Dragon Age Origins: First Impressions

Now that I've got a few hours of Dragon Age Origins under my belt I feel reasonably well placed to pass some comment on it, so here we go!

 

Character Creator

 

Bioware took the prudent step of releasing a Character Creator tool prior to the full release of the game, this lets you (unsurprisingly) create a character! It's a nifty thing that gives you the opportunity to jump right into the game once you've got it rather than pissing around with the creation process first - which can take a while if like me you like to piss around with these sorts of things.

 

The character creator also gives you a gander at the skill trees for the various classes, so if you're the sort who likes to plan this sort of shit out in advance this is a good place to start for a prospective DAO player.

 

The choices aren't complicated, sex, race (Human, Elf, Dwarf), class (Warrior, Mage, Rogue base classes, these can be altered to specialised versions as you progress) and Origin. The Origins available to you will depend on your race and/or class, there are six possible origins in total and the Origin you choose will determine the starting point of the game and how other characters in the world will react to you - for example there is a bit of racial tension between Men and the Dalish Elves. The six different origin stories give the game a potential replay value of 6x. That's a lot of RPGing.

 

After that it's a fairly standard build-a-face and assign a few stat points affair. Unfortunately the only part of your appearance you can customise is the head, so if you were planning on a mega-boobied warrior vixen then you're going to have to abandon that plan as all boobies are one size only.

 

My first playthrough character is Tessa, a Dalish Elf. Tessa is (roughly) modelled after my Fallout3 character who is also called Tessa, is a chick and has red hair. I'm actually kinda warming to the idea of creating a version of Tessa for every game I have to create a charater for. Anyhoo she looks like this:

 

 

That image is a bit shit actually. I think I'll upload another one later with better colour, maybe add some of my other creations too.

 

This Tessa was originally a human female, but I decided to go with the Dalish Elf because I thought the Elf race bonuses suited a Rogue better.

 

Controls

 

One thing I'll say about the controls is this: There are a lot of them. In actual fact you could get by with using the mouse and the spacebar alone, but you will spend more time clicking things than actually playing if you don't get to grips with at least some of the keyboard controls.

 

The array of controls is actually rather dizzying and there aren't actually enough buttons on the gaming side of my Merc-Stealth gaming keyboard to map everything on there. After a few hours of playing I've figured out which things I need close to hand (or finger) most often and which things I can live with using the mouse for so I've been able to customise a bit. There's a Mass Effect profile in the Z-Engine, so hopefully a DAO one will turn up that might work better than my cobbled together version.

 

Bottom line, there are a lot of controls, but if you're in to RPGs this will be nothing new to you and you'll either adapt to them or adapt them to you.

 

This game is out on consoles, I honestly cannot see how it's going to work...

 

Story

 

With the six different origins the story starts and plays out a bit differently for each. The central storyline is that there is a "Blight" going on - a resurgence of creatures known as "Darkspawn" who come from underground and like to get their kill on on the surface at periodic intervals. There is a caste called "The Gray Wardens" whose call and duty it is to combat The Blight. Whatever origin story you follow your character will end up joining the Gray Wardens and fight against The Blight.

 

To say any more would introduce spoilers so I'll leave it at that. Suffice it to say that there is enough plot-twist and intrigue in the first few hours to keep you playing.

 

Graphics/Style

 

The game has been in production for a good long while, therefore it might not stand up graphically to other games that began development more recently or on newer technology, but the game still looks fairly decent. It's certainly not ugly.

 

The style is very medieval Europe - I love it. How DAO looks is to me how sword and sorcery RPGs should look. The characters are clad in suitable armour, the weapons are believable (for the most part), the castles are suitably grand while remaining within the realms of architectural possibility and the dung encrusted hovels of the commoners really look like they probably smell like pig shit. Awesome! The characters themselves are of realistic proportion, the musclebound Gray Warden Alastair resembles an Athelete than belongs on a Football team rather than some sort of gym-dwelling muscle sack that is typical of the genre, and so far there has not been a single female character with a bust that suggests back strain.

 

Where the game excels (to me) is in faces, which are animated pretty well. Where it fails is hair, which often looks like more thready than hairy. One of the worst aspects of the hair are braids which appear so rigid they could have sticks embedded in them.

 

The game also kind of fails at movement. Nothing looks very natural and it's tempting to believe every character in the game has suffered recent painful anal trauma. This isn't really a fair criticism though as the majority of games still can't seem to get the movement of living things down, although there have been some games in the last few years that have made decent inroads on that front - Ass Creed springs to mind.

 

Combat

 

The system employed here is quite strange to me. It's sort of a mix between RTS and Turn-based combat. When an enemy or enemies is/are encountered your character(s) will automatically engage based on the combat rules laid out for them in their individual Tactics manual - if that sounds strange then the Gambit system in FFXII is comparable. However the player can intervene at any time and direct their charaters to move, heal or use specific skills or attacks. One of the things I'm finding hardest to get used to is the fact that I can pause the action (that's the action, not the game) to analyse the situation and direct things in a more appropriate manner.

 

Another thing that I might not quite be getting is the tactical aspect. In most situations so far the appropriate tactic has been a matter of targetting one enemy at a time, letting my entire party lay in to them until they're dead and moving on to the next one aaaaand repeat. But I've also noticed that this approach becomes less and less effective as the level and number of enemies increases. There was one part early on where I could see a number of enemies round a corner, I moved my guys into a room with one entrance, sent one archer out to attract their attention then retreated back into the room. The bad guys could only come at me one at a time so I beat them easily whereas 4 vs 9 out in the open I'd probably have gotten bummed.

 

Later in the same level you have to fight an Ogre. I attempted the swarm approach and I had my ass handed to me - the Ogre is extremely powerful and has an attack that will knock over and damage everything around it. I retried the fight, but this time the first thing I did was pause the action and send each of my characters to a different place on the circumference of the room and equipped ranged weapons. The Ogres knock-over attack was rendered useless, and because all my guys were spread out he had to pick one to attack. When he moved to attack one of my characters I simply had that character run away while the other 3 pummeled him with arrows and magic attacks. It was over in about a minute.

 

Just last night I did a quest looking for a missing person (presumed dead), upon discovering the body you get swarmed by a pack of 12 wolves, I tried various tactics but nothing seemed to work, 12 wolves just proved to be too much for my fledgling party to handle (all characters either lvl 6 or 7). On my final attempt I tried bidding a retreat towards a nearby villiage in the hopes that I could somehow channel the wolves into a narrow region where their numbers wouldn't count for as much or that the Templars in the villiage would join in the fight. Neither of those things happened, but fortunately only 6 of the wolves followed me towards the villiage, this number proved easier to handle, I took them out then proceeded back to the body and dispatched the remaining 6.

 

So you see how thinking about the opponent and the surroundings can hand you the battle much quicker than rushing in and attempting a brute force attack.

 

This is rather a new way of thinking to me and I'm still trying to get used to it, but it is intriguing and I hope to master it.

 

The Tactics system is, as I mentioned before, roughly analogous to the Gambit system in FFXII. Like the Gambit system you can set up a range of rules that govern how your character will react in certain situations, and just like the Gambit system the number of rules you can assign is dependent on the progress/level of the individual characters. Where I feel the Tactics system might edge out the Gambit system is that Dragon Age gives you a complete set of rule components to work with from the very beginning whereas the Gambit system is limited to begin with and is expanded by finding additional components throughout the game. Although just like FFXII you will start with only a limited number of tactic slots and earn more as you progress through the game. This is a wee bit of a pain in the arse as it limits the effectiveness of the system early in the game.

 

I'm still feeling my way through the Tactics, there are still some occassions when one or more of my characters will kill their target then just stand there doing nothing while the rest of the party are still engaged - so obviously my current rule sets aren't quite up to scratch. I'll keep working with it though, I think there's light at the end of this particular tunnel.

 

Building A Party

 

This is most definitely a party based RPG, there'll be no Elder Scrolls style one-man dungeon busting Super-Warrior efforts here, the key to success is building an effective party and executing strategies that play to that partys strength. You can take control of up to four characters at once, although your entourage might actually comprise of many more characters that you can pick'n'mix into and out of your main party.

 

At present I have access to six different characters, Tessa (a Rogue), two warriors (one a Templar specialisation), a Mage (War Mage I think - not sure without checking), another Rogue with Bard specialisation and a Dog (named Dogmeat by me after the Fallout dog). I've got a lot of offensive capability here, which is great, but the party lacks anyone with healing abilities which means I've been plowing through healing items like a hot knife through warm butter. This is almost entirely down to my Templar Warrior who takes the majority of damage in most situations since most of his talents lie in melee fighting and he usually ends up in the centre of a mass of enemies while the others harass from afar as much as possible - enemies tend to ignore the Dog in favour of the Templar for some reason.

 

At this point in time choosing who to use is a difficult decision, The Bard and 2nd Warrior are my newest additions, so I want to give them a go, but at the same time I'm not that keen on having two Rogues in one party, even if one is a Bard. I'll try out the current formation for a bit (Rogue, War Mage, Bard, Warrior) and see how it goes. What I really really want right now is a healer Mage who can stand behind Tessa and cast supporting magic/heals while she harasses with her bow (switching to melee if directly engaged) and the remaining two get in on the Melee stuff. Without a healer I'm going to have to spend a small fortune on healing items and a lot of time on the herbalism screen making stuff.

 

Complaints

 

There's nothing majorly wrong with this game, but there are a couple of niggles for me - if anything I've mentioned has a solution I missed I'd really welcome some comments on it.

 

Camera - The PC version of Dragon Age allows you to adjust the camera from various distances of behind-character third person and "tactical" overhead views. My main issue is with the tactical view, it's nice to get a birdseye view of the action, but the bird isn't high enough! A common situation is to engage a party of enemies who will leave a number of archers at the fringes of the battle while their melee attackers rush in for a skirmish, I will also tend to leave at least one character on the fringes firing with either magic or bow in support of my own skirmishers. This makes the entire field of battle somewhat larger than the total area shown in the tactical view and can result in a frustrating amount of camera panning and unnecessary pauses of action just to survey the overall progression of the battle. I shall endeavour to find out if it's possible to adjust the height of the tactical camera next time I play, but it hasn't seemed possible up to now.

 

Item Weight - as with most RPGs the amount of stuff you can carry is limited (you can still carry more than it's physically possible for any one human to carry, but the extent of your superhuman strength and neverending invisible rucksack are limited). The inventory system however does not appear to allude to the weight of individual items - which appears to be 1 whether we're talking a dagger, a full suit of armour, a set of gloves or a giant greatsword additionally not everything appears to have a weight at all, which confuses matters more. I think it'd be better if light stuff weighed little and heavy stuff weighed more.

 

Equipping/Buying item comparisons - When you look to buy a specific item the properties of that item and your currently equipped item pop-up so you can compare them, however it only does this for a selected character and in the case of weapons for their equipped weapon set only (you can quick-change between two weapon sets in world). It would be prefferable if it was easier to compare items and both weapon sets of all party members simultaneously. The shop screen only takes up a small portion of the available screen retail space, they could easily have included a pane that displays items and both weapon sets for each party member and had some sort of graphical indication over whether the prospective item has better or worse stats than the equipped gear.

 

Difficulty - As a 'seasoned' gamer I look at any difficulty level below medium witrh a certain amount of disdain - play on Easy? No chance! So I'm playing DAO on medium, and it's hard! It's not unusual for me to get trounced at the first time of asking in any particular encounter. I get the feeling things will improve after I have a mage that can heal, but right now this shit be HARD! I hate to admit it, but I am actually slightly tempted to switch to easy :(

 

Final Thoughts

 

I am enjoying DAO thus far. It's certainly challenging and the story is compelling. I got my copy free courtesy of VG247 and EA, but if I hadn't I'd probably be willing to part with cash for it.

 

If you're not a fan of RPGs in general then you'll probably hate this, so stay away, I also hear that the Xbox 360 version is fucking awful, so if you're going to get this it looks like it's PC or bust.

 

I've been freedoms_stain, out.