Dragon Age: Origins

Tonight I finished the game Dragon Age: Origins. It was an epic scale and engaging to play. According to the game's tally I spent over 70 hours playing it, though it counts time left paused, which doesn't quite seem right to me. The combat style pretty much requires you to pause it a lot, and that time should count, but if I paused it to go have dinner, it still might rack up an hour. It's a minor quibble. Anyway, it's weird to think of how many hours I've spent playing one game, and I'm sure this one doesn't hold the record.

Games have progressed so far since the era of 8 bit graphics it's unreal. What Bioware was able to do with Dragon Age combined some of the best aspects of books- character depth and development, and an immersion into a complex and detailed world- with the drama and visual impact of a movie. Honestly (and I'm sure this is blasphemy to some folks) the style of back story Tolkien did in Lord of the Rings bored me to tears. Bioware managed to flesh out a world which was just as rich without it getting so dry and irrelevant. They did a great job creating styles for the different cultures in the game, and different environments to explore- the woods the elves lived in, the tunnels of the dwarven kingdom, the dream-like plane of the fade- it was all pretty neat. I would say a lot of the load times were pretty extreme, though a faster computer would have helped some. A lot of it was hard drive access time which is unavoidable with all the data they're trying to stream at you. Hopefully they leaned heavily on SIMD.

Over all, it was a pretty cool game.