Best party RPG in this decade

Author's Rating:

Pros: Story, lore, gameplay, party dynamics, graphics

Cons: Might be a harder learning curve for some

The Bottom Line: 
Simply the best RPG game I have played in the last 7-8 years. An amazing enthralling experience!

Author's Review
I just finished playing Dragon Age Origins. Wait, I mean, I finished playing DAO with 1 character (1 playthrough). Time taken: 120 hours. Game content played through: 55%. With 6 unique origin stories that last a couple of hours of playtimes each, as well as a dynamic story that is driven by your choices in the game, DAO proves itself highly replayable.

I can honestly say that no other game has been able to evoke the emotions in me that DAO has. Genuine anger, sadness and the burning need for revenge combined into one emotion is hardly something you would expect a videogame to inspire in yourself. But this game did it, and a wide range of other emotions as well, more than once.

The amazing story is backed up and sometimes even overwhelmed by the lore Bioware has put together for their DAO universe. It rivals LOTR in scale. There is so much material here for many many more games set in this lore which spans tens of thousands of years.

The playstyle is very similar to the Baldurs Gate series. You control a group of 4 characters including your own. Party tactics are very intuitive and a breeze to setup after you play around with them a little, but you will still want to pause often in battles and direct individual characters for maximum strategy.

Graphical effects, if not groundbreaking, are on par with most available games out currently. You will require a midrange system to be able to run this game at high-very high graphics. I ran DAO with a Athlon64 3400+ 2.2 GHz (single core), Radeon HD 3850 512 MB and 4 GB RAM on Win 7 on "very high" settings with 8x AA except a few scenes involving many onscreen NPCs where scaled down to 2x AA and "high" settings. The soundtrack is amazing as well, especially the haunting vocal overlays.

Your party members are so real that you will miss not having them around in real life when you step away from the computer. Superb voice acting, inter party member interaction, humor, sadness, anger, happiness, sarcasm, it's all there. There are some romantic scenes as well which are all pg and are part of romantic sub plots that occur with some of your party members. Bioware has also released a toolkit which enable you to create your own adventures set in the DAO universe. I expect many user created adventures to start showing up soon online. PC Gamer magazine had one in their October issue. Bioware is also releasing DLC for the next 1-2 years for this game. Wardens Keep is the DLC released on release day and it was great!

In conclusion, if you like RPGs at all, there is no reason not to buy this game. You will miss out on an amazing experience if you do not!