Dragon Age: Origins, Play through, First Impression

In this article, as the title so clearly states, I will be writing about my first impression of the game, Dragon Age: Origins. 

Before we start it has to be said that in theory, this will be my second playthrough. You might wonder, why in theory? Well I haven't actually completed the game on the very first character I started.

Anyway, the character I'm playing the game through with now is a human male rogue. To be perfectly honest, then the reason behind picking a rogue is that according to various walkthroughs on the Internet, the best team setup is two mages, a warrior and a rogue, which for those of you who don't know is the 3 classes you can pick in DA:O. The walkthrough I found expected me to be a rogue, so, yeah. I'm currently playing on the normal setting, as I wanted to play through the game relatively easy and quickly, so it actually would be possible for me to experience the game without spending countless hours on it. You see, first character, the mage I made, got the difficulty level on nightmare which, for those who don't know, means the highest difficulty level, and the fights there takes ages. Especially as I'm not really fond of the whole tactics part, but I'll come back to that later.

Doing the making of my rogue an idea about how my rogue would act in the game world, took form. As I had more knowledge about what choices I could make and what my choices would affect, compared to when first started the game, and as I have experiences in other RPGs aswell, I knew that I had to settle with a character that was relatively good and kind. Even though I must say, that after years of RPG games it gets kind of boring that you “have to be” good in order to get everything unlocked. Dragon Age does show me that I can be evil without a problem but I'm still sitting with the feeling that I wont get to explore the game in full, if I choose to be evil. This subject I will leave for now, but I will without a doubt return to it later. In the end I decided that my character would be a good guy, but I also want to have some fun while playing the game,so I also decided that my character should be a bit cocky in his replies.

Before I move on I believe it's in order for me to explain you about how the attributes. skill and talent (spells if you're a mage) system works.

The picture below is taken the character creation screen, and is the first time you will be encountering choosing attributes for you character.

As you can see on the picture there's 6 attributes.

Strength is the one making you able to wear bigger weapons, and heavier armor, such as plate. It also increases your accuracy when using melee weapons.

Dexterity is the one that allows you to use daggers, easier for you to hit your target and easier for you to dodge attacks, it makes you deal more damage when using piercing weapons such as daggers and arrows.

Willpower basically grants you more mana, if you're a mana user, and grants you more stamina if you're a stamina user. Stamina basically works in the same way as mana, you need it in order to perform certain types of moves.

Magic gives you more spellpower, and increases the effectiveness of potions etc.

Cunning basically makes you better at various professions, such as lock picking and herbalism. It should also boost rogues as with a high cunning stat you should be able to spot weaknesses easier than the average person, which obviously can be used to your advantage.

Constitution this stat is relatively boring, as it just grants you more health.

When choosing talents and skills, which I will be covering in a minute, you at times also require having x amount of points in one stat, in order to learn the talent or skill.

As you can see on the picture below there's seven skills, but that isn't entirely true, as when you're the main character you also the eighth skill called Coercion. This skill basically allows you to persuade and intimidate NPCs on your path.

The remaining seven skills are as follows:

Stealing, allows you to pickpocket people.

Trapmaking, allows you to make traps and disarm traps.

Survival, grants nature resistance and you're able to track other creatures presence.

Herbalism, allows you to make potions of all sorts.

Poison-making, allows you to create poisons, which you can apply to your weapon and whatnot.

Combat training, allows you to wield a higher tier of weapons.

Combat tactics, unlocks tactic slots and grants tactic bonuses like your rogues aiming to attack from behind.

Now onto the talent trees. Your talents obviously depends on what class you picked.

Warriors got the talent trees: Warrior, Dual Weapon, Archery, Weapon and Shield and Two-Handed. Mages got the spell trees: Mage, Primal, Creation, Spirit and Entropy.

Rogues got the talent trees: Rogue, Dual Weapon and Archery.

Differently from the the other classes, the rogue talents aren't just 4 talents, but 4 sets of talents, like Dual Weapon. The Mage tree only got 4 talents and the Warrior trees only got 8 talents. This is hard to explain only by writing so here's three pictures of the three classes talents:

Hopefully those pictures makes it easier for you to understand how talents works.

I wasn't able to take a picture of all the talents therefore it's just the top as after that they basically look the same, the only difference is just the skills.

That's all I had for you this week, as this article is already getting way too long.

Next week I will be writing about my thoughts regarding tactics as I promised in the start of this article. I will also write more about how I intend to build my rogue and what my rogue has experienced in the week that past.