Dragon Age™: Origins - Ultimate Edition

I rarely get "sucked in" to a game these days to the point that I cannot put it down, but this was certainly the case with Origins. I put in well over 50 hours in a short time period and rarely had a single dull moment. Even at $20 this is an absolute steal for any RPG fan. One disclaimer is the combat can be a bit clunky with pausing to manage your party members' skills and overall combat tactics. I simply set the difficulty to easy so I was able to do most all of the fighting in real time--if you're looking for a huge amount of combat depth that is absolutely there for you, but know you can bypass a lot of those mechanics if they don't appeal to you.

This is a top-class modern RPG from Bioware. Deep story, memorable companions, one of the best tactics system and combat mechanics. Moreover, there il a large community on Nexus restoring content, fixing bug, and refreshing this title with high-res textures. If you did not play it, do it!

Both the steam and gog versions are broken, and even after doing everything including the physx stuff, launching windowed, and a bunch of other nonsense it just doesn't work. I bought the gog version thinking it'd be prepatched to actually work and it just isn't.

+ The story is amazing. + We have a silent protagonist, this is imo a must for a real rpg. + The companions are great and very well written. + The main quest is decently well structured and very well written. + The vast majority of the side quests are very good. + The companion quests are very good. + The different origins are amazing and they really help me immerse myself in the world. + The ui is decent for the time period. + The dialogue system is pretty good, although i wish there were more basic/vague dialogue options like yes and no and maybe later etc, if the game had those dialogue options i could actually call this a real true rpg, instead of just an interactive book with an amazing story and great characters. + The voice acting is amazing in this game. + We can roleplay a lot more in this game than in most other RPG*s out there. + The music is amazing. + The setting is amazing. + The combat is pretty good for the time. + We can do a lot of shady things in this game. + There are a lot of hard morally grey choices in this game. + Decent mod support. + Good dlc. + Awakening is a very good expansion imo. - We can only have a 4 man party in this game, i wish we could have a 6 man party like we could in bg/iwd. - We can't make our own custom adventurers/companions like we could in bg/iwd. - The crossbows are bugged and don't scale with dex or str like they should, and because this is an ea and bioware game they never fixed it :/ - A lot of the armors and weapons look dumb. - Compared to bg/iwd/nwn the amount of skills has gone down a bit :/ This is one of the best games i have ever played, i have over 300 hours logged across steam and gog and the physical game i bought way back in 2010.

Five stars for GOG fixing what shouldn't even have been broken in the first place - the DLC. For anybody who knows what EA games can be like, particularly when DRM is relevant, they'll probably know only too well that they are far more concerned about punishing legitimate consumers and milking the market. That is most likely why some of the DLC via the digital disc and also Origin (that being the EA software, similar to Steam, not the actual game) versions is widely reported as not working due to what I believe are encryption problems (that is, validating the content). EA and their obsession with DRM went too far when they introduced online activation for Red Alert 2, but the way the DLC fails to properly activate on this game is, quite frankly, fraudulent and downright malicious. I am delighted to confirm that the DLC on this GOG version works without any problems whatsoever (specifically, Warden's Keep and Leliana's Song both work fine, the main two which people are often reporting to be not working). It's a big download (about 20gb), but it's a bargain at under £4 (75% off at this time) - so I heartily recommend people to download this if they have the bandwidth, time and a few quid to spare, if they have been having the usual problems with the DLC.