UltimatheChosen said:
I'm actually surprised it's so popular. I'm a big RPG fan (and a Bioware fan), but I thought Dragon Age wasn't all that great. In my opinion, it's a pretty mediocre game (at least on console, I never got to try out the PC version).
It's a surprisingly unpopular opinion, but I agree with you. It uses a terrible engine, is riddled with badly-designed plots and bugs, suffers from a truly atrocious artistic direction and characters who look like deformed, mutant mannequins. The dwarven plotline was the worst, very badly designed to handle instances where the player does
not immediately join either of the two extremist factions with open arms with lots of opportunities to break the game if you're not careful. Even if you don't, dialogues still bug out, with NPCs first complaining you're allied to one faction, then complaining you're aligned to the other.
Overall the level of polish is on par with a mediocre German RPG like Risen or Drakensang. Especially comparing it with the well-designed and far better-looking Mass Effect 2, it's hard to believe these two games were made by the same studio. It nearly put me off buying ME2 as I thought Bioware had gone entirely creatively bankrupt. Thankfully, that's proved not to be the case, but DA:O has seriously tarnished my opinion of them.
I'm still trying to understand why others think it's such a good game. If you're yearning for dark fantasy RPGs, the Witcher is a much more interesting and original game - and does the choice/consequence system just as well, if not better. The level of polish is questionable, but DA:O never rises in quality above the Witcher in neither graphics nor writing (I'll spare judging the gameplay, since the choice between the two is a much more personal preference). Considering the Witcher is a much older game made by an obscure Polish studio, I think that's another reason for Bioware to be ashamed of DA:O.