"Dragon Age is great but..."

There are a few of these, many having to do with this being an old-school RPG in some ways. Whether the game works for you has a lot to do with whether you can see past these "buts".

After the jump are Dragon Age's biggest buts.

Dragon Age is great, but once again, Bioware assembles a world out of relatively small areas separated by loading screens. This collection of discrete contrived boxes is not unlike those elaborate modular structures for a beloved hamster. This definitely hurts the sense of immersion, and even world building. However, it's not nearly so much a problem here as it was in Mass Effect, which tried to capture the expanse of space and then presented entire planets as little more than dungeons. For me, fantasy worlds have a long history of being built on separate sheets graph paper.

Dragon Age is great, but those dialogue trees! So many dialogue trees. Ugh. I wish someone would invent a way for me to communicate with NPCs better than picking responses from a menu.

Dragon Age is great, but you have to play a kleptomaniac. Looting chests and drawers in people's houses, right under their noses, is an RPG convention that needs to die. "Hey, Lord Harrowmont, I'm going to do those quests you gave me, but before I go, I'm going to help myself to the sparkling boxes of loot in your bedroom and study."

Dragon Age just ignores the concept of property and theft. It's not like Bioware needed Bethesda's full-blown crime and punishment system from Oblivion, or their morality model from Fallout 3. Those are probably the most elaborate solutions to RPG looting conventions. In Dragon Age, all these lootable points scattered around the world are mainly an incentive to explore. But there are better ways to do this than expecting me to steal people's stuff. Consider Avalon Code, an RPG for the Nintendo DS that encourages you to look around by giving you a book that you fill in as you investigate places in the world. Dragon Age already has a robust codex and plenty of collectibles around the world that fill in the codex. Why not flesh this out instead of expecting me to rifle every last NPCs dresser drawers?

Dragon Age is great, but you play a weirdly mute protagonist in a world where everyone else speaks out loud. Every time the camera cuts to your carefully crafted custom-built face, there is nothing but silence. Subtitled silence, but silence nonetheless. It looks like you've forgotten your line. This is a strange oversight, particularly since your character was so vocal in the cutscenes in Mass Effect.

Dragon Age is great, but the animation can be awful. Especially when characters aren't doing anything dramatic. It looks good enough when someone's plunging a sword into an ogre's face. But just walking down a hallway? Good lord, that's horrible. Furthermore, most of the characters have those zombie-fied vacant eyes. They also have really awkward flipper hands, which partly explains why they're conveniently cropped out of the frame when a character hands something to another character.

Next: Was it worth it?

(Click here for the previous Dragon Age game diary.)