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What Bioware did right?
- Intricate, involving story, while may not be completely original, it's told in a way that enthralls and enchants the player. This is a rich and engaging story that is rife with emotions, taking players from the depths of betrayal and greed to the heights of personal sacrifice that stretches beyond an individual and to the world.
- You’ll discover a polished, thoughtful and flexible party-based RPG that will undoubtedly please fans of the style. That's thanks to its remarkable flexibility.
- Although the mage, warrior and rogue archetypes are basic - and though warriors and rogues share a lot of common ground in weapons skills - there are multiple tiers of customization in each. The powerful and flavorsome specializations are nicely embedded in the game's storyline
- Talent trees and common passive skills give plenty of scope for crafting an individual character. Levelling is well-paced.
- The biggest thrills in Dragon Age are found in combat. This is no breezy hack ‘n slash affair; the best encounters feel like puzzles, forcing you to use your resources wisely and make calculated decisions on the path to victory. Which enemy poses the largest threat? How do you stem the tide of oncoming skeletons? Can your tank stand in the middle of your mage’s electrical storm long enough to take down the ogre? Your answers to these questions change depending on your party members and their skills, leaving some space for experimentation. Almost every fight can kill you if you aren’t focused, but the satisfaction of standing in the midst of your slaughtered foes after a well-fought battle makes it all worthwhile. Combat brings the best out of itself with some challenging and well-designed encounters with bosses or large groups of tough enemies.
- Combat animations in particular are impressive, as your characters will set themselves before enemies and go through complex motions, with rogues jockeying for position to backstab and warriors forcefully slamming their shields into faces. Colorful kill animations result in dismemberments and decapitations, rewarding you for critical strikes in a far more memorable manner than just a bigger damage number.
- The tempo is even quicker than the Dungeons & Dragons games that preceded Dragon Age, thanks to important tweaks that minimize downtime. For example, you do not need to rest between encounters to replenish your health and recharge your spells. Instead, health and stamina are replenished quickly once the skirmish ends, allowing you to string encounters together without unwanted breaks in between. Should a party member fall during battle, he or she will be resuscitated once the battle has ended. These factors, and more, give Dragon Age an excellent sense of forward direction.
- Camera that can be zoomed in or out on the PC – one of the best additions for a traditional RPG. Personally I use both, zooming out for tactical analysis and commands, and zooming in to enjoy the thrill for brutal combat actions.
- In addition to capturing the joy of battle, Dragon Age also provides an engrossing backdrop for the action. Even more than Mass Effect, the nation of Ferelden feels like a fully realized setting with its own history, conflicts, and power groups. This is one of the main reasons the game is so addicting; completing quests isn’t just about grinding experience and amassing loot – it actually feels like you have an impact on the world. On significant quests, you'll encounter complex choices that force you to weigh the risks against the rewards, even as you try to stay true to your own vision of your character. BioWare's trademark, sometimes heart-wrenchingly difficult morality choices play as much of a role in Dragon Age as they do in past games. Your decisions influence events in Ferelden -- and how your fellow adventures view you.
- There are fascinating alternate routes through Dragon Age to be discovered. Getting a sense of them halfway through your run through the game, you conceive a desire to play it again to explore its possibilities with more freedom and foreknowledge - and it's true that despite running 50 to 100 hours in length, this game has tremendous replay value, and not considering the six origin stories.
- Great dialogue and fantastic voice acting make characters leap off the screen as if they were real friends, and the way they interact with one another feels authentic. Perhaps it's just the sheer amount of time you spend paying active attention to these virtual people that allows them to work they way into your affections. Each companion has an approval rating for the player character, and manipulating these through conversations, decisions and gift-giving - eventually unlocking personal quests, romance and even sex, portrayed with all the sensuous passion of the database spreadsheet that underlies it all - is an engrossing game in itself. Although it can be clumsy and mechanical in the details, overall, evolving your relationship with the companions has a volatile unpredictability that makes for quite a credible simulation of human interaction. It's the most convincingly organic part of the game's story.
- The environments, the texturing of the armor and effects are amazing. This game is vibrant with detail.
- The background conversations can be revealing – when eavesdropping on gossipers – or clever and funny.
- The musical score is first rate.
- One of the best characters I’ve come across – Loghain. This was especially so for me since I read both the books.
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What Bioware did wrong?
- Some of the character models look a few years old.
- The silent protagonist, aka you, a poor substitute for Commander Shepard's fully voice-acted third-person personality. Admittedly it would be expensive and difficult to complete six sets of voice-overs ( two different gender across three different races).
- Mostly lifeless animations, especially sequences of dialogues where you and characters just stood there without any cinematic touches and animations, the few notable exceptions are such as the talk with Duncan as you arrive in Ostagar and the beginning section of the Landsmeet at Denerim.
- The beginning parts of the story, the events at Ostagar, Korcari Wilds, Lothering till you first step foot on Redcliffe, were truly compelling, a cinematic achievement that raised expectations for greater things to come from the rest of plot. Sadly, from then on, it went down to a lower plateau that continues until the Landsmeet, where it began to pick up speed, but not quite reaching the lofty heights at the start, culminating in an uninspired ending.
- The central narrative arc and the characters involved serve the setting well, but don’t deviate far from expectations.
Dragon Age is sorely lacking in the things that make a truly great role-playing game: vision, inspiration, soul. Somewhere in its journey back to its roots, BioWare has got lost in the dense tangle of what it was trying to accomplish. It hasn't been able to see the wood for the trees. It has summoned an entire world into existence in the most meticulous detail, but failed to give it an identity beyond the blandest cliché. It has created living characters that respond like humans, but oftentimes speak like dictionaries and move like mannequins. It has engineered solidly absorbing RPG gameplay and character progression and stranded them in a succession of hackneyed and hide-bound scenarios. Although the systems which make up Dragon Age's world are all interesting and well-realized - the companion interaction, the plotting, the character progression, the combat - the world itself is neither.
Side quests are perfunctory and unappealing filler, usually boiling down to a treasure hunt or a long explanation for a short scrap. Dungeons are designed with great care but mostly without imagination, only occasionally leavening the maze-like, monster-infested ruined temples with the odd puzzle or dimensional warp. There is a sense that the many dungeons have been designed not by human beings with imaginations, but by complex computer programs with elaborate subroutines. The game's locations, while impressively detailed, are dull and devoid of atmosphere, surrounded by invisible walls and fractured by loading times. There's no sense of a contiguous, believable world out there, which is one thing in a linear action game - quite another in a sprawling, supposedly franchise-founding RPG. Things are better when BioWare settles into the intentionally dry Machiavellian world of the human capital Denerim (especially in the game's conniving climax) or the Circle of Magi. But when it's at its highest fantasy - especially in the dismally conventional woodland world of the Dalish Elves - Dragon Age is lowest on charm. The artwork across the board is polished and attractive but generic.
There aren't many working in high fantasy who can lay claim to total originality. Nor is there anything inherently dull and derivative about elves, dragons and dwarves. But there's something missing from Dragon Age. There's no alternative to the eeriness of Elder Scrolls, the colourful exuberance of Warcraft, the gritty savagery of Warhammer, the classical lyricism of Tolkien. In its desperation to infuse this setting with "maturity" - be it of the sober, political kind, or the game's painfully clumsy gore and sex - BioWare has forgotten the key ingredient of any fantasy: the fantastical. Without it, you're still left with a competent, often compelling, impressively detailed and immense RPG, but it's one that casts no spell.
Modifié par SphereofSilence, 18 novembre 2009 - 06:03 .
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