Screenshot from Dragon Age: Origins
My relationship with video games is strange. I might be called a deadbeat dad, a fickle lover or an abusive mother. As a child of the 90’s, video games have always been at least a small part of my life… but they never step into the limelight for long. I get tired, I get frustrated and I discard them. I worked at a video game store for years, yet I find myself staring blankly at my computer screen and listening to inexcusably loud guitar feedback more than I find myself in front of my Xbox 360.
Regardless, a little bird told me (okay, there were ads all over Vice Magazine, Last.fm, Something Awful and every other corner of the damn internet) that Bioware, the company that produced Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, was releasing some sort of American-style “dark fantasy” RPG. This game is called Dragon Age: Origins (this is already going to be a negative review, we’ll leave the name alone. Let’s just agree that it’s very uncreative and EXTREME).
I played too much KOTOR, it actually influenced my life. Let me tell you two KOTOR related stories. Both of them happened in 2004 when I was even younger and prettier than I am now.
Girl: Dustin, do you want to hang out
Me: Is your name Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic
Girl: No…
Me: Well there’s your answer
A week or so later, my best friend got super drunk and someone drove him to my house. He was a depressed, drunken wreck and he’d been my best friend since preschool. He vomited on my bushes and we sat on the steps. Instead of being concerned for his well-being, I was just super pissed off when he drunkenly spoiled KOTOR’s ending for me. By the way: I never finished KOTOR and he’s doing just fine. We’ll call it even.
The gameplay is “similar to Baldur’s Gate,” which has earned the game a lot of praise. Baldur’s Gate was pretty good when it came out, but comparing your high budget end-of-2009 fantasy epic favorably to a ten-year-old game with a fairly clunky interface should not be, you know, a compliment. The graphics are fine, graphics don’t really make or break a game anyway, but these just look flat and uninspired. So far we have a clunky interface and a game that doesn’t look great: what will save it?! A breathtaking story with life-like characters? Hardly.
The story and setting are a bit more interesting than standard high-fantasy fare (to say that’s damning with faint praise is a ridiculous understatement), I will give it that much. When it comes to fantasy, I will occasionally dip into Robert E. Howard or Michael Moorcock, so I admit I am not very well versed since I have very low tolerance for the genre’s usual schlock. Here is the revolutionary plot: some of the orcs and goblins are also zombies, which are a huge nerd culture cash-cow right now. So you’re a KNIGHT fighting an UNDEAD HORDE.
I paid $60 for this game, I was looking forward to making a Gay Wizard or a Conan for a righteous video game experience. Let me walk you through what I played before I gave up. I created a gay wizard, he hangs out in a tower. Each character gets its own “origin” story, and my origin story was fighting riddle-demons on the astral plane (which was actually pretty cool) and then fighting spiders in a storage room and running errands to get items just like every other RPG ever. I left the mage tower, where I ran some more errands, bought and sold weapons and went into the forest (which was rumored to have cannibal barbarians and witches… I only found zombie-orcs and repetitive gameplay) and then went into a tower, where I fought an ogre that was way too big to get up the fucking stairs. Way to be realistic, guys. What is this… The Lion, The Witch and the Amateur Hour?
Screenshot from Dragon Age: Origins
Dragon Age: Origins prides itself on being gritty. Blood sprays everywhere, there are swear words, hookers and sassy swordsmen with British accents everywhere. Your character can have sex with fellow warriors of either gender, which is maybe sort of progressive but it’s still just simulated sex in a video game. If Dragon Age: Origins was a 1990s comic book, it would be Youngblood or Cyberforce (all spikes, shoulderpads and cleavage, no substance). Let me tell you again: the actual gameplay is mediocre, the story is maybe slightly above average, the characters are fine, the graphics are mediocre but playing it is BORING. Perhaps my expectations run too high, but I only look for one thing in a video game: fun. Dragon Age: Origins provides many things, such as an elf management simulator (if you ever wanted to micromanage your elves, dwarves and barbarians, here is your chance) and an intricate herb-crafting system (have you ever wanted to make green tea… in a VIDEO GAME?). It also gleefully offers frustrating controls, impossible camera angles and a clunky turn-based-masquerading-as-real-time combat system. Look forward to one night stands with digital love interests of both genders, all of them sassier than any character Joss Whedon crafted on his best, sassiest day. Dragon Age also features as many different longswords with as many minute differences form one another as you can shake a fistful of dice and Baconator grease at. Sadly, Dragon Age does not provide any fun… and fun is the one thing I ask for in a video games.
Perhaps I just don’t understand, or perhaps I am the wrong kind of nerd. Dragon Age is a sacred cow right now, and I’d like nothing more than to see it slaughtered on an altar made out of Dragonforce albums and empty bottles of Code Red Mountain Dew. I am a huge nerd, maybe even the biggest– but I just don’t get it. This is a mediocre game, which is unacceptable from the company that made KOTOR and the team that made Baldur’s Gate.
Bioware gave me some good things in the past, and I remember them fondly. So let’s leave this on a positive note. Here are things I LIKED about Dragon Age: Origins:
-It is an American-style RPG. That means there are no short, chubby little Japanese anime sprites that say “…” all the time. Whenever I see a Japanese RPG I am so proud to be American that I don’t try to shoot a bald eagle for at least a month.
-EVERYONE wears a dress. Even these huge armored knights wear them. They look all tough and menacing from the waist up, but then you see their dresses and you laugh so hard because it’s a knight wearing a dress. That rules.
-Some of the concepts and story elements are legitimately cool and interesting.
-Anyone can walk around in merely a loincloth and barbarian boots if they don’t want to wear a dress. I smell an inevitable theme party brewing in a gritty witch’s cauldron…
-You can play as a giant prehistoric dog (a friend tells me they even coded in a complex urinating-on-trees engine).
-It is funny when an orc explodes, even if it is a zombie orc.
-I’m all out of positive bullet points.
November 17th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I have to agree with most of what you have said. The characters in your party have such simple motivations that its very hard to care about them. There are some cool features that I enjoy like playing with tactics and the overall story is fine.
Overall I don’t really feel like the genre has advanced much since KOTOR. In some ways I feel like I am still playing a realtime version of the same game that I have been playing since ‘Secret of Mana’
November 17th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Nerds just want to slay things with their sword. Pork or steel it doesn’t matter.
December 2nd, 2009 at 7:18 am
Could not have said it better. Nice review.
December 26th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Hahaha. On the money.
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