Can the imagination ever convey as much meaning as experience? Or rather, can exploration of the imagination — the inner life of the mind — itself become a fully developed sort of experience?
The world of Dragon Age: Inquisition is nothing if not vast; populated with collection quests, human (or Elf, or Dwarf, or Qunari) drama, and a story-driven campaign dozens of hours long. For the Steam version of the game, Right-click the 'Dragon Age: Origins' option, and select 'Properties' under the 'My Games' Steam tab. In the 'General' tab, select 'Set Launch Options', enter ' -enabledeveloperconsole ' in that field, and accept it.
After devoting roughly 120 hours in less than two weeks to completing the vast expanse of Dragon Age: Origins, I am left only with those questions.
The holidays, after all, are for many people a time to get away. For those with the financial means, getting away mentally usually entails getting away corporeally. And so in recent weeks I have heard from family and friends scattered to various tropical and alpine destinations far from their homes, and from me.
Meanwhile, in reality I went nowhere for the holidays. I woke up each day, shambled a few yards to my most powerful computer and was transported to the mystical land of Ferelden, a fantasy kingdom riven by political conflict and under assault both overt and clandestine by unappeasable demonic foes from beyond. Day after day, night after night, sunrise after sunrise, the world of Dragon Age continued to unspool before me in such variety and sheer Tolkienian extent that when I actually finished the game, at 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day, I felt as if I were awakening to 2010 from a fortnight’s trance.
This is my job, but I freely admit that if Dragon Age were any less masterly in its overall design and conception, any less captivating in its characterizations and stories, any less rewarding in its combat and progression, any less vibrant in its weaving of an entire alternate reality, I would have felt fully justified in abandoning it and moving on to less intimidating fare. And maybe actually leaving New York City over the holidays.
Continue reading the main storyAs it is, playing through Dragon Age can be likened to packing off to Bayreuth for the Wagner Festival or going on tour with a band like the Grateful Dead or Phish. In other words, it is not just an entertainment decision; it’s a lifestyle commitment. It really is too bad that the term epic, both as a noun and adjective, has been cheapened through overuse in recent years because Dragon Age is truly an epic epic.
Dragon Age, developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts, is certainly far from flawless. The interface could be both more informative and more visually attractive. The distribution and design of the player’s virtual loot and equipment, known as the itemization, could be far more creative. The pacing of the game’s final segment and of its dwarven chapter could be tightened a bit (and no, that is not an understatement).
But Dragon Age so convincingly, inexorably, gloriously draws players into believing that they are really inhabiting its world that the game easily sails into the ranks of the best single-player role-playing games ever made, alongside classics like Ultima IV, Fallout, Planescape: Torment and BioWare’s own Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
To be fair, there have certainly been moments when I feared I was succumbing to a form of Stockholm Syndrome with this game — that I had been taken captive and only through some psychological dependency was I convincing myself that I was actually enjoying it. And that would make some sense, because Dragon Age struck me precisely at the emotional core of who I am as a gamer.
Being raised an only child in the middle of the woods in a house without television before the Internet age, I basically grew up on single-player fantasy role-playing games — Dragon Age’s progenitors like the Bard’s Tale, Might and Magic, Ultima and Wizardry series. Some of my strongest memories of childhood are of meticulously mapping out dungeons from the Bard’s Tale games on graph paper.
Thankfully, you don’t need graph paper to enjoy Dragon Age, but it is unabashedly old-school in its relentless depth and considerable challenge. To succeed in Dragon Age, particularly at its higher difficulty levels, you will need to study its intricate though coherent combat dynamics. You will want to read the game’s Internet message boards to glean the insights of your fellow players. You will need to hone your tactical awareness and thoroughly understand the abilities and limitations of each member of your band of adventurers — each spell, each weapon, each special attack move. If those things don’t sound like fun, Dragon Age is not the game for you.
But a great single-player role-playing game cannot be made from play systems alone. Even more important to a great game of this sort is that it provide players with a world they actually care about saving (in this case defeating the demon menace by rallying mages, elves, dwarves and men to the cause). That means setting, plot and personalities, and it is in these elements that Dragon Age is perhaps the best electronic game yet made.
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In particular, not even the games, as fabulous as they are, are populated with such a panoply of fascinating, nuanced, realistic characters. In Dragon Age, the avatar that you create can adventure along with as many as three companions simultaneously out of a total of nine that you can discover. Setting aside your pet war hound, each of your bipedal comrades — the conflicted and vacillating knight, the hilariously rakish bisexual assassin, the court bard turned nun — feels like a real person. They have their own agendas and their own moral compasses. (In Grand Theft Auto everyone is a bad guy.) Some care about doing the right thing. Others care only for themselves. Some will abandon you or even attack you if they disagree with your choices as the story unfolds.
In all, Dragon Age must contain hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million, words of dialogue. And there is no way to hear even half of it on a single playthrough because the characters interact with one another in various combinations and there are so many different ways to approach each conversation, not only with your main companions but also with the hundreds of other characters who populate Ferelden.
More than 130 different voice actors contributed to Dragon Age, and if there is one person in the entire production who deserves special praise, it is Caroline Livingstone, the game’s voice-over director and producer. It is so easy and common for dialogue in fantasy games (and films, for that matter) to come off as stilted and hokey, especially when you’re working with European accents. But Ms. Livingstone, who also cast the game, did a simply spectacular job of eliciting performances that generally sound incredibly, immersively natural. There are scenes of deeply touching grief, sorrow and emotional tension in Dragon Age, and Ms. Livingstone’s cast sells those moments with aplomb.
But what is a great cast without a great script? The team of writers led by David Gaider delivered one, and also a torrent of ancient tales, fables, allegories, and contrived documents that give the land of Ferelden a rich sense of historical depth and meaning.
I always seem to get lost in the back story of the Elder Scrolls series, the fantasy franchise from Bethesda Softworks, which is BioWare’s only serious competition when it comes to making North American-style single-player role-playing games. And so at some level I stop caring about the world in the Elder Scrolls games. That never happened with Dragon Age. And when you come to care about the world, your ability to shape it so profoundly is what keeps you going through all of the castles, towns, dungeons, forests, towers and tunnels. In fact some part of me can’t wait to explore the neighboring kingdoms that players have only heard about so far.
And wouldn’t you know, a parade of add-ons is exactly what BioWare intends to deliver. Dragon Age is built to accommodate downloadable content, and the studio intends to deliver a new online expansion on Tuesday called Return to Ostagar (a fortress that is destroyed at the beginning of the main game).
In addition to Windows, Dragon Age is also available for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but this is in its soul a PC game. (A Mac OS X version was introduced late last month.) Sitting in front of my monitor for all of those hours I felt as engrossed and simply swept away as any game has made me feel in recent years. My body may not have made it anywhere over the holidays, but with the help of Dragon Age my imagination delivered an unforgettable, thoroughly meaningful experience.