LogFAQs > #986853835

Indeed.

33. Dragon Age: Origins
Created by Bioware
Release year: 2009
Platform: PC
Guesstimated playtime: ~125 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EhWCAHBbjU

Enchontment? Enchontment!!

Already directly name-dropped earlier and a reasonable parallel to the last game in a number of ways, DAO was an incredibly ambitious title whose main selling point is that you can play as one of six characters, each with their own unique backstory. Character classes are limited to just warrior, rogue, and mage, but with considerable customization options for each, including some bonus classes once you unlock them.

I have a lot of memories of DA:O. It's one of the first games I played that feels like its fully voice-acted. I think it's the first game I played that makes you create an online account to get bonus items. It might also be the first game I played that had DLC story content that I wouldn't just call an expansion, though it had one of those, too. It's basically the only game (that I've played) besides FF12 that lets you assign your party members priorities to follow. It's also incredibly difficult if you try to brute force it, and features a lot of branching choices (or fake choices) putting pay to Bioware's tradition of writing interesting moral dilemmas. The world is completely original and the subtitle "Origins" seemed a bit presumptuous until a new Dragon Age game released a couple years later.

When DA:O released, I was living with two guys, one of whom did ALL of his gaming on 360. Meanwhile, I owned a 360 but focused almost exclusively on PC. When I watched what he put up with trying to play this game on 360, I wondered how anyone could endure this game. Most of the things I did felt like they were only ever made to work on keyboard and mouse. He got pretty far into the game, though. (We had a similar experience with Skyrim, but at least Skyrim was designed with console controls in mind.)

One particular part of the game that gets a bad rap and I need to talk about real quick is The Fade. After the introduction of the game, you're given four target destinations afterward, and have to ultimately go to all of them, but the Mages' Tower is one of the two recommendations, where you have to work through this alternate dream dimension called The Fade. In this plane, you can change your form and you are separated from your allies. People make such a big deal about how hard The Fade is, and to be fair, I struggled with it the first time, but when I came back later, I was shocked by just how immensely simple it actually is. It really isn't hard at all, especially if you play a mage.

Of course, everything's easier if you play a mage because out of all the recruitable characters, they're almost all warriors, and mages are just plain stupidly broken. If you pick all the crowd control options with your MC mage and just focus on locking down the most threatening targets in each fight, you can trivialize the game immensely. The encounters are rigged so that you seldom fight one opponent at a time, but a good mage simplifies the calculus of battle considerably. If you and Morrigan both cast the right spells, you can hold 4 or 5 enemies in place long enough for the rest of the team to clear everything else and work through the remainder one at a time.

For a game called Dragon Age, there aren't many dragons. I think there's three total, and two are completely optional. The story goes on just long enough for me to stop at exactly the same point each time. I always get to the third area with the dwarves, clear out the deep roads, and then decide I can't be bothered to return to Denerim. I've done that 4 or 5 times now, with only one actual completion.

Related games: I bought Dragon Age Inquisition one day like a year ago, and after enjoying myself for about two hours, I tried to change my settings to skip the loader. The game irrevocably broke on me and I couldn't get it back to the way it was, so I ended up returning it. I've also played part of Awakening, which I didn't include in the main write-up even if it just casually throws Broodmothers into one of the earliest parts of the story, and the Broodmother section of DA:O was one of the most disturbing sequences in my collective video game memories. If I was making a list of top story moment memories, the Broodmother would have definitely been on it.

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Up next: A game with an astounding number of subclasses and build options.