More like Drags-On for an Age, eh? Eh?

So I've been trying scratch off a few of the RPG's clogging up my backlog, because they've become frighteningly overrepresented. Dragon Age: Origins really drained me. I started playing it way back in 2010 and I remember getting frustrated and taking a break from it, a break that wound up lasting well over a decade. After firing up a fresh playthrough I remembered what originally drove me away as soon as it reappeared. It's the undead siege at Redcliffe. Some semi-important NPC's can die during this sequence if you're not able to defend them, and your party will take a significant beating as well.

This leads me to the first of my major issues with Origins: the difficulty curve is all over the place. I was expecting this having heard such criticism from others, and I appreciate that some of that will come with the territory for a game that grants so much freedom in the order you tackle your quests, but your companions outright suggest you visit Redcliffe first, and I ignored them and went to the Circle Tower first! I should have been perfectly well leveled to take on the undead onslaught! It was at this point I cranked the difficulty down to easy because I was just getting bored and frustrated and was never going to finish the game at the pace I was going. Even then the Redcliffe sequence was a challenge but I pulled through.

I had hoped with the difficulty cranked down I could breeze through the rest of the game without the level of challenge yo-yoing back and forth and giving me a headache. However, the second major issue of the game soon became apparent: Two major questlines in the game are boring and abysmally paced, namely Orzammar and Denerim, the former in particular. Orzammar has you journeying down a series of dwarven mining tunnels fighting enemy after enemy, then having to backtrack to turn in a quest before setting out to do it again. It became tedious well before the halfway point.

Denerim doesn't fare quite as bad but it's meant to be completed last. The Landsmeet takes place there, a major payoff for many plot threads and the point of no return for the campaign, but there's a mess of stuff you have to do first, and I was simply exhausted by that point. But finally you get to confront the bastard who betrayed you at the start of the game, and for a minute it looks like you will get to confront him with all the his assholery you uncovered through all the sidequests and win the crowd to your side. But then you pick one of his crimes as a dialogue option and the game moves on. Did I even have to do all that other stuff? Who knows, but this is a massively missed opportunity to reward the player for such a massive time investment.

In the end the first two questlines I completed, the Circle Tower and Redcliffe were the better paced of the whole game, meaning the enjoyability of my playthrough was incredibly front-loaded. The endgame did little to change this. Having played so many Bioware games that have come out since Dragon Age: Origins really set me up for some unrealistic expectations. DA:O was really the trial run for Mass Effect 3. You're journeying all over looking for allies for a united front against a threat against all that's good. It amuses me a little that so much controversy surrounded the “meaningless” choices in Mass Effect 3, because from where I stand ME3 did it much better, red/blue/green endings notwithstanding.

In ME3 you had your team and allies checking in with you throughout the final mission. Dialogue lines were recorded for whether you had saved the Quarians, the Geth or both. There were heaps of story content you would miss out on had you gotten half your companions killed in one way or another. Mass Effect 3 had plenty of flaws, but it gleams compared to the endgame in Dragon Age. Almost none of your choices or accomplishments feel reflected in the endgame. Almost every player is going to hear all of the same dialogue with only a handful of choices reflected in the final hours. What you do get is a menu of summonables based on the factions you recruited throughout the game. This has more gameplay ramifications than story ones, which some might prefer, but didn't wow me. To cap it off, the epilogue of the game is relegated to text over still images. This looks cheap compared to what Fallout 1 was doing in 1997. At least there you had Ron Pearlman narrating the fate of the people and places you visited.

I'm surprised that I've heard almost no criticism from the fanbase over how underwhelming Orgins' endgame is considering titles from around the same time like Deus Ex: Human Revolution or the aforementioned ME3 gained quite the negative reputation over their endings. It's also quite impressive how much better implemented Mass Effect 2's Suicide Mission was despite releasing less than three months after Dragon Age. It gives off the appearance that Bioware shifted their priorities towards the end of Dragon Age's development.

But what of the story overall? I'm something of a resident hater here of Bioware's writing, if only because they've received what I feel is overzealous praise over the decades. I consider most of Bioware's writing merely “good by video game standards.” Few games have truly exceeded Bioware's writing accomplishments, but plenty of games are on par with them, and you don't often hear those other games compared to Dune or Blade Runner or Lord of the Rings. However, over the years I've softened a fair bit in my criticisms of Bioware, particularly when I replayed the Mass Effect trilogy via the Legendary Edition. Garrus is a terrific character, I think Miranda Lawson and EDI's character arcs are underappreciated, and we can never have too much Keith David. All that said, Dragon Age is virtually everything I've ever disliked about Bioware writing with few of its redeeming qualities.

Of the stronger elements I would say Morrigan's character fares the best. It's rather fun to have such a canonically mean-spirited character in a Bioware party, and even if you manage to soften her up, by the end she's at best chaotically neutral. It's a refreshing novelty from all of the goody-two-shoes typically populating your party in a Bioware game, and her dialogue and performance are very well executed.

A standout feature of the story is the namesake of the game, in that you get to choose an origin for your character which can give them personal ties to different NPCs that every player will encounter regardless of origin. Having only played through the game as a mage, it feels unnatural to me that a player with a different origin will experience the story with no relationship to characters like Jowan and Irving, and instead will have history with the dwarves or Dalish elves. It's impressive how natural the integration of your backstory feels, and I imagine was a major focus during development and a reason the late-game suffers.

I also appreciated that the order you tackle your quests can have certain impacts on future quests. For example, at the end of the Redcliffe quest you need to seek out help from the Circle of Magi so they can excorcise a demon. To do this I would have had to complete the Circle Tower quest had I not already done it, but since I had, this was a trivial matter. This is one of the more noticeable implementations of quest progression, and I would have appreciated more effort on this front.

I feel like there was some additional missed potential for player choice to impact quest progression on the gameplay front, being a die-hard fanboy of OG Fallout. In that game, the player can use the knowledge of previous playthroughs to make significant strategic decisions in the order they visit locations. As you travel through the wasteland the clock ticks down as Vault 13's water supply dries up, and the player must ask themselves questions like whether they should make a beeline for the replacement water chip in Vault 12, or is it better to stock up on better gear and character upgrades by visiting the Brotherhood of Steel first?

I felt some similar implementation would have benefited Dragon Age significantly, though the game would have had to have been scaled down significantly, not just to free up resources, but also because a typical Dragon Age playthrough takes three times as long as that of Fallout. Fewer players will want to jump back in for a second go-around when the time investment is so much higher. One of the villages you visit early in Dragon Age becomes overrun by Darkspawn as soon as you leave and can't be revisited. Perhaps extending this to every location in the game would be harsh and frustrating, but at the very least I would find it interesting if more powerful Darkspawn variants were to start showing up the longer you dawdled through the game. It simply feels like a missed opportunity that you can travel from one corner of the map to the other and back again as many times as you wish with the only consequence being a possible random encounter.

Even Mass Effect 2 is more interesting on this front. I always recruit Mordin as soon as possible to unlock the character upgrades available in the lab. I always complete Thane and Samara's loyalty missions as soon as they become available because they feature no combat and grant you some EXP and skill unlocks to make future missions easier. I don't consider this master-class game design, but it has certainly made my dozen or so playthroughs of ME2 more enjoyable.

Apart from the previously mentioned semi-praiseworthy aspects of Dragon Age's story,on the whole it is pretty mediocre. It's pretty much a merger of A Song of Ice and Fire and Lord of the Rings that manages to feel blander than either. There's racism against elves that was already tackled better in video game form by the Witcher two years earlier, never mind the books. Most of the characters besides Morrigan were average at best. Outside of gameplay implications I wouldn't feel panicked during my playthrough if I accidentally got any of them killed, which I didn't. I liked some of the world-building surrounding the Fade, its connection to dreams, how mages tap into it to wield magic, and how demons that reside there can possess a person as they dream, but I wouldn't say any of this lit up my imagination. A particular lowlight was any exposition over the origin story for this setting involving the Maker and Andraste and a bunch of other melts that had no lasting impression. Any time the dialogue turned to religious beliefs in this world I spent a lot of time hitting the spacebar to skip ahead, and this happened a lot.

At this point I've written 14 paragraphs of mostly negative commentary, so it sounds like I loathed this game, but I didn't. I would put it in the “good not great” category, but feel the need to highlight my negative impressions given that this game receives such lavish praise from its community, especially compared to the series' sequels. These negative elements also became increasingly impactful as my playtime winded into the dozens of hours and repetition continued to set it. The game would have benefited from being shorter and tighter.

But to focus on some of the better elements, the turn-based combat is solid. The pause-at-any-time pseudo turn-based RPG combat style has never been to my liking. The only previous game that I've ever completed that used it was KotOR, which I remember very much liking, but that was nearly twenty years ago, and I'm not sure what I would think of it now. Full on turn-based systems like Persona, or tactical-RPG's like Wasteland 3 are much more my jam, but Dragon Age had enough going for it to keep me playing to the end. The game allows you to tune your parties tactics with what are essentially a series of if → than functions which I imagine some would get a lot out of, but after fooling around with it here and there it eventually got too tedious revising it every time I unlocked a new ability. I just went with the pre-baked templates available and added a few tweaks here and there. This left my companions AI with a little to be desired, requiring more micro-managing, but there was enough fun to be had regardless. Using immobilizing attacks so you can freely arrange your party to most effectively dish out AoE spells and abilities is a fun tactic I mainly gravitated towards.

I also like that the game has no binary morality meter, instead opting for a reputation system for each of your companions. A choice you make can improve your relationship with one companion while simultaneously angering another. It's an interesting approach where even decades later I can't recall any other series attempting something similar. If another developer were to take a crack at such a feature, I can think of many ways to improve upon it. In Dragon Age your choices are only relevant to the companions currently in your party, making it very easy to game the system by switching up your party. I didn't do this often since it required a lot of reloading saves and hearing the same dialogue, and there other exploits that make this unnecessary. You can give gifts to your companions to boost your relationship with them, and they aren't in short supply. Some gifts are locked to certain characters only and tie in with their backstory in some way, and will sometimes unlock new dialogues with them. This is a fun reward for completing the side-quests where you'll discover said gifts. One of the game's DLC packs make this feature a triviality. I was able to effortlessly max out the friendship meter of every companion and still had dozens of gifts in reserve to give them if I happened to do something to piss them off.

In the end, Dragon Age is decent but I'm going to need a palate-cleanser before hopping into another RPG of its kind. I've already returned to Remnant: From the Ashes despite finishing it a few years ago. It's also an RPG but it's solid action gameplay and progression help keep the experience fresh despite experiencing a lot of the same content over and over. It's remarkable how much more enthusiastic I am to play it compared to my weeks trying to finish Dragon Age. The more traditional RPG's in my backlog like a Final Fantasy or even (shudder) Dragon Age: Inquisition are going to have to wait until next year. Any sooner and they might actually kill me.