Well I finally gave this game some serious attention. Possible only because you can at any time get up and walk away from it when you need to (unlike DAoC hah
).
Dragon Age: Origins is probably the best RPG I've played in a LONG time... prob since Baldurs Gate 2. I just finished the game as a dwarf warrior (commoner). Played it on 'hard' difficulty. Took me over 100 hrs to finish it. I opted to play the typical good guy/hero saves the day/made friends with all my companions on this go-around. Here's my break-down...
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Pluses:In-depth story line - you can choose to interact with every companion available on a few different levels (good/evil/indifferent/etc). Lots of history to discover and read about during your travels. The end-game 'what happened after you won and left' history was a nice touch, and some of it carries over to the expansion I think.
Eye-candy - for the most part, excellent. With player-made texture packs - out-fucking-standing. NPC and creature models looked fantastic; faces showed a lot of expressions (on par or even better than in HL2 series) and were realistic (unlike NWN2, where the faces looked like they belonged to an alien).
Animations - fluid, in-sync. Combat was sweet to watch, especially when you had 50+ mobs battling each other at the same time on different spots of the battlefield. Crazy action. Some of the death blows were pretty neat (like killing an ogre, or beheading a darkspawn).
Chaining combat attacks/spells - I dont have this down to a science yet, but its possible to chain 2 or more attacks/spells to get some devistating effects and kills. Example - mage casts cone of cold on a mob, then your fighter shield-bashes it while it's frozen and shatters it.
Experience - leveling up is at it should be. You dont have this weird fucked-up XP scaling that you see in a lot of other RPG's (especially MMO's). If a mob, say a skeleton, that is lvl 10, it's gonna have the same XP when you kill it, regardless of what lvl you are. More power to ya if you can kill it at lvl one (which you wont). I wasnt able to one-shot any mob til I hit lvl 22, and they were low-lvl grunt types.
Attributes - I like what Bioware did with this. You have you basics, like strength, dexterity, and constitution (strength determines how hard you hit as well as your chance to hit/penetrate armor. Constitution relates directly to your hit points, dexterity determines how well you can avoid being hit, as well as your chance to hit with weapons like crossbows/bows and daggers). Then ya have willpower, magic, and cunning... these sound mage/rogue specific but it applies to all classes, as do the first three. Also, you have an armor rating as well as a defense rating - a higher armor rating doesnt keep you from being hit; instead to determines how much damage you'll take (or wont take) when you do get hit. Your defense rating actually determines if you can dodge an arrow or a blade. I really liked their system.
Minuses:Crashes: lots of game crashes since the latest patch (1.03 as of this post) - the patch fixed a lot of bugs and game-play issues that Timmy probably experienced, but at the cost of a more unstable executable. There's a fix you can apply to the executable that makes it more stable, but you'll still want to save the game often.
Eye-candy - yeah this was a plus, but lemme elaborate. A lot of the textures that come with the game, for whatever reason, are low-rez. And it's very noticible against the high-quality textures that are in the game. You can download a player-made hi-rez texture pack that fixes this (override folder just like from NWN/NWN2) but lets be honest, Bioware dropped the ball on this one, and I am surprised they havent addressed it yet.
Lack of skill points - as you level up, you gain skill points to apply towards different skills/abulities in the game. For a warrior, this means picking things like shield or two-handed weapon or two-weapon fighting styles. For mages, it's different schools of spells to study, etc. Bottom line is that you can master (get all skills available) in one school and thats about it. As you level, you can learn specialist styles (example: mage as baseline, then you can also learn shape-shifting, or healing arts, etc) but those also cost skill points. You can get spread pretty thin rather quickly. For my warrior I went full shield training at the cost of only having one ability each in two-handed and two-weapon fighting. Bleh.
Dialogue with companions - while it was really cool to have a fully developed story line with every single companion and major NPC in the game, sometimes it seemed like it was TOO much. Luckily you can keep hitting the ESC key to skip pages of dialogue to get to your choice menu, but sometimes you have to suffer through all of it to complete a certain quest with the desired outcome.
AI - actually the AI isnt bad... it's a lot better than what came with NWN/NWN2 outta the box. On hard difficulty the mobs will flank you, sucker you into ambushes, enemy spellcasters can be DEADLY and will use cover, etc... where the AI fell a little short was with your companions. You can control them with a 'tactics' window (which is also a nice touch) but there were a ton of obvious tactics that you'd think should have been included, that weren't. Again, player-made content saves the day, so this minus can become a plus with the right add-on.
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Overall I give this game a 8.5 outta 10 - would be a solid 9 except for the instability of the game engine since patch 1.03.
Timmy - you're way too cynical man
You oughta give the game another chance, try a different class/style of play. You can find plenty of bows with plenty of enchantments built-in, with arrows that have added enchantments. You can also find items that give you plently of resistences (fire and spirit are your big two to have imo).
Gonna chack out the expansion for sure, as you can import your character from the original campaign, and your faction/reputation carries over, as well as most if not all of your gear.
EDIT - just started DA:O - Awakenings. One cool thing I noticed is that you can learn to make your own enchantments, and can apply them to certain pieces of armor as well as weapons. There are some cool new skills and specializations also.
I never had any issues with Crysis... makes me wanna go back and play it again now that I have a true DX10 machine w/ faster vid card.