Dragon Age Origins

It’s been a while since a game has been reviewed that wasn’t obscure or… well really any game that Julian Horan didn’t review.  I come now to break that trend.  There are many people who have already spent well over a hundred hours playing this game, but that most likely includes all the Downloadable Content (DLC) and the expansion, Dragon Age Origins Awakening – which are four words that qualify for the most seemingly random title ever.   This game, without all the fancy bells and whistles that came after its initial release, is still a fantastic game to play and will take hours and hours of time from your other responsibilities.

Before the game even starts, you may spend an hour or two deciding what exactly you want yourself to look like.  Personally, I think this is overkill, but that’s a common theme to long RPGs nowadays.  There are several beginnings to this game’s story, depending on the race (human, elf, dwarf), class (mage, rogue, warrior), and area you choose to play.  For instance, if you choose a dwarf commoner, you have to escape from the dwarf king who has just killed his brother, but if you choose the human mage, you are resigned to starting in the mage’s tower, a place where you can be watched and kept under lock and key.  Each unique beginning quickly catches up with the main story: to become a Grey Warden and stop the evil “Darkspawn” from taking over the lands.  Things don’t go as easily as planned, however, and you’re left with forming a new army and recruiting party members along the way.  To create the army, you have to go to three different areas and complete a string of quests. Afterwards, you are promised an army when the time comes.  If you already think the story is obvious or find it lacking, don’t worry, the best part of the game is the combat, of which there is much.

Sugar, spice and everything nice.

If you’re used to Bioware’s games (Mass Effect 2, Knights of the Old Republic, even Jade Empire) then you’ll fit right in with this game.  You can have a party of up to four people, three of which you can change around while the main character is always present.  Each party member has their own special skills, spells, attributes, etc.  which you can tell them to use with the tactics option or take full advantage of by playing as that character yourself.  Don’t like that warrior you created after 20 hours of gameplay?  Would you prefer to play as a Morrigan, the saucy spell caster?  That’s ok.  Just always switch to the next member of your party.  To make the combat more thoughtful, you can pause the game every time combat begins, specify every action and directly manage the team.  It’s a great addition and incredibly useful, but can sometimes feel like it gets in the way of the flow.  In addition to the skills available to you through your class, which are many and various, there are also specializations that you can learn through books, party members or side quests.  They also allow for more skills to be learned, although I didn’t much care for any of them.

I'm pretty sure I killed this elf.

If fantasy isn’t your thing, then stay away from this game. There is a ton of stuff packed into this game: codices, letters, quests, side quests, histories, lore.  If you take the time to read everything and try to figure out the context of the world as a whole, you’re in for some long nights.  On the other hand if, like me, you just want to play the game, level as much as you can and then kill some dragons, you’ll still partake in a great gaming experience.  Everything fits well together, nothing seems like it was added without a point and you can do dozens of quests to keep you coming back for more.  The gameplay is a solid, hardcore experience that you’ll come to thoroughly enjoy the more you play.  Each of the abilities you learn are useful depending on the situation, and you can create your party to suit the kind of game you want to play.  The soundtrack also manages to have that medieval feel to it, present in most fantasy games.  There‘s always some lady, singing eerily.  I don’t know why that’s a staple for things like this, but there you go; I can’t fault a game for fitting into the genre, no matter how odd I think it is (chanting) or how much I hate it (elves).  The one thing I feel I should mention about the soundtrack as something just completely out of place doesn’t even happen during the game.  After about 4 minutes of credits rolling at the very end, all of a sudden, without any warning, a rock song comes on:  “This is War” by 30 Seconds to Mars.  My only thought at this time was, “what the hell?”  It doesn’t make the game worse, but it is funny.  Sorry for the spoiler.

4.5/5 Near Perfect Score! Super Good!

When Games Go Overboard

I'm not sure about you, but I love playing videogames. I would miss work or class if it meant I would get another shot at the boss who's been plaguing the land with evil. He had it coming, anyway. Don't get me wrong, if it's a day I cannot miss - for fear of getting fired or maybe some kind of exam - I'll take the hit and leave my game behind, but will no doubt crave some more play time until I get back in the action. Somehow, I still sound like an addict, but what about those games that make you feel like you have to keep going? Is it always a good thing for the game to present you with near-infinite quests in order to keep you busy? Games are designed to grab their audience and keep them playing, but when does the point of "too much" come?

Anyone who has played any Role Playing Game (RPG) will attest to the countless quests available to fill your time. This is not a bad idea. I know I always want to continue from one mission to the next, despite only one out of 30 being part of the core story. I'm not sure why we feel so compelled to deliver some letters, kill a few bandits, or trek the world, facing demons, beasts or terrorists in order to find one missing person, but we do. To add insult to injury, most quests don't even give rewards worth the time sunk into completing the task. I once spent three hours, traveling from one place to the next, enduring many loading screens and killing anything that got in my way, just to get an item I vendor'ed before the next mission. All gamers know this feeling. Some game developers even praise themselves for all the possible tasks to undertake in their game, while leaving the main story as a small drop in the bucket. The entire series of Grand Theft Auto is a prime example of when extras take over the story; another series that does this is Fable. Neither of these games are known for their gripping narratives or involving gameplay, but for their open-world environments and incredible possibilities (many of which most other games do not have). The aspects which make these games famous have nothing to do with the core of the game, so how does one judge a game when its so full of extra material that it overshadows the main story?

To be blunt, it makes the game worse. By the end of Fable 2, I was sure I finished a bad game. I wanted to keep playing and kill more store/house owners to buy up their property, but I wanted nothing to do with the core game. The story was tired and dry, many quests felt like re-done versions of quests from the first Fable and the ending was just awful (the final boss is you either shoot someone once or your team member does). As for Grand Theft Auto, I don't even know what the story is. I've never seen anyone play the game and do missions to advance the character or story, just a lot of stealing cars, driving around, and blowin' stuff up real good. What makes a game great is when the player gets involved with the characters and cares about whether or not they succeed. You cannot possibly think a game is good, but the characters and story were trash. To take it one step further, one can say the entire genre of RPGs is guilty of going overboard. When did it get to the point that gamers even care about the position of the protagonist's eyebrows or width of their ears? And that's before the game even starts. Once you get into the game, there are, of course, numerous Quest-Givers who ask for a certain number of this or for you to go somewhere and talk to that guy, which do nothing other than grant you some experience or money.

The problem with this is the idea that side quests and the main story are different games unto themselves. Recently, more and more games have a tendency to provide the character with choices which affect small parts of the story. Games like Dragon Age: Origins allow the player to kill possible members of your party. This doesn't do anything to the protagonist or for the story itself other than give you fewer party members from which to choose. If you already love your current party, why not kill everyone else? Definitely makes it less to manage.

The solution to this problem is to make the side quests, all the "extra junk", have some kind of impact on the story. IGN discussed the difficulty of being evil in games, but Super Dope Games wants to take it one step further (especially since I personally have always thought being bad was much easier and more fun): Leave nothing in the game that does not affect the story in some way. This means more than just how your party members talk to you or how random Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) react to you. The Mass Effect series takes a nice step in this direction by giving you optional material which helps you out. Sure, you can ignore all your people, but you can also talk to them and make them loyal, which gives them a bonus ability, making them better in a fight. The "extras" in Mass Effect are optional, but they more directly influence how well you do in-game. None of which force you to be the hero, by the way.

If you decide to kill a party member who's a famous member of a certain race, then let that race make things harder for you: coming to sabotage your missions, putting a price on your head, refusing you from entering areas they control. More to the point: if you choose to ally yourself with monsters, let the monster-killers hunt you. As for the "conversational reactions" present in most RPGs, the intricate choices of facial structure can influence those. If someone has a giant nose or, God Forbid! a mouth that slope down too far, then people should find the protagonist unattractive and be less friendly. Maybe that strays too far away from "everyone's beautiful in their own way" but we all know that's a lie anyway. People like attractive people.

Even the fact that these optional aspects of gaming are known as "extras" lets people know how little they matter. The main story, quests that one cannot avoid to complete the game, is what's most important. That doesn't mean the optional quests have to make less of an impact, and it doesn't mean you have to jam a game full of them just to keep the audience entertained. We just ask that what our character does, matters.