Rihards Online

For the past few days I’ve been playing Dragon Age: Origins, the new masterpiece from BioWare. Just like Blizzard, BioWare is one of those rare companies that only releases high quality games.

MDK 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect just to a name a few. Okay, I might have named almost all of them, but you get the idea.

So naturally I was very excited about Dragon Age and what BioWare would give us this time. Read on for my first impressions and screenshots.

DAO is a spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate set in a new and very dark universe. The story takes place in the kingdom of Ferelden and it starts with an “origin” storyline. That is each character class has its own starting story. My first character was a human noble (I know, how boring, but at the time I thought I’d enjoy playing that the most).

After completing your origin storyline and meeting Duncan, the leader of elite warriors known as the Grey Wardens, you are lead to becoming a Grey Warden yourself. Grey Wardens dedicate their lives into combating the Darkspawn, demon like creatures who want keep invading the surface and trying to kill everyone.

I’ll admit that I hadn’t read much about Dragon Age before playing it. I had only seen the trailer, so in a way I was expecting a game like Oblivion, or Risen/Gothic, but much to my pleasure it’s more like Baldur’s Gate. It uses a pause and play tactical combat system, so you pause the game, give orders, unpause, watch what happens and pause again.

This is very much the case even in Normal difficulty, you won’t get very far by just selecting your party and making them all attack. Choices must be made, do I make the mage use this spell now, do I issue the warriors an order to use these abilities, where do I position my archers, and so on.

If you want to play this game in real-time combat, then well it’s not really a game for you, or well maybe it is but you’ll have to play it on the Easy difficulty setting, otherwise your party will just keep getting wiped out.

As with other BioWare games the story and dialog is top notch. Unexpected (and some expected as well, but not so often) twists and turns. Gorgeous looking graphics even on older PCs. The soundtrack is brilliant as well, very fitting.

But as with all games there are some annoyances, in DAO’s case they are quite minor. First of all, the whole blood spraying thing. After killing a few rats (which were normal rat size I should add) the entire party was covered in blood splatters, from head to toe, all over. I know it’s a nice feature, but sometimes it’s just over the top.

One has to wonder if they all rubbed their faces in the dead rats when they were finished killing them.

Then there’s the camera. The camera is in an over the shoulder third person view when zoomed in, and an isometric-style view when zoomed out. Now it all sounds good, but I usually end up going into third person view when I want to see far ahead, or need to target someone who is far away, because the tactical zoomed out view doesn’t let me do it.

Putting those two very minor annoyances aside I’ve been enjoying Dragon Age: Origins immensely and can’t wait to see how it all ends!