Dragon Age
I realize this is the internet and a lot of people hate reading so here's the short version: The game sucks. If you care to know why please continue but I'm warning you, go get a pizza or something.
Dragon Age is a medieval fantasy game in which the player in one of 5 different incarnations (across 2 genders and 3 races) must quest to save the Kingdom of Fereldan from The Blight, a mass of Darkspawn lead by an Archdemon that rages against the surface world for little more reason than because it really wants to. A man named Duncan who belongs to the Grey Wardens, an order of warriors who's members have pledged their steel, will, and very lives to face the threat of the Darkspawn and the Blight directly, meets the hero very early on in the story with the very obvious intentions of recruiting him or her into the order. Due to some extremely simple (and some would say cliche) circumstances, the Hero is shoe-horned one way or another into becoming a Grey Warden whether he wishes to be one or not no matter which origin story you've selected. For my credentials, I've played through Dragon Age more than halfway through as a Human Noble Warrior, Mage and a little bit of Rogue. I played almost exclusively on the xbox, and played through easy, medium and hard difficulty.
Gameplay
I knew I was in for it when I first saw King Cailhan. 'Oh god damnit' I thought, "It's going to be one of those games." Games aren't books, the majority of the work that goes into them are in the graphics and if you haven't gotten enough work ethic to get good graphics into your game it's a pretty easy guess that the same quality and effort went into the rest of the game. You have to see a game to play it, it's primary mode of getting to your brain is through the eyesockets. It HAS to look good and the story has to be amusing. If you can't put effort into one major point of the game why should anyone expect any more effort in its other important aspects? Most of the time, because of this reason you can judge a game by its graphics. Not all the time, but for me, my opinions and guesses were founded after playing for a good 10 minutes of the game (most of it right after a short dialogue with one Duncan of the Grey Wardens). I kept playing up to the halfway mark. Honestly if someone doesn't have a grip on the game by the halfway point there's something wrong with more than the graphics. When I saw the King's shoddy display I immediately developed two assumptions. The combat system would be poor and dodgy and the environments would be deceptively small and lacking creativity.
Shortly after any one of the origin stories you're thrust in to the country of Fereldan, and much like any medieval fantasy game your quest involves going everywhere and solving everyones problems. You're given a loading screen cleverly disguised as a barely interactive map and from there you set about your mad war against the Blight with your band of 2 or 3 other people by choosing a spot on the map and waiting for a loading bar cleverly disguised as a blood trail to move up to wherever it is you intend to go. I've never seen a thinly veiled loading screen before, still it's pretty cool.
So you pick a spot, someone bleeds all over your map and eventually you get to the little glowing square you poked. Then the game goes back to normal again and you're free to run around some of the smallest instances I've ever played in a game. Bioware pulls every trick in the book to make it seem like the small closet they've shoved you in is a royal throne room except for the trick of putting actual work into the game. The terrain is completely noninteractive, it exists as nothing more than a setting for your character to stand in while whacking things until they're dead before you move on to the next area. This isn't a play! This is a game! Give me something to do other than walk! Sure there are trees in the forest, and houses in the city, and the terrain isn't all flat, and it's not always just a straight path, but it might as well be.
The useless twists and turns do nothing! They lead NOWHERE. In a city, any odd bend or back alley is wasted on the fact that there's really nothing interesting to do in there besides kill some bandits. Any exit on an open field is already very clearly indicated on the map as long as you get within 40 yards of the exit, killing the lost-in-the-maze aspect of any maze and the few times you venture into a maze or labyrinth the design is laughably easy. Are you serious? Are you bloody serious? The one time you decide that the floor plan has to make any sense is when you design the dungeon levels? You want to solve the first level of the forest dungeon? Walk to the end of the hallway and hang a left. The only bit of aesthetic simplicity to find on this literally god forsaken rock, and it's the parts of the game the player intentionally wishes to get lost in? "Exit's over there." Thanks! I appreciate this, I really do, but only in games when there are other things to do. Like combat.
Other than simple answers to easy questions like 'where do I go next' the locations have other issues. Because of the combat you can't get any meaningful benefit using the terrain cleverly. There's one part in the brecillian forest where there's a high ground you get up to by spiraling around the walkway. You can use this to attack Darkspawn with arrows and they'll have to trek all the way around to get to you dying before they ever get within melee range. The problem with this is that to get to this high point you either have to kill everything on the way around or ignore them while they follow you up, the ones that don't immediately break out bows that is. Well fine ok, so I killed them, I can always use the high ground tactic on whatever else happen to walk this way. Nope, not going to work. Nothing in this game respawns. Some endless horde, eh? Even then none of the other mobs walk around. They stand still and wait for you to get within attaking range.
The quests are a joke and the rewards are very befitting. To do a quest poke an NPC or a chest or a billboard with quests on, in, or at it and some time during the game while you're traveling between locations the game will toss you into a random battle on a small cookie-cutter battlefeld. Kill all the people, loot all the corpses and go back to wherever it is you got the quest from. Quest completed. For these tasks you get 1 gold coin for each quest. You can't buy squat with 1 gold coin. You only ever get around 3 quests from one source at a time and the most quests you'll end up running around with are 10 or 12 if you talked to all the right people. That's 12 gold coins. That's one good sword for a camp of around 8 people in a time span of work that you could use to beat half of the main plot. Sometimes you pick up an item along the way like a scroll that tells you if you stand in 3 places something appears that you need to kill to obtain something awesome - do those instead. One quest for a unique sword or 12 quests for a good sword. Do the math.
Some of the quests, not all of them, give you a sense that other things are happening in the world, unfortunately none of them are backed up by anything you'll see on your travels. There's one minor quest where you have to deliver letters to widowed wives of some departed Black Irregulars mercenaries, however, I've yet to see a single Blackstone Irregular on the battlefield. All of the places I go to are prestine, no arrows in the ground, no upturned earth, no scorch marks, no blood splatters, its all so clean you wonder if there's really a blight happening at all so it's hard for me to believe that there are mercenary camps running about solving apparently real problems in the world of Thedas. I recall a bit of story telling advice. 'Show, don't tell.' There is no showing. Everything that happens in this world, including The Blight, I've got to take everyone's word for. I saw 9-12 Darkspawn in the Brecilian forest and nuked them like day old pizza, some threat. The Kingdom of Fereldan apparently scares too easily.
Combat
Combat in this game is terrible, least of all because of the mostly subpar graphics, mediocre music score, short order sound effects, and slow animations. What really gets to me is the interface. Here is where the computer does it best. You've got a row of buttons you can click and they perform all of your talents. If you want to do this on the Xbox however, you've got to navigate a slightly (incedibly) frustrating menu wheel. To switch weapons, use potions, apply salves and poisons, use skills or talents, activate buffs, tell your allies not to move, heal yourself or cast spells you've got to access the radial menu. The feeling of intense combat is lost when you've got to pause the game whenever you want to do anything more complicated than a basic attack. Thankfully the game lets us hotkey to the X Y or B keys. Unfortunately the talents are all but a waste of time.
Skills let you do things like fast-talk people, pick locks, craft potions and detect enemies. (raising the bar Bioware). Anything passive that doesn't involve combat (save two skills) goes here. The Talents however are all of your attack moves, and by attack moves I mean incredibly passive barely noticeable buffs that effect the gameplay very little if you're anything but a Mage. You get such fantastic abilities like lowering your attack speed to hit more accurately, or lowering your attack speed to hit harder, or lowering your attack speed to get better critical hit rates, or lowering your attack speed because it would be funny at the time. While these are active you lose some initial stamina for the cast but because Stamina regenerates, your buffs are always on. Where is the strategy hm? There are something like 4 abilities that do something other than lower the warrior or rogues attack rate for some random boost that because of the now slow attack rate, the boosts are entirely irrelevant and they all seem to involve hitting people with your shield. Now if we were going to have so much of this why didn't you guys just include the shield as a normal weapon?
Everything else in the talents section is a passive ability that helps you suck less, and no, that doesn't mean the same thing the other way around. The passive abilities help you not attack as badly as you were before...as much. Using two weapons means your off-hand is going to hit weaker despite the fact that anyone trained in the fine and complicated art of duel wielding effectively isn't going to have any sort of problem like this. Conveniantly they have a talent you can waste your points on to make the off-hand hit almost as hard as your main hand. Using a bow means you've got a damage penalty or something when you shoot in close combat. And using spells means when someone whacks you, you wont lose concentration despite the bleeding head wound they just gave you. Well ok technically that one is a Skill, useless distinction, but there's a skill for it! If it's none of the above, most likely the talent gives you a permanant stat boost, because you know, I can't just put points in my stats or anything every time I level up. The feeling of becoming an epic level battlemonster is lost on the fact that the skill sets I'm provided are designed to turn me from a mook into a competant warrior, not from an already competant warror to a god. This is jarring because the Grey Warden is recruiting you in the first place specifically because you're better than the average joe. This is not represented at all. You attack slowly and awkardly, you take 3 swings with a broadsword to kill a rat no bigger than something you'd find in New York because you missed once and your wrist strength won't let you push a hole through paper with your thumb. For mages, at the start you can only cast two spells despite having apparently been raised in a magic school your entire life. Some school. If a game is going to pull this "level-1 and we mean it" crackerjack then bloody well don't put me up on a pedastle before I've even killed my first rat. Talented and skilled the starting character isn't.
Passive abilities rock in a game where you've got a bunch of skills that use stamina and make you regret not having enough of the stuff for those two buffs when you really need them, but when there is nothing in this game that will drain your stamina faster than you can replenish it after putting no more than 5 or 10 points in your starting Will stat (boosts stamina if you're bad at picking up context clues) even with 6 buffs running, the strategy in activating buffs and striking with the heavy hitting techniques when you really need to is completely moot. This is ignoring the fact that unless your a mage, any buff you cast on yourself is going to be relatively pointless anyway.
Spells are fun. I nominate Dragon Age for one of the most satisfying explodey Fireball spells I've ever had the pleasure to use in a very long time. Unfortunately all of the stat points in the world won't speed up that arbitrary cool-down time so recasting when you need to (or hell, because it's so damned fun) is a slow process that hampers strategy. However when one of the fairly early spells is a gigantic swirling flaming vortex of death you kind of don't need any strategy. I defeated a dragon with 2 of those while all my meat heads whacked at it's shins. Shouldn't spells have weaknesses to make the game exciting though? Sure they should but conveying the feeling the player isn't still at level 1 is very important in a game where leveling up is supposedly important, there's no reward. Enemies level with you so no matter how much damage per second you're doing they still die in the same amount of time. I hate using the same half-dozen words over and over but this makes the leveling process moot, basic, trite, pointless, etc.
This could also be a graphics arguement but I put it here in combat where it's more relevant. The symbols they use for the talents are completely useless. They're all too busy and visually nondescriptive. My first playthrough was with a Sword-And-Shield Warrior so that's the one I know best. All 12 of the talents for the Shielder involve the depiction of a shield being moved or getting tougher looking in some way. There's a symbol of a shield that looks like it's putting up a magical wall of energy, a shield that looks like its deflecting arrows, a shield that looks like a brick wall and a picture of a man holding a shield up. Ok so...one skill protects me, another one protects me, the third one protects me and the last one makes my ribs vulnerable?
Let me give you an actual rundown of some of the talents at your disposal if you wish to go sword-and-shield like me. You get a skill that raises your defense and missile deflection but lowers your attack (hit ratio), a skill that removes the attack penalty from the previous skill (read: suck less), a skill that raises armor (defense?) and missile deflection but lowers your damage (why does this sound familiar?), and another passive skill that raises how much the two other actual skills boost defense (again, read: suck less). So you've got four abilities that do one thing.
Bioware, I am not fooled. You did no work here at all. I am so god damn ashamed of you it's not even funny.
Using this pattern I can guess that for every 4 talents I'm only really getting one effect across 2 activated abilities. So a Shielder only has 3 skills, two of which do nearly the same exact thing, so really only 2 skills to differentiate him from a Two-hander, and to be any good I have to invest 12 points? Thats entirely bull. I'm not going to read the whole list to you guys but believe me, unless you're a mage, the rest is more of the same. You only get 1 actual ability and 2 or 3 other abilities that get rid of the flaws for every weapon set you can use in the game. You'd think these buffs would be super noticeable too since they put so much effort into making you use them. They aren't. By the time damage levels get to a point in the game where you can start getting scared of total party death you've already got 2 suit of legendary armor and if you played your money well, a ring that lets you laugh at death. It might as well have Death's phone number written under the band so you can call his house at 2 in the morning so yo can bother him with bad refridgerator jokes. Until then, buffs shave off 5 or six more damage, enemies miss once every 5 swings instead of every 6, and you smack for critical damage once every 20 swings instead of every 25. Very low key stuff you wont notice very easily.
Unless you go with a greatsword, the only tactical choices you have are swing until it's dead or swing until it's dead slower. With a greatsword you get a conveniant mob sweeping ability that trust me, you'll need and want. Mobs have a simple attack pattern. If they have a melee weapon they walk up to you and swing until you're dead. If they have a bow, they'll walk up to you and shoot you until you're dead. If they're a mage, they'll cast random spells until something works. With 5 or six guys clumped up next to you, a shield bash just isn't going to cut it.
Mages are simple enough. They luck out with talents as the only job class that doesn't have to put up with mostly passive abilities and buffs. Cast a few spells down even, and sometimes a few of them will work together to do extra damage. This isn't hard to figure out because it tells you they will in the spell descriptions. When you do the same thing over again because thats the only thing that works really well, you don't call that strategy, you call it your only option, and a lack of options is not a strategy, and while it did take me a long time for fireballs to get old, they did eventually get old.
Unlocking some of the additional classes is awesome as hell-
-but the benefits from dual and triple-classing are a joke.
You get four new talents to sink points into and because of the aforementioned talents problem you're only really getting one or two extra abilities with built-in problems for each class you learn. The only really noticeable effect is the Mage's Arcane Templar subclass (go figure, mages). One ability lets you use your magic stat in place of your strength stat. Because mages are simple to build (DUMP IT ALL IN MAGIC AND WILL STATS HINT HINT) their magic stat will always be higher than your warrior's strength stat, unless you're a really determined warrior. No one plays rogues, hardy har har. All of the extra skills a warrior gets are practically meaningless. Pay attention to that word there, practically. I'm not using it to fluff the speech, that's a word, it means something. Practically, route word; practical. The warrior talents aren't practical. If you told me I could be a bitchin warrior but I had to choose between a series of active talents that lowered my attack speed and a bunch of passive talents that made those active talents suck less, or spells that let me throw fireballs and other spells that let me throw bigger fireballs, I'd pick the totally awesome throwing fireballs choice! And with that "magic = strength" talent you can wear the heavy armor so the mages don't even need a meatshield anymore. Where is the strategy Bioware? Where is the strategy? Did you hide it in one of the locked room you can't ever access in the beginning of the human noble campaign?
Story
I'll have to expand on this later when I figure out spoilers but basically, you're one of the last of a secretive order (at least the chapter present in the area) destined to stop the evil horde lead by a powerful demon once every few hundred years, and you're the only one who can stop it because the plot said so. It's pretty basic, and shamefully basic at that. You accomplish this task by reuniting a country at war with itself and leading it in a massive attack against the threat that will otherwise destroy the world. The orcs are different but the prophecy is the same. Kill and kill and kill until your problems are solved. Occasionally you'll have to fetch 20 something-somethings to get the last somin'or'other to finish that thing that guy told you to do and you'll have to go around poking objects until a doorway opens up so you can kill a guy inside for one reason or another, so it's all pretty much the exact same plot we've all played through, read, and watched a dozen and a half times this year even though we aren't even into the second month. Way to raise the bar Bioware.
You do all of this after you perform The Joining, and are inducted into the Grey Wardens shortly after your origin story.
Speaking of which, I've got a major complaint about The Joining:
"Drink this, if it doesn't kill you it will plague you with disadvantages against an enemy that doesn't hide to well"
Throughout the entire game are books and statues and certain inventory items you can poke to get backstory, I'm not sure how that works for statues and sword though. Maybe someone painstakingly knitted this information under the handle leather, I dont know. This stuff is where the game gets even remotely interesting but the menu controls for the xbox version (I'm not getting into it, and you don't want me to) are so bad figuring out which book you just picked up is surprisingly difficult to find in the codex. The entry is conveniantly highlighted, but if it happens to be too low on the screen you can't find it because while you're scrolling down you erase the highlight. You can zoom right past whatever it is you were looking for with no way of avoiding the problem. Bioware has somehow made the simple act of finding something to read a frustrating experience.
This game is plagued by terrible cliches too, like NPCs with no sense of property value. "Hey you, get out of my house!" These words are never uttered. Well actually maybe twice. It's so left field it's actually jarring encountering this unique situation. However even if your typical NPC did confront you on a regular basis about these issues, whatever lunatic with enough trouser power to say it to your face (fully armored Grey Warden packing a steel pole the length of a stop sign) wouldn't lift a damned finger after the dialogue. They stand their letting you rummage around their house! Can I get some realism for once? It's so ingrained in us that we can rob whatever the heck we like that the two times something sensible happens you figure out the NPC isn't supposed to be there or something plot significant is happening? Is this really were we are in gaming history? I was playing around with the same mechanics and story when I was around 9 or 10 years old. What is it about this game that deserves so much public praise? Nothing that's what.
And yeah, stop signs are actually pretty tall. Go outside and check, I'll wait.
Graphics, Locations, Weapons, Armor and the Visual Culture
For those of you who dont know what I saw in the fearless leader, King Pompous Idiot was sporting one of those tree trunk swords and his armor was about an inch thick everywhere. Holy crap I thought, he's got to way 200 pounds in that thing! And who designed this platemail anyway? What are all these random floating things? How do they stay on? What's the tactical advantage of this wierd pointless flange? Where are all the straps?! Why are those pauldrons radically different from each other? Why are his elbow guards different? Is this a joke? Did someone play a mean trick on the King or something? Hey oh wait damn that's your second in command huh. That blacksmith is ballsy, he did this to two of you? Take a quick glance over at wikipedia for an idea of just how thick and heavy medeival armor is supposed to be and staring at this guy will give you a migraine. He's like the culmination of everything that's wrong graphically with this game. There's some tolerance amongst humans in that not all of us can know everything but we take it with a grain of salt that a developer or writer will do an ounce of research before he tries something. Sure not everyone knows what a ricasso is for but most peole know it goes on a claymore and they get points for trying. The unexplainable aesthetic choices inherent in King Kale Soup's Armor tells me, and hopefully tells you that Bioware didn't put any effort into doing anything besides making the game look cool enough to shovel to the masses for money. And its shocking too because the Concept Art for this game was beautiful. What happend?
When you cheap on the graphics you don't just cheap on the textures. You cheap on the shape of things, the expanse of things, and in extreme cases the fields of battle can be hampered. And when that happens bad graphics can effect gameplay. If you can't easily pick out which warm body amongst the stack of clashing flailing limbs is yours you can't operate to well. Back then graphics weren't too important but if you couldn't tell mario from a hole in the ground I'll bet you wouldn't ever save the princess.
In a nutshell, the basic graphics of this game are disappointing. They aren't terrible, they're not really game breaking, but they are pretty bad. I played the console version and everyone knows compared to the graphics of a computer, consoles are usually worse. But to be fair I'm comparing console to console, computer game to computer game. In some cases the issues I have with the graphics are barely noticeable, in others they're absolutely terrible. None of the graphics in Dragon Age would be out of place in a game from the last console generation. Compare God of War, it's got less polygons sure but all of the monsters are different, all of the enemies are noticeable and the boss fights are rememberable. The locations are varied and dynamic and when you're climbing mount olympus it really feels like mount olympus. Different sort of game but this is a graphics comparison. Scaling and length and all that goodie goodie is important when considering what the engine can do and it's a shame when every location on this map can be put end to end and wouldn't be much bigger than a single level from darksiders.
While not especially unique or inspired the faces are memorable and different and very rarely would you see many similarities between two NPCs other than the hair, which the programmers have lazily implemented as a blob of polygons with a texture. I'd give them points for it but because the faces are so well done, whenever you talk to someone it's a mind screw. You're looking at this real life person's face sticking out from underneath what looks like random patches of astroturf and it's just goofy looking. I can't get very technical with that, put large patches of construction paper on your face and walk outside and see if you don't get looks. Thats what this game is like looking in every direction. I can see it, it's noticeable.
The character models are uninspired. When you look at the real human race you see so many various shapes and sizes its mind boggling. Granted there isn't a game yet that can simulate each unique individual on the planet but Dragon Age is very far from being that game. Everyone's the same height, the same width, and ethnical variances (that is, Orlaisian or Fereldan) between a single species is little more than an accent, not even a tonal adjustment is present. In the real world I can look at a German and know he's a German. I can look at an Arabian and know he's an Arabian. In this game 3 continents are veritable stew pots of skin color but there are no defining shapes. You cant just take an English character and shift the hues to make him African.
Whoever worked on the Dwarves apparently forgot to fix the arms. Yes they're Dwarves, I get it, they're supposed to be misshapen and I suppose everyone's entitled to some creative license but these guys need to have some form of anatomy we're familiar with. A Dwarf is a squat humanoid who's proportionally as thick around as he is shorter. The human eye can just tell when something is wrong. This is why fantasy Dwarves don't just look like real life little people. They have a cruel deformity and it's a sad thing to say it but humans treat a short person differently. They notice more than the height, they notice the length and thickness of the arms, the size of the head and the typical human mind reads that as a problem. Here you've got Dwarves with long arms like monkeys and nearly nonexistant necks and it just grates against me. I first noticed this while playing the game in Orzammar when a Dwarven noblewoman commented on the long length of my limbs and I immediately noticed hers. "What? Just look at you! You can touch your knees without trying!"
Their achitecture was something but I was quickly becoming frustrated with all of the impassible boundries. The grand scale however is an illusion. You get something like 8 buildings across 3 city blocks with 8-12 people on each level. I've seen more people in a college classroom with more interesting and varied things to say with all manner of different styles of clothes. This is 2010, your NPCs need to have more than one line and 2 clothing swaps each, game designers have no excuse now. What sense of grand scale can I get when I can't walk more than a few feet without having to wait for a loading screen because I went up some stairs? 2 levels and a side yard, that's the mighty city of Orzammar, and you can't even explore it all uninterrupted despite how small it is. I've walked around in pokemon villages with more buildings and people. How about we compare to a same-generation game on the same console? Assassins Creed II. Huge cities, lots of objects, lots of destroyable objects at that and not a loading screen for literal miles. And I'm supposed to be happy with a cramped shop not 5 feet wide? I'm supposed to be happy with a large empty cavern filled with some lava that I cant even walk up to? Bioware isn't some small company, they've got money and resources, if you gave this game to Ubisoft what would they have done with it? And this size problem isn't just in Orzammar either, but I already dicussed a bit of the map issues in Gameplay.
Bioware didn't even try with the Elves. Humanoids that amount to nothing more than normal Humans with pointy ears and no facial hair. That isn't an Elf. Granted we can't all be Tolkien but it says something when the only length you're going to go through in representing your elves as 'No really, they're different' is an accent that's more proper than your typical American newscaster. They aren't exceptionally beautiful, they aren't taller, wider, thinner, they're just people with pointy ears that humans hate and there isn't enough exploration culturally to really get to know any elves unless you start the campaign off as one of them. Even then there isn't anything acceptionally elvish about them. They live they breathe they eat, they're all very humanized (I'm talking about the Dalish here.) "We hunt and ride WITH our halla, not on them!" Give me a break. That has about as much credibility as 'Argh I'm a pirate cuz I wear piratey clothes and live on a boat!" There isn't anything exceptionally alien about choosing either a Dwarf or an Elf. Both of their political cultures are based on real life human ones and we see nothing of their daily lives. "Well what do you expect?" More than just their rip-off politics, that's what. You want Dwarven politics? You get Dwarven politics. You see 3 people exchanging words with each other before a fourth guy tells them to shut up. Wow, extensive.
There was a movie out called Atlantis: The Lost Empire. In this movie you had your typical humans and your Atlantians. The Atlantians had their own culture and even their own language. They had their own beliefs, everything about them was new and mysterious. Identifying their politics was backseat to the story at hand. They were human but they weren't human. You had to get to know them just like the heros (villians?) of the story. To hit a little closer to home, when everyone first read Tolkien no one knew what an Elf was, no one knew what a Dwarf did, no one understood what drove the Orcs, but they came to know them and when we emulated the best we left out all of the reason and passion. Elves are more than pointy eared nature lovers and Dwarves are more than just proud drunk Scotsmen who like axes and gold. So this brand new edgy and dark high fantasy game is aspousing to be brand new and edgy by essentially hashing out poser versions of the popular view of elves and dwarves which were already a poser view of the original Tolkien races which were ripping off of ancient culture to begin with? Way to raise the bar Bioware! Way to move away from the pack.
The city Elves get away with this because they're 'domesticated' Elves. We can expect them to act human, and thus familiar. They're forced to live as humans, by humans, and in some unfortunate cases, for humans. They've got every reason to walk, talk and act like them because they were assimilated. What about the Elves in the forest though? Ok they hunt and they live off the land and they live in tribes. Cool. Humans certainly don't do that. It really shows when I go to one of these tribes and I see the same wagons and the same tents I saw in human colonies. I see the same attire, the same weapons, the same tattoos. There's no real cultural difference present. I can identify every shape, I know what everything over there in the forest tribe does. I know what they hate, what they like and what they do in their spare time because they aren't any different from me, and that's bad story telling. Why is this bad story telling?
Put a hat on an Elf and he's a human both visually and spiritually in Dragon Age, oh woopdie doo different religion. Explain to me why there aren't more city Elves hiding amongst regular society to avoid the racism. It's a flaw in the story when you can undermine it with a peace of headgear. You couldn't tell an Antivian from an Orlaisian let alone Elf from human at 10 feet. Alright well at least they act differently from humans. Oh wait, they don't. There's no significant reason to have the Elves in this game other than to corner the Elf market. There's nothing significant about the Elves, their politics, or their culture to make them their own distinctive race, and don't feed me that they get different starting stats because those +1s cease to be meaningful after level 2.
Speaking of headgear. The weapons and armor suffer this too. It isn't with a careless eye that one points out the difference between Dwarven studded leather and Elven studded leather at a distance and even then just jumping in, we know so little about the actual cultures to really get a feel of whether or not that's what Dwarven Plate is really supposed to look like. The weapons look impractical and silly. Nothing about them immediately speaks to me that i'm holding a deadly tool in my hand. They all look like fancy wallhangers, especially the greatswords. The real life claymore isn't more than 5 or 6 pounds and it's handle isn't any thicker than a shortsword. Instead what we get is a sharpened support beam for a small house.
For anyone aware of the discrepencies in the blade designs the weapons come off as less than geniune articles of rip offs. If you look at a real claymore, there is someone out there who can tell you what each part of that sword is for and how it's relevant in a combat situation. In Dragon Age we get weapons that try to look cool for the sake of looking cool while side-stepping all the reasons the real world weapons were cool in the first place. The daggers are bulbous and large, the bows are thick and heavy looking and the longswords have completely useless features on them. I understand there's a point to adding your own personal touch but you dont need to get disney levels of stupid on me here. Everyone can recognize Aragorns sword from a mile away and it's got the decency of actually being functional and a manageable looking weight and size without having useless eyesore trapping thrown all over it.
If you happen to be incredibly male it's a safe bet you took the clothes off all of the female characters at one point or another just to see what's under the hood. Now normally I don't give a damn what a 3d nonexistant person looks like underneath but when you've got love making (and boy is that stretching the term) in a game that eventually forces you to see what everyone's lugging on the bareback it's almost mandatory. Now for those of you who didn't peek, underneath all that armor everyone is the same shape. For the women, the same breast size, the same hip ratio. For the men, the same biceps, the same muscle groups, it's all identical. Anyone else notice that Wynne looks 20 years younger from the neck down? Does that bother no one? Neck and up, I'm old, neck and down, no I'm not. Someone's lying to me here and I think it's Bioware. Who cares about naked polygons though, this is a medieval fantasy game! I'm here to slay dragons! Of course you are. But this does have a reason to it. It reaffirms lazy work on behalf of Bioware, and this is just one example. They got away with shoddy work in more than just the race models, armor and weapons, and expect the user base to be happy with something that looks like it was thrown together in a few days. I spent actual money on this game and I expect actual work going into it. The story for all it's worth being your typical Medieval Fantasy clone had a lot of effort put into it and it's being held back and hampered by the rest of the game.
The monsters are fine, they look gruesome, orcs (I mean Darkspawn) look mean and all and all anything that isn't strictly sentient looks right menacing but I dont associate with them. I'm not them, they appear on the screen long enough for me to kill them and they come and go like a breath of air, I don't have to watch them on the screen constantly but I am stuck with the player models and NPCs who sit there and talk with me for eons. I don't know what a monster spider is supposed to look like but I can tell when it's done right because I have a basic idea of what a spider is like. They get to sort of get away with it because humans have a hard time telling the difference between any two dogs of the same breed that aren't there own pet. So our brains assume they are all alike because differentiating between them isn't something we need to do to survive. We know there are differences but we don't see them, so your typical fantasy monster gets away with it because maybe there's a wart, or a bridge of the nose that's too wide, or a jaw that's too narrow on them that let them tell each other apart, not that it's important because they wont get more than a few seconds of air time.
Also, magnetic spines, I thought we grew out of this? It's partially justified in a sci-fi setting but it looks painful in any other game. We couldn't make a sheathe or two? Really?
Sound
The music is bland and uninspiring. Compare the music to any other game that's out today, including amongst them Bioware's other works and you might notice a sharp jump in quality. I saw this coming after I had to put up with the first two location themes. There are a bunch of them too, one for the dwarves, one for the elves, one for the Darkspawn, but the basic underlying tunes are so generic I personally couldn't pull any feeling from them. Even right now I'm having a hard time remembering a few of the notes in my head and I'd just played the game a yesterday. Beyond that, I can't say much more for the music. It fills its purpose but let's just say I'll be willing to put a few dollars down that Bioware isn't going to be winning any awards because of this game's musical score.
A lot of people don't believe music can make or break a game but compare the success of the Final Fantasy series as tripe and old as that is with the Prince of Persia games. Can you remember a PoP theme? Can you remember a Final Fantasy theme? 10 years from now when someone's ringtone goes off are you more likely to be thrust back into nostalgia and years gone by playing great game-a or great game-b? Music is important to a game, it makes the happy moments happier, the tragic moments more tragic, and the intense moments more intense. The human mind remembers things least of all by how they looked. That's why when you go back to an old resident evil game it's not as scary as you remember because nothing in the game looks realistic enough. Mostly the human mind remembers smells, tastes, sound. And until the Smell N' Taste Master 3000 comes out we've only got our ears to really strike a musical chord with our memories.
The effects are terrible. You smack anything and it makes the same exact sound, from full plate to dragon hide to fleshy Darkspawn, every weapon uses the same bland vaguely metallic thunky ripping noise no matter what it smacks. In the real world, smacking a hammer on a car door sounds completely different from slashing a knife through a turkey. So why is it important bioware varies the clashing weapons? When you hear the cries of battle you remember the Darkspawn and the ogres, but you also remember killing the rats in the pantry. I like every thwack of my war-mace to be personal. If you hit something wholefully squishy and it goes "BWONG" it breaks the realism. Since combat seems to be ever present (if bland), this breakage occurs frequently.
A very minor gripe of mine is the walking sound effect. Walking on grass sounds like walking on grass and walking on wood sounds like walking on wood, but bioware only has about two steps for any one material. Can you say repetative (read: irritating)? Like listening to a clock tick away in a quiet room, it's utterly maddening!
The voice acting is superb. You can tell who's talking without looking at the screen. The different countries have accents (strange the races dont...) and I'm pretty sure if you had a room full of people clammering at once you could still pick one or two of the very destinctive voices out of the crowd. All of the voice actors (save one very annoying Lothering child) are excellent performers. They did a swell job and I congratulate them. The one-on-ones you get while walking around with your party are incredibly delightful, witty, humorous, and deep. It's not just idle chatter, it's chatter. I was actually surprised very early on in my quest when I wrestled Arl Howe into an intellectual corner. I acted like a complete jerk and then wished him well, I was shocked to receive a realistic response. Something along the lines of "Really? That's...unexpected of you...Thank you I guess?" Totally threw me off. Most of the interactions are typical stuff but sometimes someone says something you don't expect, or a character displays real emotion (despite emoting in their face only while standing around like a toy soldier) that makes me forget they're not real.
Animation
Everyone stands around like a chess piece when they talk to you. There's no emotion, everyones got perfect posture, and no one ever sits. There's no body language or idle chatter either, all of them just stand about like NPCs you'd find from your typical MMO waiting around for some lunatic with a penchant for slaughtering a very specific number of fuzzy animals to come by and talk to them. When two npcs talking to you need to address each other they cock their heads slowly to the left or right without moving any other portion of their body. It's like watching the T1000 only he's not a cop, and he's not a robot, and he isn't putting holes in people, and he's not standing in the middle of a lake of fire or a river of nitrogen, or in the middle of a cool explosion, or doing anything cool at all really. Hey, you're the hero! I'll focus on you REALLY HARD. Look at how polite I am staring at you face to face like I've got nothing to hide, like some completely honest person disregarding entirely how I actually feel about you! I could be the sniveling coward, the stalwart giant, or the plucky child, you're going to get the same straight-backed half-akimbo standing posture just like the last 30 people you talked to! Yeah..spiffy. What the hell man put down your arms! Are your pecks honestly so wide you can't put your hand in a pocket or something? Yeesh how tight is that vest?
Without talking to them, I get no sense that any of these beings are real people and when you're trying to make a believeable story it helps when it's not glaringly obvious you're interacting with NPCs. Go to a play where all the actors get the voices perfect, but all they do is stand around facing each other square-shouldered. Whenever they perform an action it's identical to the guy right next to them. You'd think effort would be put into some of the more important scenes but there isn't. Most of the cutscenes amount to you and the gang walking into a room and some important soul turning around to face you, again shoulders squarely facing you with arms dropped half forced to the sides, and start mouthing words with a stiff neck. Really? This is how we respond to everything? You break into a Dwarven base like this and the Dwarves stand around like dolts wondering if you're suppose to be there. Another direct comparison to an excellent game for the current generation, in Assassins Creed II (write what you know) every cutscene is acted out. When that lady is screaming with an arrow in her leg you friggen believe it because she's toppled over a table with men holding her down while she punches and bites and screams for someone to pull the damned thing out! If Dragon Age did this scene you'd have one of the characters laying down flat with an arrow poking out of their leg, with blood splattered all over their entire body despite the localized wound not moving. They wouldn't say a thing until you poked them. "Help!" They would exclaim. "There seems to be an arrow lodged in my leg!" And while the line may be delivered realistically and believeably the performance would be lost on the fact that the guy is just laying there doing little more than bending his eyebrows in a direction that would convey he dislikes the situation. Why do all of the people in this game sleep in their beds fully clothed on top of the covers by the way?
Fighting animations are terrible. The characters swings their weapons like clubs through air that is apparently made out of molasses. All of the strikes are badly telegraphed and the characters let the weight of their weapons throw them about. Who of us wants slow and steady when they think of a sword fight? The mages have something like 4 animations for whatever they're casting, and the archers have no sense of urgency when they reload or when a melee attack gets within range of them.
Something I do like are the custom ending flourishes. They're amusing but because you could be steering around any one of 4 looney toons you've got less than a 25% chance of seeing one of these nifty finishers because they dont always do them. It's much easier to get a glimpse of the cool when you slay a boss though because they'll always do it but since you've got no part in the event it really loses the fanfare. God of War did it better, for one, it actually involved player input.
Here are some minor notes I can't seem to fit anywhere proper just yet; Everyone talks in news-caster English if they're Fereldan Humans, found items are completely worthless next to how much money monsters drop, you can't click on a body to loot it until 10 minutes after it dies, item creation is a big waste of time because item drops are abundant and the monsters will always be the same level as you so honestly if you like the story you don't have to kill everything that moves to get something out of it. However if you like combat prepare for a cliche cookie-cutter been-there-done-that borefest that does not reward leveling up. Playing through any of the origin stories takes about 10 minutes so there's no reason to replay this game unless you unwisely chose to play a warrior, or you're achievement hunting. However I have heard that the Dwarvens origins are pretty epic so you might want to look into that.
Closing Statement
Graphics never stopped me from enjoying a good story and I'm not going to be returning it any time soon but I have suffered buyers remorse. Instead of Dragon Age, I could have replayed any of the other games I have lying around in the attic. Essentially I paid 60 bucks to avoid brushing dust off my unused consoles. I do wish to finish the game because the character interaction is one hell of a saving grace, but I would honestly rather play any other game on my shelf right now, including the games I've beaten into oblivion.
My final assessment is rent it, dont buy it.
I realize this is the internet and a lot of people hate reading so here's the short version: The game sucks. If you care to know why please continue but I'm warning you, go get a pizza or something.
Dragon Age is a medieval fantasy game in which the player in one of 5 different incarnations (across 2 genders and 3 races) must quest to save the Kingdom of Fereldan from The Blight, a mass of Darkspawn lead by an Archdemon that rages against the surface world for little more reason than because it really wants to. A man named Duncan who belongs to the Grey Wardens, an order of warriors who's members have pledged their steel, will, and very lives to face the threat of the Darkspawn and the Blight directly, meets the hero very early on in the story with the very obvious intentions of recruiting him or her into the order. Due to some extremely simple (and some would say cliche) circumstances, the Hero is shoe-horned one way or another into becoming a Grey Warden whether he wishes to be one or not no matter which origin story you've selected. For my credentials, I've played through Dragon Age more than halfway through as a Human Noble Warrior, Mage and a little bit of Rogue. I played almost exclusively on the xbox, and played through easy, medium and hard difficulty.
Gameplay
I knew I was in for it when I first saw King Cailhan. 'Oh god damnit' I thought, "It's going to be one of those games." Games aren't books, the majority of the work that goes into them are in the graphics and if you haven't gotten enough work ethic to get good graphics into your game it's a pretty easy guess that the same quality and effort went into the rest of the game. You have to see a game to play it, it's primary mode of getting to your brain is through the eyesockets. It HAS to look good and the story has to be amusing. If you can't put effort into one major point of the game why should anyone expect any more effort in its other important aspects? Most of the time, because of this reason you can judge a game by its graphics. Not all the time, but for me, my opinions and guesses were founded after playing for a good 10 minutes of the game (most of it right after a short dialogue with one Duncan of the Grey Wardens). I kept playing up to the halfway mark. Honestly if someone doesn't have a grip on the game by the halfway point there's something wrong with more than the graphics. When I saw the King's shoddy display I immediately developed two assumptions. The combat system would be poor and dodgy and the environments would be deceptively small and lacking creativity.
Shortly after any one of the origin stories you're thrust in to the country of Fereldan, and much like any medieval fantasy game your quest involves going everywhere and solving everyones problems. You're given a loading screen cleverly disguised as a barely interactive map and from there you set about your mad war against the Blight with your band of 2 or 3 other people by choosing a spot on the map and waiting for a loading bar cleverly disguised as a blood trail to move up to wherever it is you intend to go. I've never seen a thinly veiled loading screen before, still it's pretty cool.
So you pick a spot, someone bleeds all over your map and eventually you get to the little glowing square you poked. Then the game goes back to normal again and you're free to run around some of the smallest instances I've ever played in a game. Bioware pulls every trick in the book to make it seem like the small closet they've shoved you in is a royal throne room except for the trick of putting actual work into the game. The terrain is completely noninteractive, it exists as nothing more than a setting for your character to stand in while whacking things until they're dead before you move on to the next area. This isn't a play! This is a game! Give me something to do other than walk! Sure there are trees in the forest, and houses in the city, and the terrain isn't all flat, and it's not always just a straight path, but it might as well be.
The useless twists and turns do nothing! They lead NOWHERE. In a city, any odd bend or back alley is wasted on the fact that there's really nothing interesting to do in there besides kill some bandits. Any exit on an open field is already very clearly indicated on the map as long as you get within 40 yards of the exit, killing the lost-in-the-maze aspect of any maze and the few times you venture into a maze or labyrinth the design is laughably easy. Are you serious? Are you bloody serious? The one time you decide that the floor plan has to make any sense is when you design the dungeon levels? You want to solve the first level of the forest dungeon? Walk to the end of the hallway and hang a left. The only bit of aesthetic simplicity to find on this literally god forsaken rock, and it's the parts of the game the player intentionally wishes to get lost in? "Exit's over there." Thanks! I appreciate this, I really do, but only in games when there are other things to do. Like combat.
Other than simple answers to easy questions like 'where do I go next' the locations have other issues. Because of the combat you can't get any meaningful benefit using the terrain cleverly. There's one part in the brecillian forest where there's a high ground you get up to by spiraling around the walkway. You can use this to attack Darkspawn with arrows and they'll have to trek all the way around to get to you dying before they ever get within melee range. The problem with this is that to get to this high point you either have to kill everything on the way around or ignore them while they follow you up, the ones that don't immediately break out bows that is. Well fine ok, so I killed them, I can always use the high ground tactic on whatever else happen to walk this way. Nope, not going to work. Nothing in this game respawns. Some endless horde, eh? Even then none of the other mobs walk around. They stand still and wait for you to get within attaking range.
The quests are a joke and the rewards are very befitting. To do a quest poke an NPC or a chest or a billboard with quests on, in, or at it and some time during the game while you're traveling between locations the game will toss you into a random battle on a small cookie-cutter battlefeld. Kill all the people, loot all the corpses and go back to wherever it is you got the quest from. Quest completed. For these tasks you get 1 gold coin for each quest. You can't buy squat with 1 gold coin. You only ever get around 3 quests from one source at a time and the most quests you'll end up running around with are 10 or 12 if you talked to all the right people. That's 12 gold coins. That's one good sword for a camp of around 8 people in a time span of work that you could use to beat half of the main plot. Sometimes you pick up an item along the way like a scroll that tells you if you stand in 3 places something appears that you need to kill to obtain something awesome - do those instead. One quest for a unique sword or 12 quests for a good sword. Do the math.
Some of the quests, not all of them, give you a sense that other things are happening in the world, unfortunately none of them are backed up by anything you'll see on your travels. There's one minor quest where you have to deliver letters to widowed wives of some departed Black Irregulars mercenaries, however, I've yet to see a single Blackstone Irregular on the battlefield. All of the places I go to are prestine, no arrows in the ground, no upturned earth, no scorch marks, no blood splatters, its all so clean you wonder if there's really a blight happening at all so it's hard for me to believe that there are mercenary camps running about solving apparently real problems in the world of Thedas. I recall a bit of story telling advice. 'Show, don't tell.' There is no showing. Everything that happens in this world, including The Blight, I've got to take everyone's word for. I saw 9-12 Darkspawn in the Brecilian forest and nuked them like day old pizza, some threat. The Kingdom of Fereldan apparently scares too easily.
Combat
Combat in this game is terrible, least of all because of the mostly subpar graphics, mediocre music score, short order sound effects, and slow animations. What really gets to me is the interface. Here is where the computer does it best. You've got a row of buttons you can click and they perform all of your talents. If you want to do this on the Xbox however, you've got to navigate a slightly (incedibly) frustrating menu wheel. To switch weapons, use potions, apply salves and poisons, use skills or talents, activate buffs, tell your allies not to move, heal yourself or cast spells you've got to access the radial menu. The feeling of intense combat is lost when you've got to pause the game whenever you want to do anything more complicated than a basic attack. Thankfully the game lets us hotkey to the X Y or B keys. Unfortunately the talents are all but a waste of time.
Skills let you do things like fast-talk people, pick locks, craft potions and detect enemies. (raising the bar Bioware). Anything passive that doesn't involve combat (save two skills) goes here. The Talents however are all of your attack moves, and by attack moves I mean incredibly passive barely noticeable buffs that effect the gameplay very little if you're anything but a Mage. You get such fantastic abilities like lowering your attack speed to hit more accurately, or lowering your attack speed to hit harder, or lowering your attack speed to get better critical hit rates, or lowering your attack speed because it would be funny at the time. While these are active you lose some initial stamina for the cast but because Stamina regenerates, your buffs are always on. Where is the strategy hm? There are something like 4 abilities that do something other than lower the warrior or rogues attack rate for some random boost that because of the now slow attack rate, the boosts are entirely irrelevant and they all seem to involve hitting people with your shield. Now if we were going to have so much of this why didn't you guys just include the shield as a normal weapon?
Everything else in the talents section is a passive ability that helps you suck less, and no, that doesn't mean the same thing the other way around. The passive abilities help you not attack as badly as you were before...as much. Using two weapons means your off-hand is going to hit weaker despite the fact that anyone trained in the fine and complicated art of duel wielding effectively isn't going to have any sort of problem like this. Conveniantly they have a talent you can waste your points on to make the off-hand hit almost as hard as your main hand. Using a bow means you've got a damage penalty or something when you shoot in close combat. And using spells means when someone whacks you, you wont lose concentration despite the bleeding head wound they just gave you. Well ok technically that one is a Skill, useless distinction, but there's a skill for it! If it's none of the above, most likely the talent gives you a permanant stat boost, because you know, I can't just put points in my stats or anything every time I level up. The feeling of becoming an epic level battlemonster is lost on the fact that the skill sets I'm provided are designed to turn me from a mook into a competant warrior, not from an already competant warror to a god. This is jarring because the Grey Warden is recruiting you in the first place specifically because you're better than the average joe. This is not represented at all. You attack slowly and awkardly, you take 3 swings with a broadsword to kill a rat no bigger than something you'd find in New York because you missed once and your wrist strength won't let you push a hole through paper with your thumb. For mages, at the start you can only cast two spells despite having apparently been raised in a magic school your entire life. Some school. If a game is going to pull this "level-1 and we mean it" crackerjack then bloody well don't put me up on a pedastle before I've even killed my first rat. Talented and skilled the starting character isn't.
Passive abilities rock in a game where you've got a bunch of skills that use stamina and make you regret not having enough of the stuff for those two buffs when you really need them, but when there is nothing in this game that will drain your stamina faster than you can replenish it after putting no more than 5 or 10 points in your starting Will stat (boosts stamina if you're bad at picking up context clues) even with 6 buffs running, the strategy in activating buffs and striking with the heavy hitting techniques when you really need to is completely moot. This is ignoring the fact that unless your a mage, any buff you cast on yourself is going to be relatively pointless anyway.
Spells are fun. I nominate Dragon Age for one of the most satisfying explodey Fireball spells I've ever had the pleasure to use in a very long time. Unfortunately all of the stat points in the world won't speed up that arbitrary cool-down time so recasting when you need to (or hell, because it's so damned fun) is a slow process that hampers strategy. However when one of the fairly early spells is a gigantic swirling flaming vortex of death you kind of don't need any strategy. I defeated a dragon with 2 of those while all my meat heads whacked at it's shins. Shouldn't spells have weaknesses to make the game exciting though? Sure they should but conveying the feeling the player isn't still at level 1 is very important in a game where leveling up is supposedly important, there's no reward. Enemies level with you so no matter how much damage per second you're doing they still die in the same amount of time. I hate using the same half-dozen words over and over but this makes the leveling process moot, basic, trite, pointless, etc.
This could also be a graphics arguement but I put it here in combat where it's more relevant. The symbols they use for the talents are completely useless. They're all too busy and visually nondescriptive. My first playthrough was with a Sword-And-Shield Warrior so that's the one I know best. All 12 of the talents for the Shielder involve the depiction of a shield being moved or getting tougher looking in some way. There's a symbol of a shield that looks like it's putting up a magical wall of energy, a shield that looks like its deflecting arrows, a shield that looks like a brick wall and a picture of a man holding a shield up. Ok so...one skill protects me, another one protects me, the third one protects me and the last one makes my ribs vulnerable?
Let me give you an actual rundown of some of the talents at your disposal if you wish to go sword-and-shield like me. You get a skill that raises your defense and missile deflection but lowers your attack (hit ratio), a skill that removes the attack penalty from the previous skill (read: suck less), a skill that raises armor (defense?) and missile deflection but lowers your damage (why does this sound familiar?), and another passive skill that raises how much the two other actual skills boost defense (again, read: suck less). So you've got four abilities that do one thing.
Bioware, I am not fooled. You did no work here at all. I am so god damn ashamed of you it's not even funny.
Using this pattern I can guess that for every 4 talents I'm only really getting one effect across 2 activated abilities. So a Shielder only has 3 skills, two of which do nearly the same exact thing, so really only 2 skills to differentiate him from a Two-hander, and to be any good I have to invest 12 points? Thats entirely bull. I'm not going to read the whole list to you guys but believe me, unless you're a mage, the rest is more of the same. You only get 1 actual ability and 2 or 3 other abilities that get rid of the flaws for every weapon set you can use in the game. You'd think these buffs would be super noticeable too since they put so much effort into making you use them. They aren't. By the time damage levels get to a point in the game where you can start getting scared of total party death you've already got 2 suit of legendary armor and if you played your money well, a ring that lets you laugh at death. It might as well have Death's phone number written under the band so you can call his house at 2 in the morning so yo can bother him with bad refridgerator jokes. Until then, buffs shave off 5 or six more damage, enemies miss once every 5 swings instead of every 6, and you smack for critical damage once every 20 swings instead of every 25. Very low key stuff you wont notice very easily.
Unless you go with a greatsword, the only tactical choices you have are swing until it's dead or swing until it's dead slower. With a greatsword you get a conveniant mob sweeping ability that trust me, you'll need and want. Mobs have a simple attack pattern. If they have a melee weapon they walk up to you and swing until you're dead. If they have a bow, they'll walk up to you and shoot you until you're dead. If they're a mage, they'll cast random spells until something works. With 5 or six guys clumped up next to you, a shield bash just isn't going to cut it.
Mages are simple enough. They luck out with talents as the only job class that doesn't have to put up with mostly passive abilities and buffs. Cast a few spells down even, and sometimes a few of them will work together to do extra damage. This isn't hard to figure out because it tells you they will in the spell descriptions. When you do the same thing over again because thats the only thing that works really well, you don't call that strategy, you call it your only option, and a lack of options is not a strategy, and while it did take me a long time for fireballs to get old, they did eventually get old.
Unlocking some of the additional classes is awesome as hell-
In one instance you perform what basically amounts to pissing on Jesus's grave and one of your party flips and and tries to kill you. You find Andraste's actual sacred Urn and have the opportunity to pour dragon blood in it on behalf of the cult in the nearby village, if you do this, the leader teachs you how to become a Reaver.
You get four new talents to sink points into and because of the aforementioned talents problem you're only really getting one or two extra abilities with built-in problems for each class you learn. The only really noticeable effect is the Mage's Arcane Templar subclass (go figure, mages). One ability lets you use your magic stat in place of your strength stat. Because mages are simple to build (DUMP IT ALL IN MAGIC AND WILL STATS HINT HINT) their magic stat will always be higher than your warrior's strength stat, unless you're a really determined warrior. No one plays rogues, hardy har har. All of the extra skills a warrior gets are practically meaningless. Pay attention to that word there, practically. I'm not using it to fluff the speech, that's a word, it means something. Practically, route word; practical. The warrior talents aren't practical. If you told me I could be a bitchin warrior but I had to choose between a series of active talents that lowered my attack speed and a bunch of passive talents that made those active talents suck less, or spells that let me throw fireballs and other spells that let me throw bigger fireballs, I'd pick the totally awesome throwing fireballs choice! And with that "magic = strength" talent you can wear the heavy armor so the mages don't even need a meatshield anymore. Where is the strategy Bioware? Where is the strategy? Did you hide it in one of the locked room you can't ever access in the beginning of the human noble campaign?
Story
I'll have to expand on this later when I figure out spoilers but basically, you're one of the last of a secretive order (at least the chapter present in the area) destined to stop the evil horde lead by a powerful demon once every few hundred years, and you're the only one who can stop it because the plot said so. It's pretty basic, and shamefully basic at that. You accomplish this task by reuniting a country at war with itself and leading it in a massive attack against the threat that will otherwise destroy the world. The orcs are different but the prophecy is the same. Kill and kill and kill until your problems are solved. Occasionally you'll have to fetch 20 something-somethings to get the last somin'or'other to finish that thing that guy told you to do and you'll have to go around poking objects until a doorway opens up so you can kill a guy inside for one reason or another, so it's all pretty much the exact same plot we've all played through, read, and watched a dozen and a half times this year even though we aren't even into the second month. Way to raise the bar Bioware.
You do all of this after you perform The Joining, and are inducted into the Grey Wardens shortly after your origin story.
Speaking of which, I've got a major complaint about The Joining:
The Joining is a secret ritual all recruits of the Grey Wardens must participate in before they are official Grey Wardens. What you must do is kill a Darkspawn and drink it's blood. Unfortunately Darkspawn blood is poisonous. If it doesn't kill you when you drink it, it'll slowly drive you mad until you die from it anyway. On top of that, drinking the blood gives you nightmares and they let you hear the calls of Archdemon which I can't imagine are very pleasant. Darkspawn can also sense where you are at all times. What do you get for all these disadvantages? The ability to find them too!
...So!?? They're Darkspawn! Hiding isn't exactly something they're famous for! The only reason we only see them every couple hundred years is because sometimes the Dwarves have a low birth rate! And I guess also because of Archdemons, but mostly the Dwarves! When they do pop up the last thing they're getting into is hiding. They march in the hundreds of thousands making as much noise as possible. If you can't find Darkspawn you probably sell pencils out of a mug.
It's not like drinking this crap gives you any special benefits either. Beyond being a Darkspawn detector you get no strength boost, no rediculous super powers or anything at all. The only reason the Grey Wardens are so awesome is because they go around recruiting the best of the best to begin with. This Joining Ritual is the most useless insane thing I've ever heard! I have an idea, how about we NOT drink the deadly goo that shortens the lifespan of everyone here, and just declare a Blight whenever we see Darkspawn popping out of the ground since the only time they make it past the Dwarves is during a Blight. Wouldn't that be more sensible?
They don't even incorporate this new found ability into the game. Darkspawn don't suddenly leap out of the ground, they stand at 50 yards waiting for you to find them and they're CLEARLY VISIBLE. The Shrieks that turn invisible? You can't even see them until they hit you so I'm starting to think the only thing drinking Darkspawn blood does is perpetuate the longest running prank ever devised this side of Thedas.
Oh wait there is a benefit to drinking the blood! If you happen to kill the Archdemon, your soul gets destroyed! ~Wait what, that's a benefit? Crap, Ser Jory got it easy. Get that, really pay attention here. If you kill the Archdemon, and you're not a Grey Warden, its soul for whatever reason seeks out the nearest Darkspawn body and inhabits that. Their great leader who's only real benefit is being a large dragon (and some would argue, also having intelligence) will lose its body and inhabit one of the weak soulless husks of one of its minions.
Short of killing every Darkspawn in existance, the Archdemon is practically immortal.
The alternative is having a Grey Warden stab it, in which case the soul will attempt to enter the Grey Warden's body instead for little more reason because than the plot demands it. As their souls both attempt to coexist in the same body, their essence, everything they ever were or are, in a world that very clearly has an afterlife, will be destroyed. They will cease to be. They will not exist as a spirit, a soul, a ghost, a demon, a thought, or even an idea after this point. Not even the maker could bring their sentience back. Any stake they had in the mortal realm will be meaningless to them because 'they' won't exist anymore.
Those are your choices, live for eternity in the spirit realm after the Archdemon wins and destroys all of the mortal world and everyone lives pretty much happily ever after in a few thousand years, or destroy your soul to stop a temporary threat because there are more dragons in the world and the Darkspawn aren't just going to disappear because you killed one dragon off. Even if you kill off all of the Archdemons, the Darkspawn threat won't go away just like that. Archdemon or no Archdemon, until you kill every last one of the Darkspawn off, including every broodmother and corrupted one, you'll still have to deal with the threat of a Blight.
Let me summarize all of that for you. If you perform the Joining and drink the Darkspawn blood you get terrible nightmares and probably body aches the rest of your life, you have to deal with a major breach in your personal safety because the scariest race on the planet knows where you are at all times, and if you kill the wrong dude you erase yourself from existance. All of this for the benefit of knowing where the least stealthy monster race in the world likes to hang out. Even if you have idiots drinking blood and stabbing dragons and erasing themselves from existance you still have to deal with the threat of the Darkspawn by killing them all down to the very last man. So why do the Grey Wardens do this?
...So!?? They're Darkspawn! Hiding isn't exactly something they're famous for! The only reason we only see them every couple hundred years is because sometimes the Dwarves have a low birth rate! And I guess also because of Archdemons, but mostly the Dwarves! When they do pop up the last thing they're getting into is hiding. They march in the hundreds of thousands making as much noise as possible. If you can't find Darkspawn you probably sell pencils out of a mug.
It's not like drinking this crap gives you any special benefits either. Beyond being a Darkspawn detector you get no strength boost, no rediculous super powers or anything at all. The only reason the Grey Wardens are so awesome is because they go around recruiting the best of the best to begin with. This Joining Ritual is the most useless insane thing I've ever heard! I have an idea, how about we NOT drink the deadly goo that shortens the lifespan of everyone here, and just declare a Blight whenever we see Darkspawn popping out of the ground since the only time they make it past the Dwarves is during a Blight. Wouldn't that be more sensible?
They don't even incorporate this new found ability into the game. Darkspawn don't suddenly leap out of the ground, they stand at 50 yards waiting for you to find them and they're CLEARLY VISIBLE. The Shrieks that turn invisible? You can't even see them until they hit you so I'm starting to think the only thing drinking Darkspawn blood does is perpetuate the longest running prank ever devised this side of Thedas.
Oh wait there is a benefit to drinking the blood! If you happen to kill the Archdemon, your soul gets destroyed! ~Wait what, that's a benefit? Crap, Ser Jory got it easy. Get that, really pay attention here. If you kill the Archdemon, and you're not a Grey Warden, its soul for whatever reason seeks out the nearest Darkspawn body and inhabits that. Their great leader who's only real benefit is being a large dragon (and some would argue, also having intelligence) will lose its body and inhabit one of the weak soulless husks of one of its minions.
Short of killing every Darkspawn in existance, the Archdemon is practically immortal.
The alternative is having a Grey Warden stab it, in which case the soul will attempt to enter the Grey Warden's body instead for little more reason because than the plot demands it. As their souls both attempt to coexist in the same body, their essence, everything they ever were or are, in a world that very clearly has an afterlife, will be destroyed. They will cease to be. They will not exist as a spirit, a soul, a ghost, a demon, a thought, or even an idea after this point. Not even the maker could bring their sentience back. Any stake they had in the mortal realm will be meaningless to them because 'they' won't exist anymore.
Those are your choices, live for eternity in the spirit realm after the Archdemon wins and destroys all of the mortal world and everyone lives pretty much happily ever after in a few thousand years, or destroy your soul to stop a temporary threat because there are more dragons in the world and the Darkspawn aren't just going to disappear because you killed one dragon off. Even if you kill off all of the Archdemons, the Darkspawn threat won't go away just like that. Archdemon or no Archdemon, until you kill every last one of the Darkspawn off, including every broodmother and corrupted one, you'll still have to deal with the threat of a Blight.
Let me summarize all of that for you. If you perform the Joining and drink the Darkspawn blood you get terrible nightmares and probably body aches the rest of your life, you have to deal with a major breach in your personal safety because the scariest race on the planet knows where you are at all times, and if you kill the wrong dude you erase yourself from existance. All of this for the benefit of knowing where the least stealthy monster race in the world likes to hang out. Even if you have idiots drinking blood and stabbing dragons and erasing themselves from existance you still have to deal with the threat of the Darkspawn by killing them all down to the very last man. So why do the Grey Wardens do this?
"Drink this, if it doesn't kill you it will plague you with disadvantages against an enemy that doesn't hide to well"
Throughout the entire game are books and statues and certain inventory items you can poke to get backstory, I'm not sure how that works for statues and sword though. Maybe someone painstakingly knitted this information under the handle leather, I dont know. This stuff is where the game gets even remotely interesting but the menu controls for the xbox version (I'm not getting into it, and you don't want me to) are so bad figuring out which book you just picked up is surprisingly difficult to find in the codex. The entry is conveniantly highlighted, but if it happens to be too low on the screen you can't find it because while you're scrolling down you erase the highlight. You can zoom right past whatever it is you were looking for with no way of avoiding the problem. Bioware has somehow made the simple act of finding something to read a frustrating experience.
This game is plagued by terrible cliches too, like NPCs with no sense of property value. "Hey you, get out of my house!" These words are never uttered. Well actually maybe twice. It's so left field it's actually jarring encountering this unique situation. However even if your typical NPC did confront you on a regular basis about these issues, whatever lunatic with enough trouser power to say it to your face (fully armored Grey Warden packing a steel pole the length of a stop sign) wouldn't lift a damned finger after the dialogue. They stand their letting you rummage around their house! Can I get some realism for once? It's so ingrained in us that we can rob whatever the heck we like that the two times something sensible happens you figure out the NPC isn't supposed to be there or something plot significant is happening? Is this really were we are in gaming history? I was playing around with the same mechanics and story when I was around 9 or 10 years old. What is it about this game that deserves so much public praise? Nothing that's what.
And yeah, stop signs are actually pretty tall. Go outside and check, I'll wait.
Graphics, Locations, Weapons, Armor and the Visual Culture
For those of you who dont know what I saw in the fearless leader, King Pompous Idiot was sporting one of those tree trunk swords and his armor was about an inch thick everywhere. Holy crap I thought, he's got to way 200 pounds in that thing! And who designed this platemail anyway? What are all these random floating things? How do they stay on? What's the tactical advantage of this wierd pointless flange? Where are all the straps?! Why are those pauldrons radically different from each other? Why are his elbow guards different? Is this a joke? Did someone play a mean trick on the King or something? Hey oh wait damn that's your second in command huh. That blacksmith is ballsy, he did this to two of you? Take a quick glance over at wikipedia for an idea of just how thick and heavy medeival armor is supposed to be and staring at this guy will give you a migraine. He's like the culmination of everything that's wrong graphically with this game. There's some tolerance amongst humans in that not all of us can know everything but we take it with a grain of salt that a developer or writer will do an ounce of research before he tries something. Sure not everyone knows what a ricasso is for but most peole know it goes on a claymore and they get points for trying. The unexplainable aesthetic choices inherent in King Kale Soup's Armor tells me, and hopefully tells you that Bioware didn't put any effort into doing anything besides making the game look cool enough to shovel to the masses for money. And its shocking too because the Concept Art for this game was beautiful. What happend?
When you cheap on the graphics you don't just cheap on the textures. You cheap on the shape of things, the expanse of things, and in extreme cases the fields of battle can be hampered. And when that happens bad graphics can effect gameplay. If you can't easily pick out which warm body amongst the stack of clashing flailing limbs is yours you can't operate to well. Back then graphics weren't too important but if you couldn't tell mario from a hole in the ground I'll bet you wouldn't ever save the princess.
In a nutshell, the basic graphics of this game are disappointing. They aren't terrible, they're not really game breaking, but they are pretty bad. I played the console version and everyone knows compared to the graphics of a computer, consoles are usually worse. But to be fair I'm comparing console to console, computer game to computer game. In some cases the issues I have with the graphics are barely noticeable, in others they're absolutely terrible. None of the graphics in Dragon Age would be out of place in a game from the last console generation. Compare God of War, it's got less polygons sure but all of the monsters are different, all of the enemies are noticeable and the boss fights are rememberable. The locations are varied and dynamic and when you're climbing mount olympus it really feels like mount olympus. Different sort of game but this is a graphics comparison. Scaling and length and all that goodie goodie is important when considering what the engine can do and it's a shame when every location on this map can be put end to end and wouldn't be much bigger than a single level from darksiders.
While not especially unique or inspired the faces are memorable and different and very rarely would you see many similarities between two NPCs other than the hair, which the programmers have lazily implemented as a blob of polygons with a texture. I'd give them points for it but because the faces are so well done, whenever you talk to someone it's a mind screw. You're looking at this real life person's face sticking out from underneath what looks like random patches of astroturf and it's just goofy looking. I can't get very technical with that, put large patches of construction paper on your face and walk outside and see if you don't get looks. Thats what this game is like looking in every direction. I can see it, it's noticeable.
The character models are uninspired. When you look at the real human race you see so many various shapes and sizes its mind boggling. Granted there isn't a game yet that can simulate each unique individual on the planet but Dragon Age is very far from being that game. Everyone's the same height, the same width, and ethnical variances (that is, Orlaisian or Fereldan) between a single species is little more than an accent, not even a tonal adjustment is present. In the real world I can look at a German and know he's a German. I can look at an Arabian and know he's an Arabian. In this game 3 continents are veritable stew pots of skin color but there are no defining shapes. You cant just take an English character and shift the hues to make him African.
Whoever worked on the Dwarves apparently forgot to fix the arms. Yes they're Dwarves, I get it, they're supposed to be misshapen and I suppose everyone's entitled to some creative license but these guys need to have some form of anatomy we're familiar with. A Dwarf is a squat humanoid who's proportionally as thick around as he is shorter. The human eye can just tell when something is wrong. This is why fantasy Dwarves don't just look like real life little people. They have a cruel deformity and it's a sad thing to say it but humans treat a short person differently. They notice more than the height, they notice the length and thickness of the arms, the size of the head and the typical human mind reads that as a problem. Here you've got Dwarves with long arms like monkeys and nearly nonexistant necks and it just grates against me. I first noticed this while playing the game in Orzammar when a Dwarven noblewoman commented on the long length of my limbs and I immediately noticed hers. "What? Just look at you! You can touch your knees without trying!"
Their achitecture was something but I was quickly becoming frustrated with all of the impassible boundries. The grand scale however is an illusion. You get something like 8 buildings across 3 city blocks with 8-12 people on each level. I've seen more people in a college classroom with more interesting and varied things to say with all manner of different styles of clothes. This is 2010, your NPCs need to have more than one line and 2 clothing swaps each, game designers have no excuse now. What sense of grand scale can I get when I can't walk more than a few feet without having to wait for a loading screen because I went up some stairs? 2 levels and a side yard, that's the mighty city of Orzammar, and you can't even explore it all uninterrupted despite how small it is. I've walked around in pokemon villages with more buildings and people. How about we compare to a same-generation game on the same console? Assassins Creed II. Huge cities, lots of objects, lots of destroyable objects at that and not a loading screen for literal miles. And I'm supposed to be happy with a cramped shop not 5 feet wide? I'm supposed to be happy with a large empty cavern filled with some lava that I cant even walk up to? Bioware isn't some small company, they've got money and resources, if you gave this game to Ubisoft what would they have done with it? And this size problem isn't just in Orzammar either, but I already dicussed a bit of the map issues in Gameplay.
Bioware didn't even try with the Elves. Humanoids that amount to nothing more than normal Humans with pointy ears and no facial hair. That isn't an Elf. Granted we can't all be Tolkien but it says something when the only length you're going to go through in representing your elves as 'No really, they're different' is an accent that's more proper than your typical American newscaster. They aren't exceptionally beautiful, they aren't taller, wider, thinner, they're just people with pointy ears that humans hate and there isn't enough exploration culturally to really get to know any elves unless you start the campaign off as one of them. Even then there isn't anything acceptionally elvish about them. They live they breathe they eat, they're all very humanized (I'm talking about the Dalish here.) "We hunt and ride WITH our halla, not on them!" Give me a break. That has about as much credibility as 'Argh I'm a pirate cuz I wear piratey clothes and live on a boat!" There isn't anything exceptionally alien about choosing either a Dwarf or an Elf. Both of their political cultures are based on real life human ones and we see nothing of their daily lives. "Well what do you expect?" More than just their rip-off politics, that's what. You want Dwarven politics? You get Dwarven politics. You see 3 people exchanging words with each other before a fourth guy tells them to shut up. Wow, extensive.
There was a movie out called Atlantis: The Lost Empire. In this movie you had your typical humans and your Atlantians. The Atlantians had their own culture and even their own language. They had their own beliefs, everything about them was new and mysterious. Identifying their politics was backseat to the story at hand. They were human but they weren't human. You had to get to know them just like the heros (villians?) of the story. To hit a little closer to home, when everyone first read Tolkien no one knew what an Elf was, no one knew what a Dwarf did, no one understood what drove the Orcs, but they came to know them and when we emulated the best we left out all of the reason and passion. Elves are more than pointy eared nature lovers and Dwarves are more than just proud drunk Scotsmen who like axes and gold. So this brand new edgy and dark high fantasy game is aspousing to be brand new and edgy by essentially hashing out poser versions of the popular view of elves and dwarves which were already a poser view of the original Tolkien races which were ripping off of ancient culture to begin with? Way to raise the bar Bioware! Way to move away from the pack.
The city Elves get away with this because they're 'domesticated' Elves. We can expect them to act human, and thus familiar. They're forced to live as humans, by humans, and in some unfortunate cases, for humans. They've got every reason to walk, talk and act like them because they were assimilated. What about the Elves in the forest though? Ok they hunt and they live off the land and they live in tribes. Cool. Humans certainly don't do that. It really shows when I go to one of these tribes and I see the same wagons and the same tents I saw in human colonies. I see the same attire, the same weapons, the same tattoos. There's no real cultural difference present. I can identify every shape, I know what everything over there in the forest tribe does. I know what they hate, what they like and what they do in their spare time because they aren't any different from me, and that's bad story telling. Why is this bad story telling?
Put a hat on an Elf and he's a human both visually and spiritually in Dragon Age, oh woopdie doo different religion. Explain to me why there aren't more city Elves hiding amongst regular society to avoid the racism. It's a flaw in the story when you can undermine it with a peace of headgear. You couldn't tell an Antivian from an Orlaisian let alone Elf from human at 10 feet. Alright well at least they act differently from humans. Oh wait, they don't. There's no significant reason to have the Elves in this game other than to corner the Elf market. There's nothing significant about the Elves, their politics, or their culture to make them their own distinctive race, and don't feed me that they get different starting stats because those +1s cease to be meaningful after level 2.
Speaking of headgear. The weapons and armor suffer this too. It isn't with a careless eye that one points out the difference between Dwarven studded leather and Elven studded leather at a distance and even then just jumping in, we know so little about the actual cultures to really get a feel of whether or not that's what Dwarven Plate is really supposed to look like. The weapons look impractical and silly. Nothing about them immediately speaks to me that i'm holding a deadly tool in my hand. They all look like fancy wallhangers, especially the greatswords. The real life claymore isn't more than 5 or 6 pounds and it's handle isn't any thicker than a shortsword. Instead what we get is a sharpened support beam for a small house.
For anyone aware of the discrepencies in the blade designs the weapons come off as less than geniune articles of rip offs. If you look at a real claymore, there is someone out there who can tell you what each part of that sword is for and how it's relevant in a combat situation. In Dragon Age we get weapons that try to look cool for the sake of looking cool while side-stepping all the reasons the real world weapons were cool in the first place. The daggers are bulbous and large, the bows are thick and heavy looking and the longswords have completely useless features on them. I understand there's a point to adding your own personal touch but you dont need to get disney levels of stupid on me here. Everyone can recognize Aragorns sword from a mile away and it's got the decency of actually being functional and a manageable looking weight and size without having useless eyesore trapping thrown all over it.
If you happen to be incredibly male it's a safe bet you took the clothes off all of the female characters at one point or another just to see what's under the hood. Now normally I don't give a damn what a 3d nonexistant person looks like underneath but when you've got love making (and boy is that stretching the term) in a game that eventually forces you to see what everyone's lugging on the bareback it's almost mandatory. Now for those of you who didn't peek, underneath all that armor everyone is the same shape. For the women, the same breast size, the same hip ratio. For the men, the same biceps, the same muscle groups, it's all identical. Anyone else notice that Wynne looks 20 years younger from the neck down? Does that bother no one? Neck and up, I'm old, neck and down, no I'm not. Someone's lying to me here and I think it's Bioware. Who cares about naked polygons though, this is a medieval fantasy game! I'm here to slay dragons! Of course you are. But this does have a reason to it. It reaffirms lazy work on behalf of Bioware, and this is just one example. They got away with shoddy work in more than just the race models, armor and weapons, and expect the user base to be happy with something that looks like it was thrown together in a few days. I spent actual money on this game and I expect actual work going into it. The story for all it's worth being your typical Medieval Fantasy clone had a lot of effort put into it and it's being held back and hampered by the rest of the game.
The monsters are fine, they look gruesome, orcs (I mean Darkspawn) look mean and all and all anything that isn't strictly sentient looks right menacing but I dont associate with them. I'm not them, they appear on the screen long enough for me to kill them and they come and go like a breath of air, I don't have to watch them on the screen constantly but I am stuck with the player models and NPCs who sit there and talk with me for eons. I don't know what a monster spider is supposed to look like but I can tell when it's done right because I have a basic idea of what a spider is like. They get to sort of get away with it because humans have a hard time telling the difference between any two dogs of the same breed that aren't there own pet. So our brains assume they are all alike because differentiating between them isn't something we need to do to survive. We know there are differences but we don't see them, so your typical fantasy monster gets away with it because maybe there's a wart, or a bridge of the nose that's too wide, or a jaw that's too narrow on them that let them tell each other apart, not that it's important because they wont get more than a few seconds of air time.
Also, magnetic spines, I thought we grew out of this? It's partially justified in a sci-fi setting but it looks painful in any other game. We couldn't make a sheathe or two? Really?
Sound
The music is bland and uninspiring. Compare the music to any other game that's out today, including amongst them Bioware's other works and you might notice a sharp jump in quality. I saw this coming after I had to put up with the first two location themes. There are a bunch of them too, one for the dwarves, one for the elves, one for the Darkspawn, but the basic underlying tunes are so generic I personally couldn't pull any feeling from them. Even right now I'm having a hard time remembering a few of the notes in my head and I'd just played the game a yesterday. Beyond that, I can't say much more for the music. It fills its purpose but let's just say I'll be willing to put a few dollars down that Bioware isn't going to be winning any awards because of this game's musical score.
A lot of people don't believe music can make or break a game but compare the success of the Final Fantasy series as tripe and old as that is with the Prince of Persia games. Can you remember a PoP theme? Can you remember a Final Fantasy theme? 10 years from now when someone's ringtone goes off are you more likely to be thrust back into nostalgia and years gone by playing great game-a or great game-b? Music is important to a game, it makes the happy moments happier, the tragic moments more tragic, and the intense moments more intense. The human mind remembers things least of all by how they looked. That's why when you go back to an old resident evil game it's not as scary as you remember because nothing in the game looks realistic enough. Mostly the human mind remembers smells, tastes, sound. And until the Smell N' Taste Master 3000 comes out we've only got our ears to really strike a musical chord with our memories.
The effects are terrible. You smack anything and it makes the same exact sound, from full plate to dragon hide to fleshy Darkspawn, every weapon uses the same bland vaguely metallic thunky ripping noise no matter what it smacks. In the real world, smacking a hammer on a car door sounds completely different from slashing a knife through a turkey. So why is it important bioware varies the clashing weapons? When you hear the cries of battle you remember the Darkspawn and the ogres, but you also remember killing the rats in the pantry. I like every thwack of my war-mace to be personal. If you hit something wholefully squishy and it goes "BWONG" it breaks the realism. Since combat seems to be ever present (if bland), this breakage occurs frequently.
A very minor gripe of mine is the walking sound effect. Walking on grass sounds like walking on grass and walking on wood sounds like walking on wood, but bioware only has about two steps for any one material. Can you say repetative (read: irritating)? Like listening to a clock tick away in a quiet room, it's utterly maddening!
The voice acting is superb. You can tell who's talking without looking at the screen. The different countries have accents (strange the races dont...) and I'm pretty sure if you had a room full of people clammering at once you could still pick one or two of the very destinctive voices out of the crowd. All of the voice actors (save one very annoying Lothering child) are excellent performers. They did a swell job and I congratulate them. The one-on-ones you get while walking around with your party are incredibly delightful, witty, humorous, and deep. It's not just idle chatter, it's chatter. I was actually surprised very early on in my quest when I wrestled Arl Howe into an intellectual corner. I acted like a complete jerk and then wished him well, I was shocked to receive a realistic response. Something along the lines of "Really? That's...unexpected of you...Thank you I guess?" Totally threw me off. Most of the interactions are typical stuff but sometimes someone says something you don't expect, or a character displays real emotion (despite emoting in their face only while standing around like a toy soldier) that makes me forget they're not real.
Animation
Everyone stands around like a chess piece when they talk to you. There's no emotion, everyones got perfect posture, and no one ever sits. There's no body language or idle chatter either, all of them just stand about like NPCs you'd find from your typical MMO waiting around for some lunatic with a penchant for slaughtering a very specific number of fuzzy animals to come by and talk to them. When two npcs talking to you need to address each other they cock their heads slowly to the left or right without moving any other portion of their body. It's like watching the T1000 only he's not a cop, and he's not a robot, and he isn't putting holes in people, and he's not standing in the middle of a lake of fire or a river of nitrogen, or in the middle of a cool explosion, or doing anything cool at all really. Hey, you're the hero! I'll focus on you REALLY HARD. Look at how polite I am staring at you face to face like I've got nothing to hide, like some completely honest person disregarding entirely how I actually feel about you! I could be the sniveling coward, the stalwart giant, or the plucky child, you're going to get the same straight-backed half-akimbo standing posture just like the last 30 people you talked to! Yeah..spiffy. What the hell man put down your arms! Are your pecks honestly so wide you can't put your hand in a pocket or something? Yeesh how tight is that vest?
Without talking to them, I get no sense that any of these beings are real people and when you're trying to make a believeable story it helps when it's not glaringly obvious you're interacting with NPCs. Go to a play where all the actors get the voices perfect, but all they do is stand around facing each other square-shouldered. Whenever they perform an action it's identical to the guy right next to them. You'd think effort would be put into some of the more important scenes but there isn't. Most of the cutscenes amount to you and the gang walking into a room and some important soul turning around to face you, again shoulders squarely facing you with arms dropped half forced to the sides, and start mouthing words with a stiff neck. Really? This is how we respond to everything? You break into a Dwarven base like this and the Dwarves stand around like dolts wondering if you're suppose to be there. Another direct comparison to an excellent game for the current generation, in Assassins Creed II (write what you know) every cutscene is acted out. When that lady is screaming with an arrow in her leg you friggen believe it because she's toppled over a table with men holding her down while she punches and bites and screams for someone to pull the damned thing out! If Dragon Age did this scene you'd have one of the characters laying down flat with an arrow poking out of their leg, with blood splattered all over their entire body despite the localized wound not moving. They wouldn't say a thing until you poked them. "Help!" They would exclaim. "There seems to be an arrow lodged in my leg!" And while the line may be delivered realistically and believeably the performance would be lost on the fact that the guy is just laying there doing little more than bending his eyebrows in a direction that would convey he dislikes the situation. Why do all of the people in this game sleep in their beds fully clothed on top of the covers by the way?
Fighting animations are terrible. The characters swings their weapons like clubs through air that is apparently made out of molasses. All of the strikes are badly telegraphed and the characters let the weight of their weapons throw them about. Who of us wants slow and steady when they think of a sword fight? The mages have something like 4 animations for whatever they're casting, and the archers have no sense of urgency when they reload or when a melee attack gets within range of them.
Something I do like are the custom ending flourishes. They're amusing but because you could be steering around any one of 4 looney toons you've got less than a 25% chance of seeing one of these nifty finishers because they dont always do them. It's much easier to get a glimpse of the cool when you slay a boss though because they'll always do it but since you've got no part in the event it really loses the fanfare. God of War did it better, for one, it actually involved player input.
Here are some minor notes I can't seem to fit anywhere proper just yet; Everyone talks in news-caster English if they're Fereldan Humans, found items are completely worthless next to how much money monsters drop, you can't click on a body to loot it until 10 minutes after it dies, item creation is a big waste of time because item drops are abundant and the monsters will always be the same level as you so honestly if you like the story you don't have to kill everything that moves to get something out of it. However if you like combat prepare for a cliche cookie-cutter been-there-done-that borefest that does not reward leveling up. Playing through any of the origin stories takes about 10 minutes so there's no reason to replay this game unless you unwisely chose to play a warrior, or you're achievement hunting. However I have heard that the Dwarvens origins are pretty epic so you might want to look into that.
Closing Statement
Graphics never stopped me from enjoying a good story and I'm not going to be returning it any time soon but I have suffered buyers remorse. Instead of Dragon Age, I could have replayed any of the other games I have lying around in the attic. Essentially I paid 60 bucks to avoid brushing dust off my unused consoles. I do wish to finish the game because the character interaction is one hell of a saving grace, but I would honestly rather play any other game on my shelf right now, including the games I've beaten into oblivion.
My final assessment is rent it, dont buy it.
