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Bioware never ceases to bring a fresh, new world in each of their titles, filled with memorable characters, amusing dialogue, and interesting locations. It is especially remarkable when developers craft a vivid story that makes you want to continue with its side quests and learn more about it. Dragon Age: Origins is the next game in a long line of Bioware masterpieces that combines solid action RPG gameplay and an epic story that blows you away.

First off, the gameplay. Attacking is fairly simple; select whoever you would like to attack with, and then right-click the enemy. The same goes for spells and other abilities. Target an enemy and hit the hotkey or the onscreen button. Like an MMO, you don’t have to constantly right-click; once is enough to have your character automatically attack. Combat is done in real-time, but the action can be paused at any moment so you can issue commands to your party members. If a character is near death, you can quickly pause the game and have him or her drink a potion to fight on. If another has a special ability that you must activate immediately, pause the fighting, assign the spell, and then un-pause it so that your character will instantly begin to perform the spell. Dragon Age blends real-time and turn-based gameplay, although any difficulty beyond Easy will require more of the latter type of gameplay because it is fairly hard, even on Normal.

Every fight, if not fought correctly, has the potential to eliminate your entire party

Crucial in the higher difficulties is the “Tactics” feature. This feature allows you for your characters to automatically do certain things based on pre-defined conditions. These are customizable and offer a wide range of possibilities, with one potential action to be using a health poultice when the character’s health is under 20% of its full health, or another being that your character uses a certain special attack when he is surrounded by more than two enemies. Each character only has a certain number of slots, but more can be added with more points invested in “Combat Tactics.” Using the tactics requires some thought and consideration of the other party members.

The game’s difficulty, as with many other RPGs, will scale with your level, so the fights will never be easy. Every fight, if not fought correctly, has the potential to eliminate your party. So unless Origins is played on Easy, it never becomes a breeze, even as your characters obtain higher-level gear and learn advanced spells and techniques. One perk that PC players have over console players is the camera. While console players are limited to a more traditional third-person action perspective, PC players are able to zoom out into an isometric view that lets you see much more of the battlefield. This eases the difficulty a little, at least in comparison to the console versions, and helps add to the epic feel in the larger scale fights.

You control up to four characters at a time; the remaining characters stay at your camp, at which you can talk to your entire group of characters and trade with a merchant dwarf and his son. Luckily the other characters that remain at camp level up alongside the ones in the combat, so it is not necessary to feel forced to use certain characters for the sake of leveling them up. Among the playable characters include the sharp-tongued Morrigan, your pet (in the case of my female human warrior, a Mabari Hound), and the proud war golem Shale. The cast of companions is varied and all of them offer something special. These are characters with their own troubled histories, their own annoyances and prejudices and their own passions. They will talk, laugh, and flirt with you, and they will talk, insult, and laugh with each other. It all feels very natural, and Bioware did a superb job in animating the character’s faces to give a sense of realism as you talk with them.

As with any RPG, leveling up means an increase in your character’s stats. In Dragon Age, every character has six main attributes that determine your character’s default characteristics, such as melee damage or mana pool. A level up will provide three points for you to add to these attributes and one talent or spell point (depending on your class) to use on talents or spells. These talents and spells are basically different abilities for the character, which may be a new healing spell, a special attack, a defensive move, or some other action. And finally for the main character, there are skill points that characters receive at certain level intervals. Skills aren’t used during combat, but some of them relate to combat (such as the addition of more tactics slots). Among the many skills is coercion, which will assist in persuading or intimidating others in conversations, and trap making, which is exactly what it sounds like.

They’ll talk, laugh and flirt with you and each other. It all feels very natural.

You start Dragon Age by creating your character. Name, appearance, and starting attribute distribution are here as usual, but the most important part is the selection of your race and background. Dragon Age offers six different origin stories that play out very differently from each other, and a couple of the decisions you make here will affect the rest of the game. Your origin determines how characters interact with you, and it all feels very natural in that considering the history of the game’s story, it all makes sense.

Regardless of what origin you go through, the general story remains the same. Every few centuries or so in the world of Thedas, creatures known as the Darkspawn gather in what is known as a Blight, and they rampage across the surface lands. A group of elite soldiers called the Grey Wardens, dedicated to defeating the Darkspawn, recruit you into joining their ranks to battle the current Blight. Unfortunately, betrayal and a coup add a bit more responsibility to your journey, as you then have to unite Ferelden’s humans, mages, elves, and dwarves against the Darkspawn threat. After the first few hours of the game and you are given the freedom to choose where to go, it becomes clear that the game world is huge and it will take you quite a while to explore and experience everything.

Of course, that isn’t the whole story. There is incredible depth to the narrative aspects of Dragon Age: Origins, whether that is the background of a character or the history of elves and dwarves. It really makes you think about the amount of effort that was placed into the creation of not only a story, but cultures and histories as well. Much of this content is revealed through dialogue with other characters, but a large amount is detailed in the game’s Codex, which acts as an encyclopaedia of sorts on the game’s creatures, characters, story, and more. Think of it as Oblivion’s books, but less detailed.

As in Bioware’s previous games (and others such as Bethesda’s), dialogue with other characters plays a big role in affecting not only how characters treat you, but also how the story plays out. Gone are Mass Effect’s clear-cut dialogue options in which you can easily tell what’s a “good,” neutral and a “bad” response. It will take a bit more thinking to decide what the best option may be for certain choices, as it can determine various events that may occur. There is no morality meter or anything of the sort but instead of other characters’ reactions and sentiments. Decide to help defend this town from zombies that are attacking? Depending on who your selected party members are, this decision could please one member, raising your relationship points with him or her, and could be met with disapproval from another, which lowers your relationship points. This makes for a more interesting experience that forces you to consider the characters you take with you.

Since you will be playing this game for easily over sixty hours, it’s a good thing that the graphics are pretty nice. These are not the best visuals you’ve seen yet, but they are well beyond acceptable. The remarkable aspect on the presentation side of things is the fantastic voice acting. Bioware’s previous offerings have been mostly devoid of bad voice acting, and Dragon Age is no exception. The characters are believable and convincing, which is essential in a game filled with tons of dialogue.

Now, Dragon Age has its flaws with a few glitches here and there, but my main gripe with Dragon Age and Bioware is the pre-inclusion of downloadable content into the game. You will encounter one or more instances of speaking to a quest giver in anticipation of a new quest, only to discover that is DLC. It is disappointing to find that Bioware is directly including quest givers to entice gamers into buying more content. It is a good way of getting more money, but it still feels a bit shady.

After playing through Dragon Age: Origins, it is hard to believe another game can surpass the standards the game has set. Much of the “wow” rests in the game’s presentation and the story, but the gameplay is right with them in its quality. DLC and user-made mods will only add additional hours to the fifty or more hours that you will spend on the first playthrough alone. It is possible to say that there is no greater value on the market, at the very least for single-player.