Game Review: Dragon Age: Origins

[dorchadas]

I first started playing Dragon Age: Origins a decade ago, shortly after it first came out. Though I was living in Japan at the time and Steam wouldn't let me buy anything due to the conflict between my billing address and my IP, I asked a friend to gift me a copy because I was so excited about the game. Another CRPG by Bioware, which had made Baldur's Gate II and Neverwinter Nights? The promise that your choices, especially your origin story, would deeply affect how the game played out for you? I had been following news of the game for months and I was so excited to play it that I mostly abandoned playing World of Warcraft and dove into Dragon Age, playing twenty hours in a couple weeks even though I was working fifty hour weeks with a two hour commute at the time.

Then, my hard drive crashed and Steam didn't back up my save.

The famed Japanese customer service returned my laptop good as new, including sending a courier to my house to pack it up in a box to my satisfaction and deliver it back to me when it was fixed, and I had fortunately backed up all my music and documents on schoolpsychnerd's new laptop a month or so before the crash, but twenty hours of Dragon Age: Origins was gone. I was discouraged enough that I just went back to World of Warcraft, where my character was preserved on external servers, and didn't touch Dragon Age for a decade. It took the recent Square Roots Podcast series on Dragon Age: Origins to convince me to take a break from Breath of the Wild and pull me back into the game.

It was fun, but I feel like I would have liked it a lot more if I had played it back when it came out.

The map is literally both grim and dark.

Dragon Age: Origins is an extremely 00s game. It's not just Alistair's hairstyle, though that is certainly part of it. It's the way that everything is grimdark and terrible. One of the Square Roots hosts described the setting as Lord of the Rings crossed with Wheel of Time with Game of Thrones slathered over the top, and I feel like that's not a bad capsule description. It's generic/classic fantasy, with humans and elves and dwarves, a horde of evil monsters who threaten all that is good, wizards, nobles, all of that. And everyone is garbage to each other.

The humans are racists who treat the elves as second-class citizens at best and enslave them at worst, the dwarves are a rigid hierarchy where it is almost impossible to ever move up the rankings but extremely easy to fall down them--simply going above-ground strips a dwarf of their caste--and the elves aren't evil only by virtue of having to occupy two separate spots on the "despised minority" scale. The city elves, who live in ghettos among human cities and suffer under oppressive laws, are Jews. The Dalish elves, who live in the wilderness and attempt to keep their ancient language and culture alive, are Romani. I've only ever played elves in Dragon Age, but the game does a good job of showing their second-class status through dialogue. Often when I spoke to someone, they'd just see the pointed ears and assume I was a servant or a messenger and order me to do something, and only when I spoke to them more forcefully did they actually look closer and speak more deferentially.

I'm not sure how they didn't see the glowing staff and rune-enscribed plate-and-mail armor, but you know, video games.

There's treachery and assassination, betrayal in noble councils and back alleys, liars galore, but, since this is a Bioware game, there's also a Coercion skill that lets you skip a lot of the hard decisions in a single line of dialogue. I maxed out my Coercion skill as soon as I could and it reduced a lot of the moral conflicts in the game into:

NPC: "I'm going to do the bad thing."
Player: [Persuade] "Do not do the bad thing."
NPC: "I will not do the bad thing."

You can't skip all of the conflicts in this game, but you can skip a lot of them. The most memorable one was when I was bursting into the Landsmeet, where Fereldan's nobility was meeting to pick the next king, and Teyrn Loghain's retainer Ser Cauthrien demanded to know what I was doing there. She told me there was no way she would let me interrupt the Landsmeet and that she would fight me if necessary, but with Master Coercion, a single sentence convinced her that her liege lord was mad and had to be stopped. I appreciated what Bioware was trying to do, but the ludic elements worked against the setting elements to such an extent that I had a hard time taking the misery seriously. Surely someone else in Fereldan has Master Coercion?

Long live the king.

Admittedly, the main enemy is one against which persuasion is useless.

I read in an interview that the original premise for Dragon Age didn't include the darkspawn at all, and it's hard to image what that would have been like because they're a bedrock part of the setting now. Long ago, when the Tevinter Imperium ruled the entire known world, a group of Tevinter magisters stormed the gates of heaven seeking the keys to creation. Their brazen hubris corrupted the Golden City and unleashed the darkspawn taint, or so goes the legend. The result is that the dwarven empire collapsed under an onslaught of monsters and, every few centuries, the darkspawn surge out onto the surface with a dragon leading their armies in a Blight that ravages the land until they are stopped. By the Grey Wardens, the organization that your character joins.

From a game perspective, darkspawn provide an endless source of enemies that are okay to kill, allowing the designers to fill caves and tunnels with enemies without providing a moral dimension to them. From a setting perspective, it provides an enemy that everyone has to unite to defeat except that their petty squabbles are proving more important. King Cailan wanted to request aid from the neighboring country of Orlais, which conquered Fereldan and ruled it for decades, and part of the reason Loghain allows the king to die in a futile charge against the darkspawn horde is that he was a general during the rebellion against Orlais and views any Orlesian troops on Fereldan soil as sacrilege. Loghain blames the Grey Wardens for the king's death, meaning that sometimes bandits and assassins come after the only people who can defeat the Blight. The dwarves are sworn to aid the Grey Wardens against the Darkspawn, but their king recently died and they're too busy engaging in street brawling and electioneering to actually send an army. The Circle of Mages is sworn to aid the Grey Wardens against the darkspawn, but due to their incompetence the tower is overrun with demons. The [e]arl of Redcliffe will help once he wakes up from his coma and the undead are drive out of his castle. And all of Fereldan is on the brink of civil war over the succession while the darkspawn rampage across the land.

The big picture grimdarkness of the setting works a lot better than the moment-to-moment interactions.

Our chief weapon is fear. And surprise.

The game is subtitled "Origins," and the advertised premise was that your character's background would have a major effect on the story. I've only played one origin, so I can only speak to being a mage, but it certainly made an impact.

Mages in Dragon Age are very similar to mages/psykers from Warhammer, both in their social position and in their danger to everyone around them. Some elves and humans are born with the talent for magic, which opens them up to the Fade. The Fade is the world of dreams and unconscious desires, home to the formerly Golden City now tarnished Black with the magisters' sin, and filled with spirits. Some of them are spirits of valor and hope and compassion, and they're generally content with their lives. Others are demons of pride and sloth and desire and rage, and they seek to possess humans to gain access to life experience that they are denied. The easiest people to possess are mages, because of their personal power and pre-existing connection to the Fade. Without training, this is generally the fate of a mage--demonic possession and transformation into an abomination before being hunted down by the Templars.

Since I played a mage, this is the background my character came from. Raised in the Circle, taken from his family as a child, barely knowing anything about the outside world, he spent his life sequestered for his own good. Then after his friend falls to practicing blood magic, the Grey Warden Duncan conscripts him to aid in the fight against the Blight. I'd sometimes run into dialogue choices where I could point out I was a mage for greater effect, and I had the chance to enter the Fade myself rather than ask a party member to do it. At the very beginning of the game, I went through the Harrowing, the test that determines whether a mage can truly withstand the temptations of demons or whether they should be killed as too unstable or dangerous to be allowed to live. The game thus asks the question whether the mages should have more freedom, or whether the Templars are correct. Is all this rigid control truly necessary?

Spoiler: yes.

I've heard that Dragon Age II delves into the mage/templar conflict a lot more deeply, but in terms of Dragon Age: Origins, the Templars are right about everything. Every mage you encounter outside the Circle is either an evil demon-summoning blood mage, an abomination, or morally questionable at best. Even the leader of the Dalish elves is maintaining an ancient curse that turned a group of humans into ravening werewolves, and while the party member Morrigan isn't evil, she's mercenary, contemptuous of altruism or good feeling, cruel, and otherwise mostly a terrible person. The blood-magic-delving friend from the mage origin attempts to assassinate the arl of Redcliffe and acts as a tutor to his mage-gifted child, leading to that child becoming an abomination and slaughtering dozens or hundreds in Redcliffe. A group of blood mages in the Circle itself take over and turn most of the mages into abominations, leading the Templars to propose killing everyone as a way to solve the infestation. It's the opposite problem that Mass Effect III has--while there the game implies that synthetics will always fight organics, but provides plenty of in-game evidence of cooperation, Dragon Age: Origins asks the question of whether the mages or Templars are right and then puts all the evidence on the side of the Templars.

It made it pretty hard to pick any of the "more freedom for mages" dialogue choices. Even at the end of the game, I went with the "give me a noble title" option because the only mage I can be sure of is me. And hey, a noble who's both an elf and a mage is already unthinkable. Give people time to adjust.

In the context of the game, that is literally what you do.

I haven't mentioned the companions yet and it's because I mostly don't care.

The companion personalities and dialogue seem like another aspect of Dragon Age: Origins's 00-ness, to me. I could say "they're snarky," and that's the primary personality trait of at least half the companions. Oh, how droll, look at how they parry and spar verbally with each other while in my party. Oh, it is to laugh!

It is not to laugh. I can't remember a single thing any of my companions said.

I even went through a romance with Morrigan, mostly because I'd been spoiled about the secret at the end of the game and wanted to set it up, but this is a Bioware game. The "romance" consisted of showering her with gifts, telling her that maybe not all mages should be shut up in a Circle, and then her inviting the PC into the tent with a transparent excuse about how cold the night was, followed by a laughable cutscene where everyone was wearing burlap undergarments and moving in a very uncanny valley way. And then Morrigan laid out the terms of the relationship: no one ever says love, she's not tied down, sometimes she just happens to fall on the PC's dick without her clothes on. And that's basically it. There's a few chances later on to push for more, but A) Morrigan is serious about what she says and will break off the relationship and B) it's just unsatisfying all around.

Voice acting ruined CRPGs. I'm comparing this to Baldur's Gate II again and its modded romances with dozens of long conversations and hundreds of short ones, but even in a game like Planescape: Torment, there are so many more conversations and opportunities to talk to party members. Voice acting makes dialogues shorter and prevents the kind of long, philosophical conversations that I love in RPGs. It's why Morrowind is a much more compelling game than Oblivion. In a Bioware context, it turns romance into a verb--how can I raise this bar to max so I can get a terrible cutscene and the relationship flag flipped to "true"?

Even Shale, the DLC companion who's probably the most interesting and best-written, is just another stock Bioware character. It's HK-47, the killing machine who dislikes squishy organics, except now it's made of rock. Cool I guess.

Explosive veto.

I also have to compare most of the mechanical parts unfavorably to Baldur's Gate II. This isn't about being a THAC0 purist or about thinking that fantasy RPGs are D&D or nothing--honestly, I'm not a major fan of D&D mechanically even if we're just comparing tabletop RPGs--it's about finding Dragon Age: Origins's systems either too annoying or too boring.

I'll start with battle. Just like BGII, Dragon Age's battle system is real-time-with-pause, with everything playing out until you hit the spacebar, issue orders, and let things go again. The problem I had for much of the game is that it was too fast. BGII was measured, with an obvious rhythm to the rounds, and while it seemed like Dragon Age used rounds as well, they came much faster. My mages hurled off spells basically as fast as I could press the buttons and everyone sprinted everywhere in combat even if they were wearing full plate armor, but this was combined with dodging being impossible. If the game thought I was in range for a hit, or if I was in range when the enemy started their attack, the actual position of my character didn't matter. I spent the first half of the game being very frustrated and reloading a lot.

Then I discovered the tactics menu and learned a bunch of this was my fault. Dragon Age has a robust if-then system of ranked commands, so you can tell your healer mage to heal themselves if they're low on health, then heal another party member if they're low on health, then drain the mana if any enemy is a mage, then cast sleep on anyone attacking the main character, and so on. After I went through and reset everyone's tactics, almost every fight afterwards was a cakewalk. Which is good, because the 3D environment makes telling what's going on extremely annoying. On the over-the-shoulder view it's impossible to see everything at once, and on the pulled-back tactical view the terrain often gets in the way, requiring constant pausing. I guess I should be happy that at least there was a tactical view.

Generally only for a short time.

There are two combat elements pulled from MMOs and I don't like either of them. The first is the tank-healer-dps holy trinity mechanic, to the extent that threat is a mechanic in the game and warriors have an explicit taunt skill. DPS warriors, rogues, and mages have to manage their threat so they don't get smashed by the enemy, and tanks direct enemy attacks on themselves and use their skills to maintain aggro and reduce the damage they take. I played World of Warcraft for six years, so I'm very familiar with this. But it was always an extremely gamey way of dealing with battle and I never really liked it. Especially in Dragon Age: Origins, which is going for a realistic mood for its battles, it was weird to watch a mage blast enemies with lightning and enemies disengage from whoever they were fighting, or run right past my melee front line, with no consequences whatsoever. I guess they didn't want to implement facing or attacks against withdrawing targets, but it was always a strange disconnect for me.

Then again, combat and story have always been separated in games. I remember when I volunteered to duel with Loghain for the future of Fereldan, and after a prelude where the duel was described as a contest of arms before the Maker, with no tricks or deception, the assembled lords of Fereldan watched as I blew Loghain apart with fire and lightning and then acclaimed me the victor.

The second is the incremental nature of the upgrades. A weapon is great if it has +4 damage, or +3% crit chance, or "reduces threat" (whatever that means). A lot of gear has +10 physical resist, or +1% spirit damage, or various other bonuses I didn't care about. Not a single item I ever found was game-changing or memorable, even the items that had their own entries in the codex. In contrast, look at Celestial Fury from Baldur's Gate II. Translated into Dragon Age terms, it has +3 damage, a chance to stun on every hit, and a 5% chance to do +200% lightning damage. That is a magical weapon worthy of legend! In contrast, a weapon like Starfang has +3 damage, +3 dex (on an open-ended scale), and +2.5 armor penetration. The numbers on the screen when I hit people go slightly up, the same as every other item in the game. I kept hoping for something interesting, something transformative, something where I would equip it and think, "This is what I've been waiting for." But it never happened.

BGII had Crom Faeyr, the Robe of Vecna, Carsomyr, the Ring of Gaxx...Dragon Age: Origins has nothing like that. They learned the lesson that items should have stories to make them memorable, with the codex entries attached to important items, but not that the items themselves should be mechanically impactful.

What a kill-stealing jerk.

As I said above, one of the hosts on Square Roots described Dragon Age: Origins as Lord of the Rings and the Wheel of Time with Game of Thrones slathered on top. I think that's a fair assessment, and so I'll use a quote from the Lord of the Rings to describe it:

You are a lesser son of greater sires.

It's a good game, and it does some interesting things, but it's not as good as Baldur's Gate II. Its mechanical elements, the Coercion skill and the darkspawn and the +1% crit chance weapons, hold it back. I honestly think I would have liked it better if there had been no darkspawn, if the game had been entirely about political intrigue and the Orlesian threat, about solving the problems of the dwarves and the Circle of mages, but that would have been such a different game that it'd be completely unidentifiable.

You'd think I'd appreciate playing an elf, and while I do remember enjoying the female city elf origin--the only other origin I've played--and slaughtering my way through human oppressors while wearing a wedding dress, learning the revelations about the elves from Dragon Age: Inquisition sours me quite a bit on the elves, and especially learning that it was planned from the beginning. It's like Attack on Titan. If part of your message is "but maybe they deserved it," I'm going to notice.

I don't think I'll continue with the series. As interested as I am in the setting, the game parts of Dragon Age II and Inquisition sound like they'd turn me off even more than the game parts of Dragon Age: Origins did. So I'll consider this the closing the door on a decade-long project and let Dragon Age rest.