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Angels and AirwavesHere's my first impressions of Dragon Age after playing about eight hours in the last three days. There may be some small spoilers in here, but there aren't too many plot twists to start the game so you can read with confidence that I won't ruin the plot for you.
Dragon Age is a great evolution of Bioware defined Western RPGs. The game opens with a short cinematic to bring you into the world of the game, but your story specifically doesn't start until after character creation. Like Mass Effect, physically your character is extremely customizable. As far as more gameplay oriented stuff, you can choose from three races, humans, elves and dwarves, and then from three classes: Warrior, Rogue and Mage (dwarves cannot be mages due to the lore of the game).
But this is where Dragon Age starts to show signs of evolution over Mass Effect. You can choose one of six back stories based on your race and class combination. Most combinations will have a choice of two of the six backgrounds, but some only get one back story. Replay value already just skyrocketed. In addition to this, not only can you customize your character's look, but also their attitude in their voice acting. Six different choices come up including cocky, mythical and violent. Crazy awesome.
From there the game opens with your back story leading to an important event in your life that causes you to cross paths with the Grey Wardens. Think of them as Spectres from Mass Effect or Jedi from KoTOR; special guardians of the peace over the land. Much like Jedi in the original Star Wars films, Grey Wardens are mostly marginalized in a society that has advanced beyond needing them.
Naturally, your character is recruited to be in the Grey Wardens and the story takes off from there. The story itself has been largely straight forward thus far, plot twists are obvious and a little tired. But the characterizations, forking plots and keeping to tradition keep it fun anyway.
Gameplay-wise, the game is almost a World of Warcraft clone. Characters have red health, yellow energy (for rogues and warriors) and blue mana (for mages). Pulls occur and mobs are crowd controlled. Your party members can have scripts set up for them to make them not dumb, but you can also control any party member at any time by switching between them. For those of you that never played a game like this: scripts are like If/Then triggers; if Health <> Bard, and the other is in what you put talent points into, like in WoW. So you can put your Warrior's talent points into fighting with a sword and shield, or into dual wielding, for example.
The battles, unlike WoW, are in real time. A luxury a single player game can have. Having good scripts is vital as battles become harder because everything moves so fast. There are two default scripts for every character if you find it intimidating, but you'll have to learn custom scripts pretty fast to make your characters more situational fighters. Control feels a lot like Phantasy Star on-line in the way that the game makes an MMO type of battle system work on a console. You have your A button always being attack and then you can customize two sets of actions to the X, Y and B buttons. You switch between the sets by holding the R trigger. It's a good way to make "action bar" type gameplay work on a console.
Also like WoW, humanoid characters can have jobs like herbalism, poison making and other crafting abilities. All of these types of skills share points you can allocate to other abilities like Persuasion and Combat Skills which also buff your character.
The conversations are much more like KoTOR than Mass Effect, which is a little disappointing since you can decide the attitude of your character. But your character rarely speaks in conversations, instead you pick from the conversation choices and the conversation flows as if you had said it, unlike Mass Effect where you choose an answer type and then your character delivers a voice acted line. Still, the conversations are even more complicated as six different back stories affect not only what you can say, but what people say to you. Race plays a big role (as in most fantasy role playing games). What's nice too is that conversation flow much better in this than previous Bioware games, if you get too far down a conversation tree, you can't go back just to see what every option gives you. It makes your choices in conversation much more meaningful.
All of your party members have an opinion of you. You can get them to like you more based on conversations with them as well as your actions both in the battle field and in puzzles as well as NPC conversations. Much like KoTOR 2, you can use this influence to get more from them and open up new plot points. You can also give your friends gifts to help gain their favor. I haven't seen too much of this in action yet, but I just got a full party not long ago.
Graphically this game is actually a little rough, the graphics remind me of last generation in many respects, but very smooth like something from the GameCube or Dreamcast, not the jaggies that you see in PS2 and X-Box games sometimes. The art style is gritty and "realistic," which in my opinion kind of sucks. All of your characters look the same, and they often look similar to your opponents since everyone is wearing the same type of armor and such. In the higher difficulty levels this has to be even more frustrating since you can harm your allies with friendly fire. While the character models are detailed and they have really great looking hands in particular (hands have always been an issue in games, look no further than Perfect Dark), but the rest of the environment suffers for it.
There is some ridiculousness to it all as well. Blood is literally everywhere, and not in the fun, over the top, Tarentino way. Your characters are just covered in blood after a good battle, which somewhat makes sense, but they don't even care how much blood is on them. Even prissy characters, concerned with their looks, leave spattered blood all over their faces as they have deep philosophical conversations with you. Surprisingly, there aren't too many scantily clad women running around though, so the blood may be an attempt to grab the "mature" 13 year old male audience since they fail them a bit on boobs.
The game requires you to read the instruction manual. There is no way to play this game with the paltry "tutorials" in the game that are really just a paragraph poor explaining a gameplay mechanic. And even then, some things are buried in an overtly complicated menu system that is sometimes cubersome. The best example of this was when I wanted my herbalist to make me potions. You can't do this by selecting the raw materials in you bag. Nor can you find a "trade" menu anywhere for various trades that your characters have. In the circle menu for your character there is a "talent" or "spell" selection, it's not in either of those.
No, in order to use herbalism I had to open the Potion submenu in the circle wheel of my alchemist. Then, right next to the potions as if it was a another potion, was the button to go to the herbalism crafting menu. Completely inane.
Overall, I give the game a solid B. It has everything I want out of a game and I will love it, but if you're not a total Bioware nerd like me, you may find the rough around the edges, "realistic" aesthetic and open wandering a bit too flawed to enjoy the nuggets of awesome in there.
- Saosin
