Dragon Age: Origins

Dragon Age.

Origins.

I have swayed between loving this game and hating it so many times over the past week that I honestly don't know what to think any more.

Let's go through it.

Marvelous!
Gritty Origin Stories

I've played through three of the six origin stories and they all have a real depth to them. There's real human emotion and the definite feeling that the world of Dragon Age is brutal and unforgiving. The Dwarven Noble origin especially is a world where avarise and honour are ever present and constantly vying for a place in your characters mind.


Shoddy!
Contrived Origin Stories

Sadly, at the end of every origin story, you have to join the Grey Wardens (the jedis) so the main plot can start moving. This can can be fantastic (as in the Dwarven Noble origin) but when I played through as a mage, he just turned up and Deus Ex Machina'd me out of a ridiculously contrived crisis.


Marvelous!
The Combat

The combat is very well done - it's an updated version of KOTOR's system with many more options like swords and shields, seperate skill trees for duel weapons & two handed greatswords. It's also the first RPG I've played where it's the most fun to play as a mage.


Shoddy!
The Grind

So I've liberated a castle from undead creatures and have been sent off to go and get a sacred thing to cure some chap who needs curing. I then found this cure was in a Cathedral. I cleared out the Cathedral, fully expecting the cure to be somewhere therin. It wasn't. It wasn't in the catacombs under the cathedral either. It was in the natural tunnels at the end of the catacombs. Each of these bloody areas was absolutely fucking massive. There is a line between making levels a decent length and game-expanding padding. Dragon Age can't even see this fucking line it's so far past it.


Marvelous!
The Characters

Are all briliantly scripted and acted. You're also given genuine moral dilemas which your NPC mates will help you with.


Shoddy!
The main story

I blogged earlier about how fantasy is usually shite because the villains lack complex motivation. That's especially true in Dragon Age. There's some sort of horde of evil thingies that is coming to kill everyone. Despite the fact that they are wiping entire towns off the map, you have to go around convincing everyone to help you fight them. This is bullshit. These guys know it's unite or perish, so why is it so fucking hard to convince them? Thankfully the sub plots and complex characters you come across during each exercise in painfully slow diplomacy are interesting enough to make you forget the fucking stupid reason why you're there but it keeps popping back up and biting you on the nose like a rake in the grass with a snake attatched to it.




Overall!

I've restarted Dragon Age three times without really getting that far into it. This is because I kept finding that there were much better ways of doing what I was currently doing. The problem was, every time I did this, I had to go through the same bullshit grind quests again. Thinking about having to go through that bloody cathedral level again actually makes me slightly deppressed.

The problem is, Dragon Age is half briliant. And half shit. If it wasn't as grindy, if it wasn't so fucking massive it would be a classic, there's not doubt about that. That said, I will stick with it because when it's good, it's marvelous. Time will tell what side of the fence I fall on.