Dragon Age: Origins has been a long time coming from Bioware, I remember reading about it over 3 years ago in magazines and on the web. The good thing is that Bioware do generally take their time to get things right with their role playing games and they haven’t disappointed anyone here, at least in the PC version of the game that is.
As the spiritual successor to BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate, one of the most successful role-playing games in the industry, Dragon Age: Origins represents BioWare’s return to its roots, delivering a fusion of the best elements of existing fantasy works with stunning visuals, emotionally-driven narrative, heart-pounding combat, powerful magic abilities and credible digital actors. The spirit of classic RPGs comes of age, as Dragon Age: Origins features a dark and mature story and gameplay.
- Epic Party-Based Combat – Dragon Age: Origins will introduce an innovative, scalable combat system, as players face large-scale battles and use their party’s special abilities to destroy hoardes of enemies and massive creatures.
- Powerful Magic – Raining down awesome destruction on enemies is even more compelling as players apply “spell combos,” a way of combining together different spells to create emergent unique effects.
- Deep Customization – Players will develop their characters and gain powerful special abilities (spells, talents and skills) and discover ever-increasing weapons of destruction.
- Your Story, Your Way – With its emotionally compelling story, players choose with whom they wish to forge alliances or crush under their mighty fist, redefining the world with the choices they make and how they wield their power.
- Origin Stories – Players will select and play a unique prelude that provides the lens through which the player sees the world and how the world sees the player. The player’s choice of Origin will determine who they are and where they begin the adventure, as they play through a customized story opening that profoundly impacts the course of every adventure.
So once again we have a Bioware Role Playing Game in our hands, for those of you who haven’t played one before (and where have you been) you will come across a whole manor of quests, items, loot, spells, character traits and more in the game as well as a very detailed back story to the whole game.
The format of the game is an RPG where you control a party of up to 4 adventurers. Your main character can be picked from 3 races and because of this there are 6 individual opening chapters to the story, which means the replay options are vast, if you are like me and enjoy playing through Bioware games multiple times. he game has many dialogue choices to be made throughout and each answer can be important to how the rest of your group feel towards you.
Friends will battle together
Dragon Age actually picks up the story and action quite quickly in each opening chapter of the game, once you have chosen your look and start out stats of your character, you will be in what I felt a very well made tutorial introducing you to how to control your character, tactics, traits, stats, inventory etc. The game gets much deeper as you play through it from creating items, to choosing tactics for your group.
As with any Role Playing Game, loot plays a big part when you kill enemies and find chests and crates around the map. The inventory system works well by splitting up items into sections such as weapons and armour as well as making it very easy to compare what you have to the items in your inventory when trying to make sure you have the best kit available to you.
Tactics play a very important part in Dragon Age: Origins. Sometimes you will want to hold some more vulnerable characters at the back and use them for ranged combat while you will want to put your most violent, armoured and deadly ones at the front fighting your cause. There are many options from defence to ranged tactics that you will need to play with to get the right blend when you are taking part in bigger fights as the game goes on.
The story is very much like a version of Lord of the Rings, and there is nothing wrong with that what so ever. Bioware has created quite a deep back story which you can read about in the journal and through the conversations you have during the game. The dialogue is excellent throughout Dragon Age and a lot of credit has to go to the excellent voice cast that has been chosen for the game as they do some great work for the most part.
Let there be blood
Graphically, despite what many people have been saying, I thought the game looked excellent. I have been playing it at 1920×1200 with full detail and 8xAA set and the game ran perfectly for me with no slow down at all even with loads of enemies and characters on the screen at one time. The art design and the general UI look great too with lots of polish put into the whole feel of the game. There are criticisms though, the blood splatter effect on your characters looks great at first, but as you go on you realise it is over done, also the cutscenes in the game engine look superb, but when it cuts back to video footage it is jarring due to poor compression used.
As I mentioned earlier, the sound work is great, from the clanging of sword to the general atmospheric sounds around you everything has been really well done. The voice work is top notch and there is a lot of it in the game. Music is good too, but some of it is repeated too much and I would have liked to have heard more orchestral tracks used.
So overall an excellent game from Bioware once again, remember though this is the PC version and is by far the best version of the game out there, the Xbox and PS3 versions have some control issues that would mark them down slightly, even though the basic gameplay is identical in each version. I’ve had loads of fun with Dragon Age: Origins and any fan of Bioware’s previous RPG’s will really enjoy this one, roll on Mass Effect 2!
| Dragon Age: Origins Review | |
|---|---|
| Gameplay |   |
| Excellent gameplay and not only that, it will last gamers many hours. | |
| Graphics |  |
| Great art design throughout and even at high resolutions the game ran perfectly for me | |
| Sound | |
| Music is ok but the sound effects and voice work is excellent. | |
| Longevity | |
| Many hours of gameplay here as well as different character stories to play through | |
| Overall | |
|---|---|
| Simply if you love Bioware's RPG's then you will love Dragon Age | |
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- Let there be blood
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- A fiery death
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- Friends will battle together
