This is not a game that can simply be explained, how does it begin? it begins in six completely different ways and each of these can be met with a wildly different approach. an excellent portion of the game to relate would be my adventures in the Dwarven city of Orzammar, except there's little chance that you will experience the same events in the same way when you get there. The relationships you have with your party - they all form an experience unique to you.
What will be common to all is the combination of dialogue and combat. Whether you play as a human, elf or dwarf, a rogue, a warrior or mage, a noble or commoner, Dragon Age requires smart use of your wits and weapons. Combat is a combination of real time fighting and turn based handing out of orders.
This is about politics, moral philosophy and love. And about killing dragons with swords. No matter how you approach Dragon Age, combat will be your constant companion. While there are many encounters with a silver tongue that can end peacefully, you aren't going to be reasoning with the Darkspawn, enraged demons, or bandits and assassins. This is where the balance in your party is essential. The game's unfriendly difficulty settings (more on this later) don't leave much room for a gang that doesn't have at least one healer, a couple of strong melee fighters, and someone capable of combat both at range and close up. Fortunately you've got no shortage of suitable candidates.
You can approach combat a couple of ways depending upon your personal preferences and the difficulty level to which you've set the game. In theory setting it to easy should let you fight in real time, where you select opponents and issue instructions from a row of tiled attacks, spells and special items familiar to any MMO player, as the fight happens. Choose normal and you'll have to make consistent use of the spacebar to pause and jump between characters, lining up their next move. This might be used to heal themselves, change target, use a particular special attack, or aid another. Hit space again, watch how these moves play out, then pause once more. It's a form of self created turn based play that encourages enormous involvement.
Further to this are the combat tactics. Each character has a limited number of these slots (expanded through leveling up and choosing particular skills) to which you can assign specific actions to be performed in specific conditions using cascading menus.
However, in a game with few flaws, theres one flailing giant (multiheaded?) one when it comes to difficulty settings. The pop up text suggesting that switching to easy will remove the need for micromanagement during fights is lying. There are difficulty spikes at certain points where getting through a battle on easy becomes stunningly hard, and requires frenetic fine tuning. Similarly if you chose to play a dwarf rogue, you'll find yourself forced to pick easy during the opening moments of the game because you're simply incapable of surviving battles otherwise.
Later on, any class can hold their own with enough skills, But unless you're a mage with a cluster of healing spells you must be prepared to spam health poultices to get though many tough encounters.
Nothing in the game comes without an involved background or moral ambiguity. For example at any point your party can camp, which allows you to heal up, talk to your companions and trade with a couple of dwarves who appear follow you around. But even these dwarves come with a history. The younger of the two is the only mentally handicapped character i can remember encountering in a game. He's looked after by his father, and has a savant gift for enchanting weapons. Treat them as more than a shop, talk to them and the details of their past emerge, along with a surprising ethical quandary.
Dwarven culture, incidentally, is fascinating. It has a caste system where dwarves are born into the same role in life as their same sex parent. Your family will be nobles, warriors, smiths, artisans, miner, merchants or servants, and this well never change. Should a servant marry a noble woman, his son would remain a servant while his daughter would live in the upper echelons. And then, as we mentioned earlier there are the casteless. Either because of ancestral disgrace, or because they went above ground for too long, these dwarves are stripped of their identities, their ancestry removed from Dwarven history.
It's abhorrent. Exploring the city's slums is distressing. But you're an outsider (unless you're playing a dwarf, of course) so how much is it your place to object? This is question the game asks. At one point you're challenged over whether to help set up a chantry in the city of Orzammar - among a race who believe in a completely different, completely incompatible religion. But what if the chantry might offer help to the casteless? What then? At the same time you're drawn into the dirty politics of which of two deadlocked candidates should be the new king, alongside exploring the Darkspawn infested abandoned mines and townships deeper into the mountain. And that's less than half of what happens here.
Were the difficulty levels not so enormously silly, it would require sheer pickiness to find a major fault with this game. Importantly, overly difficult sequences can be powered through on easy, but this doesn't excuse it being necessary. Despite the time and investment required to cultivate relationships with party members, these still feel a little clumsy, and despite my best efforts to have a gay relationship with one party member, i found myself surprised and somewhat confused to have inadvertently accepted the advances of another. Oh, and if we're listing faults, one appalling gaff is the failure to change family members skin colour if you roleplay a non Caucasian. My main protagonist, a black Man lived as a sort of reverse 'The Jerk', where no one mentioned the fact that his mother, father and brothers were all white. Embarrassing.
But coming out of the end of an epic 80 hours first playthrough, I live with memories that feel like more than simply events in a game. the friendship i formed with fellow grey warden Alistair has an echo of a reality. His penchant for sarcasm, his sniping conversations with Morrigan as we explored, and his struggle to balance emotion and bravado, continue to resonate.
I've not only been to huge cities, but I've learned their past, their present, and been involved in shaping their future. This hasn't felt like passing through a series of checkpoints, but having experienced a world. I know enough about the religion of the chantry to preach their own chants. My connection to the grey wardens is palpable, and the part I played an honourable one.
This is the most enormously detailed game world I've experienced, its history stretching back thousand of years, its cultures vivid, beautiful and flawed, the battles enormous, the humour superb. roleplaying games now have a great deal to live up to.
