Mordiceius' Gaming Blog Flying Away on a Wing and a Prayer

Dragon Age: Origins (I Hope You Like Blood and Talking!)

I have not posted for the past few days as my entire time has been filled with Dragon Age. This is not going to be some sort of fair and balanced review as everyone in the planet is writing up reviews and "first impressions". For the best review, I would suggest the one at GameTrailers.com.

The gameplay is rock solid in my mind and the game is utterly compelling in every way. My problem is that I am occasionally getting conversational fatigue. It is a double-edge sword to be quite honest. The dialog is well written and can be very witty and funny or really convey a sense of sadness. The problem is that you spend so much of your time talking to people, it fatigues me. You can easily spend an hour talking to someone before you get to go fight for ten minutes only to come back to talk to people for another half hour. The easiest comparison would be to the Fellowship of the Ring movie. It was a great movie, but it just spent a lot of time in exposition. I am only about fifteen hours in so I am expecting to get a lot more fighting before this is over.

The second minor issue I have is the blood. Blood everywhere. Zoso at Killed in a Smiling Accident illustrates well the overuse of blood. Kill one rat? You will be drenched from head to toe in blood and the blood will still be there in the follow conversations and cutscenes. Luckily, there was an option to turn this off and I did right promptly. When you move from one location on the world map to another, your trail is shown via drops of blood on the map. All the load screens are bloody. Even the dragon silhouette in the intro video is made out of blood. It just seems like someone took the idea of mature gaming and though "we need to just have blood everywhere". It just gets a bit over the top sometimes.

Despite those two minor problems, I am having an amazing time with the game. When not playing, I constantly think of what will be happening next and wondering how certain choices will play out. I genuinely enjoy the characters and their interactions and cannot wait to see how everything unfolds.