I remember when I first played Battlefield 1942 with friends during a LAN. You were storming beaches, tanks where blowing stuff up, airplanes in the air, explosions, bullets flying everywhere. It was really epic, far from the standard FPS gameplay since it wasn’t scripted, and you could jump into a tank and drive one yourself. It was the perfect blend of FPS, vehicle driving, and teamwork.

Now, 8 years later, the Battlefield franchise has undergone a lot of improvements, but the feeling is exactly the same. You are storming villages, tanks are blowing stuff up, explosions, bullets flying everywhere. And it looks absolutely gorgeous!

Thanks to the new engine almost everything is breakable. Walls to buildings can be destroyed with tanks, rockets or grenade. Doors, windows, people, and fences are breakable with a knife. It raises the gameplay to a whole new level, since a hiding with your back to a concrete wall is not so safe any more. People who are fortified in a house can be dealt with simply razing the building (preferably with the people still inside). The battlefield looks completely different after you have fought in the area for over ten minutes. Every structure will be reduced to rubble, burning tanks fill the air with smoke, and every tree is gone.

The amount of classes in BFBC2 are a comfortable 4, compared to the cumbersome 7 (each good at only one thing) in Battlefield 2.

• Assault is a straight anti-infantry that resupply ammo and is good at both short and medium ranges.
• Engineer can take out vehicles with rockets/mines, or repair friendly vehicles, but is only good at short ranges versus infantry.
• Medic can heal or revive friendly infantry, and has a machine gun.
• Recon is a sniper effective at very long ranges and can call in mortar strikes and plant C4.

As you play more with one class you unlock new weapons and gadgets, and you can change the setup each time you respawn. At first I was annoyed that you couldn’t unlock all the weapons in the beta, but now I’m thankful since it gives you reason to try the other classes too. For example I never thought I would enjoy the Recon class since I have a natural dislike for snipers, but I actually found it very enjoyable, mostly thanks to the mortar strike you can call in.

The beta only includes one map and one gameplay, but even after playing it countless times I still want to play it again, because no game is the same. I’m only seeing a tiny part of the game and I’m already sold. 29 days to go.

Bioware games supposedly have a lot of replayability, but I’d never be able to access it without a traumatic head injury and the concomitant memory loss.

Tycho of Penny Arcade

See, I know exactly where Tycho is coming from here. Just like him I swore to replay Mass Effect before the sequel comes out (it unlocks on Steam in… 2 days), but I never got any far. Mass Effect is one of those games that has massive introduction with a lot of conversations and very little action. Replaying is like reading yesterdays newspaper – it’s interesting the first time, but once you’ve done it the charm is gone.

I have a lot of books in my bookcase and I reread most of them eventually, but always when my memory of them has reached the bare minimum. Because that’s when they are the most entertaining: when you don’t remember what happens on the next page.

It’s entirely different for Fallout 3. Where Mass Effect is a linear story progressed by conversations and actions, Fallout 3 is a sandbox where progress is achieved by exploration. And because Fallout 3 has such a huge area I could finish the game and then start a new one immediately afterwards, without having the memory of the previous game ruin the experience too much for me.

MMOs are just too time-consuming. It requires you to devote all your available time, and it doesn’t care how much all your time is, it will never be done with you. Switching from one MMO to another doesn’t give you more free time, you just change what you spend the time on. I realised that ever since WoW came out I have spent pretty much all free time from one MMO to the next, and that – in the lack of other words – sucks. I love games, but spending all the time playing just one game feels like such a stupid waste of time. It’s like being in a candy story with 500 types of candy, and only eating one. Only when I was between MMOs would I pick up single-player games, and when I was done with them I would have time to do other stuff, because those games had an end.

So a while ago when I was still playing WoW I started picking up non-MMO games. Torchlight came first. Then I installed Rome: Total War and had a blast, despite its age. After that came Dragon Age, and Modern Warfare 2. Suddenly there wasn’t enough hours on the day. With all those games to choose from why continue to play for just one?

When I started the Wrath of the Lich King expansion I was excited. It was new content, and classes had enough new and changed abilities that they felt like whole new classes. But I feel that this entire expansion has been a complete letdown aside from that. Grinds and repetitive content was everywhere. Blizzard seemed to have missed the point of why people liked daily quests when they was introduced in Burning Crusade. It wasn’t because they were fun, but because they beat grinding fire elementals any day to make gold… which you needed a lot of back then. Now Blizzard is creating more and more daily quests, and at the same time more things you have to spend gold on.

I had always supported Blizzard in their strategic changes before, but what was happening in this expansion… Achievements (feel obliged to do things for the sake of doing them), free epics from heroics, trivialized raiding content, etc, etc. I can see their reasoning, but I can’t agree with it. I don’t want things for free, I want to earn them, to fight for them. I had in vanilla WoW, and Burning Crusade. It was neither a smooth nor easy ride, but I knew what I was getting into. Handing out free epics is like having a GM coming in and giving you a helping hand at the last percent of a boss fight. There is nothing I hate more than deus ex machina moments in movies, and what is happening in WoW is nothing less than just a deus ex machina moment.

But I’m not unreasonable. There are more people who play the game than me, and I understand that game is shifting focus to the wider audience. I’m not going to cry to everyone I see that the sky is falling. It’s not; it’s just changing. But I don’t like that change, so I leave.

I love what they are doing in Cataclysm, but I also don’t like what they are doing to the “plan” of the game, and in the end I doubt redesigned old zones is going to balance the issues I feel I have with the game.

The honeymoon is over.

So while I finished the entire game in 52 hours – and this included 75% of the sidequests, romancing (with both ladies *cough* don’t tell Leliana), maxed relationship with all of my party, and at least one of the DLC (Stone Prison) – it felt way too short a game then, and it certainly feel too short now. The origins does wonders to help you get through the usually tedious introduction by offer different stories depending on race and heritage, but after that it’s just the same.

The story is good, the dialogue great, but it is way too short. I would even say purposely short, as Bioware/EA seems intent on squeezing out DLCs into Oblivion (pun intended). Dragon Age, for all it’s glory, is definitely no Baldur’s Gate that you can squeeze out 500 hours of gameplay. Yes, in terms of combat, conversations, inventory management, spell combinations, etc, the game beats oldies like Baldur’s Gate by a wide margin – unsurprisingly. But in terms of replay value (and yes, I’m even counting the DLCs) Dragon Age is way below par.

You got a prologue in the origin. Then Chapter 1 where you travel into the wilds and the battle of Ostagar. After that you got a long Chapter 2 where you complete four long quests to gather allies (are some of them even mandatory?), and finally a Chapter 3 that is the Endgame.

The Prologue is fun since it’s usually different each time you do it. Chapter 1 became boring the second time I did it, and the third time I was just rushing through it and skipping all conversations. Chapter 2 can be enjoyed a couple of times as you can complete quests in different ways (the good diplomatic lets-all-be-friends-way, the neutral someone-has-to-die-way, and the crazy let’s-just-kill-everyone-way), and you can do them in what order you want. Chapter 3 is just combat all the way through so not much variation there. Exactly how many times can you play the game from beginning to end until it becomes tedious? For me it was exactly one and a half time.

I have to fall back on the impressions I got from the Character Creator: there just isn’t enough different combinations of races, classes and origins to make repetitive play enjoyable. There are just three different classes, and while mage stand out as completely different from the other two, warrior and rogue feel just the same. Both can become dual-wielders or archers, and you can dress your stealthy rogue up in massive armor. Hell, you can dress up mage in massive armor without problem thanks to the Arcane Warrior specialization (which from what I have heard is worthless). Furthermore, since your party is limited to only four (I would have preferred five), and that you will always need the usual setup of tank, healer and rogue for unlocking, your variations of companions is always somewhat limited. I want to bring the dog with me all the time, but his inability to perform any of the three roles mentioned make him a liability.

And no, I don’t think DLC will solve any of this. I highly doubt that Bioware will ever develop a DLC anywhere near the standard of one of the main-quests to gather allies. The Stone Prison was like, what, 20-30 minutes gameplay? Yes, you got a new companion that is really cool, but maybe I don’t want Shale in my party? Maybe the price determine the experience, but I don’t want to pay for the game one more time to get one fifth of the content.

52 hours played from start to finish on my rogue main character, with some additional hours on a warrior and a mage. It certainly sounds like an impressive number of hours, but as I did over 75% of the side-quests (I got an achievement for that just before the endgame) I only wish it was more. Time really flies by when you are having fun.

Most of the side-quests are picked up by various people who belong to certain factions, and they are all pretty much “travel to location X, kill person Y”, with a short text that barely give you the reason. The main quests on the other hand are fantastic stories with interesting dialogues, sudden twists, and difficult moral dilemmas. Most of them also offer vastly different paths to take, so you can always create a new character and do the opposite thing than last time. For example when confronted by a large force I chose to attack, but I discovered later that if you chose to surrender you got to do a prison break.

You can play the game with a top-view like in Baldur’s Gate, but I played the entire game with a behind-the-shoulder view of my main character like in Neverwinter Nights. Part of what makes that possible (and not having to jump between characters every second) is Tactics. Tactics allow you to set a limited number of commands with different priorities to each party member. For example my mage would cast Heal on any ally that dropped below 50% health, and only use damage spells if she was above 25% mana. The Tactics interface felt complicated at first, but it was easy to learn and not much harder to master. At the end I even thought it was a bit lacking and would have preferred more exact conditions to be specified.

I know I complained about the lacking character creator before, but when I actually sat down with the real thing in the game I really liked it. Some spells and talents to pick between, and the different “origins” are more than just some description in your character profile. If you play as a Human Noble you start the game in your family’s keep, get to experience a betrayal, and ultimately end up as a Grey Warden. I really enjoyed how the “origin” story was a part of the future game and not just something you did once and forgot. For example as a Human Noble you meet the man who betrayed your family later in the game and get to decide his fate. I did the mage origin before I settled on the rogue, so I was a bit surprised when I met a person from the mage origin when playing on my rogue. I only did two of the six different origins (dwarves are not for me), but I’m torn between whether they are an awesome introduction to the game, or wasted time better spend on the main story so that everyone gains from it. I guess not having to go through the same introduction twenty times in a row weights in the origin’s favor.

Something I absolutely love about Dragon Age is the characters. In other games I can see party members as numbers and stats, and pick the best ones all the time. This time I ended up with certain people because I liked them, not because they had 48 strength. Alistair is the prime example of this.  Sword ‘n’ board fighting felt very lacking in the game, and if I needed a tank I would probably pick Shale first, but Alistair is the kind of guy I would buy a beer and sit and chat with. Your party members sometimes have random conversations when you run around exploring, and one between Alistair and Morrigan had me spurting the tea all over the screen from laughter. This pretty much describes all of these conversations. Even my dog (named Barkspawn of course) had his share of conversions, consisting of *whine* and *happy bark*.

Because I started the game as a warrior with the ambition to be a plated shield-fighter, I came at odds with Alistair after a while. He was a tank, and I was a tank. With all the defensive stances we used there wasn’t much stamina left to use abilities, so things didn’t die too fast. But when the choice came to either dump Alistair or reroll a new character… I actually picked the second. That’s how much I love Alistair. But just like in previous Bioware games (i.e. Baldur’s Gate) certain companions don’t go well together with others. So if you want to bring both Alistair and Morrigan you would have one of them disapprove in every decision you make. Alistair is happy you saved the puppy from the wolves, and Morrigan thought you ruined the show.

Conversations was a surprisingly large portion of the game, and up until the moment that I discovered you could skip parts with the Esc key it was a feature I didn’t like very much.

The game engine is nothing short of beautiful, but still runs very well with a lot of mobs on the screen at once. Lightning falling over statues in some old ruins was just gorgeous at times. Spell effects looks good. The character models look good. Animations are good, and facial expressions and movements during cut-scenes are always spot on. The lip-syncing to the voices is so good it seemed natural all the time, and even the voice-acting was perfect. So all in all it’s hard to find bad things about Dragon Age. There are some, but it’s mostly my personal issues with different spells and abilities.

Dragon Age is a superb role-playing game, and naming it “spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate” is not such a load of horsecrap it once sounded like. I actually tend to agree with that statement now. There is much more I want to mention about the game, but I save it for later instead of writing a wall of text.

Meanwhile, here is a chart I made of Sten, one of the companions you can take on your journeys. You meet this qunari locked up in a cage in Lothering, and he admits of murdering a human family, including the children. Why you would want a depressed child-killing mentally disturbed warrior wielding two-handed swords in your party is beyond me, but maybe Morrigan will like him.

Sten is the Swedish word for “rock” by the way. Go figure.

After hearing nothing but good things about Torchlight on blogs and Twitter I decided to look it up. From the first view on their website I figured I wouldn’t like it, but downloaded the demo nonetheless. And that was fortunate, because Torchlight is a really good game.

Everyone who mentions Torchlight also mention Diablo in the same sentence, and rightly so. The game has its own graphic style and story, but everything else is heavily borrowed from Diablo and Diablo II. However, Runic Games, who made this game, consist of people who made Diablo and Diablo II in the first place, so I can forgive them for this rip-off.

The basics

If you have ever played some of the Diablo games you know what this game is all about. You travel down into a mine, and then deeper and deeper as progress in the story. Each level of the dungeons is straightforward journey from point A to point B, and completely packed with trash mobs that you blast through. Now and then there is a boss or mini-boss to fight, and your character collect better gear and more powerful spells and abilities. And that’s about it.

The story is quite shallow about a corrupted wizard and a mysterious ore known as the Ember. But really, it could have said “chase the white rabbit” for all I care about the story in these kind of games. Diablo had some nice background lore, but it doesn’t matter. These kinds of games are all about gameplay. So if you love games with rich storylines this either is not for you or you need to learn to relax and enjoy the ride, your choice.

But since Runic Games are planning to make a MMO of the Torchlight world I think they could have worked more on the lore. Although Torchlight is fun, it doesn’t convince me that a MMO would be a good idea at all. Instead I would have liked if they continued on Torchlight and made it a online game just like Diablo. But, that’s their problem, and for an entirely different game.

There is no character customization whatsoever involved, except naming your character, which is a shame. One neat feature in Torchlight is a companion, which is either a dog or a cat. They have an inventory that you can dump stuff in when yours get full, and with a single click send them to town sell everything they carry to the vendor. Then they return to where you are in the dungeon with the cash. It only takes a couple of minutes, and it’s nice not having to personally visit the town every 20 minutes.

Gameplay

I played the game as an Alchemist, which in Diablo II terms is a mix of Necromancer, Sorceress, and a little bit of Druid. Aside from the Alchemist there is also the Destroyer and Vanquisher, who could be seen as Barbarian and Amazon respectively.

The Alchemist has powerful offensive and defensive magic spells, and summoned minions such as imps and golems. You have three talent trees, but you don’t have to follow a path and can just drop points wherever you want as long as you meet the level requirements. Aside from spells from the talent trees you also have four slots where you can place spells you buy from vendors (or drop). You can also give your dog/cat two spells, and with some thinking you can come up with great synergies between you and your pet. I for example had my pet freezing mobs in place so I could nuke them from afar.

While the dog is intelligent enough to run and sell stuff in town and find its way back to me twenty levels below in a couple of minutes, the rest of the minions are not as bright. They tend to get stuck in rooms and I often had to resummon or fight without them.

I decided right from the start to play the game in Hard more, since I wanted a challenge. The fun in hack’n’slash games comes form just hack’n’slashing, but if it gets too easy it can become tedious. Hard felt very easy in the beginning, but after level 10 or so I started encountering mobs that hit like trucks, and I had to rethink my strategies and gear. Occasionally a mini-boss would turn around and one-shot me anyway, magic shield or no magic shield, which was a little off-putting. I started the game feeling like a god, and at the end I had to run in circles to survive. This is fine since I have minions beating on them while I run around.

There are different themes as you venture deeper into the dungeons. You have the mines, normal crypts, caves, jungle ruins, a goblin siege camp, a dwarven fortress (which I thought was the most fun), and a bunch of other areas. Most of them are quite beautiful and the lightning really does wonders, despite the somewhat cartoonish art style.

While boss fights at the end of levels were challenging, they all faded in comparison to the last fight. It was a fight so far out on the Epic scale that it nearly fell off. Nefarian has nothing on this guy. My standard damage spells usually drops mobs in one or two hits, but after using my entire mana pool on the boss his health bar barely moved. I don’t know exactly how long time it took, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something like 30 minutes. Usually he was trying to eat my minions and just ignore me, but occasionally there would be adds spawning all over the place that hit like trucks, so it was far from easy.

Once he is beaten the game is technically over, but you have now unlocked the “Endless Dungeon”. It keeps spawning random dungeon levels forever, and I can’t figure out if that’s a blessing or a curse. Vendors also sell maps that when used will open a portal to a random dungeon. So you could actually play this game forever.

User Interface

The game set out to be very entry friendly and easy to get into, and while it succeeds at the gameplay it fails a bit with lacking tooltips and UI. Magic spells has strange information, for example some get “20% weapon damage”. So if I improve my weapon my spells hit harder. I think. I actually invested in dexterity (there is strength, dexterity, magic and defense) since I saw it increased my ranged damage, which I had with my wand. But magic also increased the ranged damage… so go figure. Tooltips could definitely need a cleanup so they are clearer.

I also found the UI very lacking as an Alchemist summoner. At some point I would have 6 nether imps, 2 golems, 1 dog, 7 skeleton archers, and a whole army of skeleton warriors doing my bidding. And when mobs where running everywhere and the whole place seemed to be on fire (*nefarious laughing*) it was just impossible to tell how many I had left since there was no unitframes except for the dog. I found myself stopping and counting my imps after each fight to see if I needed to resummon some of them.

The controls are exactly like Diablo II, so if you are a D2 veteran you can jump right in and feel at home. Left-clicking is standard attack and moving, and right-click is a pre-determined spell, with a secondary spell quickly available for switching with the tab key. I remember back when I played Diablo II I was an expert with this kind of setup. Bind different spells to keys, and it changed the spell to be used with the right mouse button. However games as evolved since then, and I’m now used to a system like in World of Warcraft, where I place spells on action bars and press those buttons. Since you only have 10 buttons, and two of those needs to go to health and mana potions, and since only 1-5 are within reach on the keyboard that leaves not much room. This brings us to the next point.

Mods

Keybindings. Why do I write about this under a “Mods” title? Because it’s not available. If you want to change keys you have to dig deep into the system, past hidden folders, and open up a settings file with notepad. And then you have to enter codes from a chart for each character you want to bind. Not very user-friendly. This is also happens to be where you need to place mods.

Hopefully we will see some useful mods coming to the game, but one that should be standard is the Respec mod. In the game there is no way to reset your talent points, just like it was in Diablo II. But the world has, once again, moved on since then, and the ability to not have to level a new character because you put one point wrong is standard nowadays, but the Runic Games developers disagreed. This is quite ironic since it’s one of said devs that created the Respec mod.

TLDR

This became quite a long review, but I had so much I wanted to say about this game. Torchlight is one of those games that doesn’t promise much, but delivers anyway. The features seem small, the story is shallow, but it’s fun. It might borrow heavily from games like Diablo, but they do it right and add their own touch to it. If you loved Diablo you are going to love Torchlight, and if you are out to just have fun you couldn’t pick a better game. It doesn’t cost much (16€)… so why not?

PS: there is also fishing in the game. But I thought it was a stupid waste of time in World of Warcraft and I still think it is in Torchlight.

Thunder Clap. I mean, look at it! Instant AoE damage, does a debuff any tank would kill for (but there is usually at least one warrior in any raid that could apply it), and with only a 6 second cooldown. Only when you try to apply it in action you realize just how… lackluster it really is. In these days where crowd control is a myth halfway faded to legend, every class have an AoE ability they assign to every button on their keyboard before they faceroll over it, in these days it is very lackluster.

Paladin’s Consecration is ticking AoE damage on a fixed position on the ground, with pretty much the same cooldown as Thunder Clap, so they are easiest to compare. Now it will have a slight disadvantage when you are moving around much and mobs only will get a few ticks of the full damage. In those situations you could think that Thunder Clap is better.

…but what if you miss a mob? Or even a lot of mobs that for some reason was outside of the radius when you stomped the ground? Say, for example, the whelps on Onyxia? Then you have to run around like a panicked chicken while you wait for the cooldown. And it’s pretty much in this kind of situation that I will sigh and wish I was a Paladin.

Death Knight’s Death and Decay is like Consecration, but it can also be cast from range. Enough said.

Druid’s Swipe is a spam-away ability, and since the change to 360 degrees around the bear and unlimited targets it’s pretty damn nice.

I understand the reasoning that tanks need to be unique and bring different things to the table, but the fact is that Warriors are the worst tanks in pretty much all aspects. Blizzard know this (even admitted it) but refuse to change Warrior tanks since it’s (apparently) a popular tank. Warriors have been the original tanks since the beginning of the game (until TBC they only valid tanks, and in TBC still the best) so it’s to be expected.

This to me is shit. I want to be able to AoE tank without wanting to throw my precious tea cups across the room. I have few good enough already.

What can be done? Make a Warrior Major Glyph named “Glyph of Thundering” that either:

a) Lower the cooldown of Thunder Clap by 3 seconds.

b) Making half the damage of Thunder Clap instant and half the damage ticking on the ground for the entire duration.

c) Taking away the instant damage of Thunder Clap altogether and let it tick on the ground for the entire duration.

I mean, the spell is only used by Warrior tanks to apply the debuff (every 20 seconds or something) when facing single targets, and when AoE tanking. That’s it! Why not buff it with a glyph that only Warrior tanks will take? It’s already tough competition between the glyphs so you would only pick it if you really wanted the extra AoE threat.

Or, at least that’s what I think. Maybe deep down I enjoy tormenting my mind by killing the same ten rats over and over again, like some kind of grind-masochist. Leveling in WoW is a hundred times better than it was four years ago, but it’s also four years of doing the same leveling content over and over again, with some fresh new expansion-stuff on top of it. Leveling in Northrend is not too bad. Actually, it’s quite enjoyable experience. But even that gets dull the third time you do it… and I have done it three times now. I don’t need QuestHelper, because I know from memory the locations of all quest locations.

So why is it impossible for me to stay faithful to one character for any length of time? I keep thinking of my friend who has played the same character since release, and I just wonder how does he do it? He got alts – and a few of them are even max level - but he always got his priorities straight and will throw them under the bus at any time for his main character. I can never manage that. I put all my focus on one, and when playing with alts it’s just a matter of time before I play him more than my main character… and he becomes my new main character.

The “problem” is even more problematic because I can’t find a logical pattern that could hint to why I do what I do. I mean, if I stuck with melee characters longer than casters that could give me a hint that I just enjoy a specific archetype, but that’s not the case. I leveled a hunter to 80, then a druid to 80 for healing/caster DPS, and then a warrior for tanking and melee DPS. And now the tank is being put to the side for a mage. Does it make sense? Not to me anyway.

It could be that I don’t enjoy playing any of them, and I just go back to the archetype that I played far enough back in time to forget why I quit.

But I think the real reason is that I just enjoy the thrill of starting over. Tabula rasa; a blank slate. That once I’ve got used to a familiar pattern or habit I start looking at other characters and seeing their difference in a new light. That maybe being a mage isn’t that bad after all. Every time I quite a healing class I swear I will never touch healing again, and yet I know I will level a priest or paladin eventually. Maybe it’s the experience of doing something different, or maybe it’s the challenge. I don’t know.

Actually this problem is not just in one game, but all games that has the ability to create individual characters with different potentials. I remember that I played games like Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights for a full run with one character, and then created new characters over and over again, but never coming close to finishing it before starting over.

Maybe it’s even a blessing; to be able to ignore all past experience, pain and suffering you had to go through to get a character where it is, and create a new one with no remorse. But I like to think of it as a curse, because leveling sucks.

If I ever meet Sisyphus he and I could trade some stories.

Releasing parts of the content before the actual product is not new for EA, who produce the game. In Spore the creator was available for purchase earlier, and EA then used all the uploaded creatures to populate their universe. Basically people paid to do the dirty work for them. It’s not a stupid idea, letting player create characters to an RPG – for me it’s one of the favorite parts of the game – but not play them. It’s like letting you unwrap a candy bar but not eat it. You are holding it, smelling it, feeling it, but you can’t eat it. Or, at least that’s the idea with the Character Creator.

Dragon Age’s Character Creator is not a complete letdown, but almost. See, what I like about making a character in RPG is not to spend two hours creating a face of a famous movie star (sorry Arnold the Warrior, your time will come), but to assign skills, abilities and talents. I would spend days with pen and paper D&D to create my characters, making sure I get all the feats and skills I want to use. I would plan my character, so I knew I would be able to get the Prestige Class Dwarven Defender at level 5 and not at level 7. This is the kind of small micromanagement I love. This is how I roll.

Dragon Age doesn’t have any of that!

This quote from the Dragon Age site speaks for itself (bolded important part):

Players will be able to customize the appearance of their character using the most detailed facial customization tool BioWare has created to date. Players can also choose their character’s race, gender, and class. They will also choose their character’s point of origin and backstory. Continued customization choices open up as the character gains levels.

Since it’s BioWare who made the first Neverwinter Nights game there will be plenty of comparisons between Dragon Age and NWN (and NWN2 for that sake, although it wasn’t BioWare who made it). In NWN2 (with all the expansions) you got 10 races, 18 sub-races, about 40 classes and prestige classes, hundreds of feats, skill points to place, ability score, spells to choose, familiars, background traits… and then you got appearance as a by-the-way at the end. I could sit literary hours creating my character.

So, what does Dragon Age have to top all that?

In Dragon Age you got 3 races: Human, Elf and Dwarf.

Really? Can you get any more default than that?

You got 3 classes: Warrior, Mage and Rogue.

Wow, 3 whole classes. Granted, these are like hybrids in that they can do a lot of things that in the D&D universe only selected classes can, but 3 is still very weak.

Mages for example can do both damage and heal, but from what I saw there only was like 2 healing spells anyway. It’s a lot of specialization involved, so Warriors can become tanks with sword ‘n’ board, or dual-wield Rogue-wannabies, or two-handed barbarians, or archers. Rogues are stuck to duel-wield or archery, while still having stealth of course.

Background options seems to be nothing more than a pre-generated background story for your character. If you pick Elf as race and ‘City Elf’ as background your human overlord raped your bride on your wedding day. Ooookay. There you go then. Now you got a reason for going around be a dick to humans. Ain’t role-playing wonderful? That there only is one or two background options per race make this all the worse. So you want to be a ‘Human Farmer’? Sorry, only ‘Human Noble’ available.

The appearance options on the other hand are vast, and very impressive. Instead of just pre-generated faces you got sliders for everything from eye color to nose size. Impressive, but nothing new really – this is becoming standard in most games these days. Hair styles and beards felt sorely lacking of variety, and I can’t wait for someone to actually create a system where you can customize your hair with sliders as you can with your face.

Something very annoying with the appearance page was that the character was standing in so much shadow you couldn’t see half the hair styles and colors unless you moved him around. I know it’s supposed to be a ‘dark’ RPG, but is it too much to ask for some sunlight when I create my character? I like to see what I’m doing and not finding out that the ‘brown’ hair color I assigned in fact was purple when I start the game.

Attributes is the same as D&D, except Intelligence is split into ‘Magic’ and ‘Cunning’, and Charisma is gone.

Skills are pretty much a simplified version of the D&D skill system. You got things like Survival (Survival), Craft Trap (Craft Trap), Stealing (Sleight of Hand), etc.

Talents work similar to Talent Trees like in many MMOs, but at the basic is just like feats – except every talent seems to be a spell or ability that you can use. In a way it is nice not having to get passive feats that improve skills, and just get abilities that you can use on enemies, but it also take away some more of that micro-management.

Skills and Talents might be alright, but you know what frustrate me in a Character Creator? That I can’t change any of it! How about you let me assign some points on my own and not just having me click ‘next’?

One this is clear: Dragon Age is focusing on being more action-oriented than micro-management tactical that I loved about D&D and the NWN games. And very much catering towards a bigger crowd than the standard fantasy RPG nerds. Simplified (bordering on stupid) character customization system, more action, more blood, more sex, more violence. With the assumption that everyone is male and enjoy Steven Segal movies you can’t go wrong with that.

Something that is also painfully obvious is that BioWare is not so great at making their own IP. Look, the lore might be incredible deep (I don’t know), the story might be awesome (I don’t know) and the dialogue might be a masterpiece (I don’t know), but if you can’t create a basic character system that is nothing more than a worse copy of the IP you have been using for years, then you are shooting yourself in the foot! You stop doing your old stuff because you want to make something better, not just to make something new!

3 races, 3 classes, and very limited amount of character customization… your gameplay and story better be damn good, BioWare.

Damn good.