At the beginning of the year I took a “quick” break from development on my next interactive fiction title to play Dragon Age, which I got for Christmas from Robin.  I’m a big Bioware RPG fan from way back; I’ve played most of their titles over the years and have been really impressed at how they’ve pretty much singlehandedly taken the Western RPG from life support to marketplace dominance.  So I was expecting an epic-scoped of game with plenty of character development, relevant player choice, and intricate, intertwined plots.

What I was not expecting was a massive, addicting game that would eat up three and a half months of my free time.  Granted, part of that is because the amount of time I have for gaming is a lot more limited now, with newborn Jonathan and his massive disrupting effect on our family schedule.  It was common for me to only get one three-hour block per week to play during this period, and the game has somewhere around 100 hours of content, depending on how you play.  Speed wasn’t enhanced by my decision to play on the “hard” difficulty level, which ramps up the difficulty of the combats.  The main result of elevated difficulty was to require more time fiddling around with gear and a few extra restores on tough fights — again, costing more time.  By the end, I was almost desperate to finish the game, as like Zeno’s Paradox the finale always seemed reachable, but each individual step towards it only got me partway there.  When it was over, I was pleased to be done, and impressed with the excellent main plot arc and the incredible detail in terms of allowing meaningful player choice.  But I was also sick of playing it, and almost resentful of it for refusing to let my mind go.

Dragon Age was a hard master, and I’d finally won free.  I wasn’t going to stick around to give it another shot at me.

I’m going to cover the branching plot and analyze the conversational model of this game in an upcoming post that focuses more on the craft of building these types of games and the lessons we can take when writing interactive fiction.  In this review I’ll just cover the game itself.  There will be some plot spoilers, so if you don’t want the backstory and a bit of the plot spoiled, it’s probably best to stop here.

There are six separate openings, which you can play depending on which race and class you chose, and what background you want your character to have.  Each of the openings is about two or three hours long, completely separate from the others, and sets you up with contacts, history, and a place in the story that is unique.  Depending on which opening you play, other options open up for you throughout the game.  Someone that you wouldn’t know from any random passerby if you played the City Elf opening turns out to be your renegade blood mage friend if you played the mage opening.

The continent of Thedas is recognizable if you’ve ever read any of the myriad Tolkein-rooted Western fantasy series.  The game takes place in the nation of Ferelden, a relatively recent political construct wrested from the domination of the Orlesian Empire by a popular king and his friend and general, Teyrn Loghain.  Despite its brief current incarnation as a kingdom, Ferelden has a long and storied history that is revealed piecemeal as you travel the lands.

The social structure is feudal, similar to medieval Britain.  The king nominally rules over the whole land, but vassals administer the actual holdings.  The majority of these nobles are known as “banns” — the equivalent of “barons”.  Particularly exalted banns are known as “arls”, and the top rank of the nobility are the “teyrns” — analogous to dukes, or more accurately the sovereign princes of the Holy Roman Empire.

Actually, the comparison to the Holy Roman Empire is fairly apt, as the church is a major force in Ferelden as well.  In this game, it’s known as the Chantry, and consists of priestesses of the prophetess Andraste, the Beloved of the Maker, and their militant arm of Templars.  Templars are warriors trained to fight rogue mages, known as maleficarum.  They also serve as protectors of Chantry property and personnel, and as somewhere between guardians and jailers for the approved mage circles.  No one trusts the wizards after the tyranny of the magister lords of the old Tevinter Imperium, and Chantry policy in Ferelden and nearby lands since that time has been to lock down all mages until they have proven themselves able to resist demonic corruption.

There’s a very noticeable Gnostic influence at play in the depiction of the Chantry; the Maker is presented as capricious and almost petulant, an aloof and grudge-holding god who seems to expect the worst of the world he created.

Humans are the dominant race in Thedas, having destroyed the ancient elven culture centuries ago.  Elves now either roam the wilderness, trying to avoid human encroachment, or live as an underclass in “alienages” in major cities.  Dwarves exist as well, although their great subterranean civilization has dwindled to the single city of Orzammar under the constant onslaught of the darkspawn.

Oh, yes, the darkspawn.  How could I forget?  The darkspawn usually roam the Deep Roads — the abandoned underground highways and outposts of the dwarves.  Every few centuries, however, they find… something buried in the earth, and awaken it.  These paragons of evil become archdemons, forge the mindless darkspawn hordes into legions of evil, and lead them onto the surface to wreak havok on the kingdoms of men in an event known on the surface as a Blight.

In Dragon Age, regardless of which origin story you play, you end up becoming a Grey Warden — one of an elite group of warriors dedicated to fighting darkspawn and ending Blights.  And just as you become one, all the other Wardens in Ferelden but one get themselves killed.  So it’s up to you to secure allies, figure out what’s going on, try your hand at politics and intrigue, and eventually put an end to the archdemon and end the Blight.

That’s the 10,000 foot view of the plot.  The actual game is played out through a series of interlocking quests, seasoned with cut scenes and extensive dialogue.  There is plenty of combat, and they’ve done a good job implementing it, but what really makes the game shine is the setting, the writing, the structure of the plot, and the interactions between you and the other characters in your party.

As you travel around, the characters in your party will have conversations among themselves.  These are generally short exchanges unconnected to surrounding events, and appear to be triggered at certain geographical points.  You can also initiate conversation with your party members at any time, although certain topics (and the romantic subplots) can only be pursued in camp.  You can find out a great deal about the backstory of the characters by talking to them, but often you can only get them to really open up if they trust you, which involves impressing them in conversation or with your actions when they are accompanying you.

I chose to travel with: Morrigan, an amoral sorceress from the Korcari Wilds; Alistair, a templar, the other Ferelden Grey Warden and secret bastard son of old King Maric; and Leliana, an Orlesian lay sister of the Chantry and sneak thief.  The writers did a pretty good job with these characters — although they have distinct personalities (approaching caricatures at times) there is a bit of subtlety in the changes in the way they react to you over the course of the game.  For the most part, their attitudes seem consistent with their backstories, and the writing and voice acting flows well.  There was a wide selection of other potential party members, many of which I acquired but never traveled with.  They ended up relegated to spots in camp, where I could talk to them but little else.

It was really the NPC interactions that drove the game forward, and here they did a very good job.  There were very few “FedEx”-style quests involving delivering items from one place to another.  There were a larger number of “kill” quests where someone wanted you to take care of some sort of problem, from protecting them to eliminating competition, but there was almost always a compelling rationale provided for your actions, and you could usually get to the solution in multiple ways.

This is particularly true for the main plot quests.  There were always major choices to be made that could have serious ramifications in the future.  Ally with the elves or the werewolves?  Mages or templars?  A choice here could not only affect the ending of that particular quest segment, it could affect options available in the next segment, and change the disposition of troops available to you at the endgame.

And speaking of the endgame, the sheer number of ways the denouement can play out based on the choices you’ve made throughout the game is just crazy.  Who rules Ferelden (there are about 5 different possibilities here)?  What becomes of Loghain?  Does the main character even live?  Not only do you get to talk to each of the major characters at the end of the game to get a debriefing on their status, but at the very end you get an epilogue summary for each character that lets you know what became of them.

It’s a fantastic, deep game, one that I’d strongly recommend for folks with a taste for dark heroic fantasy and some time to burn.

Tags: Game Review