An epic story, but some irritating flaws keep its feet on the ground.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Amazing voice acting, deep character development, dynamic and highly detailed world.

Cons: Annoying difficulty issues, lack of treasure, slow leveling process.

The Bottom Line: 
A great game that could have set the bar if a few issues could have been resolved before release. 

Author's Review
I love RPG's, and I've been playing them in various formats for almost thirty years.  Most of this time has been spent playing Dungeons and Dragons using pencil and paper, but the release of Baldur's Gate for the PC showed that you could get a compelling RPG experience on your computer screen.  As software companies go, Bioware is at the top of the pile for developing great role-playing games.  This is why I was so excited about the release of Dragon Age: Origins.  After seeing what Bioware was able to do with a science-fiction setting in Mass Effect, I could only imagine how great a pure fantasy game from these guys would be.

First of all, this game is not officially linked to the Dungeons and Dragons rule-set.  While the overall inspiration for character classes, weapons, and magic are pure D+D derivatives, the rules are significantly different from those used in Neverwinter Nights.  While this may be viewed as a strength to those who never spent weekends rolling dice in their basement in order to complete a dungeon-crawl, I found myself missing some of the familiar (if convoluted) rules. 

As in many RPG's, you start by creating a character who belongs to one of a few basic classes.  You can choose to start with a hack-and-slash warrior, a spell-wielding mage, or a rogue.  This is a very limited list, but as the game proceeds you are given quite a few choices about how to specialize your skills and abilities.  For example, a warrior can eventually specialize in fighting magic-users and become a templar.  A mage can choose to focus on spiritual healing, shape-changing, or even the forbidden arts of blood magic. 

In addition to choosing a class you also choose a race and "origin" for your character.  Races here are familiar to D+D veterans, with dwarves, elves, and men represented.  The catch is that elves are now a disenfranchised minority who have lost most of their powers and live in poverty.  Dwarves are secretive, caste-oriented, and in a state of decline as well.  Humans, who are typically the most flexible characters, are the dominant race in this world.  Your origin story is a nice twist, however, because you get to choose your character's background before starting the adventure.  You can elect to come from a noble family or from a hardscrabble upbringing in the streets.  Surprisingly, this choice makes a difference in the way the game progresses.  I found this to be one of the game's strengths. 

The biggest strength in Dragon Age: Origins, however,  is its storytelling.  Overall, this is one of the best-realized game worlds I've ever encountered on a computer screen.  The society your character lives in is multi-faceted, complex, and evolving right in front of your eyes.  Character classes are vital in a caste-oriented society, and not all classes get along in ways that are simple to predict.  For example, mages are viewed with suspicion due to their habit of being posessed by demons and becoming dangerous abominations.  This means that the templars, a class of church-affiliated warriors, are constantly baby-sitting the Circle of Mages and keeping a lid on their powers.  The relationship between religion and magic in this game is wonderfully written and lends a great deal of depth to the story. 

Another excellent facet of Dragon Age: Origins is the magnificent voice acting.  Not only is the dialogue well written, but it is also delivered with serious skill.  Each character you encounter is presented as a complex, often conflicted individual whose motives rarely fall easily into "good" or "evil."  Even your own companions are often full of complex motivations and ambitions. This makes your dialogue choices surprisingly difficult when you attempt to make your character follow a clear set of morals.  I loved the way it was difficult, even when attempting to play a purely good character, to make the "correct" choices as the game progressed.  Sometimes you try to do the right thing and experience unintended consequences.  Other times, you want to do the right thing but are unable to pull it off.  In one case, for me,  this resulted in a town being slaughtered after I was unable to win a key battle.  I had to give up and move on to another part of the game, leaving the town to its horrific fate.

Graphically, the game is fine.  Spell effects are fairly typical if you've played Neverwinter Nights or similar games.  Monsters and enemies are rendered with enough detail to be believable, and their movements are fluid and realistic.  I did, however, find that facial expressions during dialogue tended to be fairly wooden and unresponsive.  The strong voice-acting, however, minimized this issue. 

Despite all of these great facets, Dragon Age: Origins has some nagging flaws.  In a game with so many things going for it, such flaws are actually more irritating than you would expect.  Almost all of these flaws are in the game's mechanics, and I feel that most of them could have been avoided. 

One huge problem in the game is that it is incredibly stingy with loot.  In any fantasy role-playing game, you accumulate treasure, equipment, and magic items throughout the course of your adventures.  Your characters typically start out with basic equipment, but soon have a large choice of deadly weapons and powerful magic artifacts to choose from.  In Dragon Age: Origins, on the other hand, there is a major lack of treasure to be found.  Money seems to be particularly scarce, even as your character reaches high levels of experience.  While certain items, like basic armor, tends to be easy to loot from dead enemies, other items are almost nonexistent.  The most glaring example of hard-to-find staples are "injury kits."  In this game, characters regenerate health automatically after every battle without the need to "camp" for the night.  This is a nice development.  The only problem is that, after being knocked unconscious during battles, your characters start to accumulate injuries.  These injuries, such as cracked skulls and gaping wounds, limit your health and other attributes.  The injuries cannot be repaired with basic healing spells, but rely on "injury kits" for treatment.  This would be a great idea if you found more of these things laying around.  Unfortunately, they rarely pop up.  When you do find a few after a battle, you typically have a party with a dozen injuries and only a few kits to go around.  Even worse is that markets rarely stock very many of these things.  In fact, the markets rarely stock much of anything useful at all.  It isn't even very easy to find places to buy and sell items in the first place, although they do pop up as random encounters on the road at times.  Stores rarely have a great deal of merchandise that you need, and when they do the prices are high.  Because money is so difficult to get hold of, you spend a lot of time gazing longingly at equipment you can't afford.

Health potions and injury kits can be created by characters with herbalist skills, and herbs can be collected from your environment.  This is fine, but there's a catch:  you can't make a potion without a flask to put it in.  When you drink a potion, you lose the flask.  Flasks, unfortunately, are worth their weight in gold in this world and are difficult to come by.  This is an irritating obstacle to something that should be a no-brainer in a difficult tactical game like this.

Difficulty is another major flaw in this game.  The PC version is seriously challenging, presenting you with a series of highly tactical battles which demand a lot of strategic thinking to overcome.  This is fine, except your party's AI is incredibly bad.  Fighters, left on their own, will charge headlong into gangs of enemies and are quickly cut to pieces.  Magic-users will chip away at enemies with minor spells while their biggest spells remain unused.  You can set tactics for your characters, but this seems to make little difference in their behavior.  In the end, you usually have to turn off the AI and micromanage everything that your party does.  This quickly becomes tedious and, considering how other games have pulled off similar ideas.  Icewind Dale, for example, is as old as the hills but its party dynamic is far more intuitive and effective. 

Most of the time, the battles are just difficult enough to be interesting.  However, every once in a while you will encounter a battle with a level of difficulty that simply doesn't make sense.  For example, I completed one leg of the campaign by defeating a powerful series of enemies in a ruined temple.  It was quite difficult and satisfying, and even my powerful mage had problems surviving some of the encounters.  After leaving the temple and traveling back to a large city, my party was ambushed by simple bandits.  These bandits managed to kill everyone in minutes.  They absorbed fireballs, lightning bolts, and massive sword-strikes without pause and pummeled my party into dust.  I've played enough RPG's to realize that these bandits have stats that "scale" to match my party's stats.  The problem is that they scaled well beyond my party and became absurdly powerful.  This happens more often than it should during random encounters, which interrupts the flow of the game and causes a great deal of frustration.

Finally, there is way spells and skills are distributed.  For every experience level gains your character acquires one new spell (if they are a mage) and one skill if they are a non-casting class.  The problem is that leveling up doesn't occur very quickly, meaning that your one spell had better be a good one.  Make the wrong choice (and it isn't always obvious) and you'll be stuck with a useless spell for a long time until you reach the next level.  In games like Neverwinter Nights, there is always a great deal of flexibility with the spells you choose to memorize.  The list of available spells in Dragon Age: Origins is much smaller and the chance to pick and choose is strictly rationed.  While I understand why this may make sense in terms of the storytelling, it exerts a cost on the gameplay.  The wonderful combinations of clothing/weapons/artifacts/spells that make Dungeons and Dragons titles so much of a kick to play is missing here.  There is still excitement to be had once you finally reach that spell you've been longing for, but the path is unnecessarily long and arduous.

Overall this is a great game, and the campaign is long enough to keep you busy for hours and hours.  The evolving storyline means that you can replay it several times and have very different experiences, which adds value.  The little gripes, however, stand in stark relief to the things this game does so well.  It causes a game that could have been an all-time classic to simply be a very, very good RPG.  Hopefully, if the developers choose to write a sequel, they will adjust these gameplay issues so that Dragon Age can attain the legendary status it is capable of.