Dragon Age - Reviews @ MTV, CVG, Worthplaying

Three more reviews in what will obviously be the vanguard of a flood of Dragon Age reviews.
MTV says the dialogue has great depth but calls the game "vanilla":

"Dragon Age: Origins" is BioWare's best effort since "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic." It's not a great leap forward in the evolution of video game RPGs, but it is a compelling, well-crafted experience. The warts are there to be sure, but they are easily overlooked in light of the insane amount of game on offer. BioWare probably won't win many new fans with this one and they'll probably lose a few who enjoyed the more active entertainment offered by the likes of "Mass Effect," but old school RPG junkies will get a kick out of exploring the rich, if initially difficult to breach, new world that the developer has crafted.

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CVG has reprinted John Walker's review from PC Gamer UK. This is a lengthy piece and John is clearly impressed, awarding 9.4/10 and detailing a lot of history and atmosphere:

I've not only been to huge cities, but I've learned their past, their present, and been involved in shaping their future. This hasn't felt like passing through a series of checkpoints, but having experienced a world. I know enough about the religion of the Chantry to preach their own Chants. My connection to the Grey Wardens is palpable, and the part I played an honourable one.

This is the most enormously detailed game world I've experienced, its history stretching back thousands of years, its cultures vivid, beautiful and flawed, the battles enormous, the humour superb. Roleplaying games now have a great deal to live up to.

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Worthplaying has an X360 review, with a score of 8/10. This is one of those "step backwards from Mass Effect" articles and they accuse BioWare of being afraid to take risks (and really being a PC game). Still, they say there is a "lot to like" if you want a traditional experience:

Dragon Age: Origins is going to feel extremely similar to Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic games. Lightsabers may be gone, but the basic combat mechanics are unchanged. You have a lot of the same abilities and moves, and most of them even share the same D20-inspired names. However, there are a few changes that make things a little more interesting. First and foremost is the greater emphasis on area-of-effect attacks. Spells and certain other abilities in Dragon Age will occasionally have friendly fire effects. On lower difficulty levels, this simply means that you risk freezing an ally when casting an ice spell at a crowd. On higher levels, you'll be able to do half damage, or even full damage, to allies, but fortunately, you have greater control over these attacks. You can direct exactly who and what is going to be caught inside your magic's attack radius, and that is crucial to keeping your party fighting during some of the tougher areas.

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More information.

I think I've seen a Bioware developer, maybe Derek French or Patrick Weekes,
somewhere (maybe on quartertothree or on the bioware forums?) saying that Dragon Age have been in development well before Mass Effect 1. This was definetely news to me.

And as such adding a full voiceacting to the player character would have meant changing nearly everything in the game as well as cutting down the game's length to about half the size of what is it today.

And why does every new rpg out there have to be next new thing or at least have such a thing in them? I still enjoy seeing old movies or reading old books.
Or playing old games...

IIRC, Dragon Age has been in development since 2004. Early prototyping was done in the NWN engine. It definitely preceeds Mass Effect.

It was announced in 2004 and I've been waiting for it since then. They probably started working on the game even earlier, maybe 2002 or 2003 after NWN was released.

I much prefer the PC to unvoiced. I prefer to 'voice' my character in my head, and don't like waiting while the dialouge choice I just chose is spoken. I think that the console people who are enamoured with Mass Effect are going to mark this game down a bit for all the reasons that I'm loving it.

I was under the impression that when they announced DA in 2004 and opened its forums the game was really in the very early stages of design and they actually wanted to get fan input on it, user centered design? With nwn1 in 2k2, kotor2k3 and jade empire 2k5 they couldn't have started much earlier than when it was announced, or devoted many people to it.

Anyway how would adding a voice-over to the main character's dialog lines cut down the game's length to about half the current size?

KapitanUnterhosen said:

Anyway how would adding a voice-over to the main character's dialog lines cut down the game's length to about half the current size?

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Voice-over costs money. Three races, both male and female. Dialog for all those and some of the origins probably have special dialog restricted just to them even beyond the origin stories. So voicing all that would probably at the least double the amount of voice-over.

lumiapina said:

Voice-over costs money. Three races, both male and female. Dialog for all those and some of the origins probably have special dialog restricted just to them even beyond the origin stories. So voicing all that would probably at the least double the amount of voice-over.

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Not only that, but it's work that's not reusable. Not for expansions, nor for internationalization. Each language in which the game is sold would need a full recasting.

It's one thing to say that having VO for the main character would double the voice-over costs because it would about double the amount of in-game voicework.

It's another thing to suggest that if they decided to do it then the game would only be half as long.

On the one hand it seems you're suggesting that instead of increasing the budget for voicework , Bioware would just cut half the game's content in order to have the main character's voicework feature. Seems absurd to me.

And by that you're also implying that the cost for the game's voicework as it is now is equivalent to half the cost of implementing the game's content, that designing an area, designing quests for it, designing the npcs, writing dialogs implementing the area, objects, npcs, quests, dialogs, sounds, music, testing it all, a plethora of other work packages I can't even think of, basically everything in the game put together aside from voicework only costs twice as much as the voicework?

I don't even care for VO in games, reading the subtitles is much faster, but these numbers you're talking about seem unrealistic to me, where are you getting them?

Personally, I'm against that the main PC is voiced. It creates the Gothic/Risen syndrom where you can only have a «neutral» main pc.

I expect, from a game like DA, a great freedom in character creation. We already have 6 different backgrounds which is already pretty high. Then double that as you would want to have female too. Then you got several different type of female character : sexy, haughty, cruel, etc. Just look at NWN1 where you have basically dozens of different voice. It was only possible because every character only have about a 10 sentences voiced but the rest of the game was text only.

KapitanUnterhosen said:

I don't even care for VO in games, reading the subtitles is much faster, but these numbers you're talking about seem unrealistic to me, where are you getting them?

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I remember someone from Bioware saying that it would half the size with a voiced PC, but can't find the exact quote.

Did find this tho, http://old.dragonagecentral.com/single/1219691340