Dragon Age: Origins is Bioware’s latest fantasy role-playing game. Those of you who are fans of previous games such as Neverwinter Nights or Baldur’s Gate will be well aware of Bioware’s capabilities and history at producing well thought out worlds, with depth, character, and replayability.

Dragon Age is no different. After my first few hours playing an Elven mage I knew I wanted to replay this game with each of the origin stories that are the backbone to the game. When you create a character for Dragon age, you choose from six main origins, Human noble, city Elf, woodland Elf, Elven or Human mage, Dwarven noble and Dwarven commoner. For the non-mage origins you have a choice of warrior or rogue. The reason mages are different becomes readily apparent after spending some time with the game.

Mages are treated as a necessary evil. Constantly under watch by a zealous group of Templars, who would be more than willing to kill a mage who shows any signs of going rogue against the strictly enforced religious beliefs. As such creating character as a mage offers unique moral choices throughout the game. Now this is not to say that a rogue or warrior doesn’t face the same choices, but playing as a mage gives you a unique perspective of the oppression that people who can use magic face.

Being a Bioware game, Dragon Age is almost always about moral choices and decisions that affect your story as you play through the game. Some decisions can alienate specific party members based on their strong feelings about how you handle situations. On the other hand, some will like you more based on those decisions. To offset hurt feelings Bioware has introduced a Gift System for your party members. Should you find items that hold special meaning to party members you can give them these items to increase their favor. This can also lead to them telling you stories of their own origins and extra plot lines, and also to romance should their favor be high enough.

Probably the one thing that stood out in my repeated play times was the banter between the characters currently in your party. As you wander around towns exploring shops and back alleys, the members of your party fill their time with idle chit chat and light hearted banter about each other. One of the earliest characters you acquire is a rather light hearted knight who later turns out to have a very complicated history. While walking through a town one of my other party members started very earnestly making fun of his rather oafish ways and his naive view of the world. There are many interactions like this that give you a great deal of immersion into the world. Making the characters feel more real and engaging. You actually care what they think and laugh at the jokes they make of each other.

Now all of that said, the biggest complaint about the game isn’t about the gameplay or content you experience but the content you have to fiddle with just to play the game. Bioware had three or four different retailers all offering different downloadable content on launch day. It has been a growing trend among publishers to have special content based on where you purchase a game. This being a pet peeve of mine, since I feel that content that’s been created should just be a part of the game unless it was completed well after the launch of the game, content you get with the game shouldn’t be so difficult to activate. Many people had issues activating, downloading, and installing this “extra” content. This should just be something that just “works.”

Downloadable content (DLC) is a bonus and shouldn’t be a hassle that causes frustration. Nearly every single person who installed Dragon Age either on their PC, Xbox360, or Playstation3 had some sort of DLC related issue. Mainly because every single copy of the game had free DLC. This caused the servers that handled the distribution of this content to be overloaded for a time and caused undue frustration. Once this content was installed you still had to log into the Bioware social network to use this content. This constant redundancy I’m sure was meant to prevent piracy of the game and other content, but it also creates a great deal of frustration for the average gamer.

So aside from non-gameplay frustration with the installation and function of DLC, Dragon Age: Origins delivered on everything it promised. High fantasy role-playing experience with wonderful visuals and a stark realism that makes the fantasy setting even more enjoyable. Truly as a Tolkien inspired fantasy realm it gives us a picture of the real issues facing the characters we create and the consequences of the actions we make. Offering 40-50 hours of gameplay in single play through, not to mention the other origin stories which offer just as interesting a story, I’ll be playing this game for months.

Score: 9.5/10