It’s easy to say a game is great. I could start and end this review by just saying “Dragon Age: Origins is the best game of the year, and possibly, the best RPG in the last couple of years, better than The Witcher, better than Mass Effect and better than King’s Bounty.” but it wouldn’t do the game justice. Dragon Age: Origins is a game that’s made to be a classic. It’s a game that no matter the flaws, no matter the hiccups or the problems it might have, it manages to make you ignore them entirely and push on, immersing you in an amazing journey, enjoying every moment and at the end giving you an experience that you will gladly remember.

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Dragon Age: Origins is a role-playing-game made by one of the long-time-leaders in RPG developing, Bioware. The game is made to be a spiritual sequel to one of their previous highly-acclaimed classic, the Baldur’s Gate series. It’s quite interesting to see old formulas being reused in today’s games and working out quite well, when you have developers hybridizing genres and trying to make them as flashy and unique as possible. Uniqueness is all great and fine, experimenting with new gameplay types is fine, but sometimes you just want to sit down, kick back and relax with a tried and proven recipe.

For gamers of a younger age, Baldur’s Gate was a top-down 6-people-squad role-playing-game released in 1998 that focused on delivering a great story, with a lot of intertwining dialogue choices. It featured tactical squad-based combat using Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules and was set in the fantastic world of the Forgotten Realms. This was the first game using the Forgotten Realms universe made by Bioware, but it was soon followed by Neverwinter Nights and its expansions. It featured most of the concepts aside from the squad mechanic, using a single companion, but keeping the same emotional connection. This changed in the sequel, Neverwinter Nights 2, which brought back the concept of a tactical gameplay allowing two party-members but keeping the game in the same direction that was set out with Baldur’s Gate… and even earlier with Black Isle Studios’ Icewind Dale, but that’s a story for another time.

So this is what they meant about a 'mature' theme?

Dragon Age: Origins is a game for a new age, but oddly, featuring the same concepts that most people put down in the “nostalgia box” as being unprofitable to use now. Concepts such as a 4 person tactical squad system with a pause button, the heavy use of text read from books and various notes, the amount of spoken dialogue and purely the game-lenght are things that most producers nowadays shy away from. It’s been said that the modern day gamer wants fast-paced action combat, no nonsense characters and big burly men telling busty beautiful women that they’ll save the world. I’m happy to see that at over 5 million copies sold, gamers worldwide are proving to be smarter than your average 14 year old.

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