I went to my friend's place, got to play DA:O for a bit.
Immediate impressions: Dragon Age: Origins is not a great game. Maybe if I played it more I'd call it a good game. As it is I'm struck by how
mediocre of a game it is. What it is, is a fairly decent animated "Choose your own adventure" storybook with dicerolls and combat on the side.
Before D&D types jump on my case for this, let me explain that I've played D&D before, but not religiously. It's actually quite fun. You are in a group of friends shooting the breeze, talking shit while the GM comes up with fantastic(hopefully) scenarios. In DA:O's case the GM is bioware, you have one scenario, and it isn't particularly imaginative. D&D offers a myriad of classes and races, and in Dragon Age:Origins you have 3 basic races and 3 classes. DA:O is watered down D&D, but at least you don't have to deal with body odor from nerdy neckbeards breathing heavily at you right?
The professional reviewers talk about all the choices you get to make, the difference you get to make in the world. I don't think I need to spoiler this because ultimately, you're going to experience it and it won't make much of a bloody difference.
As a mage, in the beginning you have to choose to help a friend or help those in charge of the two of you. The decision you make DOESN'T MATTER. The game continues after mildly slapping your wrist if you decide to be a jerk about it and/or you get rewarded by the higher ups for betraying your friend on purpose. After a bit of class/race specific intro, the game's plot melds together for every single one.
So you can choose black, white, and shades of gray, but the storyline moves forward regardless of what you pick.
There are millions of little choices like this which affect small things like at this certain point, if you choose to kill this lady, you can unlock the evil magic path for your mage. Yay! However no matter how evil you get, you still continue along the same storyline as a goody-two-shoes paladin (or any other offshoot you decide to call your branch of the 3 classes) So what you really do doesn't matter all too much. Not yay! Dragon Age: Origins is an exercise of fatalism at it's finest.
And the combat, well... Much has been said about the variable difficulty. The problem comes from enemy abilities, in which you're managing a battle perfectly fine, and then a spider, wolf, or troll will start spamming a bullshit ability which simply crushes you. A character will be knocked on the ground while every enemy brutally gang-rapes the character while the other members of your party can only look on in horror. While being crushed the character will be unable to parry, block, fight back, cast spells, heal himself, or raise his/her voice to object to being brutally gang-banged.
Gee, I hope you brought along a support/healing mage.
Speaking of mages, at least in the game I was playing, combat consisted of
Mage Bodyguard. That is, the mage steamrolls through everything and the warriors are just there to make sure the mage doesn't die. Meanwhile the rogue is running around trying to be remotely useful and
not die as they're the only one that can pick locks. I was playing on nightmare/hard though, so maybe that taints my experience. Any melee fighter within range of a creature's bullshit ability found themselves quickly dead without mage support.
Thanks to the internet, I have found out that there are
wooooooooo... sex scenes with clothes on, and if you remove a female character's clothing the underwear has camel toe. When you think about it, that's the type of thing the developers did instead of adding more actual content to the game.
So Dragon Age is pretty, it's a computer game, but overall it's a much poorer experience than D&D and Baldur's Gate/Neverwinter Nights was, on the plus side DA:O is less buggy but it tries to sell you more DLC. My personal recommendation is to either rent Dragon Age, wait for mods to come out/or the game's price drops, and send the money you saved to Toady. Support a game where what you do really affects the gameworld.
I'm so biased.
What do you guys think?
EDIT: I forgot to mention that they're trying to sell the game as an ACTION rpg, which means that instead of having non-stop diablo killing things game, they have more rpg elements. Instead of having classic Bioware rpg, they have more action elements.
It's a shame that Dragon Age remains a watered down union of action and rpg.
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Topic: Dragon Age: Origins (Read 34608 times)