Dragon Age: Origins Review [PC]



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55 hours. In the end, when the final cutscene played, that was my playtime for Dragon Age: Origins. Saying that was my finished playtime, though, is going too far; judging by my statistics I'd completed somewhere around 60% of the game. I still had several origins to go through, plenty of side-quests left uncompleted, and lots of character arcs still dangling.

This is a huge game, and that's intended in every sense. It'll take a while to complete, certainly, but more than that it's a game with a massive, deeply involved backstory and a truly gigantic world. You are on a desperate quest to save the world, without leaving your country. That country feels like a country, and the desperation, too, is genuine: little touches like a growing dark stain on your map signify the progress of the Blight, certain quests feel like races against time, and you never feel anything but pressured.

Every few hundred years, the world is struck by a Blight. Darkspawn, tunnelling deep underground, will occasionally come across a sleeping Old God – a gigantic dragon worshipped by civilisations past. When this happens, they corrupt the Old God into an Archdemon that leads the Darkspawn to the surface on a destructive rampage. If the Archdemon falls, the horde retreats until they find another, but their limitless numbers mean that holding them off until the Archdemon is killed is no easy prospect. The last time a Blight occurred was 400 years ago and, generally, only a truly united front can hope to stop them – a united front supported by the Grey Wardens, an order dedicated to the destruction of the Darkspawn, the members of which have all given up their lives in the name of the cause.

Loss is a persistent theme throughout the game. The Grey Wardens are, in the end, all about the greater good: dark methods may have to be employed to get the right results and making sure the Blight is stopped is the only result that matters, which makes being stereotypically good a very hard thing to do. Being kind and chivalrous is all well and good, and there's a lot of scope for your personal opinion but, dangerous and “evil” as some aspects of life might be, if they'll help end the Blight, then that's what really matters.

But it's not all about you. Your companions, a bunch varying from bitchy witches to stoic, eight-foot warriors, have their own opinions on your actions. Noble and kind Leliana might appreciate you taking the time to sort out a profiteering trader, while the more focused Morrigan will complain that you're wasting time sorting out petty grievances. When it's minor things like that, in the short term at least it won't make much difference. When you do something completely against their views, then you will get into an argument, which could well result in the party member leaving the group or attacking you. It's possible to miss out on a number of party members simply by being a dick when you first encounter them and being forced to fight and kill them. The flipside of this is that raising your relationship levels – either through actions your party approves of or through gifts, with each character preferring different things – grants bonuses to that character's primary statistic. The more your characters like you, the more useful they are to you. Callous and cold, but in keeping with the theme that you do whatever it takes to get the job done.

Dragon Age does a fantastic job of screwing with you on this, too. My elf mage, for instance, had to make some hard decisions in her origin story prior to joining the Grey Wardens and beginning the game proper. While many games might do a bad job of making you realise that these decisions are difficult, or returning to the consequences later, I felt genuinely conflicted about what I had done. On the one hand, I had no doubt I'd done the “right” thing, but at serious cost. Amazingly, this was revisited in a later and particularly introspective quest: upon being asked whether or not I felt guilt at my actions at the beginning, I didn't even think through each of the five options to try and work out which option would let me avoid combat or net me the “best” result. There was only one answer that I could give - “Yes” - and when I was told that I'd acted out of necessity and that I should forgive myself as I had already been forgiven by those I'd acted against, I actually felt absolved.