It's time for me to talk about Dragon Age: Origins and its unsightly cancerous growth, Awakening. That's not to say I don't like Dragon Age. In fact I do, because there's a lot to like. It seems we should dive right in. Shall we?
Well, let's get the good stuff out of the way. Dragon Age is good because... Well, I don't know, really. It's safe and regular and does it well for the most part. And that's also what's so bad about the game. Dragon Age suffers from the two same problems as Fable, or rather the same two-faceted problem. What I'm saying is that both games made a lot of grandiose promises but only fulfilled some of them, like they ran out of steam (or money...) in the middle of development.
To further explain what I mean, Dragon Age promised it was a fresh, more mature take on the traditional fantasy world, and also the option to play the game through six different perspectives, this through six different origins, hence the title. Now, the problem is that both of these claims are evident only in the first 90-120 minutes of the game. After that the game seems to give up on these ideas. If we discount said first hours of the game, all your chosen Origin affects is a few lines of dialogue. Characters from I think all the Origin stories pop up along the main quest, but even if your character knows them there is no effect besides a few lines of dialogue. This hardly provides an incentive to play through this considerably long game six times.
The "fresh, mature take" goes over even worse. The very worst part is how it affects the visual presentation. One big thing is the blood. While on paper the idea that engaging in battle, where blood is spilled, leaves bloodstains on the character models in the game is interesting, herein the idea is put to practice horribly. As soon as the character strikes the very first blow that model is now covered in small blood spatters from head to toe. The visual effect, going from zero to one hundred in no seconds flat, is quite jarring.
The take on the fantasy world is a little bit fresh here and there but not really mature in any way. Once again, in the Origin stories we see (here and there) some more mature ideas. For example, if you play as an elf living in a human city, what happens is that a local lordling's son interrupts your wedding and steals your women with intent to rape them (this would be the short version). Yes, this is more mature compared to what we see in contemporary video game stories. But once again the main part of the game doesn't really have anything that comes across as particularly fresh or mature.
Overall, Dragon Age is just so very standard. It wouldn't be a bad thing but for the game's advertising. The elves are again a dying race that once had its days of glory; this is very typical. But now they're second-class citizens in the human kingdom; this is much more interesting. But the freshness really ends about here. Beyond that Dragon Age is your typical fantasy world with a few cosmetic changes here and there.
It's a shame that the game suffers from something as irrelevant as advertising, because at its core it is a good game. The gameplay works for the most part, the dialogue is relatively well-acted and not at all painful to follow and you want to keep following the story. There's not much I can complain about here. There is some, though, for example combat. It is made apparent from very early on that combat in Dragon Age is based on being overwhelmed. There really is no such thing as a fair encounter in this game, from a numerical point of view. Yes, your party of up to four characters is mighty and powerful, so the fights are rarely impossible.
Refreshingly, Dragon Age is a relatively difficult game, combat-wise. I was completely hopeless for most of my first playthrough. The challenge of the combat lies in smart crowd control, seeing as most of the time you're hopelessly outnumbered, but eventually you come up with that winning strategy and you can use it to breeze through the rest of the game. This happened to me with every character/party setup sooner or later. After that combat becomes relatively dull, because you're just going through the motions. If that point happens to you very early on in the game, the rest is going to pretty dull since it's mostly made up of combat.
The game actually does lend you a big helping hand in terms of micro-management. It allows you through a relatively easy-to-use interface called Tactics to script the behaviour of your characters. That is not to say that friendly AI works perfectly. Though it functions well for the most part, it has some very frustrating quirks. Yes, you can make it so that your mage casts a group healing spell every time that any character's health falls below 50%. But when push comes to shove that mage might be all too busy casting other spells to cast that particular life-saver.
So, to recap, Dragon Age: Origins is a game that functions well and is interesting, but seems bland and unimpressive in comparison to what the developers said it would be. If you still want a game that has a "fresh, mature take" on the standard fantasy setting, go play the Witcher.
And a few short statements about Dragon Age's add-on, Awakening. It's much the same as Dragon Age and thus its faults and virtues are by and large identical. If you like Dragon Age and want more, sure, go get Awakening. The overall feel of the game, however, suffers from lack of trying. It seems to me that the developers thought "hey, this is just a short add-on to the real game, we don't need to lavish this with attention". Whether or not this really is the case, that's how it feels. It's like Dragon Age, but with less effort. Considering that the main game, in comparison to its hype, already felt like the ideal Dragon Age, but with less effort, I have to wonder where the series is going to go from here.
So, those were my thoughts on Dragon Age. I'm now working on completing Final Fantasy XIII, but again, I have no idea how long that will take. In the likely event that I don't have it finished by the weekend I'll tide myself over by writing up my thoughts on Assassin's Creed II.
Until next time.
0 comments:
Post a Comment