Dragon Age: Origins is a very interesting combination of the mostly good elements from both RPGs and the MMO vein of RPGs.The interesting thing about Dragon Age's combat is that you can play as any of your four party members and switch between them at will, and you can set combat triggers to dictate exactly what every one of your computer-controlled allies does, depending on the circumstances presented.
One thing it does well is create a huge sense of flexibility in dialogue, party members, strategy and story arc. Virtually every party member you can recruit, you can kick them out at any time, and even kill them in some cases. Quests can be completed typically two different ways, and there's even a few quests where an impasse can be created by choosing the wrong dialogue options.
The game is really good, but it's also one of the most flawed "really good" games I've ever played. I won't mention any raw glitches or graphics problems, mostly because there's not much of a point to them, as we're really concerned about design both in programming and gameplay concepts.
Problem: Class Imbalances
As a Rogue, you can do pretty cool things like lay traps, throw grenades (bombs.. whatever) and go invisible. Unfortunately, going invisible isn't always effective, and the damage boost you receive from stabbing somebody off a surprise attack is significantly less than you could get walking up to them, stunning them and attacking them. Traps and bombs aren't something you can rely on or use in every fight. The archer variation they include for Rogues is never helpful, either. Archers don't deal much damage, they don't stun well and they don't offer much party support. The only useful thing you should have a Rogue in your party for is disarming traps and picking locks. Frankly, I ran all the way through on my second playthrough with zero rogues and didn't miss them at all.
As a Warrior, you're essentially a damage sponge. Playing as a warrior is boring because it's nothing an automated tactics routine couldn't do. There's little skill variety other than either knocking people over or stunning them, and in the attributes screen the only attributes worth spending your points on are Strength and Constitution, so your Warrior can wear heavy armor and take a lot of damage. However, every skill requires stamina to use, and the Willpower attribute governs how much stamina you have. So, if you try to make a Warrior use a good array of skills, you're going to need to put points into Willpower, taking away from the most useful Warrior attributes. As a result, the Warrior is either specialized in walking into a fight and absorbing damage, or unfocused with a bunch of different, ineffective skills. There's no incentive to ranged attacking (with a bow), either. Using a Warrior as your main character offers literally no advantages versus your main character being a Rogue or a Mage.
As a Mage, your options are wide open. Mages can deal the most damage among any class, they stun and disable better than any class, and they are the only class that has healing spells. There are even spells that both damage and stun/disable at the same time. During my second playthrough, my party consisted of 3 Mages and 1 Warrior. Each mage had a specific role on the battlefield, and even on the hardest difficulty, we had absolutely no problem dealing with any foe because of how easy it was to disable nearly every opponent and deal ridiculous amounts of damage.
Problem: Battle Imbalances
Too much of a battle comes down to being able to completely control a battle with stuns or disability. As a mage, it's way too easy to freeze 2 or 3 guys (instant kills if you can shatter), knock most of the other guys over and deal a lot of damage, stun and/or confuse huge groups of enemies, paralyze groups of people so they cannot attack at all, etc.
Every battle is essentially a contest of who can stun/freeze/paralyze who, first. As a human (as opposed to an AI), you almost always can render the enemy useless before they hurt you at all, because the enemies are 85% melee attackers that do nothing but rush your most intimidating character (usually a Warrior), giving you plenty of time to set them up and kill them.
There are both mental and physical resistance checks, which act as a percentage (I think) determining whether you can resist being stunned, confused, knocked down, etc. The problem is that these numbers are always way too low. Success rates on some spells are 100%, making these resistance numbers useless. Success rates on spells that can be resisted, even on the hardest difficulty, are still greater than 60% on average.
In a game like Final Fantasy 4 through 9, your mages would be given skills like Death, Toad, and Stop, essentially qualifying as an instant kill. Imagine if in Final Fantasy if every mage had the capability to use those spells, and the success rate was 90-95%. You'd never stop using those spells! Battles wouldn't even be challenging unless the enemy had some sort of automatic resistance to those spells. That's exactly how Dragon Age is, but with real-time combat instead of turn-based combat.
The damage done versus how much a certain class can receive is finely balanced, but if you have a mage in your party that is doing nothing but stunning enemies, then you're going to cakewalk through the entire game on the hardest difficulty setting, especially considering there are combinations of spells to both stun and heavily damage the enemy at the same time. If you set your tactics correctly, you can often take less than 100 points of damage among your party while killing every enemy in sight, even if you're outnumbered 3 to 1. No enemy group is too difficult to take down with enough mages.
Raised resistance checks, or lowered effectiveness of stun spells would definitely go a long way in this game to help balance classes and make combat about who can damage who the most, instead of who stuns who first. It almost would have been worthwhile to set up a multiplayer testing environment to compare classes and strategies in this game. If they did that, they would see that a mage would win every single fight because with the correct combination of spells they could leave the opponent stunned and taking constant damage without running out of even half of their mana.
Problem: Wild Difficulty Swings
As I mentioned earlier, I blew through the game with a 3-mage, 1-warrior party on the hardest difficulty. So, with the right party and the right strategy, the game is ridiculously easy.
Conversely, on my first playthrough, I only had one mage, 1 rogue and 2 warriors. Late in the game, the mage left my party leaving me with no healing effects other than using potions. During the final stretch of the game, you can't buy new potions or anything so I eventually got used to fighting battles without healing at all. It resulted in a lot of losing, running around trying to avoid damage, pointlessly, and at least 4 or 5 times of trial-and-error before I knew how to correctly approach each battle. And this first playthrough was on Normal instead of the Hardest (2 difficulty setting difference).
By the final fight, it was literally not possible to win with the only party combination I had left. The final boss would knock over all of my warriors, I had no ranged attacking due to it not being leveled, and I didn't have enough skill to keep damage on the boss from the cannons around the map. I would drain all 30 or so of my potions within the first 2 minutes of battle. By the time I would run out of health potions and ran out of cannon capabilities, the boss would still be at around 60% health. It was not possible to win on Normal, so I was forced to change the difficulty to the easiest setting just to complete the game.
Needless to say, your classes completely determine which difficulty you're able to take on. As I had proven, it is possible to make the game impossible to complete on any difficulty higher than easy unless you were totally prepared for what was about to happen.
The flexibility is nice in terms of which party members you can avoid, kick out, include, etc, but it can turn into a problem.
If you solve every problem up to this point, this problem takes care of itself.
Problem: Side-Quest Irrelevance, and Miscellaneous Navigation Issues
The amount of available, non-essential quests in this game is vast. The quest goals range anywhere from fighting a group of enemies, to retrieving items, to choosing the correct dialogue options.
The issue with a good portion of these quests is one of two things. The quests are either too vague, requiring hours of trial and error to figure it out, or looking online for a quest guide. If that's not the issue, then the quests are usually something you don't need to go out of your way to do. Explore every thing you can and you'll solve 85% of the quests without even glancing at the quest details.
Another very confusing aspects of quests is the lack of quest-specific navigation. In the quests menu, there's an option to mark a certain quest as your active quest. But, it doesn't change anything on the map in terms of directing you where to go, so marking a quest does nothing beneficial for you. Quests will constantly say "go to this location", but if that location is vague you can't get pin-point navigation to lead you to where you need to go. So, again, you'll probably need to look the solution up on the internet, which defeats the point of doing the quest in the first place.
The obvious solution here is to build a system that would support direction on a map from area to area to guide you to where you need to go to complete the quest. A simple relational database structure giving rank to each location and type of location would make this possible.
So while Dragon age might be a very good RPG for many reasons, it's also very unbalanced and once that balance is figured out and exploited, the game is a cakewalk even at the hardest difficulty setting.
A bit more testing and critical thinking application would have prevented such a huge exploit in gameplay. Building extra tools to test and, as a result, balance gameplay (such as a multiplayer arena) would have been a good idea with minimal programming.
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