Post edited to be less inflammatory

Considering all the delays this game has gone through over the years, especially the delays to produce the console version, you'd think that BioWare and EA might have had some time to play-test it. You know, just start a character, play through the game, and see how it goes. But you'd be wrong.

Here is a typical scenario. You are running along a corridor, and set off a trap. Every monster in nearby rooms rushes in and proceeds to kill you. You re-load. You deal with the trap one way or another (pity the fool who doesn't have a rogue in his party), and then proceed to clear the enemies out one room at a time. You then reach a larger room with a lot of enemies, who kill you. As always, since you've been quick-saving every 15 seconds, you reload, send a character into the room, pull some enemies, run back, and kill only those who followed. Meanwhile, their buddies just calmly walk back to their places and await their turn to die. After all, they can't see you, so you're not there. Never mind the fact that their comrades just ran behind that same wall and their screams of agony can be heard throughout the castle. No, they'll just get back to playing dice until you're good and ready to dismember them. There are tactical battles, and there is outright exploiting of poor AI. Abusing the AI became so commonplace in my time with the game - often out of necessity (either to survive or at least preserve health poultices for the inevitable ReallyToughFight), that it almost seems as if BioWare balanced around the bad AI, rather than addressing the core issue.

The stats/combat system is prehistoric and yet at the same time indecipherable. Why in the world would anyone base an RPG around D&D style combat nowadays? Well, to appeal to D&D geeks, of course. To create an old-fashioned dungeon crawl RPG with lots of fights and tactical battles. D&D, like Dragon Age, is chock full of weak classes and feat builds. The difference is that the experienced gamer knows those classes and builds and simply doesn't build them. In Dragon Age, there's no way to tell. There is no manual worth mentioning and the tooltips are misleading at best, and utterly uninformative in most situations. How does armor work? I don't know. How is damage calculated? Beats me! Why does the really good weapon only do 3 more damage than the really average weapon, and does this mean anything? Couldn't tell you! And neither could the game. If you're going to build a tactical RPG around an old-school combat system, it is not enough to simply build it. The system must be explained. It is the details of it, how it works, and how to power-game it, that appeal to people who like knock-down, drag-out, tooth-and-nail dungeon crawls.

We're no longer in the 90s, there's no excuse to have poorly balanced skills and classes. Every class in the game is playable, but odds are your archers really just won't get the same play time that your mages will. The burst damage and utility of the mages far outweigh the (in)consistent damage of the archers, who are so dependent on positioning (and not having an axe in their face).

The BG games (and Icewind Dale) were famous for their tactical battles. Dragon Age won't be. Part of it is that we've gone past the "do this at X time to win" style of play. Mostly, however, it's because many of the difficult battles are poorly done. Say you're walking along a certain road and the 4 of you get ambushed by 20 archers. The tried and true tactic to beating this battle is to turn the difficulty to easy and continue. Clearly, it's how the developers did it. How do I know? Because the fight is so disproportionately difficult compared to everything before, that there's no way they did it in Normal difficulty and thought to themselves "yeah, that fits." It's not even a boss fight; it's just randomly and infuriatingly hard for no apparent reason. It is beatable in Normal, but it is not balanced for Normal.

There are good things about the game, very good in fact, but those are not redeeming features. The excellent as always BioWare character development and interaction system is not a reason to buy Dragon Age. Putting big shiny wheels on a broken car does not make that car a good ride. The setting is marvelously well-developed and feels mature, like it's been around as long as the various realms of AD&D. More's the pity then, that the same level of polish didn't go into balancing and AI.

That's not to say people won't enjoy the game. Some will - perhaps a great many. I'm on the verge of liking it, but I've had my fill of frustration. Some of those will also post here about how they've played hardcore RPGs since before the SSI Gold Box games and how it's about time that a game hard enough came along, one that respects the traditions of the genre. And of these people, some will even be telling the truth. The rest will just be measuring e-peen. I played Pools of Radiance. I played Curse of the Azure Bonds. I played the Krynn games, and Eye of the Beholder and Baldur's Gate. Trust me, at the very least wait for a few patches, if not for the game to hit the bargain bin. It is disgraceful that a title so long in development is so unpolished and is full of unbalanced encounters.

PS
Props to EA for finally allowing people to skip their annoying opening logo cinematic.

PPS
Thumbs down to EA for including an immersion-breaking DLC hook in the game. Yes, I would like to log into the EA servers so I can tell you I'll never pay for DLC.

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