A Crown of Sorcery and Steel
By Josh Labelle
“This isn’t real peace,” you say. “It’s a false peace, a peace that can never last. Sooner or later, people will remember who they were before you took all that away from them.”
I still remember playing Dragon Age Origins when it was first released. I played every origin from Human to Dwarf to City Elf up until where the story converged with the Gray Wardens where you crossed the bridge into their camp at Ostagar. There was something amazing about seeing how different people could end up in the same place, and then see how the world reacted to who you were. It was amazing, as it hadn’t been a super common occurrence up until that point.
I ended up choosing a City Elf as my Warden, and this is the closest I’ve felt to that level of ownership of a character in quite a while.
General Story:
As a member of one of four races, you find your hometown sacked by an army of the Queen. As her occupation settles in, you are tasked with smuggling out an artifact of your people and find yourself caught up in the machinations of four nations, and a struggle against the queen’s clockwork army. Do you stand resolute against her, or could you find yourself at her right hand if you play your cards right?
You’ll find yourself in the pursuit of completing not only your own quest, but you must try to balance helping your party members in their personal quests as well. Will you focus on trying to help the elves reclaim lost artifacts, breaking a cult-like stranglehold on the Thieves Guild, or maybe trying to help a dwarven friend write a song that will be remembered forever?
This all works, and it evokes both the BioWare days of old and tabletop gaming. You can easily imagine who among your D&D group would make each of these characters, and what their justification would be. There is a main goal (deal with the queen), but there is motivation for every other character and your actions can help or hinder them.
Dialogue works, and every single character evolves as the story progresses.
Format and Typos:
Readability is high, and I found very few typos in the text. However, I found a lot of errors in the code, the major culprit being a reversed positive or negative percentage.
Game Mechanics and Stats:
Stats are fairly standard skills (by percentage) and opposed pairs. You create your character early on, and choose one major skill, one minor skill, and one weakness. There are rare opportunities to raise skills, and often it’s difficult to raise anything to meet a higher threshold… This becomes an issue because while every skill gets a chance to shine, it becomes obvious that Might and Charm might be the most two used skills and worth a focus if you are trying to ‘win’.
Quests, yours and your allies, are tracked as well. You might try balancing all the quests so they are all successful, or maybe even try to make sure certain ones fail.
Replayability:
There is a lot of replayability, and I can assure you that I wanted to play again right after my first run. After my second run, I knew what I wanted to do for my third. I’m sure the fourth will happen just to see all of the backgrounds, but even after that, there are more achievements and paths to pursue. I still want to play someone who rushes down all of the spells in the game, or maybe someone who doesn’t go the heroic route. There is a lot to do here.
Dislikes:
- There seems to be a few skills that are more important in total than others. My first character felt like I only really had the chance to pass less than half of the checks because I focused on swiftness and ruggedness.
- Lots of stat coding errors that might affect your enjoyment, one in particular that seemed to forget the work you did to circumvent it. This is likely to change, but it was there in my first playthrough, and may confuse you when your stats don’t change the right way.
- I gathered a lot of money on my first run through the game, and after finishing your personal quest, it might have been nice to have some reference to the extra coin you had in your pockets.
Likes:
- I’ve never wanted to start up another run so quickly after finishing my first.
- Every character is absolutely amazing, and I really did like that they respect the gray morality of decisions to a certain extent. Some will take a stand, but others will understand.
- Party splits and vignettes are super well done, and I never found myself bored or wanting a different character to return.