Dragon Age Reviews: Morality Redefined

Even if you couldn’t care less about RPGs, today’s arrival of Dragon Age: Origins, and the high review scores the game is gathering, should have you raising an eyebrow. That’s at least how I felt reading over some Dragon Age reviews today, several of which hail the game’s morality system as something special. It would seem that as moral choices creep into first-person and third-person action games, the advancements in Dragon Age: Origins could become important for games of all kinds. Let’s take a look at what critics are saying after the jump.

“Rather than the good/evil systems of most BioWare games, in Dragon Age you’re judged by what your companions think of you. And this depends upon their own personalities,” says PC Gamer’s John Walker. Eurogamer’s Oli Welsh says manipulating characters “through conversations, decisions and gift-giving – eventually unlocking personal quests, romance and even sex, portrayed with all the sensuous passion of the database spreadsheet that underlies it all – is an engrossing game in itself.”

What seems most promising to me is how the game obscures moral choices so that “good” and “evil” aren’t clear. “You’ll be presented with tough scenarios where none of the options at hand seem particularly good, leaving you to choose what may seem like merely the least evil choice. In the weeks after completing the game, I still feel sincere regret about how some of those decisions played out and am already making plans to handle them differently in my next playthrough. The choices cut deep,” says Giant Bomb.

I’m not a big RPG fan, but I’d like to see complex moral systems replace the black-and-white ones in shooters such as Bioshock, Mass Effect and Fallout 3. For that reason, I plan to check out Dragon Age: Origins to see what the future may hold.