Dragon Age: Origins
Jan. 5th, 2010 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbI haven't played a videogame all the way through to the end since the second (disappointing) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
This is only partly because I haven't had the time to get seriously into a game, or the money to buy very many: I've played a number of games since then, Oblivion and the more recent Neverwinter Nights among them, and they didn't grab me. For me, a game is like a book: it has to have a good story and interesting characters before I'm willing to give it a significant amount of my life. And games take longer than books, so there's a lot more time for them to lose my interest.
Dragon Age: Origins... doesn't. I got it (and my Xbox) in a really quite unbelievable deal from Amazon just before Christmas, and I have spent upwards of a hundred hours playing it since then. (Consider: a fiction book takes me between one and ten hours to read, depending on length and complexity.) To start with, I wanted to find out what happened next - rather desperately, in fact.
But once I'd got mostly to the end in one play-through, I went back and started again. Several times, in fact. Because one of the most appealing things about DA:O is that there are six "origin stories" from which you can start - and depending on which one you choose, characters in the different areas of the game will react to you differently. And depending on the choices you make, characters in your party (party of up to nine - or ten, if you access the downloadable content, which I haven't, not having the internet connector thingy) will react to you differently.
Oh, it's subtle enough, I suppose, and wouldn't matter very much were it not for one of the other very appealing things about DA:O: it's solid. The world-building may contain quite obvious influences from a number of the fantasy magnum opuses of our time, but it mingles its influences with a certain amount of originality, and it goes all the way down. It hangs together remarkably well, and makes sense within its context. So does the story, and the little differences depending on where you start from add to the overall sense of it's-got-its-shit-together-ness.
And it's well-written. From the overall arc to the dialogue options to the random voice-acted snark between other party members that crops up in the background when you spend a lot of time running around without doing anything. The voice-acting is kind of made of win all around, actually: I'm rather fond of Claudia Black voicing the rather brutally pragmatic Witch of the Wilds, but they're all pretty excellent.
I've come across a couple of bugs when - very occasionally, but it's very frustrating when it does happen - conversations fail to trigger at the right moment, so you're left running around in circles until they do; or, more frustratingly, at a couple of moments the previous conversation will trigger instead of the one you're supposed to have. And, well. It manages to be rather egalitarian for a videogame, but there are moments when you realise, "Oh. Boys wrote this." (And the romance options appear to assume you are young, but at least they don't assume you're heterosexual. Small gains, I approve them.) I'm also not sure I really like the gore, but hey, it's amusingly over the top - sort of like a Quentin Tarantino movie, except a whole lot less self-absorbed, smug, and self-referential.
My favourite moment of dialogue occurs quite near the beginning of the game, though. You meet a new party member, and - if you choose the right dialogue options - one of your party members says, "More crazy? I thought we were all full up."
Snark. I approve.
Yeah, I like it a whole lot. Enough that I thought I'd tell the whole internets.
This is only partly because I haven't had the time to get seriously into a game, or the money to buy very many: I've played a number of games since then, Oblivion and the more recent Neverwinter Nights among them, and they didn't grab me. For me, a game is like a book: it has to have a good story and interesting characters before I'm willing to give it a significant amount of my life. And games take longer than books, so there's a lot more time for them to lose my interest.
Dragon Age: Origins... doesn't. I got it (and my Xbox) in a really quite unbelievable deal from Amazon just before Christmas, and I have spent upwards of a hundred hours playing it since then. (Consider: a fiction book takes me between one and ten hours to read, depending on length and complexity.) To start with, I wanted to find out what happened next - rather desperately, in fact.
But once I'd got mostly to the end in one play-through, I went back and started again. Several times, in fact. Because one of the most appealing things about DA:O is that there are six "origin stories" from which you can start - and depending on which one you choose, characters in the different areas of the game will react to you differently. And depending on the choices you make, characters in your party (party of up to nine - or ten, if you access the downloadable content, which I haven't, not having the internet connector thingy) will react to you differently.
Oh, it's subtle enough, I suppose, and wouldn't matter very much were it not for one of the other very appealing things about DA:O: it's solid. The world-building may contain quite obvious influences from a number of the fantasy magnum opuses of our time, but it mingles its influences with a certain amount of originality, and it goes all the way down. It hangs together remarkably well, and makes sense within its context. So does the story, and the little differences depending on where you start from add to the overall sense of it's-got-its-shit-together-ness.
And it's well-written. From the overall arc to the dialogue options to the random voice-acted snark between other party members that crops up in the background when you spend a lot of time running around without doing anything. The voice-acting is kind of made of win all around, actually: I'm rather fond of Claudia Black voicing the rather brutally pragmatic Witch of the Wilds, but they're all pretty excellent.
I've come across a couple of bugs when - very occasionally, but it's very frustrating when it does happen - conversations fail to trigger at the right moment, so you're left running around in circles until they do; or, more frustratingly, at a couple of moments the previous conversation will trigger instead of the one you're supposed to have. And, well. It manages to be rather egalitarian for a videogame, but there are moments when you realise, "Oh. Boys wrote this." (And the romance options appear to assume you are young, but at least they don't assume you're heterosexual. Small gains, I approve them.) I'm also not sure I really like the gore, but hey, it's amusingly over the top - sort of like a Quentin Tarantino movie, except a whole lot less self-absorbed, smug, and self-referential.
My favourite moment of dialogue occurs quite near the beginning of the game, though. You meet a new party member, and - if you choose the right dialogue options - one of your party members says, "More crazy? I thought we were all full up."
Snark. I approve.
Yeah, I like it a whole lot. Enough that I thought I'd tell the whole internets.
