Every single journalist on the interwebs has already chanted praises for this game. And I intend to do exactly the same.

Last week I optimistically bought a copy of the PC version of Dragon Age. Optimistically because I realised only after the purchase that my PC at home was an old AMD 2.2GhZ with 1GB or RAM and a puny geforce 7900 GTX (or something like that).

It took some compromising but the game runs. More then my computer being able to deal with it I suppose it’s the game caring for my PC as you would with a senile pensioner.

Nevertheless I played for a few hours yesterday and I have this to say. They got it just right.

I was a huge fan of the original Baldur’s Gate series and played it over and over. Mostly because I was at school at the time and spare time was plentiful and cheap.
Why was I fan? Because of the storyline. It was stupendously enthralling.
After BG I stuck with BioWare and bought Neverwinter Nights. Everybody raved about it yet I didn’t like it. Very little control over the whole party. And the little you had was spoiled by a  slightly awkward control system.

The toolset they released with Neverwinter Nights was also mightily impressive. You could see that was the start of a revolution in the way RPG were played and content was created for them. Unfortunately, as most first editions/tries, it lacked in functionality and flexibility.
This, as far as I’m concerned, also put a cap on game designer’s creativity when they were writing the main campaign story.

I’m glad to see they have worked all these things out. Everything I didn’t like in Neverwinter Nights is now fixed in Dragon Age.
The game just flows.
This is thanks to a beautifully written and very compelling story, a more intuitive and usable control system and a fantastic toolset. Which I believe put the power back in the game designers’ hands and allowed them to really go to town with the storyline.

It’s a fantastic game. If you don’t know it watch the trailer video, buy it, lock yourself in your room and start playing.

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