Bioware’s latest RPG masterpiece is finally upon us, and it’s obvious that they’ve made the most of the 6 years they’ve spent developing it (that’s right, for those unaware, Dragon Age was announced well before Mass Effect yet has only beaten Mass Effect’s sequel to stores by a couple of months).

Obviously a game with such a long development time has some huge expectations… expectations I stayed away from by distancing myself from as much of the previews and trailers as possible so that I could stay out of the hype and just enjoy the game, rather than being concerned with whether it met my expectations. But you know what; I don’t think it would have mattered as the game is, in a word, “brilliant”, though far from perfect. In fact, perhaps “difficult” is more appropriate as it seems to be the first thing that pops into mind when I talk to people about Dragon Age.

More after the jump.

Killing is a bloody, but jovial business

Of course, I  haven’t finished the game yet (In fact, with around 20 hours played I’m only 22% complete according to the in-game meter) and there’s still plenty of time for my opinion on some of these things to change so don’t take these thoughts to be the final word on the game. That being said, so far I’m really enjoying the game in a where-did-the-past-6-hours-go kind of way.

The difficulty seems like a great place to start actually as it seems to be, by far, the least polished aspect of the game. First and foremost, there are four difficulty levels; Easy, Normal, Hard and Nightmare… but I don’t see any reason for them to include either Hard or Nightmare as even Normal seems nigh impossible at times, and I’ve dropped it back to Easy difficulty more times than I dare to mention on a gaming website. Maybe I’m just terrible at the game, but it doesn’t seem to be a matter of not making the right moves, but just sheer weight of numbers/incoming damage that, unless you get lucky, is just insurmountable.

Pictured: Slightly less blood than your average Dragon Age rat

This isn’t the only problem with the game’s difficulty though and while some fights seems insurmountable, there are just as many that you barely notice the enemy before they’re eliminated. While every fight shouldn’t leave the player on the edge of their seat, they should at least provide some amount of challenge, and such inconsistency in the difficulty of combats makes it really feel like the game’s difficulty was rushed together at the last minute and as such really lacks the polish present in most other aspects of the game.

Another poor design choice that helps compound the difficulty problems is the way they display the party’s health and mana/stamina on the screen; small circular icons in the top left corner of the screen. This in itself isn’t the problem though, the issue is that in the heat of combat, there’s no way to actually see the physical amount, or even the percentage of, the character’s health/mana/stamina without pausing the game and completely breaking immersion by going into their stats page. If you’re constantly pausing and micro-managing all of your characters move-by-move then it’s not as large of a concern, but for a player like me who tries to play it in real-time and enjoys the sense of immersion Bioware have accomplished, it’s rather annoying and disappointing, especially when there is a large empty space in the bottom right of the interface where larger, more detailed info could of been placed.

Now the time is here, for Iron Man to spread fear

Despite this however, the actual gameplay is still really enjoyable and the combat system in particular strikes me as an unusual mix of traditional Baldur’s Gate/KOTOR gameplay spliced with aspects of World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XII, which is hard to explain and sounds really odd in theory, but works really well when put together in the game.  In fact, some aspects such as the system of assigning key strategies to your allies is ripped almost word for word from Final Fantasy XII and works just as well in Dragon Age as it did for Square Enix a few years ago, though is no less intimidating to those unfamiliar with the system (you have a number of slots per character that you can assign certain abilities, attacks or items for them to use depending on certain situations, such as how much health you have or how many enemies are nearby).

Another interesting aspect to the gameplay is how the design team has dealt with the death of characters; they’re not permanently dead and will revive at the end of a battle, but with major debuffs such as “Broken Arm”, which greatly reduces their damage, or “Cracked Skull” which does the same to their Cunning, with these penalties lasting until you return to camp or use an uncommon/expensive “Injury Kit” item. Given how unbalanced the difficulty can seem at times, I think they’ve done a great job with these penalties, making them damaging enough that death is still a major concern, but without making it impossible to continue onwards; a balance that given the difficulty of the game, I’m

glad they got right.

Robocop, is that you?

I find it interesting how much Dragon Age has the feel of an MMORPG to it, despite being a completely singleplayer experience, and it seems odd to me that Bioware haven’t tried to implement at least a 4-player Co-op mode akin to Baldurs Gate as the game would be phenomenal with a whole party of human characters. Truth be told, after playing Dragon Age I’m already psyched up for The Old Republic; Bioware’s Star Wars MMO, because if they can capture the blend of Storytelling and Gameplay from here, I could see myself investing far more time than I’d care to admit into TOR.

Which brings me to what has always been Bioware’s greatest strength; their storytelling, world design and characters. Fereldan really feels like a living, breathing world and I’ve yet to find a named NPC who hasn’t been a well-rounded, fleshed out character; even when I kill them after 2 lines of dialogue. While many of the traditional fantasy tropes are present, Bioware has still done a great job making them interesting and seemingly unique to the world presented in Dragon Age, and as always, the writing in the game is brilliant; especially the little one-liners and background discussion your party members will casually toss around during idle moments. Even outside of the main storyline and sidequests, there is a wealth of background information in the codexes I’ve stumbled across in librarys, or even by examining landmarks such as statues and ruined guard posts. Not only this, but the game itself is incredibly long; I’ve spent nearly 20 hours in the world of Dragon Age and have completed just 16% of the game according to the stat tracker in-game, and with the multiple branching archs, it’s obvious theres a huge amount of replayability aside from the 100+ hours of main gameplay.

Uh.. Yeh... No idea whats going on here...

The camera style is, by default, a 3^rd person over-the-shoulder style akin to Gears of War, but can be zoomed out into a more traditional Isometric view in the style of Baldur’s Gate or Neverwinter Nights which, combined with the ability to pause the game on the fly, means that it can be played in the same style as it’s progenitor though, even as a huge BG/NWN fan, I actually find myself playing the game more in over-the-shoulder style. It should also be noted that orientation seems to be a bit funky in the fully-zoomed Isometric view, rendering the WASD movement controls almost useless and essentially forcing you to use the annoying click-to-move controls

Speaking of polish; the game runs incredibly well even with graphic settings cranked up to full. While my PC isn’t top of the range, it is fairly powerful still (2.4ghz Core 2 Duo, 4gb RAM, 260GTX) and I wasn’t expecting to have the game run so well while looking so good, major props to the codemonkeys at Bioware for such great engine work.

More thoughts to come later…