Dragon Age: Origins – Chapter One

And verily, he smote a rat

As you’re no doubt aware, BioWare’s multiformat RPG Dragon Age: Origins has been out for a few weeks now. Long enough for someone to have played it and written a review, for sure: we got a PC code from EA a few days before release and the 360 version is currently sitting atop my home console.

But, as even the less astute among you must have noticed, our coverage of the title has been somewhat lacking. No review, no gallery of screenshots, no chats with the developer stolen from CVG and passed off as our own work.

I could pass this off as an unfortunate result of having so many other high-profile titles to review over the last few weeks. Or that by letting it slip for so long a review has become invalid.

But those would be lies. The real reason I’ve not done anything on DA is, simply, rats. Giant rats, if you want to be specific. The first encounter in BioWare’s game is with a pack of the king-size rodents in a castle pantry, and while it’s an effective enough introduction to the basics of combat it’s also a perfect example of the cliched RPG trope that I’d hoped BioWare had left behind.

Dragon Age, from everything I’d read, was going to be a mature game. Its gameworld would be rife with social ills and political machinations. NPC interactions would have serious repercussions in terms of party unity and progression. George R.R. Martin’s dark fantasy novels were cited as an inspiration. Basically, everything pointed towards something a little different from the bog-standard sub-Tolkien nonsense that passes for a story in so many western RPGs.

Things started well enough. A spectacular opening movie with much lushness of scenery and smiting of orc had my inner D&D geek hooked right away, and I even managed to retain some enthusiasm through the forty-plus minutes of character creation and expository dialogue. Hey, this is BioWare after all. It was all going spiffingly, in fact, until the developers bought out the rats.

Look, just for once, I want to start an RPG as a character who can kick some ass. Start me off in a cave system crawling with goblins, tell me how to use my sword, and let’s go. I’m meant to be a hero, right? Someone who in all likelihood is going to save the world from some ancient evil or other? So why am I starting this game on pest control duties? Do you think Tolkien (or Jackson) ever considered a scene where Aragorn learns how to be a badass by battling some podgy rodents? Or maybe they realised that, you know, there was a bit more dramatic potential in fighting NINE FUCKING NAZGUL.

To be fair, it’s not just BioWare’s game that casts you in an early role of exterminator. Many gamers will remember fighting giant rats in Oblivion’s dungeon escape introduction, and pretty much every other western RPG will start you off fighting either vermin or another seriously crappy baddy for hours on end before you can even think about handling an orc or whatever. Not only is it hugely un-heroic, then, but it’s also a hackneyed and pedestrian means of introducing players to a game, and those aren’t words that I’d ever have associated with BioWare before.

With nothing else on the review shelf this week, I’m going back to Dragon Age tonight. My faith in BioWare might have faltered somewhat, but the Canadian developer is probably the studio I trust the most to make games that appeal to me. And I’m sure that Dragon Age will hook me at some point. I just pray that the rats won’t be making an encore…

Chapter two.