A worthy successor to the Baldur's Gate Series

Author's Rating:

Pros: Excellent graphics, sound, story, party based format

Cons: Considerable hardware to run

The Bottom Line: 
IF you have the computer hardware to support the game, and willing to invest some time before jumping in, you will find many hours of enjoyment in this game.

Author's Review
First of all, let me just say that I very much enjoy Baldur's Gate (made by BioWare, the same people who made Dragon Age: Origins) with its party format and NPC interactions. Dragon Age: Origins helps to recreate that enjoyment by having up to 3 other NPCs (Non-Player Characters) be part of your character's party.

Dragon Age is an epic tale about Gray Wardens and Darkspawn. Gray Wardens are the people whose task is to stop/defeat the darkspawn incursions into the world. Initially you can only choose Warior, Rogue or Mage, but later you can develop specializations. You can also select different origins (noble, commoner, etc.) which gives you a different story to start out. Different races are also available.

Just starting the game we (my wife and I) were impressed at the VAST customization of your PC's character's face. A lot of the customization someone would never do (looks horrible/ridiculous).  Honestly we thought they put in more than needed, for example, you can customize ears -- really? Ears usually not even noticeable. Not only that, but probably the ears will be covered by a helmet if you aren't a mage! And to boot, if you choose a female character, your hair could cover your ears, making the customizations moot. Just to be clear, not saying they did the customization of the character's looks badly, just needlessly complex.

There are MANY movie sequences in this game, which all that I have seen are quite well done. There is a LOT of blood and gore, however, so I wouldn't advise for children under 11. My wife and I usually play this game when children are in bed or otherwise occupied.

So I started a game as a noble warrior. I then experimented with the right click to change the view. You can change the angle of the view of your character and it will stay there, which is a very nice feature. In practice, though I found that viewing my character from over his shoulder raised a slight angle was the most convenient.

You navigate by clicking with the mouse where you want your party to go/to attack. You can also use W,A,S,D keys to move around. Once I got party members, I found using the mouse to select destination the easiest way to get around.

Most of the time, my party ran around in a kind of box at an angle formation. An interesting mechanic was that whoever is currently (or was last) selected, and you tell the party to move, that character will be at the top of the formation to where ever you are going. Got in a few battles with the mage in the front, when of course wanted my character (a "meatshield" as tank type characters are sometimes called) to be in front with his high defense and armor class. Took me a while to realize what was going on in this regard.

It didn't take me long to realize that yes, this is set in a fantasy setting, but it is NOT D&D (dungeons & dragons a complex rule system for role playing), so I can't translate what I learned from D&D to this game. I needed to "forget" D&D and just learn the mechanics of this new game. Going through the tutorial first time and keeping the auto-help text that comes up when looting/doing new things I highly recommend as it was quite helpful.

There's a number of tradeskills in this game. I don't do tradeskills in Everquest (an on-line Role-Playing Game I play), and didn't do them here in this game either, so can't comment on this feature.

Despite not doing tradeskills, I have found that so far, have been able loot enough healing/mana potions/injury kits to keep going. But since I don't do the tradeskills, I always buy heal potions/injury kits at every vendor I come across. You can't really have too many.

I really like the way the game handles party deaths in this game. In D&D, only high level clerics could resurrect dead party members, or temples. In this game, as long as one party member survives, when the battle is over, then when that party member walks close to a fallen comrade without any user interaction that party member is raised form the dead. This is very user friendly. There is a consequence however, so you still don't want party members to die if you can help it and that is when resurrected party members will appear with an injury that lowers some of their stats/effectiveness. They can be repaired with injury kits. So I made it a point to always loot any injury kit, you never know when you might run into a difficult battle.

Speaking of user friendliness, BioWare must have gotten the notice that users want a user friendly program. Complexity and depth to a game are useless if a player doesn't have a user friendly way to deal with it. Interface is easy to use, manual has several key pages that are extremely helpful (that sample battle scene in the manual with statuses/buttons/windows explained I found invaluable), and the fact that whenever something new comes up, whether it be ability, type of loot, or event, a help window comes up by default (which you can turn off). Another example of user friendliness: I tried to open a locked chest with my warrior, and Leliana (my group's rogue) pipes up with "I can help you with that.". That's great help for people who are not familiar with RPG concepts. In addition, after a battle is over, everyone's health/mana/endurance regenerate very quickly. This is nice, which means you never need to use mana/health potions after battle, only during. And lot of battles WILL drain health/mana/endurance, so without this feature the game would be much less enjoyable. And it means you don't have to wait very long to keep moving.

When leveling up, some parts of it were a challenge to assimilate - what skills should I concentrate on? What stats were important? What spell line will be most helpful? That wasn't easy to answer. In general though, if I had equipment waiting for a character to use, but they needed higher stats in something would use that as a guideline to help on the level ups. If I did make a mistake, it hasn't seemed to adversely affect my game yet.

There is combat in this game, and a lot of it. I found it enjoyable for the most part. There's the usual sounds you would expect, spells going off, grunts when making a powerful swing of an axe/sword, the sound of a weapon hitting/piercing armor etc., but also voice overs, such as battle crys or also cries of warning when they were badly hurt was a a nice help. There's a lot of subtle touches which really make the game enjoyable, such as hearing the clinking of my character's armor (a warrior) as he runs, or hearing the thud of an enemy weapon bouncing off his armor.

For most of the game, my party has been myself (a noble warrior), Alistair, Leliana, and Morrigan. You can even get romances in the game, which currently have one going with Morrigan. So far, the default scripts have been working great. I take manual control of Morrigan (a mage) and have the melees do their scripts. Once in a while the scripts do the wrong thing, but fortunately you can turn off the AI during those times and take full control of all actions and turn it off when the special situation has passed.

This is a review, not really game advice, nevertheless, you will many times find yourself outnumbered 2-1 and sometimes even 3-1. What helps in these situations is a mage, so always have at least one mage in your party. I can't tell you how many times Morrigan has cast mind blast to stun the enemies which gives the melees time to burn them down. Many fights would have failed if I had not cast mind blast. Mages are also the only characters who can heal, so even if you prefer your melees taking everyone down, you will still want a mage to keep your melees alive to do their thing. Mages ALSO have a number of buffs that affect melees damage output, such as a buff to give all melee weapons a frost attack. And they also have area effects which I can't even review on because my mage doesn't have any yet, other than the mind blast.

On a scale of 1-10 where 1 being easy, and 10 being most difficult, would rate Dragon Age a 7. On the one hand it's so fun and user friendly, on the other much depth to the game, and also the fact many encounters you are either outnumbered or have some very powerful enemies. I have only reloaded a few times in my current run through, BUT have had MANY close calls. And by close call I mean entire party dead except Morrigan or Jeanluc (my character) finished all the enemies off. But challenging encounters isn't bad if it's not frustrating and you have fun doing it, and for me Dragon Age: Origins does that.

The party members interaction, both with you and members in the party is just great. Sometimes some very involved conversations will occur between 2 NPCs (non-player characters), giving insight to your party members, and even entertaining anecdotes/one liners will occur.

Dragon Age has an interesting feature which is that each party member has a view of you, ranging from hate to more or less "loving" you. It goes up or down, depending on what you do in the game world, and say both to themselves and to others. You can't please everyone in real life, and nor can you in Dragon Age. However, there's an interesting way to compensate for that. In the game you will find strange knick-knacks which the description says is a gift. You give these to your party members to try to raise their opinion of you. Some of the gifts are quite obscure, I find it interesting to see if I can guess which party member would like the gift the most.

No discussion of Dragon Age: Origins can be complete without discussing hardware requirements, which are considerable. This game requires more CPU than even Everquest, and that's saying something. The most important hardware in terms of running Dragon Age well is the CPU. The game system requirements even say that dual or duo-core CPU(s) is the minimum. However, the game does scale down it's features so that the game is still playable on a single core. In fact, my wife's system is 1.25 GB RAM, single 3.0 ghz CPU and it runs OK on her system, but some features are turned off automatically (such as the character potraits). I run duo core 2.2 GHZ, 4 GB of RAM, Vista OS on low graphic textures and even on my system I will have get some lag, but fortunately not so much as to be unplayable. The game does come with a hardware configuration utility, so that does help. The bottom line is if you want to experience Dragon Age: Origins at its fullest, you want at least dual/duo core CPU(s).

I have found the Story/Lore/NPCs in Dragon Age to be very interesting, and in fact seems like a very interesting world. The game does a nice job of immersing the player and helping them to forget the real world.

BioWare did an incredible job with the dialog choices/game situations. My character was put in a few situations where there WAS no way to choose the good or "noble" course of action, my usual preference. I had to make an choice and live with it. Many a time was a dialogue with my party members, just knowing if I chose wrong the view of the party member would go down a lot and sure enough, and after selecting my option (in the case am thinking of) it said Alistair Approval -5 -- doh! Fortunately BioWare also realized that some players are flippant and allows a person to give a flippant (usually funny) answer, which is nice. My wife killed 3 unarmed men with her character and there WAS a consequence later. So many games you kill someone and that's that. By having an effect for her making that choice, there was a consequence and therefore like the real world and therefore helps with the immersion.

With all this praise, you would think maybe I thought this was a perfect game. But no, not quite. In particular, there was a temple with a TON of enemies I had to wade through to complete an important quest. But the beef I had was that the layout of the enemy's base made no sense -- I didn't get the feeling that these guys had fortified the place to stop incursions, it felt like their only purpose at all was to be slaughtered by my party. It was VERY monotenous, was very glad to be out of it. Shortly after I got out of there, there was a VERY difficult puzzle (for me). So difficult it seemed hopeless. Fortunately a search of the Internet found me a solution, but EVEN with the Internet walk through still had difficulty! (that's how confusing it was). This was the only place in the game (so far) that I needed outside help.

So, after all this, should YOU buy it? If you liked the Baldur's Gate series, it is VERY likely you will like this product. The game has excellent graphics, sound, story, interface, and user friendliness. BUT there is a LOT to the game, a lot to learn. If you are willing to do that, and have the computer to support it, then I believe you will find an investment into this game worthwhile. I know I did, I had to buy a copy for both myself and my wife, we both enjoyed it that much.