On my first attempt at a run through of Dragon Age, I started out taking my time — just like I used to with the old Baldur’s Gate games. Those old adventures remain in my mind as some of the best experiences I’ve ever had with games. The degree of party customization possible in the Icewind Dale games was a blast to play around with. On my first playthrough of Icewind Dale 2 it was over an hour before I had my band of adventurers ready for action. Baldur’s Gate 2 drew me in with its rich story right away.
From the moment that Dragon Age landed in reviewer’s hands, Bioware’s claims that the game was a successor to those classics seemed to be born out. Reports of 80-hour games were common in reviews and podcasts. My interest was thoroughly piqued.
My first mistake, I now realize, was my decision to play the game on the PS3. Not to say that the game is bad on the Playstation — it just doesn’t fit. Dragon Age is a game in the tradition of the old Bioware titles in style and substance, and so my brain wanted it to play like them. By all accounts on PC, it does. Players are free to zoom out to the old isometric view for a tactical view of the field, pausing the deliver and queue commands is almost mandatory. The PS3 locks you into a close, behind-the-back camera, driving your character around the game-world. Because of this it looks like most of the other action games that I’m used to playing on the system.
I’ve mentioned my disastrous first playthrough before — I think these platform limitations are one of the big reasons behind the failure. Playing as a Mage, I expected to be able to use tactics like those I had developed in Bioware’s old games. Have my party hang back as a rogue sneaks into the middle of a group of enemies, cloaked — allowing a mage to target them with a high powered area of effect spell from a distance, softening them up before the warriors charge in. The console version of Dragon Age doesn’t really let you do any of this. I could pause combat to issue commands — but only one. The moment you trigger a particular skill for one character to use, the game starts running again. This seriously hampers tactical play. The difficulty of precisely positioning characters destroys it. The only way Dragon Age can reasonably be played is like an action-RPG, or an MMO. Fire off a spell, wait for the cool-down timer to run through, fire it off again. The game’s AI will take care of the other characters, with some guidance from ‘tactical rules’ you can assign.
So I would grind my way through side-quests, exploring the world and developing my character, but not really being engaged. Early on I accepted a quest from some beleaguered villager, offering to help them out with some small problem. Morrigan, one of the more interesting companion characters, chimed in with a snide comment, chastising me for getting involved in these petty little problems when there are more important things looming. Indeed, according to the plot, the entire world is under threat from a giant demonic dragon. Why should I, supposedly a great hero, be carrying someone’s laundry for them? This has always been something of an unintentional joke in RPGs. A man in a massive suit of armor, wielding an even bigger sword walks up to a villager — who then asks the great warrior to go out into a field two-hundred feet away to collect some plant for them. This is utterly ridiculous, and in this instance, Dragon Age recognized the joke. I chuckled, but accepted the quest anyways. At the bottom of the screen Morrigan’s approval of my character went down 4 points. This made me think. Why am I doing this?
This was the beginning of the end for my Mage. I stopped playing for a month or so. The game simply wasn’t fun for me. Why bother? I was planning to trade the game in, see if I could get some money back for it. Rarely had I ever been more disappointed by a game. But I thought I would give it one last chance. Try another character, with a different ‘origin story’ starting them somewhere else in the world.
I went back to basics — a human noble warrior. By the time I had finished the origin story I was back in. This is how the game should be played on consoles. The locked camera feels much more appropriate when your character is busy swinging a sword. The mechanics of the game seem like they belong. The selection wheel that had been my constant companion as a mage, always pausing the game to pick my next spell, virtually disappeared. Instead I had my palate of favourite abilities assigned to the face keys, and began playing the game in realtime. The feeling that I was fighting the console to play the game as I wanted to faded away. It just worked.
One other decision turned my enjoyment of the game around: I blew through the campaign in what I gather is near record time. Only rarely did I consent to side-quests, instead charging ahead with the central mission of building an army to defeat the dragon. At thirty hours to completion, Dragon Age was transformed from a meandering sprawl to a much tighter experience. The story hangs together much better, and doesn’t lose momentum as easily.
Another significant issue that I had when playing as a mage was also rectified by playing as a warrior: the way Dragon Age handles skills. As a warrior, your skill tree flows naturally, with each skill in a particular line building on the last. Playing as a mage, on the other hand, I found that I was accumulating a large collection of spells that I had no interest in using, just because I needed to pick them in order to reach another spell further down the line. With the game’s already limited selection of spells, this was quite frustrating.
Dragon Age is ostensibly a game about choice. Throughout its story you are charged with making difficult moral decisions — and in a rare twist, many of these actually are difficult. But on consoles, Dragon Age seems to miss out on the most fundamental choice in an RPG: the mechanics of the game are such that to be properly enjoyed you can only really pick one class. The detailed tactics required to properly enjoy playing as a mage or a rogue are missing, leaving only the warrior.
This is, no doubt, an opinion that shaped by my preconceptions of what the game should be based on my experience of Bioware’s earlier games, but so be it. On consoles. play as a warrior, and Dragon Age turns out to be a great game. If you want to play as anything else, the console versions of the game are best avoided.
