Dragon Age: Origins — 100 hours in

Disclaimer: I work for EA, and I used to work for BioWare. My opinions are my own.

Disclaimer 2: I think you should go out and buy this game right now. I’m going to say a lot of critical things about it, but if you have or have ever had any love for RPGs, just go buy it. Nothing that I say should keep you from playing it.

Dragon Age: Origins is an odd game in that I don’t think you can rate it on just one scale. On the one hand, the metacritic score on PC is 91 (and 88 on consoles), which speaks to how good the game is. It’s a classic RPG in the same vein as Baldur’s Gate. There are multiple dialogue options, conversations between the followers, magic, swords, dragons, good, evil and everything in between.

On the other hand, I find it hard to reconcile the 91 rating with the fact that every 4 seconds I have a new bug or complaint about it. I’ve played it for approximately 100 hours between two platforms — XBox 360 and PC — so it can’t be a BAD game, but there are so many things wrong, I find myself wondering how they couldn’t have caught this one flaw, or why they decided something was a good design decision when it obviously wasn’t. Dragon Age, then, needs a rating of how BAD it is as well; how likely it is to make you want to throw your controller, or say, “Really BioWare? REALLY?” On that scale, I figure it’s running a good 75, because I’ve uttered that phrase more than once…though I’ve yet to throw my controller.

I’m going to list thing things that I can remember that drive me crazy about the game. This may seem nitpicky or pedantic, but I honestly feel that if BioWare put enough time into the game to try and make it a rich gaming experience, it’s only right that I pay enough attention to the details to notice what’s bad about it. Honestly, I think it would be worse for me to shrug my shoulders and walk away from it; it would have meant they didn’t make any impression on me at all.

Everything after this point is likely to be a spoiler. Don’t read it if you don’t want certain plot elements to be revealed to you.

There’s no particular order to these, just how they came to mind.

• If you side with the Werewolves instead of the Dalish, you lose a supplier of infinite Elfroot, a component used to make certain potions in the game. I haven’t sided against the Mage’s Circle in any of my playthroughs yet, but I suspect that you could similarly lose that supply of Lyrium Dust for mana potions. DA:O is generally even-handed in that if you make an ‘evil’ decision, it doesn’t judge you for it, but in this case with the Dalish, you end up at a significant disadvantage for the rest of the game. It would be one thing if the Werewolves were somehow better or more useful than the Dalish, but they’re not. There’s a morality imposed upon you with no prior warning, which is bad. You MIGHT happen to have a savegame that allows you to go back far enough to try stockpiling the resource, but there are other design issues surrounding that.
• There’s no stash in the world unless you pay for it. Sorry, but that’s lame. Inventory management isn’t a fun part of most games, and it certainly isn’t a fun part of this one. You end up paying $7 to complete the gameplay experience, not enhance it.
• On the XBox equipping items doesn’t seem to remove them from the bag inventory slot. Bug or by design, I don’t know, but I hate it.
• The auto-save system is archaic and bad. There are 5 autosave slots. The game doesn’t autosave often, and sometimes not before very important events. It certainly doesn’t save before world events (like the arrival of Zevran). Sometimes it saves before fights that are more or less impossible for you to win, for whatever reason. It’s easy to get stuck at some point in a dungeon with no way out to get more potions or whatever else you might need, so you either struggle through and hope to get lucky, or you go back to a really old save and lose potentially hours of progress. All the players I know have developed a quick-save twitch, and I try to re-use save slots on my XBox, but I’ve got at least 25 saves running at this point.
• You’re required to keep a rogue in your party for any chest. There’s no spell to open a chest (like in D&D) and your warriors can’t bash it open. If you’re a rogue, you’re forced to spend points on lock picking, but it’s unclear how helpful that is. With 4 points in the lock picking talent, I was still unable to open chests in Andraste’s temple. Maybe my cunning was too low, but I have no idea how any of this affects the potential to open a chest.
  • Even worse, if your character isn’t a rogue, there are chests at the beginning of the game that you can never open, because you don’t get your first rogue until Lothering.
  • Leiliana is a good-aligned character, so you can’t take her along unless you’re making the ‘good’ decisions. Zevran doesn’t show up until even LATER.
  • When Zevran DOES show up, he has no points in lock picking, so he can only open a few chests. Instead of putting points in stealth and assassination, you’re forced to waste them on picking locks.
  • Leiliana isn’t actually a particularly competent rogue, and I found the bard specialization to be lacklustre at best.
  • You can play through and leave all the chests locked, and then come back with your rogue of choice to loot everything, but that’s terrible. I know quite a few people who have done that, and it’s not fun running back through the empty dungeon to find the chests you missed because you need the money.
• There seems to be a dead-zone controller bug on the XBox. My controlled character often interrupts himself and runs away for no reason. This is particularly annoying when I’m controlling a mage at the time. This isn’t a problem in any other game that I own; I have no appreciable dead zone drift. Sometimes I’ll come out of a door or cut scene and my character will start walking without me touching the control stick at all.
• Mages should not be the best tanks in the game.
• There are two DPS Warriors and they’re both 2h specced, and they’re both fairly fragile.
• The best party always includes at least two mages. I would run four mages if I could. With 3 mages, you can have 6 individual monsters on the field locked down just using Force Field and Crushing Prison. If you spec any of them as a Blood Mage, you can mass-lock them with the third tier spell. I haven’t even bothered getting Mass Paralysis yet, but come on. You can control the entire field with even just one mage. Rogues and Warriors have nothing that good.
• Wynne is nearly indispensable, especially at harder difficulties. You could spec Morrigan into a healer, but you have to wait until level 14.
• Shapeshifting is a stupid specialization for a mage because the animal forms have no utility. They can’t cast spells or use items. They’ve got one or two abilities that have a more powerful mage version, if that’s what you actually want to do. They end up being weak versions of rogues or warriors, and those two classes are already badly outstripped by mages.
• Bard and Shapeshifter are bad specializations and you can’t change them until level 14. You can’t have all the new specialization powers until level 18, near the end of the game.
• Clearly there was some acknowledgement that you could make decisions that your party wouldn’t like, so you can woo those characters into liking you back at camp by talking and giving them presents. However, some decisions are so bad that the party member might leave outright. You can’t act against the Mage’s Circle if you want Wynne. If you poison Andraste’s ashes, Leiliana will confront you IN CAMP, even if she wasn’t with you. If you don’t have a high coercion skill, she’ll leave.
• Morrigan’s attitude seems to push you towards doing NOTHING, not doing a different thing. She actively wants you to get less experience, for some reason.
• On the PC it’s faster to quick-save and quick-load to eliminate cooldowns, like Arrow of Slaying. Out of combat, those talents should cool down faster. It’s just annoying otherwise.
• Runes are only marginally worth the cost of carrying them around. My Arcane Warrior mage hits for over 40 damage, which then has an extra 4 elemental damage added to it. Given the premium on bag space, the 4 points is barely worth it, and anything else is just fodder.
• It isn’t clear what giving items to your allies does in the end. I just sold things rather than give them up with no immediately obvious benefit.
• The sex scenes are terrible. It looks like two lego people sliding over one another. The underwear texture is horrendous. It all looks very, very fake. It ruins any immersion you may have built up at that point.
• The lip syncing is appallingly bad. It’s a noticeable step BACK from how good it often was in Mass Effect. Some of the expressions on the faces of the people when they’re talking makes them look really inhuman.
• There’s a scene where Wynne collapses. The PC turns to her and drops her mouth open like a marionette. I actually laughed the first time I saw it.
• The idle poses while in conversation are sometimes okay, but it’s weird for the PC to cross their arms and look bored while their love interest is saying something sweet and emotional. Also, you shouldn’t be able to cross your arms in full plate armour.
• Why do I have to click 50 times to make 50 potions?
• Why is there no way to select how many items I want when buying stacks of things on the XBox other than holding the stick over for several seconds.
• Why is there no way to auto-loot a body when I right-click on it? At the very least, the ‘take all’ button should be near the top. This is simple human-computer interface stuff here. (This is one UI point where the Xbox is better than the PC.)
• The AI routines are flexible, but not flexible enough. You’re guaranteed to have to intervene at some point, especially with a healer. They have no way of figuring out when to use Group Heal, for instance.
• Why can I only activate a mode when I’m trying to use the condition that the enemies are clustered together. That seems like a good time to target one and use something like chain lightning. I can jump to a different AI state, but then I have to have one that just targets ‘any’ enemy to cast on. It would have been better to leave this AI mode out, as near as I can tell.
• You can’t start combat until the game tells you you can. You can’t ambush anyone the moment you see them if they’re not already hostile. If they’re hostile, though, they instantly see you when you can see them. You can get one backstab off, sure, but that’s not the same as starting out with a Chain Lighting without worrying about if they’re going to interrupt you. Worse, it lets you cast the spell and watch it hit your target, and it doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t even turn them hostile.
• There’s no way that I can find to abandon a quest, even one that is impossible to complete now.
• You can’t kill everyone. This one is a nitpick, but I liked that you could just explode anyone you wanted in Baldur’s Gate.
• There’s no clear benefit to health and mana potions that aren’t the base version. They’re cheaper to make and they tend to heal just enough to be useful. The only reason why you use any others is because they’re on a different cooldown.
• Most potions don’t confer enough of a benefit to be worth carrying. I sell basically all of them.
• There are human characters in the game that hit harder than the High Dragon. I beat that Dragon the first time with just Alistair after the rest of the party died. He used potions and just stood and tanked it out. He was killed in 3 swings by a human female with a 2h sword. Sorry, what?
• You can’t see what’s afflicting your party without switching through each one.
• You don’t know what items you stole after pickpocketing. Changing the inventory sort method to ‘newest’ doesn’t help, because stackable items are placed by when they first ended up in your inventory.
• Why put a cooldown on pickpocketing? It’s just wasting time. What, did Leiliana’s hand get too tired to do it again?
• I have to hit ‘esc’ to skip conversations. That’s normally fine until I get to a shop, because I often inadvertently close the shop window. Why are they talking to me after I ask them to show me the goods, anyway?
• There are quests where if you don’t currently meet the pre-requisites, but you could in a little while, or where if you say the wrong thing by accident, become unavailable. Forever. Hope you saved just before the conversation!
• The PC version crashes a lot. I’ve had it crash a few dozen — seriously — times.

Update: I thought of some more!

• Shapeshifting isn’t just bad, it’s appallingly bad. Not only can you not cast spells in other forms, none of the other talents in the tree synergise with shapeshifting at all. But worst of all is that area transitions and conversations pull you out of the shifted form, so it’s almost impossible to start important fights in the form that you want, at least early in the game. There’s a 90s cooldown on shapeshifting, and if you have your AI characters doing it, the entire tactics set is useless and invalid.
• Stealth also ends during conversations, meaning you’re at a serious tactical disadvantage if you normally start fights in stealth or by laying down traps.
• Pets are unsummoned on some transitions, so you can walk through a door and not have a pet that you were expecting to be there. World events are a notable example. And it triggers the beginning of the cooldown, so you have 60-90s to wait until you can summon another one. I ended up just rotating through pets.

That’s all I can think of at the moment, but that’s quite the list. I suppose I could add one more complaint here: I keep playing even when I have a list as long as my arm of the things that I find broken or irritating about the game, guaranteeing my future irritation. But the game is really just that good; I can struggle past all of it.

If you don’t have it, go buy it. It’s 100 hours of the best gameplay on the market today.

Advertisement

~ by cyclistatlarge on November 28, 2009.