As this cold im coming down with is slowly taking me over more and more I managed to finish Dragon Age.
Somehow I can´t get myself to write a review but I still feel that somehow this blog entry will be about the same lenght as one.
I also thought that the world felt extremely static. Walking past the same vendors saying the same thing over and over and walking through the capital of the land with only a handful of people inhabiting it.
I guess this is a product of modern games. The technical difficulties with populating a world with enough people is probably harder than one assumes when playing a game like this. But more background noise and enviromental sounds wouldnt have hurted it either even if the stuff that actually is there sounds sweet.
The world also completely lacks any kind of day/night cycle and most importantly weather. Theres some snowfall in one particular area and some rain in one single cutscene but there was abviously not alot of work put into making the world feel as alive as possible.
The rest of the graphics are very uneven. Some characters look like they´re from an Xbox 1 game while some looks really sharp. Some clothing and armor have textures more muddy than my new high res Steam version of Quake while some looks superb.
Character faces looks good overall but feels a bit stale in some situations that would benefit from waay more dramatic expressions and it seems like almost all people of the same gender shares bodies. Theres a male and a female version of every piece of clothing in the land and when someone wears it their body morphs to look exacly like everyone else of the same gender wearing those same clothes. Its 1 body with different heads.
These are a minor issues in the grand scheme of things but its so painfully obvious where corners where cut to allow the game to find its way to stores. Corners are cut in pretty much every aspect of the visual presentation even down to sometimes glaring glitches, framerate hickups, artifacts in prerendered cutscenes and goofy looking body animations.
Walking through a "forest" that consists of a path with muddy textures and 4 trees, 1 piece of low res grass and a painfully "backdrop" looking sky while enduring wierd animations, bad looking models and a controlscheme that allows for no precision at all at times are things you cant ignore forever in such a long game.
They also deserve praise for the choices you get to make throughout the game. The things you can do are mindblowing. There are so many paths to take through so many messed up situations and its never as easy as good and evil. You encounter situations where theres simply different points to view them. People have different opinions and different ways of viewing the world. Its never easy to choose a side and I often found myself thinking heavily on even the smallest of decisions and even regretting things I made earlier in the campaign.
Its roleplaying at its finest. You get to tailor who you want to be and how the world sees you like no other RPG in recent memory. You get to choose how you want to act and what you want to do, not the developers. I even managed to bend some stuff in totally crazy ways to double cross several people and even fool myself out of a reward in the end.
I feel like the game misses ALOT of opportunities that could have made it way more memorable and I also feel like the game could have embraced the mature rating even more. The game feels like its still censoring itself at certain points where it wouldnt have felt awkward or disgusting to let it go all the way.
I never feel enveloped in the world itself and I feel like some things could have used some more dev time when it comes to the presentation (even on the PC wich I´ve played some of aswell) but somehow, after about 30 hours with 1 DLC completed (casual difficulty, a decent number of sidequests not completed), I want to do it all again and see how I will affect those around me if I decide to behave differently and make different decisions.
I feel really bad about some of the stuff I did this time around and it eventually robbed me of several party members that I really wanted to get to know better. I also managed to rob myself of any kind of romance in the game.
So i´ll probably jump in for another round of this one, tho maybe not right away.
To round things up its not fair to compare it to Baldurs Gate. It was a different time back then. Games where made with less impact on economy and with less man hours. We were all much younger and played games in a completely different mindset than we do now. You cant compare the mindset and the way games were back then to how they are now.
Dragon Age stands as an RPG of today even if its made in a very BioWare-like way. As such I couldnt help but change the way I looked at the game as I played it. I went in wanting to enjoy it like I enjoyed BG2 back when I was a youngster but lets face it, thats impossible.
Hmm, I might end up posting some version of this as a review after all.
If you stuck around all the way down to these lines, thanks for reading and feel free to comment!
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