Dragon Age: Origins – Become a Recluse For a While
Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! Happy New Year!!
What?
Oh…I missed all that, did I? Well, that’s quite all right with me. Wasn’t the best year for holiday cheer anyway. But I did find myself spending my break fully entertained.
Dragon Age: Origins has been leaching my life away over the last week or so. And I just have to say, Bioware has impressed me yet again.
I thoroughly enjoyed the old days of Neverwinter Nights – all the possible choices, all the story and all the characters! I loved it. I lost hours upon countless hours to NwN back then. And once I was finished, I was a little sad.
But then there was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I’m not even a huge Star Wars fan, but my brothers convinced me to try the game out. I was once again ensnared by the mounds of content that Bioware dumps into their games.
I have to say the same thing about Dragon Age, although I haven’t yet finished it. I sadly had to return to work, which really interrupts my game play. So after only 27 hours or so, I’m forced to give the game a rest. It’s terribly addicting. Do try to play with a clock around, because maybe then you can stop yourself from realizing it’s 8:00 AM and you should probably get some sleep.
Especially when you have one last Christmas stop to make at Noon that very day and your mother shows up at your house at 11:45 banging on the door, pissed off with you for being asleep. Whoops!
Dragon Age: Origins gives you so many choices your head’ll spin. You have the option of playing as one of three races: Humans, Elves, or Dwarves. Now, within each, you’ll have the option of choosing between two different starting points – for example, you can either be a free Dalish Elf wandering the forests, or a City Elf – where city elves are typically slaves or servants living in slums. You’ll then choose your class – Warrior, Mage, Rogue – and later you can unlock specializations like Rangers or Templars.
Seriously, there’s a lot to do. And there’s a decent amount of customization available for how you want to make your character look, sound, etc. But once you get into the game play, all the choices you make are going to affect how the game turns out. You can decide which characters to piss off with your smart mouth and which ones to befriend or even seduce, if you like.
It’s an epic game. The content is simply amazing. Bioware put so much time and effort into this world. This is easily apparent in the number of long-ass codex readings you’ll find. They are jam-packed with lore and history and story. It’s amazing how much additional, side information they hide throughout the game. There’s so much that you may be able to waste hours just reading through your codex.
The battle system is equally entertaining. You fight in real time, slicing away at shit like a mad man, or, if you’re a mage, you can freeze the fight while you plan your spells and decide where to drop that massive fireball.
You can choose your difficulty from Casual, Normal, Hard and “You’re Kidding Me…” (I don’t remember what comes after hard because I wasn’t about to even try that.) If you play on Hard, you better make sure you have an overwhelming supply of health poultices, because you’re going to need them.
I’ve only played through one race/class so far, but I know that as soon as I’m done, there’s practically a diffferent game awaiting me as another race/class. And interestingly enough, Bioware changed the story based on the character’s gender, which a lot of games don’t bother doing. I know this from watching my boyfriend play his dude (Yes, I had to share…damn it), and I realized that he gets treated differently based on gender (and of course race) but I had never really played a game where the developers realized women would also play and that it might be more interesting for them to see the game and the world from that female perspective.
I think that was really cool. It shows that Bioware is really acknowledging the fact that girls are becoming gamers now and sometimes just as obsessively as their male counterparts.
So while I’m forced to break from game, what do I find in my Google News today? Why a news release about Dragon Age: Origins, of course. It seems there is a new expansion to be released in March. (Read article here, and curse the damn website for putting it all in italics, EWWW!) And not only that, there’s a comic book to be released as well, also coming in March. (Read that article here.)
How cool is that? In addition to the free $15 downloadable content coupon I got with my game, I’ll soon get even more fun and excitement out of Ferelden (although it’ll cost me an extra $39.99 or so…)
If you haven’t played this game, it’s amazing and you should. The graphics are amazing, the content is superb, and the game play is simple and intuitive. It’s not a hard game to get into at all. If you’re a hardcore RPG/Gamer, you can almost definitely handle the Hard difficulty (until you get tired of it, possibly) but if you’re slightly new to gaming or RPG’s or maybe just got into it for the story itself, go ahead and start out on Normal, maybe even Casual (or EASY, you weaklings!!) >=D
But whatever you do, try to pick up a copy of this game. It is so much fun! There are hours and hours of fun to be had here. This game is EPIC. Go play!
