So I’ve finished Dragon Age: Origins.

It is the kind of game I used to hate.   Rough around the edges, with a bland western fantasy aesthetic and character building lifted wholesale from D&D.   I grew up on kawaii bullshit and pretty protagonists that could effortlessly punch through schools — getting to where I’d even look at unapologetically western games built around what PC gamers have come to love and expect versus what I cut my teeth on as a console JRPG kid has been a long and roundabout road.  Meandering through Elder Scrolls games, full loot MMORPGs and casual stabs at P&Ps (not to mention hurtling toward 30 and getting tired of the kinds of interpersonal melodrama and teenagers with attitude that typify Japanese RPGs) I eventually found myself at a vantage point from which I could appreciate a game like Dragon Age.  Summarily, I pulled my head out of my ass just in time.

I played DA:O alongside my sister, with she on the PC version (which I’ll hereafter refer to as the One True Gospel) and I on my PS3.  The version disparity dead horse has been beaten elsewhere but the game can’t be discussed without this coming into play.  Moreover, I think shit has been grossly understated elsewhere.  DA:O does not come in PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 versions;  DA:O is a PC game with bullshit, awkward, phoned-in console ports that just happened to be simultaneously released.  People talk about how the 360 version has ugly textures but preferable, steady framerates, the PS3 version is notchy but features better textures and colors that pop more (what) and the PC is the standout, with its capacity for zoomed-out tactical views and a slightly more elegant interface.  This talk is garbage.  Simply put, the game looks like absolute ass in its console incarnations.  I say this not as a graphics whore, or someone who doesn’t get Bioware RPGs;  I say this as someone who’s played the game on both a PS3 and a modestly endowed PC.  The PC version is actually attractive. The textures are appealing, the vertigo-inducing shimmer nonexistent, the lighting natural.  The tactical view is nice, but nicer still is a bright, responsive UI that puts everything at your fingertips and looks decent doing it.  Where the PC menus are dark-on-white and recall venerable tomes, the game’s console counterparts are dark and twisted, light-on-black Moonsiders crippled by some of the worst interface lag I’ve ever seen.

Now, remember: I said up there that I myself finished the withered and reviled PS3 Dragon Age, not the sainted PC version.  Even so, I am reminded what fandom feels like; it’s been awhile since playing through a game left me with a genuine pit of regret in my gut that my time with it was over. 

Every version of the game is plagued with niggling faults and outright bugs.  Bafflingly long load times, frequently fucked-up event queuing, easy-to-break NPC AI.   Outfits like Bioware (and Bethesda, and others) are never taken to task for this stuff because stupid oversights are easier to forgive in the face of scope and ambition, and DA:O is all about both.

The character interractions are a goddamned joy.  I think George was starting to feel genuinely annoyed with my attachment to sometimes-lion, sometimes-emokid Alistair.  I spent the endgame in impressively rising dread at whatever might come between the latter and my character, and in fact had to rollback to a previous save a couple times to ensure I was able to pull a happy ending from an awesomely nuanced shitfire of circumstance.

I was used to rolling back to a previous save, though. DA:O is not a brutally hard game, but it doesn’t pull its punches, either.  Encounters are tough, frequently requiring you to rethink your strategy and approach them from a different angle, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally.  They’re more or less finite, too, so grinding out a few more levels to overpower a boss is generally not an option.

And now pardon an abrupt end to my rambling but I have to close up shop for the night (I’m writing from work) and head home so I can get back to that second playthrough.

Categories: games

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 8:22 pm and is filed under games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.