Dragon Age looks to be just another RPG, but thankfully, looks can be deceiving, cause DAO is a fantastic experience!
Dragon Age Origins is one of the deepest, most thoughtful and complex RPG's ever made.
From the varying origin sequences, this game has alot of possibilities. And the choices...oh how Bioware loves choices...each and every choice you make has an impact on the story as it unfolds. You can easily play the story through 3 times over, and feel like you're playing a completely different game each and every time.
Bioware, as usual, excels at creating characters that are interesting, starting with your own. And, with each and every character you gain, you get a little more depth, deeper into them, deeper into the world of the game, deeper into the weight of the choices you make, and the conflicts and alliances that these choices create throughout.
The story, which starts off as a pedestrian Tolkienesque tale, begins to take shape as you gather your team moving through the world. The stakes feel high, for everyone involved, at which point it shifts from a high fantasy and begins to dip it's toes into something more like Michael Moorcock...something with far more shades of gray than Tolkien black and white.
The characters, as well, share these subtle shifts in tones. The heroes have doubts, the feared have cause, and even with obvious evil on the horizon, there is a sense of a world without a clear sense of itself in need of reunification.
Gameplay is just as strong as story and character in this game, and the gameplay does not disappoint. Certain fights are challenging, and some are just downright hard, but they remain rewarding, and never grow tired of themselves or the mechanics in which they work.
There is, to be critical, that familiar Bioware sense of "gimmicky" manipulation of the approval system, where you can buy off the loyalty of members who do not approve of the choices you make with gifts, which I feel, takes away from the need of living with the choices you make a little too much. I only point this out, because the choice system, and it's rewards and consequences of how the game plays out in light or dark of them is so right on, that buying the approval of characters who, by all rights, should hate you a little, feels like it robs the strongest and most well executed element of this game of a good deal of it's weight and significance.
But, it is not too strong a point that it ruins the experience, and the experience, and the journey, remains very solid from beginning to end.
Graphically, I've seen better games, but don't tell that to my GPU, cause it made so much noise playing this game, and blew out so much hot air from my case, I thought I was playing Crysis all over again. For a game that looks, well, average to my eyes, it is a resource and system hog. I hope most of you can play this in the winter, cause DAO will turn your computer into a space heater while you're playing it.
Complaints aside, it's a fantastic game. Easily one of the best ye old lore RPG's to come into my life in a good long while, and one of the more challenging ones at that. There's wells of depth both in story, characterization, and subplots, to keep you at this for dozens upon dozens of hours, with plenty enough left undone to play through again, and many things resolved in ways that will make you want to play through again, just to see if different choices bring out more pleasing or dire results...which they do and will.
Bioware hit a home run with this game, and if they made you live with the choices you made completely, the ball would have gone out of the park. Nonetheless, it's a landmark game...maybe not the best they've made, but it's up there, and while it's impact won't be as instantly spectacular as Mass Effect 2, it's lasting appeal and future expandability will lay a solid foundation for a future that insures that gamers who want the next generation of Diablo/Baldur's/NWN style of games will get them, and they'll continue to deliver rewarding experiences that will allow these games to endure for a good while yet.