Dragon Age: Origins is too large to be contained in a single post, so we’re going to start here, at the beginning, talking about the game itself.

To start, I want to say simply that my CRPG experience runs parallel with Dusty Monk’s over at Of Course I’ll Play It. My “golden age” was the Gold Box D&D series on the C64, which naturally fed into Baldur’s Gate on the PC. BG really marked the end of the era of the single player, party based CRPG for me, as the tide turned towards FPS and MMOs on both the PC and consoles. Not-so-oddly enough, it was Bioware who kept the flame alive, with Neverwinter Nights in the interim, and it’s Bioware who is bringing the industry back around to the classic CRPG with Dragon Age: Origins.

DA is a classic CRPG painted in modern styles: you can get an isometric or over-the-shoulder view of the action, but you are still in sole command a party of up to 5 NPCs. As it’s a Bioware title, though, all of the technology and even the artwork takes a back-seat to the story.

The story may not be overly original, but I found that it’s presentation, through cut-scenes and dialog choices, was profound. As Dusty mentioned it in his post, you must approach DA like a novel and not like Diablo. Where other titles feel heavy and bloated with cut-scenes that you force yourself to sit through, DA’s scenes left me wanting more story and less action. This is a testament to the fine animation that Bioware has achieved, and also the great voice talent that Bioware secured for the title. By the time I had completed the opening story for the human warrior I was playing, I felt that I had stepped into a novel which follows in the footsteps of Tolkien, or G. R.R. Martin.

Game play wise, DA is both as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Pressing the Space Bar will pause the action, allowing you to check on your party and issue orders if the action is too hectic. You can switch to any member at any time to take direct control, which is useful for issuing commands in combat, or to pick a lock or cast a spell. If you’re not into micromanagement, then the AI builder is incredibly powerful for visually scripting how your party should act under various circumstances. I like the shared inventory, which allows you to cycle through characters but not have to worry about transferring items from one character to another.

If you’re a lore-freak, then DA will be your cup of tea. You’ll unlock information on places, people and creatures, but you don’t get a dinky paragraph. You’ll get a short essay on each. It fully supports Bioware’s focus on the story behind their games, and it’s very refreshing to see something so deeply written after years of throw-away quest text.

Thus far, talk and reviews of DA have been positive. It’s a Bioware product, so we could expect no less. It’s a testament to the quality of the product when it can take so many MMO players away from their social interaction and tether them securely to a single player title, which is what seems to be what’s being expressed in several MMO themed circles.

Speaking of which, the next post will focus on Dragon Age in the time of World of Warcraft. It’s inevitable that DA will be compared to MMOs, despite the fact that it has no multiplayer component. We’ll also look at Dragon Age being released to a group of gamers who may have never even played a single player CRPG before.

Read Part Two: Dragon Age – Single Player CRPGs in the Age Of WoW