You'll also ply their favor with small tokens of appreciation, with some gifts being perfectly suited to particular characters. You'll spend lots of time wading through interminably long conversations while getting to know the members of your party, in an effort to improve their approval ratings. The quality of the voice work ensures that you'll rarely skip through the frequent conversations and inter-party banter. Even the dog companion is a full-fledged ally worthy of bringing along, complete with his own inventory and unique abilities. The Grey Warden Alistair, the witch of the wilds Morrigan, and the mysterious minstrel Leliana are your primary romantic options and the game's main supporting characters, though other characters like Sten, the taciturn warrior, are nearly as interesting. While your own story is important, the companions that join you play an equally important role. Magi live secluded lives of research and study in their towers under the constant watch of the order of Templars, a religious sect tasked with ensuring that magic does not lead to demonic infestation. Elves who live in human cities reside in closed-off alienages, destined for a life of servitude to the human nobility. Dwarves have a complex caste system, with the nobility focusing on political advancement while the casteless underclass live in ghettos, struggling to eke out a living as part of the criminal underbelly. The tropes of fantasy fiction lie intact, with Dwarves dwelling underground and elves living in the world's forests on the outskirts of human civilization, but these societies are still fleshed-out and made unique. Your character's origin story, the first steps in your adventure, plays a significant role in how this tale plays out. You can easily log a hundred hours exploring every inch of this world, with plenty of incentive to come back again to approach the tale of the Grey Warden from a new perspective and origin story. Then there's the sheer scale of this undertaking. Colorful kill animations result in dismemberments and decapitations, rewarding you for critical strikes in a far more memorable manner than just a bigger damage number. Combat animations in particular are impressive, as your characters will set themselves before enemies and go through complex motions, with rogues jockeying for position to backstab and warriors forcefully slamming their shields into faces. Dragon Age: Origins' landscapes and dungeon interiors are rife with detail and a joy to explore. That isn't to say that this is an ugly game, by any means. Blood plays an important role in the world's unique fiction, but watching your characters relay meaningful lines of speech while splashed with more blood than the prom scene in "Carrie" borders on the ridiculous, robbing such scenes of any potential sense of gravitas. Then there's the odd decision to go so over-the-top with the blood. BioWare's own Mass Effect was far more visually impressive, particularly in the dialogue sequences, where Dragon Age's facial animations and character models can seem stiff and wooden. ![]() This is a game that's been in development for what seems like forever, and it shows. Origins is a solitary experience you'll isolate yourself from the outside world, staying up nights and well into the morning because when this game grabs you, it simply won't let go. Before achievements and trophies, a role-player's greatest achievement was working the system to build the most broken, overpowered character possible within the constraints of whatever edition of Dungeons & Dragons the game was based on. ![]() "Back in my day," I'd say, as I waved my walking stick like a crotchety old bastard, "RPGs were single-player only, and we played them on PCs."ĭragon Age: Origins is old-school. ![]() I've never fielded this question more often than when I was playing Dragon Age: Origins for this review.
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