Dragon Age: Origins Review

9.4

Format PC

Developer Bioware

Publisher Unknown

Genre Role Playing

34 Comments

It is said it was the hubris of man that brought the Darkspawn into the world: a rampaging evil, swelling up from underground, that attacks without mercy or purpose. It has been over four hundred years since the last Blight, but even those who remember believe there will never be another. One man disagrees. Duncan, head of the Grey Wardens in the nation of Ferelden, sees all the signs of a coming Blight. He is seeking new members to join this most elite band of fighters, for it is only the Grey Wardens who can defeat the Archdemon at the centre of the onslaught.

Thus begins Dragon Age, one of the most enormous and astonishing of games. It's an unashamed high-fantasy RPG, rooted in the most traditional soil, yet set in a highly original world. This is a story of humans, elves, dwarves and mages building a tenuous alliance in the face of a terrible evil. It's about sacrifice, death, passion, death, adventure, battle and more death. There's an awful lot of death.

This is not a game that can be simply explained. How does it begin? It begins in six completely different ways, and each of these can be met with a wildly different approach. An excellent portion of the game to relate would be my adventures in the dwarven city of Orzammar, except there's little chance that you will experience the same events in the same way when you get there. The relationships you have, your allies and enemies, your party - they all form an experience unique to you.

What will be common to all is the combination of dialogue and combat. Whether you play as a human, elf or dwarf, a rogue, warrior or mage, a noble or a commoner, Dragon Age requires smart use of your wits and weapons. Combat is a combination of real-time fighting and turn-based handing out of orders. You have control of all in your current party (which has a maximum of four characters), as well as an elaborate Combat Tactics system that enables you to all but program your team's AI. But there's also an entire realm to explore, and a central, overwhelming theme of acculturation within its many towns and races. This is about politics, moral philosophy and love. And about killing dragons with swords.

No matter how you approach Dragon Age, combat will be your constant companion. While there are many encounters a silver tongue can end peacefully, you aren't going to be reasoning with the Darkspawn, enraged demons, or bandits and assassins. This is where balance in your party is essential. The game's unfriendly difficulty settings (more on this later) don't leave much room for a gang that doesn't have at least one healer, a couple of strong melee fighters, and someone capable of combat both at range and close up. Fortunately you've no shortage of suitable candidates.

You can approach combat in a couple of ways, depending upon your personal preferences and the difficulty level to which you've set the game. In theory, setting it to Easy should let you fight in real-time, where you select opponents and issue instructions from a row of tiled attacks, spells and special items familiar to any MMO player, as the fight happens. Choose Normal, and you'll have to make consistent use of the Spacebar to pause and jump between characters, lining up their next move. This might be to heal themselves, change target, use a particular special attack, or aid another. Hit Space again, watch those moves play out, then pause once more. It's a form of self-created turn-based play that encourages enormous involvement.

Further to this are the Combat Tactics. Each character has a limited number of these slots (expanded through levelling up and choosing particular skills) to which you can assign specific actions to be performed in specific conditions, using cascading menus. These can be as simple as picking 'Self' then 'Health', then 'is < 25%' then 'Use health poultice: least powerful'. Or as complex as 'if party member Leliana' is 'Being attacked by melee attack', then 'Deactivate mode: Powerful swings'. And so on. With at least five or six slots available for each character, this enables you to set up an elaborate array of specific behaviours so that your party can enact your will without constant babysitting. It's most useful for getting members to self-heal at the right times, heal each other, and switch from range to melee weapons in particular circumstances.

As you and your party level up, at levels 7 and 14 you get a point to spend on a sub-specialism that opens up new talent trees. A warrior, for instance, can choose to be a berserker or champion, among others. A mage might opt for shapeshifting, allowing her to morph into an animal during battle. A superbly useful talent for a Rogue is Ranger, which allows you to call an animal to join your party. Life's always better when there's a three-foot spider fighting at your side.

Party members can gain further skills simply through your character's relationship with them. Inspired by your leadership, they may gain boosts in cunning, or constitution that contribute to passive and activated tools in battle. It all makes combat more involving, without being overwhelming.

However, in a game with few flaws, there's one flailing giant one when it comes to difficulty settings. The pop-up text suggesting that switching to Easy will remove the need for micromanagement during fights is lying. There are difficulty spikes at certain points where getting through a battle on Easy becomes stunningly hard, and requires frenetic fine-tuning. Similarly, if you choose to play a dwarf rogue, you'll find yourself forced to pick Easy during the opening moments of the game because you're simply incapable of surviving battles otherwise.

Later on, any class can hold their own with enough skills. But unless you're a mage with a cluster of healing spells, you must be prepared to spam health poultices to get through many tough encounters. Ideally this will be fixed with a patch, with a more realistic 'Easy' setting for those who want to play in a genuine real-time way, and a 'Normal' for those who want a reasonable challenge.

These tough fights might involve facing a huge number of enemies at once, or facing beasts of enormous size. The former encourages smartness in your tactics, firing arrows to draw smaller groups away, tricking opponents into traps, and so on. Larger enemies, which include the titular dragons, lead to a more frantic assault, where you're chipping away at a mighty health bar.

Back to those six possible beginnings. Humans are the dominant race in Ferelden. Dominant in some extremely unpleasant ways. Until a few hundred years ago elves were the slaves of humans. In theory they have been freed, but those who live in cities remain second-class citizens, forced to live in slums, either begging or finding menial work in human houses. A small number of elves broke away to live in the Dales; these 'Dalish' elves are attempting to recover their lost culture. Bitter and vengeful, they kill all humans who wander into their territory.

The dwarves live in the Frostback Mountains, fiercely independent and embroiled in their own complex politics and caste system. The treatment of the elves by humans is (if you'll pardon the pun) dwarfed by the attitude this underground race show to their own casteless kin.

Mages are feared and loathed by all. Those demonstrating magical skills are separated from their families as children and sent to a Mages' Circle. A mage is vulnerable to possession by demons, or to the allure of deadly Blood Magic. They must live under the control of the soldiers of the Chantry, the presiding human and city-elf religion, serving in the army.

It is from this cauldron of tension and hostility that you select your character.
Your first two hours playing as a human noble have almost nothing in common with those of a dwarf commoner or Dalish elf. While you're taught the basics of combat, and introduced to party mechanics, the rest is unique. Select a mage (either human or elf - dwarves have no affinity with mana) and you must go through the Harrowing - the test all mages must face before leaving their apprenticeship. This involves entering the spirit world of the Fade to do battle with dreams and demons. Select a city elf (either rogue or warrior) and you play through a tale of wedding-day excitement, terrifying attacks, and rape. A human noble faces terrible loss, while a Dalish elf gets hands-on experience with the Darkspawn. Play as a casteless dwarf, or the son or daughter of the dwarven king, and the contrast is dramatic.

What each opening eventually has in common is the arrival of Duncan, a Grey Warden attempting to recruit armies to join the fight against the Blight. Hundreds of years ago each race signed an accord to provide armies on demand should the Darkspawn rise again, and Duncan is asking people to make good on that promise. Along the way, a promising candidate for the Wardens themselves catches his eye. Which would be you.

Once recruited, you arrive in Ostagar with Duncan, meet king Cailan Theirin, and begin the ritual of becoming a Grey Warden. At this point all six beginnings converge. But this isn't a case of a couple of hours of unique story before being dumped on the same path as all the others. Your race and your social position have an enormous impact throughout the 80-hour long game. Once you're through the ritual, your goal is to visit the elves, dwarves, humans and mages to convince them to send their armies to fight the Blight.

Most extraordinary about this opening choice is the incredible sense of being of that race, and the part that race plays in history. I know much about the elves, the dwarves and the mages: I've been to their homelands, experienced their cultures, influenced their lives and been influenced by them. But I've no idea what it's like to be a Dalish elf. I can tell you all about being a noble human, my family's past, our relationships to the ruling classes, and most of all, the horror of loss and betrayal that surrounded me. No part of the game is without this enormity of history.

The world is so vast and detailed you could believe it was a hundred years in the making. Much of the background is delivered to you via the Codex. This encyclopaedia of the game's world, past, laws and characters is constantly updated as you explore new areas, read new books, talk to strangers, or get to know friends better. You need not read it, but each page is beautifully written, often funny or dramatic, and mostly a pleasure to look through.

The main quest - to get all the major races to send their armies to join the Grey Wardens - gives you the freedom to explore the world in the order you choose, and influences much of how you experience the game. Head to the capital city, Denerim, and you'll find the main market district. Here you'll meet not only key characters for the main story, but dozens of others who might send you off on side quests. In Denerim alone you'll find quests from underground organisation The Blackstone Irregulars, the Mages' Collective, dubious work known as Favours For Certain Interested Parties, and missions from the Chanters' Board outside the local Chantry.

These swell up your list of current quests, some to be sought out when reaching later cities, others adding new areas to the map. These can range from simple conversations or fights, to battling your way through huge dungeons. Characters such as rogue bard Leliana, fellow warden and warrior, Alistair, and Witch of the Wilds, Morrigan, join you early on. Other members of your gang will sign up once you've visited their homelands.

Whether you play male or female, there are various characters with whom you can fall in love. However, this isn't a genderless universe, and a gay relationship will be recognised as such. When one male teammate approached my male character with romantic interest, my conversation options included responding with confusion or horror, politely declining, or indeed welcoming his advances. Getting to the point where another character will declare their feelings, however, is no small matter.

Rather than the good/evil systems of most BioWare games, in Dragon Age you're judged by what your companions think of you. And this depends upon their own personalities. Choose paths that are bad news for others, or act in your own self-interest, and you'll win favour with enjoyably wicked characters like Morrigan. Take the righteous, selfless path and others like Leliana will highly approve. The more they like you, the more intimate your relationship. This can be boosted through the giving of gifts: special items discovered or bought and given to your colleagues.

Nothing in this game comes without an involved background or moral ambiguity. For example, at any point your party can camp, which allows you to heal up, talk to your companions and trade with a couple of dwarves who apparently follow you around. But even these dwarves come with a history. The younger of the two is the only mentally handicapped character I can remember encountering in a game. He's looked after by his father, and has a savant gift for enchanting weapons. Treat them as more than a shop, talk to them, and the details of their past emerge, along with a surprising ethical quandary.

Nothing is just thrown in. Even the damage you take is specific: when you fall in battle, rather than simply recovering unharmed once the fray is over, you are given an 'injury' which will impede one key statistic until you either use an injury kit to heal it, or camp.

Dwarven culture, incidentally, is fascinating. It has a caste system, where dwarves are born into the same role in life as their same-sex parent. Your family will be nobles, warriors, smith, artisans, miner, merchants or servants, and this will not change. Should a servant marry a noble woman, his son would remain a servant while his daughter would live in the upper echelons. And then, as mentioned earlier, there are the casteless. Either because of ancestral disgrace, or because they went above ground for too long, these dwarves are stripped of their identities, their ancestry removed from dwarven history. They are unrecognised by all society. It's abhorrent. Exploring the city's slums is distressing. But you're an outsider (unless you're playing a dwarf, of course) so how much is it your place to object?

This is a question the game asks. At one point you're challenged over whether to help set up a Chantry in the city of Orzammar - among a race who believe in a completely different, completely incompatible religion. But what if the Chantry might offer help to the casteless? What then? At the same time you're drawn into the dirty politics of which of two deadlocked candidates should be the new king, alongside exploring the Darkspawn-infested abandoned mines and townships deeper into the mountain. And that's less than half of what happens here. The ending, which is different depending upon how you've played, manages to deliver on the anticipation built up, surprising you with new twists, and creating an appropriate sense of scale.

Were the difficulty levels not so enormously silly, it would require sheer pickiness to find a major fault with this game. Importantly, overly difficult sequences can be powered through on Easy, but this doesn't excuse it being necessary. Despite the time and investment required to cultivate relationships with party members, these still feel a little clumsy, and despite my best efforts to have a gay relationship with one party member, I found myself surprised and somewhat confused to have inadvertently accepted the advances of another. Oh, and if we're listing faults, one appalling gaff is the failure to change family members' skin colour if you roleplay a non-caucasian. My main protagonist, a black man, lived as a sort of reverse 'The Jerk', where no one mentioned that his mother, father and brothers were all white. Embarrassing.

But coming out the other end of an epic 80 hours' first playthrough, I leave with memories that feel like more than simply events in a game. The friendship I formed with fellow Grey Warden Alistair has an echo of a reality. His penchant for sarcasm, his sniping conversations with Morrigan as we explored, and his struggle to balance emotion and bravado, continue to resonate.

I've not only been to huge cities, but I've learned their past, their present, and been involved in shaping their future. This hasn't felt like passing through a series of checkpoints, but having experienced a world. I know enough about the religion of the Chantry to preach their own Chants. My connection to the Grey Wardens is palpable, and the part I played an honourable one.

This is the most enormously detailed game world I've experienced, its history stretching back thousands of years, its cultures vivid, beautiful and flawed, the battles enormous, the humour superb. Roleplaying games now have a great deal to live up to.

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John Walker