Dragon Age: Origins - How Deep Does This Rabbit Hole Go?

In an industry inundated with bald space marines, flashy first person shooter #98576482, and casual games as far as the eye can see it is fairly rare to find a decent single player fantasy RPG. Even rarer is finding a RPG with such well written and voice acted dialog that you can actually get emotional.

This review contains no spoilers for the game.

Dragon Age: Origins starts you off with a bit of backstory explaining the basics of the game universe. Every few centuries the darkspawn arise from the depths of the land driven forward by an Archdemon, they kill a bunch of people and destroy everything in their path until the Grey Wardens arrive and destroy the Archdemon. Seems simple enough, but that is just the backstory.

The game itself begins with you picking a race, class, and origin. This last is very important. The game has six origins for you to choose from, and each origin will have lasting effects on the rest of the game. Your origins are restricted by your race and class, so their is a lot of replay value to see all the origins and see how they all affect the storyline.

You play through your origin, which can last from 30 minutes to a few hours depending on how much you explore, who you talk to, and the choices you make. Eventually you will find yourself recruited into the Grey Wardens and on your way to fighting the blight of darkspawn that threaten the country of Ferelden.

Ferelden is a little familiar in it's design, and it does seem to be ripped from the British dark ages. Neighboring countries have characters that sound like they are French or Spanish. All in all you can tell where Bioware took their inspiration from for the game world, but that's only on the surface. In the official strategy guide from Prima Games there is a chapter that is just the lore and history of the universe, and this can take hours to read on it's own.

DA:O plays like another Bioware game, Baldur's Gate. You find companions, form a party, go on quests and undertake a very long journey. The game will easily run you 40 hours at a minimum unless you skip all cutscenes and dialog. But what will you be doing during those 40 hours?

The gameplay in DA:O centers around you as you lead your party of adventurers around the world fighting the darkspawn menace. Depending on your origin you might be a warrior, a mage, or a rogue. While this sounds limiting there are numerous specializations to unlock. Mages for instance can become Spirit Healers, Shape-shifters, Blood Mages, or Arcane warriors. Each specialization has it's own advantages and disadvantages, and your companions all have their own talents and can be given their own specializations. This is the main part of Dragon Age's gameplay, knowing what skills to give a companion and when to take that companion with you is just as important as which weapons and armor you outfit yourself with. During battles you can pause the action and issue commands to your party members, plan tactics and change equipment. In fact the game practically demands you pause, otherwise it does get cripplingly difficult to win a battle. Everything is paused, even the special effects which lead to some great eye candy, but more on that later.

Regarding the difficulty of the game I have yet to meet anybody who can play this game on anything above the easiest setting, the battles can be that difficult. I have heard of people online playing at the hardest difficulty, but I wonder if they are not just talking themselves up.

Aside from combat, the game rewards you for exploration with treasures, unlocking specializations, and little hidden undocumented quests. Being given something as inane as a book seems silly in the grand scheme of things, however there's no telling when someone might want that book or there could be some hidden information in it. I have played the game for over 100 hours, and there's still many thing I am discovering as I play though.

Speaking of companions and choices, you can have romances with four characters in Dragon Age. If you are playing male or female you have three people to chose from, two of them will always be the same meaning that same sex relationships are also a possibility (if you don't like that option, don't chose it, simple as that). All your companions, (romance object or not) have an approval rating of you, and this can change drastically with one single choice you make, even a single line of dialogue you say. You get your approval high enough and you will become friends or lovers depending on how you have talked to that companion. If you get your approval low enough, and your companion may leave the party or they may even turn against you and fight you to the death.

DA:O in the end is a game of balance. Do you balance your front line fighter with an offensive mage or a healer? Do you bring an archer or an assassin? Even something as simple as do you talk to this person or just walk on by can affect your entire game. I was amazed when one little girl I talked to had her own part of the epilogue, but she was important, she just didn't seem to be.

Speaking of the epilogue, I have now had 4 friends play through and beat the game, and even amongst the party companions we all have none of us have had the same epilogue, even for a party member we were sure would be the exact same between our games, and yet there were wild differences.

Obviously you can tell from how long this review has gone that the storyline is very in-depth, as are the game play choices, but what about the eye-candy and sound of the game? The graphics, admittedly, are a bit dated. The game has been in development since 2005 and it does show a little. However, the game does have it's jaw dropping moments and set pieces, and the graphics are good enough to draw you into the world fully. Some of my friends gripe about the proportions of characters, but honestly I never noticed. The best thing about the game though is the characters, they are very well detailed and everything from expressions to lip-syncing is done well.

As for the sound the music is amazing, and the voice acting is so spot on that it can get your emotionally involved in a character. Tim Curry and Kate Mulgrew do good work with their characters as does Steve Blum. Sadly those are the only voice actors I can remember by name, but all of the voices fit their characters and are very well done. The exception to this is your character, they don't speak at all. It's a little annoying but I can understand the creative choice and the limitations. The character interactions are so complex that having your character speak could send you the wrong message as player if it wasn't acted just right. It's a small annoyance in the grand scheme of the game, and should not deter you from picking up the game.

Now we come to a point of contention, which platform should you get DA:O for? Honestly, the PC is the best platform here. On the PC you have more freedom, you can zoom out the camera to better plot your strategies, and you have a large bar to store you spells and abilities for quick and easy access. Also, the PC version can utilize user mods to upgrade the graphics as well as add new quests, characters, items and more. The console versions by comparison suffer from the inability to zoom out the camera, and you are stick using a stripped down radial menu, and no mods or add-ons other than the officially released ones. However if you do not have a PC capable of running the game the console versions are still good and the storyline is well worth the slight gameplay changes.

Overall the game is well worth the price of admission, with well over a hundred hours of gameplay if you really get into the storyline and the universe, which is amazingly easy to do despite the graphics being slightly dated.