Dragon Age Origins - The Best RPG of 2009

Author's Rating:

Pros: Excellent graphics, story, voice acting, and tactical combat gameplay.

Cons: EA forces you to register the game online. Not cool!

The Bottom Line: 
If you love the old Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale games, you're really going to love Dragon Age Origins.

Author's Review
I had all but given up hope that there would ever be another great party-based computer RPG like the Baldur's Gate games until Dragon Age Origins came along. It's so nice to see a great single player RPG with a solid story and genuinely fun gameplay. Between this and Fallout 3, 2009 has been an awesome year for role playing video games.

You start this game as either a warrior, mage, or rogue, and it takes you through a brief origins type story before getting into the main plotline. As the story unfolds, you will become a Grey Warden, which is a sacred order of guardians who watch over this fantasy world. When a demon army storms the kingdom and kills nearly everyone inside, including the king, you find yourself at odds with a former ally who is making a power play for the throne. It's up to you and your small group of helpers to stop the demon horde and take out the traitor before he gets any more people killed.

The game is played using a combination of third person and isometric viewing, and with the mouse scroll wheel you can zoom in an out between over-the-shoulder and overhead views. The way it all works is brilliantly executed because you'll most likely use the third person view for exploring and talking with others while the overhead view is mainly used for combat. It's the perfect balance between old and new styles of gameplay.

Like most single player RPG's, you will spend a lot of time talking to people and going back and forth delivering messages, plus there are plenty of little ‘go find this' or ‘go kill that' side quests you can do for bonus experience and items. In that regard, it's a tried and true style of gameplay and there's nothing really new here. What makes this game so great is the intriguing story that develops as you move from town to town trying to convince people who the real good guys are and killing any bad guys that get in the way.

Combat is highly tactical in this game. Sometimes you can highlight your whole party and have them go from target to target and you will still survive the battle. Other times, you have to work out the right tactics or else you'll get stomped. Most fights will leave you outnumbered and even the weakest enemies can take you down one-on-one. Boss fights are especially challenging because you will have to utilize your character's powers to the utmost of their abilities if you want to make it out alive. On the plus side, characters ‘fall' rather than die in combat, and they can be revived when the battle is over so long as at least one person survives.

The graphics in Dragon Age Origins are really amazing, but you're going to see a pretty stout PC to run them smoothly. I've got an AMD x2 5000+ processor and 3 gigs of RAM with a 512mb GeForce GTS 250 video card and the still gets a little choppy at times. When playing in dungeons or inside rooms, it runs pretty well, but when my characters go outside it tends to slow down. The environments and character faces all have an incredible amount of detail to them, so it takes a strong machine to run it. If you ever played the old Baldur's Gate games, then you'll remember how most of the environment was fixed images with a touch of animation here and there. In this game, nearly everything is animated, including flags blowing in the breeze and roaring bonfires, all in full 3D. The game does perform much better in the overhead view than in third person, so that helps a lot when you zoom out during combat.

Actors Tim Curry (Clue) and Kate Mulgrew (Star Trek Voyager) provide two of the character voices in this game, as do many other veterans of previous games, cartoons, and movies. The voice acting is superb and the writing is equally good. There's some humor, plenty of mystery, and lots of intriguing characters brought to life by the excellent voice work. This game contains many hours of script reading. The sound effects and music are equally well done, with the soundtrack created by the same guy who did Baldur's Gate II and Fallout 3. When combat gets heavy and you have the pounding music, shouting characters, clashing weapons, and random spells going off, it sounds just as good as something out of a movie.

I highly recommend Dragon Age Origins to anyone who loves a good story-driven role playing game and has a system powerful enough to run it. EA Games forces you to register the PC version of this game before you can play it, so I am not quite sure if it has any resale value, and that concerns me greatly. If you have an older computer but also own an Xbox 360 or PS3, you may want to consider getting this game for the console, instead. At least then you could resell it when you're finished.