Product Details
 | Dragon Age: Origins |
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Product Description
Become immersed in a dark and heroic fantasy world realized with BioWare’s trademark depth and expertise, enriched with its own unique lore and brought to life by some of the best artists in the industry. Deep customization gives you control over your character in Dragon Age. Race, appearance, abilities, and equipment all affect how you look. What you do will affect how you are perceived. Your origin defines your place in the world and how others see you. These playable sequences introduce the world and let you decide how your character becomes a hero, setting the tone for the entire story to come. Stand at the heart of the storm sweeping across Ferelden. Choose the fates of nations, people and, ultimately, yourself. Just remember: for every choice, there is a consequence. Control your perspective as you guide a party of four into battle. Issue orders, build your own tactical AI, or take control of any party member to lead the charge. Downloadable content will provide you with exciting new stories and ways to expand your Dragon Age experience beyond the original game. Use the provided toolset to author your own adventures to share with friends.Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1014 in Video Games
- Brand: Electronic Arts
- Model: DragonOrigin-pc
- Released on: 2009-11-03
- ESRB Rating: Mature
- Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP
- Format: CD-ROM
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .40 pounds
Features
- Scalable combat options that let you decide the level of control you have over your party, including NPCs. Issue orders, set your own tactical AI, or take control of any party member to lead the charge.
- 6 possible playable preludes known as 'Origin Stories' which along with your play, define how your hero character will see the world, how it sees you and sets the tone for the entire story.
- Travel across the vast and varied lands of Ferelden; from the conspiratorial halls of the last great dwarven city, Orzammar, to the untamed snarls of the Korcari Wilds.
- Dragon Age: Origins will give you deep character customization options including: class, race, appearance, abilities, and equipment.
- At the heart of the storm sweeping across Ferelden. Decide the fate of nations, people and, ultimately, yourself. Just remember: for every choice, there is a consequence.
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Product Description
Customer Reviews
Kind of like a cross between Witcher and KOTOR 2
Dragon Age is a kind of game
that is becoming increasingly rare: a deeply immersive single-player RPG
with an interface clearly designed for the PC. It's easy to sling
around the word "immersive" at any game that looks pretty, but DA isn't
messing around - the world of Ferelden shows a unified sense of design
and depth that blows even famously vast games like Oblivion out of the
water. Coupled with consistently excellent writing and across-the-board
quality character design even down to relatively unimportant NPCs, the
game truly does feel like it's reacting to your choices dynamically from
the very beginning, and how you play your character can have amazingly
subtle effects on the way the story unfolds.
Graphically, the
game's a little uneven. All the design elements are there, and it has
plenty of high-quality textures and strong environmental visuals -
particularly fire effects. The polygons themselves, particularly on
character faces, are a little simpler than you'd expect from a 2009
game. Overall, the game looks about on level with Oblivion, although the
visual distinctiveness and design ethic of areas and characters are
significantly better. Animation stands out as a strong suit here,
particularly during the game's frequent dialog sequences, with none of
the dead-eyed staring or bizarre walk cycles that plagued other RPGs
like Fallout 3.
Gameplay is pretty straightforward, and very much
in keeping with previous Bioware titles like Knights of the Old
Republic and Mass Effect. You control a party of up to four characters,
each of whom develops a plethora of useful abilities to keep track of.
The inclusion of a minor programming element (very much in keeping with
the gambit system from Final Fantasy XII) will let you set up a few
default actions on each character so you're not stuck frantically
switching between them to make sure they drink their healing potions,
but battles frequently require some degree of tactical planning. Setting
up ambushes and planning your party strategy to play to strengths is
necessary to get through some tougher areas. The interface is,
shockingly, clearly tailor-made for the PC (the console versions have
their own interfaces designed from the bottom up and are apparently
easier games to allow for the sacrifice in easy access to skills). You
have an insane number of quick-access slots, and nearly the entire
keyboard is bound to one thing or another. It's the kind of interface
that hasn't been in vogue since before the PS2 came out. The game is
extremely linear, although the frequent and varied dialog options give
it the feel of a more free-roaming game, and it's very tempting to go
back and replay huge chunks of the game just to see how the complex and
dynamic conversations will play out. The main downside is that there's
no easy way to level-grind, which is to the game's benefit to a point
(no tedious circling around killing wolves) but occasionally means you
can get in over your head.
What the game sacrifices in terms of
sandbox free-roaming it more than makes up with in the excellent writing
and characterization. An absurd attention to detail and
across-the-board excellent voice acting breathes a lot of life into the
game's conversations, which make up a significant chunk of gameplay.
Characters are extremely varied and the interplay between them is a
major draw, a trademark of Bioware's games, but Dragon Age has some of
the most likable characters I've ever seen in a video game and the
excellent performances from talents like Tim Curry, Kate Mulgrew and
Claudia Black really put the game a notch above. Even the game's fairly
generic-on-the-surface fantasy world is livened up by a few critical
details - for example, the elves in Dragon Age are a massive underclass
of servants.
It's actually difficult to find things to level
complaints against in this game. One petty gripe is Morrigan's visual
design - her character is one of the game's strongest, and she has great
personality and some very clever writing, but visually she's a pair of
giant breasts with a cloth draped improbably over them. Other women in
the game are treated with a bit more restraint, though, and female armor
is gratifyingly sensible. Another issue is that it can be difficult to
manage battles on the fly, and accurately targeting enemies with skills
frequently requires tactical pausing just to line the cursor up over
their relatively small active areas. It's a petty annoyance, but the
game clearly wasn't meant to be played Diablo-style anyway.
A few
other things to know about the game:
-The game is mostly DRM-free,
and ships only with a simple disc check. EA has a reputation for fouling
up its customers' computers with DRM malware, but DA seems to be free
of those problems.
-If Dragon Age were a movie, it would be rated R. I
don't remember ever seeing any swearing, oddly, but the game is rife
with violent imagery, extremely dark themes and frank sexuality
(including a handful of relatively tasteful sex scenes and occasional
demonic nudity). The game handles all of it with maturity and depth, but
it's clearly not meant for children, and even parents of younger teens
should be cautious.
Overall, Dragon Age is one of the strongest
games to come out in recent memory, and is another installment in
Bioware's increasing resume of superbly-written RPGs. Players looking
for a fast-paced hack-and-slash "rpg" should look elsewhere, but anyone
who likes deep and elegant plot development, memorable characters and
excellent role-playing will love this game.
The best RPG of 2009
Before diving into the
review, a brief summary: Dragon Age Origins is the epic role playing
game that many of us have been waiting for since we first fell in love
with the genre with the classic Baldur's Gate. It drops the player into
an immersive fantasy world rich with lore and compelling settings. The
aesthetics and score are as pleasing and engrossing as a good cinematic
feature or novel. And while it is spectacular in just about every way,
it is not without its faults (mostly technical in nature, and affects
players with very specific computer hardware as far as I can tell - I'll
explain more later). In short, if you're a fan of the genre you will do
yourself a favor by purchasing and experiencing this game. I have never
felt more comfortable suggesting a RPG to the Internet-at-large as I do
right now with Dragon Age. I will swear upon whatever holy text you
prefer that it's the best single-player RPG to come along since Fallout
3. If you're not a theist, I suppose I could place my hand upon a
photograph of Carl Sagan before making the same solemn vow. But I
digress. Onto the review. Aspects I found positive are preceded by a
(+), negative aspects a (-).
GAME PLAY
(+) Dragon Age
(hereby referred to as "DA") plays like a perfect hybrid of turn-based
and real-time RPGs of yore. The controls are a mash up of overhead
tactical maneuvering ala Baldur's Gate and the third-person RTS-like
mechanics found in Knights of the Old Republic. You control character
movement with either the WASD keyboard directions familiar to MMO and
FPS players, or via mouse-click navigation (concurrently). You can play
from a third-person perspective to get a full view of the world around
you, or zoom out into an overhead tactical view to aid in unit placement
and positioning (in which the graphics take on the painted look and
feel of Baldur's Gate - a nice touch). The camera may be controlled with
either the keyboard or mouse. All around, stellar.
(+) The UI
makes a powerful and elegant use of economy of space (it fits a lot into
a little, all while looking and playing extremely well)
(+)
Character customization is as rich if not richer than any other RPG
hybrid or pure RPG on the market - past or present. You have standard
archetypes (warrior, mage, rogue) which alone have various "trees" or
avenues of progression focusing upon things like weapon preference
(sword + shield, dual wield, two-handed, etc) or general and crafting
skills. In addition there are specialist classes that excel at specific
vocations (such as the mage-nullifying Templar, shape shifting mage, or
crit-happy Duelist - to name a few). On top of this, special abilities
and vocations may be unlocked by finding rare items or special quests
(often a combination of both)
(+) Combat is highly tactical,
taking into account elevation, range, "crowd control" mechanics, and
vast synergy between the abilities of your party members
(+) A
deep tactics system can be utilized, in which you assign a custom AI to
each of your characters based upon a variety of criteria and situations.
For example, you can tell your mage that every time they're surrounding
by two or more melee mobs, they cast a certain crowd control spell. If a
party member has less than 50% health, heal them. Or have your tank
taunt mobs that attack the mage. Or have the rogue stun the mobs your
main character is fighting. Etc.
(-) Melee-centric characters
draw from a pool of stamina to perform their various abilities and
group-enhancing skills. This pool feels very limited, even when you
invest heavily into the stat that grants more stamina. It's further
hampered by injuries that your characters will sustain, on occasion,
while fighting (which are treated with injury kits or by resting at your
camp). Hopefully this will be tweaked in a future patch.
STORY,
PRESENTATION, & SETTING
(+) The seemingly hackneyed story
(you`re the last in a long line of sacred warriors who's mission is to
vanquish a very particular foe) quickly unfolds into a compelling,
immersive, and interesting tale that rivals those found in quality
fantasy novels and movies. Each race, town, city, and region are wholly
unique and diverse - from the political intrigue of Dwarven society to
the juxtaposition of the city and forest Elves (and the layers of
complexity involved therein). I can't go too much into this without
potentially spoiling the many excellent stories. Suffice to say, it's
superb.
(+) While the world isn't technically "open", being
divided into many instanced zones (if you will), it is nevertheless
truly vast. Most areas are substantially large. There is no limit to
draw distance: your viewing distance is essentially to infinity, and
most zones can be fully explored to the smallest nook and cranny (and it
pays to do so). You unlock more areas as the game progresses (and the
areas vary depending upon your origin and choices), and there's a
complete underground zone in addition to the zone all non-Dwarves start
within.
(+) The story is always evolving and changing. Your most
minor, or major, decisions regarding plot or character interactions will
have lasting repercussions that may not come to fruition for some time.
You can build intimate relationships with characters, and being an
active participant in the dialogue and lore pay huge dividends in the
end
(+) Replayability is very high - due largely to the
aforementioned dynamic story, as well as the "Origins" part of the DA
title: different race and class combinations have different starting
stories, and merge into the overall arc in different ways and at
different times
PERFORMANCE
(+) The games looks, sounds,
and plays perfectly well on middling hardware
(-) If you own a
dual or quad core AMD CPU, expect gradually increasing load times as
your session time increases (the longer you play and the more you
transition between zones, the longer the load times become). From 5 to 7
seconds at first, upwards of 5 minutes after 45 minutes to an hour of
play. This can be resolved by restarting the game, which literally only
takes about 20 seconds. But still, it's frustrating, and many people are
reporting it on the official forums. Hopefully it will be patched.
(-)
The first PC patch was a bit of a goof: the new build included a newer
version of the Visual C++ 2005 runtime, while the retail version had an
older build. The result was that many people couldn't launch the game
after patching. A trivial issue for the computer savvy (I just checked
my event logs and saw the issue then patched), but the lay person would
have no idea what's going on. After days Bioware has yet to respond
officially with the obvious fix, leaving it to the community to resolve.
That behavior and communication casts doubt upon the level of
commitment Bioware has in regards to DA from a technical support
perspective.
Overall, the few technical issues are far
outweighed by the overall quality of the game. I would provide a more
in-depth review, but I am honestly afraid that I'll accidentally spoil
something, as this game is ridiculously vast. Buy this game. You will
not be disappointed.
THE RETURN TO
THE AGE OF THE CLASSICS!
First things first: in the
past I have chastised EA a number of times for its release of
cookie-cutter games, crippled with atrocious DRM schemes. So, in all
fairness, I now have to say this: DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS IS A GAMER's
DREAM! It is an excellent game - and it comes FREE of any DRM madness.
So, thank you EA for listening to your customers (let's only hope this
new trend holds...).
This is one of those games that are easy to
control, a joy to roam through and fun to play at no end.
I am a huge
cRPG fan and cannot remember such a great companion/squad cRPG ever
since the Baldur's Gate Saga. And to tell you the truth, this is the
game I was dreaming of being able to play one day while playing BG
(yeah, by now we all know that NEVERWINTER NIGHTS never delivered).
There
are about a dozen gender/race/class/background choices and a great many
combinations in forming your party. The armor and the weapons are
exceptionally made and everything shows on your characters. And the
graphics are truly beautiful! You have to see the rendering of flames to
believe them.
Nevertheless, what really stands out is the gameplay.
Every battle is a puzzle to be solved, pausing ever so often to
reallocate enemies to the best suited party members (a feature I loved
in BG!). Of course one can always turn off the autopause feature and let
the AI take over the rest of your party and turn the game into an
hack&slash action RPG (not exactly my cup of tea but, hey, it's
still nice to know it's there).
Finally, this is a game made just
like the classics in many ways, including duration. I am now playing
the game for over 20 hours and I feel that I barely scraped the surface!
DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS is one satisfying RPG!
My only gripe is
this: I did not appreciate such short dialogue options. Most fit a
single line and more often than not they consist of a couple of words. I
like my RPGs to be wordy and challenging to my verbal imagination as
well - and I want my characters to participate in the humor, not just
provoke it or react to it. Remember the long dialogue options in BG?
Well, expect to find DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS much more laconic.
I guess
10 years of fast-paced FPS and blitzkrieging RTS do take their toll...
The
blood sprays, the swords clang and the spells explode. The animations
are beautifully made and add a lot to both enjoyment and immersion.
There is a verse in Homer's Iliad I love: "the warrior fell and his
armor echoed around him" - and I was reminded of it many a times
throughout the game.
This game will stay with you. Do not miss on
it.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
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