisely possible to do – some of the difficulty spikes are impossible to defend.  Boss battles in particular pose a great problem, but even some seemingly lesser encounters involve throwing around health potions like nobody’s business, and repeated failure is often a distinct possibility.  It’s sensible to train up a healer as quickly as possible, which makes things far more manageable, but there’s still little in the way of a smooth curve here, the game instead opting to intersperse generally fair challenge with hideous sections of near-impossibility.  It never quite sits comfortably.

Perhaps because of this, the big, climactic finale to each major quest feels at least half an hour too long.  Invariably, the narrative’s strands begin with a quest hub, in which you can trade, talk to locals, take on odd jobs and build relationships, before heading on a bloodthirsty journey to uncover a McGuffin of particular importance to the race you must convince, in order to defeat the Darkspawn, to join your army.  A quest that begins in the mages’ tower, before heading over into a bizarre misstep of an alternate dimension, is a major offender in this respect, and only the section in the Brecilian Forest bucks the awkward trend.  Dragon Age’s scale is no doubt impressive, but you get the impression that by trimming out the odd half hour of intense combat here and there, BioWare could have gone some way to alleviating the difficulty problems while ensuring pace and interest were maintained more fluently than they end up being.

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