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Dragon Age: Origins marked the point at which western RPGs properly moved into the spotlight. Knights Of The Old Republic laid the groundwork, combining a surprisingly geeky implementation of Dungeons and Dragons rules with its direct player control and swishy lightsabers. Jade Empire then tried to take it somewhere new, only to stumble right out of the gate. It modernised the genre, offering something fresh, but it never really got its due.With Dragon Age: Origins, we saw a game torn between an old audience and the new, designed as a spiritual return to the hardcore charms of Baldur's Gate but at a scale where only a mega-hit would do. It was a strange combination. BioWare talked about the detail of its lore, and of taking inspiration from the likes of A Song Of Ice And Fire, long before Game of Thrones had become so popular. And at the same time we had trailers fast cut to Marilyn Manson and a cleavage-baring Morrigan.
Dragon Age: Origins was so often torn between its inspirations - dark, gritty and with a relatively realistic brand of low fantasy - and the needs of a big budget game. Magic is canonically rare, with mages locked up in Circles for everyone's own safety and every spell putting the user at risk of demonic possession. The idea was that most people would never even have seen magic performed in public, at least, nothing more dramatic than the pulling of a rabbit out of a hat. In practice, mages are everywhere, and nobody blinks an eye at spells like Walking Bomb that turn the screen into a swimming pool of gore. Why? Because people like throwing fireballs, and mages make for better opponents than endless enemies wielding the old sword-and-board.
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