Editor's note: One of my favorite aspects of Dragon Age: Origins is its treatment of characters. As in Baldur's Gate 2 and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, I came to value my Dragon Age companions as much for their personalities as for their abilities. These characters impacted Jonathan as well. How many of you came to value your companions as more than stacks of stats? -Jason

What makes players connect with artificial, intangible characters? Emotion. If Dragon Age: Origins does one thing right, it's in its presentation of characters that players can relate to on almost every level.

From the drama-filled opening scenes of each origin story to the betrayal at Ostagar to the crowning of a new ruler and the defense of Fort Drakkon (and many quests in between), the growth of the characters mirrors growth found in everyone in the everyday world. The common theme of friendship and loss, the loss of identity and its reclamation, the loss of home and family, struck a chord somewhere deep. It's the theme of life, and Dragon Age captures this in a vivid detail that is tangible, unlike many stories in video games today.

I found myself feeling elated when characters cared for me, and as I began to learn more about them, as I began to inch closer to them, I felt, strangely, as if I were growing to care for them, not as a character, but as player. When a character would threaten to leave my party, or actually do so, I found myself feeling the loss, feeling as if I lost a real friend or confidant.

I also found myself going to great measures to make sure characters liked me, entrusted me with information that I began to feel they would only entrust to me and no one else. I became invested in them as real people, not as NPCs or intangibles.

Dragon Age is the first role-playing game in a long, long time that engrossed me to such an extent. And at the end, after 58 short hours, I wanted more; I wanted the story to continue, to never end, and to take me to more people and locations.

I felt, more than ever, that I possessed real-life control in my interpersonal relationships in a game. The dialogue, although preordained to illicit certain reactions, as in other RPGs of its ilk, provides enough options and intrigue that it gives off the aura of reality. I simply knew that at any moment I could verbalize the wrong feelings and permanently lose a friendship or, in the opposite vein, solidify one forever.

The option of gifts greatly enhances this as I could reclaim lost affinity, but ultimately, I felt as if my conversations were either my saving grace or my downfall. And the best thing is that the characters were invested in me as much as I them.

It's evident that the writers at BioWare went to great pains to make their characters real. They did such a good job at storytelling that despite the mythology and, at first glance, seemingly egregious disconnect between cultures, the player finds the world as his own. This is the mark of the great storyteller -- his ability to transform any unfamiliar place and unfamiliar people into mirror images of the recipient. This speaks volumes to the storyteller's great ability to find connections between any circumstance, any event, any culture, and any people. The writers at BioWare have, as always with their epics (Knights of the Old Republic), delivered on the scale of any great novelist or screenwriter in this criterion.

The story left me salivating, bloodthirsty for more.