#yeah her hellbaby gonna be half dwarf

[vyrerus]

Vyre’s Top 12 Games of 2009~2019 Decade #11

So this game came out n PS3 in late 2009... and let me just say I became grossly addicted to it. I was in my sophomore year of college, which was my last year of college as I dropped out after that. I didn’t actually own this game until a few years later, but a good friend of mine had bought a PS3 and this game just as soon as it was available. He was taking a lot more classes and had a big social life, as well as a mildly anti-video game boyfriend. As a result he let me and his suite mates play it A LOT! And I played it nearly endlessly, in one sitting I played it for nearly thirty-six hours straight. I did a character for every origin and race. I did complete playthroughs for every character I made. This game is by Bioware, the same folks who made Knights of the Old Republic. As such it had similar gameplay and mechanics.

The game itself centers around interacting via dialogue options, though as I remember it, there’s no morality system. You can choose to be a dickhead or a saint, and it doesn’t affect anything other than game events, such as NPC death or EXP/material acquisition. There are oodles and boodles of items and sidequests. There isn’t an overworld, but there is a world map, and you travel from location to location, and each location is rather large and maze like with the occasional field or forest. 

Dragon Age is a game of possibilities. You have the opportunity to romance almost everyone in your party, with certain characters being locked by their sexuality. You can work up a rapport and you will get a form of a sex scene where both characters are in their underwear and do some heavy petting by a campfire. I don’t remember if this made as much of a stink as Mass Effect, though I’m inclined to think that it didn’t. Romance was certainly a focus of each of my playthroughs. 

In my first playthrough, my friends and I were taking turns at playing. One had chosen to be a Mage. The other also a Mage. I chose to be a Dwarven Rogue from the commoner upbringing. I was not disappointed by my choice. The Dwarven commoner is branded as casteless with a tattoo marking his lack of a house name. Dwarves have their own slang terms, city location, and are unique in that they cannot use magic. As a commoner you work for a crime boss who wants you to rig up an arena tournament that he’s bet money on. You drug his fighter’s competition, only to find that his fighter is blackout drunk. You decide to put his armor on, the helmet covering your face, and fight in his stead. As you go on to beat every opponent in the tournament, all dwarven nobles, right before the final match, the drunken dwarf enters the arena grunting and mumbling about you having stolen his armor. Forced to reveal your identity, you are cast out of the tournament, despite your battle prowess, for being a casteless dwarf. The crime boss then throws you in prison for ruining his wager. You break out, and are apprehended by the Grey Warden, Duncan. He gives you the choice of facing the consequences of your actions within dwarven society or agreeing to become a Grey Warden.

Every origin leads to that. Basically the plot of the game is that Duncan is the last of a handful of Grey Wardens in a country known as Ferelden. Ferelden is beset by a horde of evil, demon like monsters known as Darkspawn. Darkspawn originate from when the Tevinter Empirium and its council of incredibly powerful mages used Blood Magic to physically enter a realm of spirits and demons known as The Fade. When they returned to the world, they did so as the Darkspawn and lead a war, known as a Blight, which ruined the land and shattered their nation. It went on for 200 years, and was only stopped by the formation of the first order of Grey Wardens. Duncan suspects another Blight to be coming, and he seeks to bolster the Grey Wardens’ forces with talented warriors. 

So its story interested me. The gameplay itself is a mixture of real time tactics with a global cooldown of sorts on your abilities. Auto attacks come into play as well. It’s fairly similar to an MMO. You can use melee weapons, bows, or magic. For melee there are two handers, dual wielding, and sword/shield. All come with benefits. Certain classes offer perks to certain styles of combat, and only mages may perform magic. There are basic classes and advanced classes that you can unlock later, as well as prestige classing, so you get a main class and a sub class basically. Corpse as lootable. THere are doors and chests that are locked all throughout the game, picking them yourself or with a party member yields experience. Your party size is limited to 4, with three of your members controlled by the A.I. though you may give them direct orders through a pause wheel menu or switch to controlling them directly, though you may only control one character directly at a time. When you lose all HP, but the party wins the fight, any incapacitated party member recovers some health but receives an injury and the injury gives a debuff that persists until the injury is healed. 

Mages are the most powerful class to be, followed closely by Warriors, but Rogues are no pushovers. No matter which class you pick, you need to read your skill descriptions and take note and remember what they do, so you can fight as effectively as possible. I believe the game has a menu set difficulty setting, but I never touched it. 

The most enjoyable thing about this game was playing it with friends. Even though it’s single player and we took turns, it was fun to see the same situation play out 100% differently from character to character. For instance, there’s a situation with the forest elves, The Dalish, where you are trying to get them ally with the Grey Wardens and fight the Darkspawn. You have to take care of a forest spirit and werewolves for them. You can cause one of three things to happen. You can do as the Dalish bid and rid the forest of the spirit and werewolves, thus getting the Dalish on your side... or you can side with the forest spirit, getting the werewolves on your side. Further, I think you can kind of screw fuck yourself and get neither, but it’s been far too long since I last did a playthrough.

Despite buying a copy for myself a few years later and doing one more playthrough for a total of, I believe, 7 complete playthroughs? The magic of the game had worn off, and without my friends to enjoy it with, it seemed a lot less humorous. I can still say though, it was one of the best games of the last 10 years and easily earns a spot on this list. I must have put 150 hours into that game, easily. My favorite characters are Shale, Alistair, and Morrigan. Morrigan was my first romance, and I sure as shit gave her as much as my humble casteless dwarf could give!

The game also can tout slightly different endings, though I think all that really changes is who winds up killing the archdemon and related to that, is whether your character survives or not. It’s at least worth one full playthrough if you can get your hands on a copy!