Dragon Age Thoughts

A lot of people have been singing the praises of Dragon Age: Origins for months.  I too was wooed by this title at first, but after an extended period of play time it has lost its luster. 

Dragon Age: Origins or DAO has an impressive depth of story paths, dialogue choices, plot paths, items to collect and enchant, spells to learn, crafts to make and other good stuff.  All of this is a great building block for an amazing RPG.  But towards the end of the game it felt more like a job and less like I was playing a video game for enjoyment. 

The combat has an MMORPG repetitiveness to it.  You have a variety of different spells and actions you can perform to mix up the monotony, but none of them are truly amazing to look at.  I also found spell activation to be cumbersome, this is where it becomes evident that this game was meant to be played on PC with a nice row of keyboard shortcuts.  But no matter how they mix it up I couldn’t stand one more moment of hacking and slashing the same small variety of enemies over and over.

My version of choice was the PS3 version and I was very put off by the visuals.  The textures seemed either washed out or very low resolution at times.  The character models seemed oddly proportioned and facial animations were very outdated looking.  Every character in the game seemed to have the same rigid skeleton with no hope for any kind of differentiation between any of the character poses and mannerisms. 

The cut scenes also fell way too short of my expectations.  I found all of the conversations to be very dull and unexciting.  Usually I’m the kind to sit back and enjoy a good Metal Gear Solid style hour and a half cut scene, but I found myself dying for them to be over.  The stories seem to throw a lot of stuff at you where you have no idea what they are talking about and don’t really care in the long run.  I did however like the massive amount of dialogue choices they give for your character, but it would have been nice to see them vocalize your character’s dialogue like the rest of the characters in the game.

Sorry for the hate, but for my score of Dragon Age: Origins I give it a much overhyped 6 out of 10