Dragon Age: Origins is BioWare post-World of Warcraft. All the traditional elements of their games are here: party members ranging from the benevolent to the antisocial, a bevy of combat specs, endless dialogue trees with the ability to persuade or intimidate, and the “go to four places” story progression structure. In Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire, being good or evil provides bonuses to certain abilities; following Mass Effect, DA:O divorces morality from combat specificity. Something new here is the primary goal of building an army. Instead of simply going to four key locations to solve an arbitrary, localized problem, you’ve got to pick a side between two factions and eventually recruit one of them to accompany you into the game’s final battle. Side quests, instead of locking you into exploring one area for an extended period of time, often require you to solve problems in other regions before proceeding.

The game takes place in a world oozing with background information and an extended literary universe. You’re introduced to much of this in the opening cinematic: a long time ago, the hubris of Man led a group of mages to dabble in the dark arts and somehow transform themselves into Darkspawn. These monsters eventually built into a horde strong enough to capture the innermost recesses of the Dwarven underground kingdom. Every few centuries they emerge from the darkness, united under the control of an Archdemon. This event is known as the Blight, and it has a habit of occurring just as the “surface-dwellers” have known safety and comfort for enough centuries to forget just how dangerous the Darkspawn threat really is.

You play something called a Grey Warden, a man or woman chosen from the countless number of mages, warriors, and rogues in the land to drink the blood of Darkspawn and thus become locked into an eternal resistance against them. Prior to joining the Wardens, the player experiences one of six “origin stories” determined by the race and class combination she chooses. These introduce you to one aspect of the game world that other players won’t learn about until they visit the origin story locations later in the main quest. You can be a Dalish (forestal) elf, an elven commoner, a mage, a human noble, a dwarven noble, or a dwarven commoner. Each of these will bias the player toward a particular mode of interaction with other races and professions, encouraging roleplay.

Most of the richness of the game world comes from the political histories of all the factions: dwarves have a caste system similar to that of India; mages live trapped within a tower, guarded by templars whose job it is to make sure they never taste too much power; elves populate ethnic ghettoes known as alienages, subsisting in abject poverty and periodically being rounded up to be sold into slavery. These aren’t half-assedly developed as were the political intrigues of Final Fantasy XII--these are real people with tangible, relatable problems. There’s typically no obvious right or wrong decision to make when completing main quests. All the factions have a reason for believing what they do, and each has something unique to offer you as a reward for choosing to take its side.

As in KotOR 2, most lasting consequences emerge from how your party members react to your actions and choices. Dragon Age: Origins is a game about relationships. Unlike in Mass Effect, where you advance through friendship and sexual courtship at a pre-determined, staged progression, the party members in DA:O open themselves up to you at different rates. Within an hour of playing the game, you might be bedding one of the first two characters you come across. After a few more hours, you could be sneaking kisses with a newfound companion. This typically results in the forging of a love triangle rife with deceit, casual lovemaking, and the development of some degree of virtual love (depending on how into it you get). Who you bring along for combat and story progression can affect a lot: if one of your party members has a vested interest in how a particular problem gets solved, she may choose to fight against you when you make a choice anathema to her desires and motivations.

You’ll spend a lot of time dungeon-crawling, and this is where the only real weaknesses of the game pop up. I said before that this was BioWare after WoW. Just as in Final Fantasy XII, an attempt was made to model the group dynamics of MMOs--with tanking, aggro pulling, AOE, backstabbing, and crowd control--for a singleplayer experience. FFXII implemented a “gambit” system to automate party members based on simple scripting commands, and DA:O apes this innovation exactly. Unfortunately, the command system simply isn’t complex enough to handle the amount of WoW-style mechanics included.

Here’s a hypothetical combat situation. Your party runs into a room and sees a group of twelves enemies at the bottom of a staircase. You’ve got an archery-specced rogue, a sword-and-board warrior, a healer, and a combat mage in your party. Your warrior has a bunch of armor on and a bunch of skills designed to maximize defense. Your rogue has orders to disable all the traps in the room before the warrior goes in. Your mages are supposed to start out every battle by casting as many crowd-control and mass area of effect damage spells as possible. What happens?

Your warrior charges in, setting off every trap in his way. Your rogue, who’s supposed to maintain a distance from the battle, runs up to the enemy and starts firing arrows from five feet away. One mage fires off a mass hypnosis spell, which eight of the twelve enemies resist. Then your other mage throws a fireball, which also happens to knockdown and burn your tank and archer. If you’re really unlucky, there’s a a yellow (uncommon) or orange (mini-boss) mage in the enemy group, who can kill half your party right away with a well-placed fireball or chain lightning spell. Within a few seconds, your tank is dead. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to kite enemies with your mages, quaffing mana potions and firing off ice spells... but usually you wipe.

Admittedly, I played the game on Hard, which increased enemy spell resistance and friendly fire damage. But I played World of Warcaft for two years: I know how crowd control is supposed to work, I know that my tank is supposed to draw aggro and soak up damage. It just doesn’t come together, because I’m used to playing BioWare games where you don’t meet such massive groups of enemies until you're well into the endgame. After awhile you get used to the quirks of the combat system, but players with no MMO experience might never make it that far (without setting the difficulty to Casual). The brute fact is that the difficulty progression, WoW-style group dynamics, and party scripting just weren’t balanced correctly.

Another problem is the massive gulf between how mages and melee classes advance through their skill trees. It’s fairly obvious what to do for a melee character: balance strength (for wearing heavier armor), dexterity (to increase hit chance), and constitution (health) while picking a sword-and-board, dual-weapon, or two-handed specialization. Mages, on the other hand, are presented with over twenty trees of spell types to choose from. Unlike earlier BioWare games, where progressing through a tree unlocked stronger versions of the same spell, each “school” of magic is littered with mostly useless abilities that must be checked off in order to get what you really want. Then, after dropping four points into a given tree, you may find out that the skill you really wanted really isn’t that wonderful or effective after all. At this point, even if you save regularly, you have no opportunity to re-spec and recoup your spent points.

These aren’t all the possible complaints one might have with the game, but I’m probably also making things seem worse than they really are. You’re playing this game to learn more about your companions and the Dragon Age universe--it represents the peak of BioWare’s storytelling and characterization techniques. In between these juicy morsels of political and sexual intrigue, you’ve got to do some fighting. You might get stuck on a particular enemy encounter for thirty minutes, but when you finally clear it you’ll feel like you’ve actually accomplished something. Through the course of your experience, you’ll vacillate between being a hero and being a complete asshole: the game literally works against our predilection toward picking one role and sticking with it. Persevere to the endgame, and you get to participate in a massive battle that simultaneously makes you feel invincible while challenging you tactically and emotionally.

Slaughter some Darkspawn, fall in love, and save often.

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The Good: a rich storyworld that begins with a bang (the origin stories) while evolving the "go to four places" trope

The Bad: apes WoW-style mechanics while botching scripting options, skill progression, and enemy difficulty

The Ugly: I'll just give you this link and leave it at that

Playthrough: purchased by the reviewer, completed on Hard over the course of forty hours