This is truly the age of dragons
Two weekends ago, I sat on a couch with Zach and Rod thumbling through the first few hours of the Dragon Age: Origins as an Elf/Warrior/Commoner campaign. It was - for lack of a more epic, dragonish descriptor - amazing.
The problem with Dragon Age: Origins is that it comes with a helping of “you just don’t get it”. Nicole was driven to sleep by the dialog and the amount of time that we were spending messing with the radial menu. I come from a land of Neverwinter Nights and Baldur’s Gate where my entire teenage years was spent being weaved into the stories, menus and mechanics of these games. I have invested into titles that today seem dull and static to Nicole. Dragon Age: Origins is a refinement of these systems with a healthy amount of cutscenes, dialog, camera work, voice acting and visuals to keep your mind busy forever. Just watching through most of the beginning, you are constantly reminding yourself to go back and explore, or reroll a character to act a certain way. This game is only attractive to those kinds of people, but it doesn’t have enough “wow” factor to keep an casual onlooker interested. But that isn’t the point of the game, it is more of a love letter to people that have already spent the amount of time on Bioware’s previous titles.
I remember specifically spending a few hours dungeon crawling in Diablo 2 while under a blanket, with a heater underneath it and waiting until we could dig ourselves out of the snow in order to go to school. Television didn’t appeal to us a teenagers as much as a high fantasy video game did.
I have been spending a lot of time with Dragon Age: Journeys and have come to an idea that I don’t want to play games like this in the browser, it lessens it. I really do want to download it for free and put it into fullscreen so that I can take advantage of all the prehistory. I hope to get a copy for Christmas and to spend 4 relentless days pouring over menus, drops and dialog. I would like to give Journey’s the same attention, but it is built for me to treat it like a red-headed stepchild. I have been conditioned by Flash games to only spend five minutes playing them and then leave. But do I only have this repulsion because of the other bazillion things to play?
Best Buy will have Dragon Age: Origins for $35 on Black Friday, this has been added to my list of things to do on that specific Friday. The other part of the list - and there is only one other thing I have to do - is play more Borderlands.
