Dragon Age: Origins -- Initial Impression.

I was actively avoiding starting anything the last few days with the hope of picking up The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks and starting it right away. Finding a copy of the game proved tougher than I expected with a poorly handled release from Nintendo. So I ended up ordering the game online. Now I'm free to start something else, and so I have. Next up for me is Dragon Age: Origins for the Xbox 360, developed by BioWare's Edmonton team and published by Electronic Arts. Dragon Age: Origins has been a long time coming. It was first announced at E3 in 2004. The game has been described by BioWare as a spiritual successor to their Baldur's Gate series. The manual goes as far as to say "Dragon Age: Origins is a modern re-imagination of an epic party-based fantasy role-playing game, dense with story and tactical combat." It'll be interesting to see BioWare's take on that in a year where From Software has essentially done the very same thing with Demon's Souls on the Japanese dungeon crawler side of things. I think that most everyone agrees that the Dragon Age: Origins advertising campaign wasn't very compelling. The game seems to have sold on BioWare's name alone. It seems BioWare fans are getting exactly what they wanted. My main experience with BioWare has come in the form of Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. I'm simply expecting that same basic combat style with Dragon Age's high fantasy setting overlaid. I do have to say that Electronic Arts sure does make it easy for one to hate them. I bought the collector's edition of Dragon Age: Origins so I was entitled to some free download content. The hoops you have to jump through to access said content almost made me start something else. After jumping through said hoops it's safe to say I went in to Dragon Age: Origins actively annoyed. You would think that wouldn't bode well for my initial impressions. I have to say I came away from my initial playing actually impressed. I've played through the origin story for my character, an elven mage. Graphically the game seems solid and clean. The graphics are nowhere near impressive but I found myself initially pleased with their cleanness. At least initially in the elven mage story the music comes off as subdued. The voice work on the other hand seems strong. I'm not sure what to make of the combat system as I've not explored it thoroughly enough to get a strong sense of it either way. What I did get an impression of, at least initially, is the strong sense of gray in the choices when dealing with characters. I was impressed with the twists and turns of the elven mage's origin story. I also found myself rather interested in the moral questions being presented by the elven mage's origin story. The game seems to have a very rich and rather dark lore as a foundation. Of course we'll have to see how the game plays itself out. But initially I have to say I'm surprisingly intrigued by Dragon Age: Origins.