Pumping Irony

I suspect every time I hear or say bon appétit from now on, I’m going to hear Meryl Streep playing Julia Childs in this summer’s chick flick Julie and Julia.

Anyway, the table is set, the candles are lit, and the wine is poured. I have some crow to eat…

See, for the past couple months Twitter has been atwitter with the boisterous bevy of bloggers I follow as they tweet their excitement and anticipation of BioWare’s upcoming Dragon Age: Origins.

My first thought at the time was the usual “whatever.” I managed to finish Mass Effect; it eventually became fun later in the game and I enjoyed it enough that I’ve at least commited myself to Mass Effect 2 in January. But a single player fantasy RPG? I realize BioWare and Bethesda have differing design mentalities but I couldn’t help but think of Oblivion and how boring it’s been so far.

Then I hear “Dragon Age will be the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate!” and you’d have thought the heavens opened and angels sang Halleluja as bloggers and gaming press went off their rocker bonkers. I sat back and thought to myself “Wait, I played a demo of Baldur’s Gate back on the PS2 years ago and it was garbage.” For the life of me, I couldn’t possibly imagine why anyone would get excited over the idea of a “spiritual successor” to a poor “Diablo meets Gauntlet in the Forgotten Realms” mashup. Then again, I never understood the excitement over Mythos and now Torchlight, either. Well, as I learned this morning, what I played on the PS2 was Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance by Snowblind Studios which was an entirely different beast from Baldur’s Gate by BioWare.

Next, people starting posting tweets with URL’s to YouTube videos for Dragon Age: Origins. I checked a few out, and some even had some gameplay footage from the PC version. While I still wasn’t overly interested, at least the gameplay videos looked good. That is, until all the chain-pausing. The party would get into combat and suddenly the player pauses the game, scrolls the camera all over the place as if the game were a CAD architechture demonstration, then flips through abilities and spells, unpauses the game and the combat continues. Until a few seconds later he pauses it and does the scroll, select, unpause again. And again. And again. I’m like “what the hell?” Everyone’s getting all excited for a game you just pause every 5 seconds? Needless to say, the PC gameplay videos were extremely offputting for me.

Finally, it was obvious this was a group game, not a solo hero RPG. I said “awesome!” and thought that in light of the recent surge in games that can be played cooperatively, perhaps there was something to look forward to in Dragon Age: Origins after all. Nope! Single player only RPG! Flabbergasted, I made several off-the-cuff tweets about my disappointment, more than likely bumping heads with Pete yet again, who had been, by far, the most enthusiastic pre-launch trumpeter of the game.

So Tuesday I woke up, turned on Twitter and watched as the explosion of excitement scrolled by. It was Dragon Age: Origins launch day at long last. With a shrug, a shake of my head and a roll of my eyes I brewed my coffee and did a few quests with my soldier in Borderlands. At lunch, I stopped by the local Gamestop to inquire about the Left 4 Dead 2 pre-order. [Side note: Rumor has it that K-Mart is going to break the Black Friday sale date and sell L4D2 for $40 on launch day rather than after Thanksgiving! Purely rumor though, I have nothing to back that up with.] The manager was working the store and was busy playing what looked to be a pretty cool RPG on the 360 demo unit.

“Say, what game is that?” I asked.
Not looking up from the screen, he answered “Dragon Age: Origins.”
Immediately thinking of the horrid PC gameplay videos I crinkled my nose and said “No it isn’t.”
This time he looked at me. Looked back at the screen. Looked at the box lying next to the demo unit. Looked back at me as if I had two heads and gave an exasperated reply of “Uh, yes… it is.”

I need another game like I need another hole in my head but what I was seeing looked very cool. Not only cool, but it looked fun! Out came the wallet and off I drove with the very last copy of Dragon Age: Origins for the 360 in the store!

What a glorious RPG this is! This is without a doubt the first time a single-player RPG has immediately grabbed me and drew me into the game and its world and characters.

In lieu of (just for spite) of the recent humorous “No Elves” campaigns other games are waging, I opted to make a fiery red-headed female elf mage, Claricia. I was pleased with the character creation options, though one of the presets struck me as what I was going for and only made a couple minor tweaks to it.

I’ll be honest, there is a lot of just sitting back and watching to the game. Almost everything (so far, at least) has lengthy cinematic dialogues trees. I don’t mind, honestly because cinemas using the game engine and involving my actual character help me enjoy the story more, just like as in Guild Wars. I also enjoy that any buffs that were active on the party members remain active during cinematics as well. The “persistent gore” setting (on by default) is interesting too. Battles in DA:O tend to be brutal and bloody, and the blood and gore remains on the characters’ faces and clothing until they get into a town to clean up. One of the first set of quests Claricia did was enter the storage area in the tower of the Circle of Magi, which had become infested with giant spiders. Yes, it was a Kill Ten Rats (ok, kill five spiders, but same difference) quest. However, two very important details set it apart from any run-of-the-mill Kill Ten Rats quest found in an MMORPG. First, the cinematic. No reading some atrocious poorly-written wall of text explaining why some Schmoe of an NPC wants to hire my character as a mercenary because he “needs” rat tails or wolf guts. No one gives a damn — this is exactly why we just skip to the end and click OK so we can get it over with, get our XP and rewards and move along. No, in DA:O we get a cinematic dialogue tree to actually involve us in the explanation and acceptance (or not) of the quest which gives it more weight; more meaning. Secondly, a number of what we think are side quests are actually intertwined with the main story without it being immediately obvious. This can be a double-edged sword, however. On the one hand, it’s a wonderful surprise when what I thought was just a side quest ends up completing one of the objectives in a story quest, and to a degree gives a different “feel” than in an MMO where we go to a quest hub and grab every task the Quest Dispenser NPC’s have for us willy-nilly. On the other hand, as I discovered, sometimes picking up what looks like a side quest enters you into a discussion where major events can happen and there’s no going back or changing your mind. An example is during Claricia’s origin part of the game, she has the choice to help her friend Jowan, a fellow mage who is romantically involved with a Chantry initiate Lily. This is forbidden by the Circle and Chantry and the pair discovered that Jowan is to undergo the Rite of Tranquility which appears to turn the person into an emotionless, intelligent zombie of sorts. A dark fantasy version of Star Trek’s Vulcans, if you will. Here we are presented with a few options to help Jowan or not. I agree (Peter Molyneux is right, I do prefer to take a “good-ish” role the first time around — but I’m so glad that DA:O choices are never black and white, but all shades of grey!) to help them break into the Circle and recover Jowan’s phylactery — a vial of blood taken from all mages which can be used to track them down if they turn rogue — but along the way I saw that Claricia’s mentor Irving had what appeared to be a side quest. Momentarily phasing into “MMO Mode” I figured I’d grab this side quest then continue. While exploring the dialogue trees I got myself into a situation with Irving where he knew all about Jowan and Lily and I was unable to turn the conversation back around to avoid betraying them. It’s entirely possible that this was scripted no matter what, I don’t know, but that single-handedly struck the point home that the entire design of DA:O is very subtle and nuanced, and every little choice can have a major consequence.

I’ve had several other similar instances where it seemed certain NPC’s were supposed to help me out, or even possibly be a recruitable party member, but my dialogue choices made them dislike me. Apparently the peoples of Ferelden do not believe in second chances; once an NPC dislikes you, it’s permanent.

That does not apply, however, to party members. Each recruitable NPC has an approval rating, similar in concept to Reputation with various factions in MMORPG’s. The importance here is that each character has their own distinct personality and a single choice on the player’s part can simultaneously add to one character’s approval while another character will disapprove and you’ll take a penalty on their approval rating. Occasionally you’ll find certain items labelled as “gifts” which you can give to the party members to essentially bribe them for a small approval boost.

Going along with the idea of each character having a distinct personality, this is very much in play with the voice acting, which is incredibly well-done in DA:O. They also have their own idle chat interactions while not in combat. Think of Left 4 Dead where the characters would occasionally make idle remarks to each other, and you’ve got the general idea, though DA:O has full conversations. I currently have two characters (well, one character, Sten, a dual-wielding qunari warrior and a war-dog) that I’d love to have in the group to level up, etc. but the interactions between Alistair and Morrigan are so hilarious (I love how Alistair is well-meaning but incredibly snarky, which appeals to my own dry sense of humor) that I can’t bear to take them out of the party. I also keep Leliana in the group because she’s a bard-rogue who can open chests, etc. and buff the party.

Ok, ok, on to the combat! This is what the Gamestop manager was doing when I entered the store and informed him that he was mistaken, he was not playing DA:O. This is also what made me immediately enter a giddy stupor and hand him my credit card. Again, I’ve never played nor seen the original Baldur’s Gate from BioWare. So to my eyes, I was seeing Dungeon Siege 3, this time finally at a third-person perspective so I’m down in the action with the characters rather than the annoying and attention-breaking overhead birds eye view of the previous Dungeon Siege (as well as Diablo style) games. In Dungeon Siege, I never had to micro-manage my group. They have their own AI, which the player can tweak, and they do their job and perform their roles accordingly in combat. For my likes, this is how things should be. DA:O does this, and does it incredibly well. So well, in fact that the first time I switched to actively playing Alistair, suddenly Claricia was doing a much better job of keeping herself and the party alive than I was…

Part of the character sheet options is a Tactics page where a number of AI rules can be specified. For example, I might set one up that says “if my health is less than 75% cast Heal.” And so forth. There are plenty of scenarios in the tactics to set up rules for casting buffs, protecting specific characters, you name it, it’s probably in there. As characters level, you can put points into Combat Tactics (I think that’s the name, I’m not home to check) which gives them more tactic slots to set AI rules. Each character has several preset tactics which represent the various roles of that character’s class and you can switch between and tweak each one, plus a custom tactics slot which you have to totally customize yourself. This is great fun, and I’ve found myself often just engaging in auto-attack with Claricia so I can watch the group kick some ass with the AI tactics I’ve set up. That and Claricia is the only one with a Heal spell currently, so I have to preserve her mana… That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it!

Graphically, DA:O is a mixed bag but in a heavily story-based RPG such as this, I’m after the “big picture.” Sure, the ground textures are shockingly low resolution at times, as well as some of the armor textures. But taking in the whole picture, both low and higher resolution textures and the overall art style in the game gives Ferelden and its peoples a very unique and engaging appearance. It’s a real shame the 360 does not have a native screenshot ability, however. Most importantly, the 360 keeps a very solid performance. There are times in crowded areas where I can see the frame rate drop a bit but it never goes below 30fps. I’ve read several reviews of the PS3 version which has better textures but the performance gets awful with a lot of action. BioWare hasn’t had the greatest track record with their PC versions in recent years but so far it’s sounding like they released a solid PC client with DA:O from all the rave reviews and impressions I’m seeing on Twitter and blogs.

There are a few glitches, however, hopefully which BioWare can address in a patch. Err, excuse me, apparently they’re calling them “Title Updates” now in console land… Whatever.

There is a fair amount of clipping, such as beards clipping into faces while speaking or armor clipping into the character’s body. I’ve had a few occasions already where a cinematic shows a character speaking but there is no voice to go with it. Once the voices start again, it seems to pick up right where it left off which leads me to believe we were never supposed to see the scene with the character’s mouth moving in silence.

All in all though, the glitches are but minor quibbles in such an incredible and yes, epic RPG. I give DA:O my highest recommendation, on any platform.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.