Dragon Age: Origins, and why it's awesome.

In an effort to stop the rampant pessimistic and overly critical stance this blog seems to have taken lately, I've decided to dedicate an entire post to something that is awesome. It should come as no surprise that the awesomeness in this post comes entirely from Bioware. No, I'm not talking about The Old Republic MMO (I'm reserving judgement on that), but from the upcoming RPG Dragon Age: Origins.

One of the always appealing aspects of the Western RPG is that you get to choose your own character and build him or her up from scratch. This is great and allows enormous amount of replayability in games, but has the problem in that it doesn't allow for much background. I sincerely doubt my heavily armoured Lawful Evil swordsman who's well on his way to becoming a divine embodiment of "evil arsehole" has much in common in his background with my chaotic good hippy-like Ranger who never wears anything heavier then a cotton shirt, and judging by the number of romantic options he seems to get, often much less.

So how to get around it? Some RPGS seem to just dictate to you who you were and bugger any choices you make on the matter. Case in point 1: Knights of the Old Republic 2, no matter what you choose with your character, your entire history is dictated to you and you need to find it out like an amnesiac cliche (despite the fact your character doesn't have amnesia, and is apparently just so thick he needs his life story narrated to him). Case in point 2: Neverwinter Nights 2, it seems this one village is so diverse it can give rise to anything from a Demon-summoning Warlock to an elite Warrior Paladin. Not bad for a place that only has three visitors a year.

What does Dragon Age do differently? Simple. From everything I've read, upon character creation and after choosing a class, gender, race, etc etc, you choose an origin story. An origin story is less of a dictated narrative and more of a basic social standing (high class noble, enslaved Elf, etc etc), which the game then places you in. Each origin has it's unique starting position, and you spend the opening part of the game exploring your life and informing the game of your normal sort of position in your backstory, how you got along with people, what your moral stance on XYZ is, things like that. Then at the end of your backstory, for some reason or another, you're recruited into the elite group who end up up shirt creek without a washer or dryer, beginning the epic narrative of the game.

I for one am so excited about this concept it gives me tingly feelings in my pants which cannot be contained in there alone, and so spread upwards into my nose affecting the erectile tissue contained there, as well. Are you sufficiently grossed out? Good, let's go onto the next paragraph.

This is taking RPG storytelling in a whole new direction. It was experimented with slightly in Mass Effect, with some background being chosen which had, at best, a tiny effect on the story (primarily just some dialogue changes and one or two minor quests), and I feel it was one of the appeals of the game. Now Dragon Age: Origins has taken this idea and run so far with it there's a gold medal in it for the game if it pulls it off and isn't caught using illegal drugs like "flat out lying in press releases and marketing".

The origins are supposed to have a genuine impact on the game. Dependant on who you are you'll be treated differently by NPCs. Inside the human settlements, Noble Humans will be readily accepted since they can order your castration otherwise, while low-born Dwarfs will be seen as little better then the yappy dog next door that comes over and wets the carpet. However the 'Wild-living' Elves will be completely unaccepted in human settlements, but the moment you go into the wild and meet their cousins you're up easy street, while the humans will be lucky to leave with both testicles still in the right container.

I could be over-emphasising the importance of the origin stories, and they could be little more then icing on top of the game-cake (in which case it needs to be a good cake anyway for the icing to be worth it), but considering it's part of the name of the bloody game (Dragon age: "ORIGINS") presumably they'll put some effort into getting it right. And anyway, it's BIOWARE. I haven't seen any bad decisions from them since "Hey, let's send all our sequels out to this Obsidian mob".