Katinka has thoroughly summed up Dragon Age, but I felt I ought to put my own spin on the series, while waiting nervously to see what can go wrong next with the PB...
Game: Dragon Age (series)
Released: 2009-2014
First played: 2010
(Highly) Personal rating: You get to kill Janeway to impress Aeryn Sun. Let me repeat that: you get to kill Janeway to impress Aeryn Sun. Awesome.
This game pretty much prevented me throwing my PS3 out of the window. Having owned a PlayStation, and a PS2, I bought the PS3 in order to play a newly released RPG. It was a gross disappointment (and may appear later in these write-ups). But I caught a review of DA: Origins somewhere and decided to give it a try. I pretty much got the value out of the PS3 just for the number of times I played this one game.
As I said about Baldur's Gate, my usual pattern with RPGs is to play through once at speed, either grinding or turning the difficulty down if necessary, then again with the aid of a nice, fat guidebook to get close to completion. If I like the game I'll probably come back to it once or twice more. I've played Origins through eight or nine times, I think. So yes, I liked this game a lot. Some of this may have been because I had not been exposed previously to Bioware's games - if I'd been familiar with some of the mechanics ("moral" choices, balancing the superficially contradictory agendas of your party) it might have had less impact.
As Katinka said, it's highly replayable. First, there are choices in starting background: you get one of six starts, each of which is only distinct for an hour or so before starting the main storyline, but with lots of nice little touches scattered throughout the game that are different depending on who you are and what you chose to do. Second, you get a rich choice of class and specialisation. This is a protagonist centred game, and you tend to end up more advanced than your team-mates as you get ahead of them in levels and pick up bonuses they are denied. The good thing about this is how you build your main character changes the play and affects which party characters you spend most time with, which makes the game feel different. Third, you get distinct choices as to how to achieve your objectives. You can play like some honourable hero or you can slaughter half the country (including your own team-mates if they object) while grabbing every piece of dark power you can to boost your capability to win.
Personally, I found most of the voice acting and dialog to be excellent, not getting tired even on multiple playthroughs (although, OK, Claudia Black and Kate Mulgrew could be considered "stunt casting"), and I enjoyed the gameplay. It was the first time I really had to get to grips with the "tank, DPS, support" model and it took me a little while, but I did like the way that you (normally) cleared parts of the game as you progressed, and could use bottlenecks and terrain, or even sometimes disengage completely and come back to finish off particularly awkward large groups of foes.
But, above all, I am a sucker for story and world-building, and Dragon Age has this in spades. The writers have used a lot of the standard fantasy tropes (and that can be a complete blocker for some people), but they've put them together in new ways, and there are even some bits of the world that feel genuinely original (particularly as they focus on the Qunari in the sequel). They tie themselves in knots slightly and there are some bits of the history that don't quite fit together or make sense, but the same is true of Tolkien. Above all, they've put together a supporting mix of races, creeds and identities that are a rich source of narrative conflict, without either making too many divisions into clear "bad" and "good" or falling into the trap of so much "dark fantasy" of just making everyone either competent or pointlessly nasty and miserable (looking at you, Joe Abercrombie). You can't fix everything in the game world, certainly not without costs, but you can make some things better. The first game does suffer a bit from the main arc being a the standard "save the world from mindless, non-negotiable evil", but even the Darkspawn get a little depth as the story develops. As a threat, they are also enough to plausibly justify grabbing and using all that dark power - not all characters or organisations in the game world will see it that way, but it's a view the game supports.
That said, my favourite part of the series is the first act of the sequel. You're not saving the world; just trying to make a living (albeit a violent, not necessarily legal one) as a refugee in a strange land. Later you end up having to tackle bigger issues, trying - and largely failing - to save your city and family, but for a while you are just a guy (or lady) hanging about making money and hitting the pub with your mates at the end of the day (well, the more socially balanced ones - the runaway demon mage and the whiny mutilated killer elf prefer to stay home and brood, which they do very well).
The sequel loses some of the mechanical rough edges of the first game (hey - you can tell your characters where to move to, rather than having to take control and run them one at a time out of the firestorm!); it's also much less brown than the original, with actual sunshine (the best lit part of the first game is the dwarven underground city!). However, the gameplay has been sped up and made to feel less tactical - enemies now just "pop" into existence through walls as a matter of course, rather than that being a rare, unpleasant surprise. It retains a lot of the replayability of the first game, but doesn't have the different backgrounds. It's also geographically much more limited, to a single city state and it's environs, with some parts "randomised" in ways that feel repetitive and gamey. What it does have is that choices you made in the first game carry forward into the history of the world in the second. One of the reasons I kept replaying the original was to set things up in particular ways to play the second game.
So, I was really looking forward to the third part - Inquisition. It picked up on parts of the storyline I wanted to explore further, brought back characters I cared about, expanded into new parts of the world and looked stunning. So why did I never finish it? I'm not sure - there's no one big thing. It's partly that it's just too large a game. There's too much time-filling fetch-questing going on; I'm normally OK with this, but Inquisition passed through some sort of barrier where it wasn't interesting any more. The combat mechanics never quite made sense to me. I like choices, but felt that the "who's going to die?" at end of the Grey Warden sequence was too on-the-nose. I was also disappointed that in order to set up the world the way you wanted to or to get a full "manual" to help with a playthrough you had to go online and sign up for things. Meh. Pain in the neck on a PS3 - I've got a spare USB keyboard around here somewhere, but it was just too much hassle, and felt like a privacy and security risk (not a big one, but still an issue). So, somewhere around an annoying, timed floor puzzle which I found a pain to do with a PS3 controller I dropped it. Possibly because I decided to take PC strategy gaming more seriously at just about that time...
Game: Dragon Age (series)
Released: 2009-2014
First played: 2010
(Highly) Personal rating: You get to kill Janeway to impress Aeryn Sun. Let me repeat that: you get to kill Janeway to impress Aeryn Sun. Awesome.
This game pretty much prevented me throwing my PS3 out of the window. Having owned a PlayStation, and a PS2, I bought the PS3 in order to play a newly released RPG. It was a gross disappointment (and may appear later in these write-ups). But I caught a review of DA: Origins somewhere and decided to give it a try. I pretty much got the value out of the PS3 just for the number of times I played this one game.
As I said about Baldur's Gate, my usual pattern with RPGs is to play through once at speed, either grinding or turning the difficulty down if necessary, then again with the aid of a nice, fat guidebook to get close to completion. If I like the game I'll probably come back to it once or twice more. I've played Origins through eight or nine times, I think. So yes, I liked this game a lot. Some of this may have been because I had not been exposed previously to Bioware's games - if I'd been familiar with some of the mechanics ("moral" choices, balancing the superficially contradictory agendas of your party) it might have had less impact.
As Katinka said, it's highly replayable. First, there are choices in starting background: you get one of six starts, each of which is only distinct for an hour or so before starting the main storyline, but with lots of nice little touches scattered throughout the game that are different depending on who you are and what you chose to do. Second, you get a rich choice of class and specialisation. This is a protagonist centred game, and you tend to end up more advanced than your team-mates as you get ahead of them in levels and pick up bonuses they are denied. The good thing about this is how you build your main character changes the play and affects which party characters you spend most time with, which makes the game feel different. Third, you get distinct choices as to how to achieve your objectives. You can play like some honourable hero or you can slaughter half the country (including your own team-mates if they object) while grabbing every piece of dark power you can to boost your capability to win.
Personally, I found most of the voice acting and dialog to be excellent, not getting tired even on multiple playthroughs (although, OK, Claudia Black and Kate Mulgrew could be considered "stunt casting"), and I enjoyed the gameplay. It was the first time I really had to get to grips with the "tank, DPS, support" model and it took me a little while, but I did like the way that you (normally) cleared parts of the game as you progressed, and could use bottlenecks and terrain, or even sometimes disengage completely and come back to finish off particularly awkward large groups of foes.
But, above all, I am a sucker for story and world-building, and Dragon Age has this in spades. The writers have used a lot of the standard fantasy tropes (and that can be a complete blocker for some people), but they've put them together in new ways, and there are even some bits of the world that feel genuinely original (particularly as they focus on the Qunari in the sequel). They tie themselves in knots slightly and there are some bits of the history that don't quite fit together or make sense, but the same is true of Tolkien. Above all, they've put together a supporting mix of races, creeds and identities that are a rich source of narrative conflict, without either making too many divisions into clear "bad" and "good" or falling into the trap of so much "dark fantasy" of just making everyone either competent or pointlessly nasty and miserable (looking at you, Joe Abercrombie). You can't fix everything in the game world, certainly not without costs, but you can make some things better. The first game does suffer a bit from the main arc being a the standard "save the world from mindless, non-negotiable evil", but even the Darkspawn get a little depth as the story develops. As a threat, they are also enough to plausibly justify grabbing and using all that dark power - not all characters or organisations in the game world will see it that way, but it's a view the game supports.
That said, my favourite part of the series is the first act of the sequel. You're not saving the world; just trying to make a living (albeit a violent, not necessarily legal one) as a refugee in a strange land. Later you end up having to tackle bigger issues, trying - and largely failing - to save your city and family, but for a while you are just a guy (or lady) hanging about making money and hitting the pub with your mates at the end of the day (well, the more socially balanced ones - the runaway demon mage and the whiny mutilated killer elf prefer to stay home and brood, which they do very well).
The sequel loses some of the mechanical rough edges of the first game (hey - you can tell your characters where to move to, rather than having to take control and run them one at a time out of the firestorm!); it's also much less brown than the original, with actual sunshine (the best lit part of the first game is the dwarven underground city!). However, the gameplay has been sped up and made to feel less tactical - enemies now just "pop" into existence through walls as a matter of course, rather than that being a rare, unpleasant surprise. It retains a lot of the replayability of the first game, but doesn't have the different backgrounds. It's also geographically much more limited, to a single city state and it's environs, with some parts "randomised" in ways that feel repetitive and gamey. What it does have is that choices you made in the first game carry forward into the history of the world in the second. One of the reasons I kept replaying the original was to set things up in particular ways to play the second game.
So, I was really looking forward to the third part - Inquisition. It picked up on parts of the storyline I wanted to explore further, brought back characters I cared about, expanded into new parts of the world and looked stunning. So why did I never finish it? I'm not sure - there's no one big thing. It's partly that it's just too large a game. There's too much time-filling fetch-questing going on; I'm normally OK with this, but Inquisition passed through some sort of barrier where it wasn't interesting any more. The combat mechanics never quite made sense to me. I like choices, but felt that the "who's going to die?" at end of the Grey Warden sequence was too on-the-nose. I was also disappointed that in order to set up the world the way you wanted to or to get a full "manual" to help with a playthrough you had to go online and sign up for things. Meh. Pain in the neck on a PS3 - I've got a spare USB keyboard around here somewhere, but it was just too much hassle, and felt like a privacy and security risk (not a big one, but still an issue). So, somewhere around an annoying, timed floor puzzle which I found a pain to do with a PS3 controller I dropped it. Possibly because I decided to take PC strategy gaming more seriously at just about that time...
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore