Dragon Age Heathers and free text dialogue

[Note: I originally wrote the draft of this on 1/12/10, but never posted it.  I'm posting the edited draft on 6/12/12, but backdating it to 1/12/10.]


So, I got Dragon Age: Origins for Christmas and have played through the game once.  I enjoyed it, but feel like I should have named my character Veronica, so I could have the following conversation:

"Morrigan, why can't you just be a friend? Why do you have to be such a megabitch?" 

"Because I can be."

Unfortunately, even if I did have the foresight to play Veronica, I still couldn't have that conversation because DA:O gives you a very limited set of choices for dialogue.  I cannot begin to count the number of instances in which my character's true response was not listed.  If only we had the technology to allow players to enter free text responses!  Oh, right.  Zork did that in 1980.  Well, if only a traditional RPG allowed you to talk to NPC's with free text!  Oh, right.  The Wizardry series did this in 1988 (though they have since regressed to dialogue trees).  Even though it was clear that Heart of the Maelstrom crudely mapped your responses to an underlying dialogue tree, it was far more satisfying to be able to say what you wanted, rather than be forced to choose a canned response.

Confessions:

• The only computer game I've played with any regularity since Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (in 2007) is Little Green Guys with Guns (which is tons of fun, but not an RPG). 
• The only other computer RPG game I played with any regularity in the 00's was Wizardry 8 (I'd played all previous installments in the series, and still have fond memories of Wiz 5).

So, any impressions I have of DA are coming through an Oblivion / Wizardry filter, with a little bit of memory of Wizard's Crown.  No KOTOR***.  No Fallout.  No MMORPGs.

*** This deficiency has since been corrected.  KOTOR is great, aside from the canned dialogue.