Playing A Game Dragon Age: Origins PC

I waited too long to try Dragon Age: Origins.

To its credit, some aspects of Dragon Age still shine brightly -- chiefly, the writing quality and voice acting. Just a few minutes with this game reminded me of BioWare's aptitude for building interesting, entertaining characters; and how compelling their games become through that characterization, in making me curious about how their lovable miscreants will develop.

Also -- the real-time-with-pause combat, wrapped in hybrid RPG-RTS camera controls, has a slight learning curve but ends up working quite well. I was pleasantly surprised by how expertly it marries the control strengths of Baldur's Gate and Warcraft. As weird a combo as it seems, they pull it off very competently.

But while some parts of Dragon Age are easy to appreciate even today, others have aged pretty poorly. Game design and technology have made great strides since 2009, and things like enemies being visually unremarkable against the environment; or the terrain's collision not really matching up with the visuals; or UI elements and fonts being under-scaled at modern resolutions, are all "old" problems to have.

By default, the game asks you to manage the character sheets for all of your party members, a mechanical complexity that's kinda dated by now. You can opt into letting the AI manage level-ups and skill points, but not into keeping their armor and weapons up-to-date, which remains a manual process. I respect that this was more typical a decade ago, and some folks would probably still prefer it -- but today, to me, it's tedious minutiae.

Meanwhile, the gameplay that comes out of those character sheets is bit underwhelming. I mean, it's not like I expected to be able to vault ogres or pickpocket ninjas from the start; but even after several hours and levels, my character's lack of distinctive and disruptive skills felt dull. I'm sure this would have gotten better over time, but ... how much time?

The mute protagonist is a more debatable "problem," but one that I'd argue still feels antiquated. On the one hand, since Dragon Age lets you choose a gender and race, and has a shitton of dialog options, recording voice-overs for everything the protagonist might say would be a significant undertaking (even by modern standards). On the other hand, without a voice, the protagonist comes off as out-of-place among the vocal party members and NPCs.

Mass Effect, which BioWare made earlier, sacrificed racial choices and thus had a fully-voiced protagonist. And Witcher 3, par exemple, with no gender or race choices, made Geralt sound really at-home in its game world. Personally, I lean more toward voicing the protagonist, even at the cost of customizability.

Finally, while those things made me somewhat blasé on Dragon Age, what actually made me give up on it was the lazy autosave. Sure, for its time, it wasn't that surprising that a game would expect you to make heavy and regular use of the quicksave hot-key; two years later, Skyrim was still reliant on manual saving as insurance against game crashes.

But Dragon Age's autosaves are extraordinarily rare. On a few occasions, the game will trigger a checkpoint before a battle, but this is more the exception than the rule. And in Dragon Age, when your party dies - which happened many times to me, due to tactical miscalculations - you have to reload a save file.

In other words, you can spend a bunch of time talking to NPCs in town, organizing your inventory, and exploring the map, and then on your way out if some enemies ambush and wipe your party ... welcome to 35 minutes ago. That's what happened to me in my last session.

Near as I can tell, I would have loved Dragon Age for its storytelling prowess and RPG intricacy, had I played it when it was new. But by today's standards, the payoff it offers for testing my patience doesn't feel worth it.

Progress: didn't quite get out of Lothering.