Dragon Age: Origins is a bioware game where you play as a nobody who suffers a great personal tradgedy, is inducted into an elite orginization dedicated to rooting out and destroying evil whereever it may go, suffering a defeat shortly after or before being inducted into the orginization and then is forced to go to 4 locations to use the macguffins to defeat the badguy who uses the power of an ancient race, while having an annoying sarcastic male companion and a variety of other archetypes following you around for vaguely-defined reasons. And you're a dick to everyone you meet, because that's where the best lines are.
I have a massive love-hate relationship with this game.
On one hand, the characters and graphic design make me want to gag with the rediculous cliches and the over-the-top level of blood and sex.
On the other hand, it has my favorite character in any bioware game, the combat is fun if easily broken, and it has TEH TITTIESSSSS LOLOLOL Ol.
That being said, I've already put 55 hours into the game despite the fact that everytime I think about it I hate it, so I figured I might as well play it again and try to make you people change my mind/ make me hate it more.
Before we start, feel free to use the dragon age wiki here:http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Dragon_Age_Wiki
Not only does it have a crapton of information because it's a wiki, it also has helpful spoiler tags for those of you who haven't played it yet. If you haven't played this yet, have that wiki on another tab because Bioware, as usual, did a massive amount of worldbuilding. You can learn most of it through text dumps from npcs, but not only does it break the hell out of my immersion it's boring as shit. So I won't be covering those.
Now that I'm done rambling, The intro:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q94rdV9M1M4
Well, Dragon Age knows how to establish a mood. I mean crist, the first thing you read is from their Bible, and ther god is even worse than the old testament one. He punishes breaking and entering by unleashing a massive cannibalistic death horde that can wipe out all life on earth if EVERYONE doesn't worship him. Nice guy. The chantry has more depth than that though, they're not just Yu Yevon in a Western RPG. I'll talk about that later.
In summary: Mages entered Heaven using magic. The maker was all like "what the hell, hero" and decided to turn them into ugly people and cut himself off from the world. Because he is a rational, fair, and just god, to punish the horrible mages that were trespassing he makes the orcs fuck up the dwarves first.
The dwarves who can't use magic.
Yeah.
I love the dwarves in this game. Orzammar is without any reserve the best part of the game, and I look forward to covering it. For now though, the dwarves role in the story is to get slaughtered, along with everyone else. Until some mentally deprived-asshole forms the grey wardens. Unfortunatly, the game just uses this as an excuse to have a bunch of people slash up a bunch of ugly people and have an absolutley absurd amount of blood come out of their bodies.
It's playing heroic music though, so it's supposed to be awesome, not narm. *sigh*
And to finish it off, Obi-wan talks of an ancient threat that has been ignored for ages, considered a tale to scare the kids, and it's COMING BACK. Please restrain yourselves at this shocking development. I swear, this game starts off worse than the Wheel of Time.
And after that intro, we come to my 2nd favorite part of the game: Character generation.
>.> <.<
•COUGH*
That is the character selection screen. We have a variety of options.
Female or Male: Self-explanatory.
Our races, which are A: Human, the boring one, B: The Elves, the ones that are very much not awesome, and C: The Dwarves, which are not scottish and don't neccessarily have beards.
Our class is also rather self-explanatory. Warriors hit things. Rogues hit things from behind. Mages break the game.
The fun part is the origin. There are six. Human Noble, Dalish Elf, City Elf, Dwarf Noble, Dwarf Commoner, and Circle Mage. If you are a mage, you can only choose the last. Dwarfs cannot be mages, but both humans and elves are free to choose whichever class they wish. I already did one playthrough as a dwarf commoner, so I would appreciate it if we didn't pick that, but I'd be fine if you did.
We need a Name, Gender, Race, Class, and Origin. Feel free to make appearence suggestions as well. And no stupid crap. Dick Licker Cousland is not going to save Ferelden.
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