Dragon Age: Origins
Let me start off by saying that I never go out of my way to actively break a game. I do things the game tells me to do, and more often than not, I actually can get to the ending. It is thus surprising that for a game touted as the next best RPG since Oblivion, Dragon Age: Origins seem to be plagued with a great number of technical issues.
I’m fairly certain the people with decked out monstrosities for desktops would run this game fine, but my 1 and a half year old laptop handled Assassin’s Creed 2 fairly decently, and I assumed it wouldn’t be a problem for Dragon Age. Orzammar was a non-interactive environment that at any given loading point was probably 1/40th of the size of Venice in AC2 – it wasn’t that hard to make that logical jump that a decent laptop could probably run something that only came out months after the biggest sandbox game ever.
I met with freezing cutscenes, quests that wouldn’t complete (the NPC disappeared; even reloading the game had no effect), quests that completed but still had the quest tracker over the NPC’s heads and lagging spells that would only activate 5 seconds after it was cast.
Other smaller glitches included my party members speaking to me with their helmets on (which resulted in a fairly amusing encounter with my main character attempting to kiss through Alistair’s helmet. It looked like his head was going to snap from THE INTENSITY OF THE ROMANCE), dialogue that claimed one thing when I made sure that I did not get that outcome and receiving no attribute points after leveling.
The most frustrating point was when I was forced to skip through most of the dialogue during the Landsmeet (the dialogue climax of the game) because it kept freezing midway. The forums suggested a variety of fixes, which only amplified the multitude of coding problems that were present in the game.
A few solutions were to run the game on one core (a memory leak issue), disable the sound (a sound coding issue), or to reload the game (game processing issue). I’d probably need Kali’s 10 arms to count the number of times I did all three, and in the end I had to skip the dialogue as quickly as possible, hoping that I might squeeze through and make it to the end of the autosave once the cutscene ended.
Which is an enormous shame, because the world of Dragon Age immerses you. While it is still essentially an “Alliance versus Horde and dragons figure in the mix somewhere”, they manage to bring a classic with a few twists to the head. The dwarves are American, not Scottish, the city elves are slaves to the humans and the Dalish elves are Italian, and the humans are… well, still medieval armor wearing, territorial seeking assholes. The story behind the dwarves and Branka’s determination, I must admit, scared me in a morbid and fascinating way. It’s the type of horrific disaster that you can’t wait to hear the next part, and it’s quite empowering to actually have a say in Branka’s decision in the end. It all boils down to one point: immersion.
(At which point immersion is completely thrown out the window when one encounters the multitude of processing problems that plague this game.)
I played an elf mage first and a human rogue on my second playthrough, and I have to say: class balance probably didn’t figure much in creating these classes. Warriors and Rogues have about 8 abilites each, but they just threw everything in when it came to the mage. The number of spells are staggering; to the point where every spell can’t possibly fit on your bar, especially if you wind up specializing in 2 trees. Warriors and rogues are essentially DPSers, and warriors turn into tanks through passive abilities + shield, but mages are crowd controllers, healers, debilitators and AoE and single target DPSers all at once.
You wonder why there are only 2 mages and 7 melee damage dealers in the entire party that you could potentially accrue.
The allocation for attributes were also rather skewed. Essentially, as a mage, you could just dump all your points in two main attributes – willpower and magic – but distributing it for tanking warriors was a slow and agonizing process, because they require 4 of the 6 attributes to be a proper tank (strength to wear massive armor, dexterity to miss attacks, constitution for physical resistance, and willpower to have enough stamina to use your abilities). It wasn’t all the surprising to see the threat generation poorly done, where my overpowered mage would slice an enemy’s health bar in half because the melee did tick damage, and the enemy would zoom straight for her.
It was also fairly annoying to realize that the ending that I wanted on my elf mage (Alistair as king and my character as queen) wasn’t going to be possible with the double whammy of not being a human nor a warrior/rogue. Which led me to create another character, and to be honest, being a rogue is ridiculously boring. I stopped playing after the first major quest was done on the second playthrough; I don’t know if I’ll pick it back up.
The romance options were cute in the beginning, and turned into disappointment when I couldn’t lesbo Morrigan. The only same-sex relationship was with an overzealous religious woman whose character I honestly couldn’t like at all. The other male-female relationship was with an elf who tried to kill you and whose loyalties were doubtful the moment you recruited him. Yeah, no. So romancing the future king it is then!
I would have enjoyed Dragon Age a lot more had I not run into so many bugs in the game, as much as I was disappointed in not being able to get the outcome I wanted on my main character. In short, great story with a few unique twists, but playing the story itself just bogs it all down.
