On the Subject of Dragon Age: Origins

Lorena

Damn the neverending Steam sales. Somehow the Dragon Age expansion appeared in my game library, as if by magic, and so I decided it was probably about time I completed the original game.

First time around I took what I presumed to be the straightforward route and built a standard issue tank character. This was fine to start with but I soon found the difficulty creeping upwards, despite lots of people posting on forums claiming that the encounters were "easy" (see my Guide to Forum Posting). If you find yourself in a similar position, you'll soon notice that all the people claiming the game is easy a) are playing mage characters, and b) recruited the additional healer party member Wynne. Unfortunately I a) was playing a tank and b) killed Wynne in the mages tower because I thought she was a sanctimonious old bitch. This leaves your party without a healer (unless you spec Morrigan as one, but that would be no fun), and I think you'll find that ups the difficulty considerably. Ultimately I got a bit bored of spamming potions and eventually moved on to other games, after completing perhaps 25% of DA.

So, lesson learned, this time I made a nice mage character, cranked up her healing skills, recruited Wynne (who turns out to be largely unnecessary if you play as a healer yourself) and set out to save the world from the nasty darkspawn.

It certainly was a lot easier this time, no doubt partly due to my familiarity with a large chunk of the game. Unfortunately that also made the early stages quite tedious, despite starting off from a different racial/class starting zone. I doubt I'll play DA again for a while, unlike both Mass Effect games which I've completely 2 or 3 times. I'm not sure why but I don't find the game world of DA quite as compelling, despite the storytelling and voice acting being very similar. Except for the fact that your own character doesn't speak in DA, which has quite an impact on your relationship with him/her. It sounds like that will be one of the big changes in DA2, and it's one I whole-heartedly endorse. Also there's a lot less party micro-management in ME which streamlines the game play a great deal. DA is quite an old-fashioned, almost turn-based game at heart so it doesn't "flow" as smoothly.
Still, once I caught up with myself and reached a point where I was facing new encounters it got a lot better. The story takes a while to find its feet, and of course it takes a while for your character to level to a point where you feel like a double-hard killing machine. Eventually you're felling dragons and laughing at the ragtag ruffians who dare to take you on and you reach that golden stage of really feeling like the hero you're supposed to be. I also turned my mage into a blood mage (at the expense of a poor, defenseless child), which is slightly odd in a game world where blood mages are villified while you're the great white hope for civilisation's future. You do get some cool spells though.

I'm still not keen on all the micro-management. I still want to play as my character and let all the others get on with their jobs. I don't mind gearing them all up, except for the fact that there are quite a lot of them, but forever pausing battles and switching party member to issue instructions or heal or whatever is a bit too RTS (not even "RT", mostly "S") for my liking. I could probably have tweaked the combat tactics a bit more, but in the end I just made them at least try to heal themselves, and to prioritise serious enemies, and protect my character above all else.

I'll admit I did cheat once, but I also maintain that it was forgivable. Essentially I wanted my pretty lady mage to get it on with naughty bard Leliana, but I ran into a bug where you can't trigger Leliana's personal quest if she likes you too much, so I had to make her a little less adoring temporarily.

And bugs are my main complaint. Not necessarily in terms of game play (although I did encounter stuck characters occasionally), but god DAMN the game crashed a lot. For a start if you play for extended periods then it begins to crawl, especially during loading screens. And I had any number of CTDs during battles, often "important" battles. I suspect they were audio-related, as a recent patch does list that as one of the fixes. But there were several sections, especially towards the end of the game, where the fucking thing would crash immediately upon entering a new area, over and over until by luck I could do a quick-save on the other side and restart. Given the relatively modest technical complexity of the engine (at least in PC terms) it was quite disappointing. Especially compared with the surprising reliability I had become used to while playing GTA4 (even if they did manage to fuck up the engine with the LC expansion).

Anyway, I got there in the end. The world was saved, the girl got the girl and various other boring shit probably happened but I couldn't be bothered with reading all the end-game text. I think I'll take a break before diving into Awakenings, though.