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.

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.