Dragon Age™: Origins - Ultimate Edition

I've ever finished one Bethesda RPG - Fallout New Vegas, you know, the one made by Obsidian. Why do I start my review like this? because I've finished this game multiple times, each time with all the DLC, the expansion and all optional quests. Around 160 hours per playthrough. Now, does that mean this game is a masterpiece? NO. It just means I really, really like the game. That being said, the graphics haven't aged as well as one might have hoped, and the game still has it's fair share of bugs, but it at least doesn't need an unofficial patch like RPGs from other developers whose name starts with the second letter of the alphabet. The GOG version has the advantage of being as close to complete as one can hope considering EA's original release model and plethora of retailer specific DLCs. The price is also acceptable for a game that's this good and this old. What else can I say? I really enjoyed this game and when it comes to RPGs it's up there with Vampire The Masquerade - Bloodlines as one of my all time favourites. Again, I'm not saying you will enjoy it. I'm partial to story and narrative driven RPGs, and there are still enough exploits in the game that you can play the entire game at the highest difficultly without much of a sweat. If you're looking for the best combat experience you can find in a game like this one you will be disappointed. If you're looking for hyper realistic graphics, you will be disappointed. If you're looking for a great fantasy narrative and story set in an interesting fantasy world, then, this might be that one gem you haven't yet discovered.

I loved the first 25 hours of Dragon Age. I beat Baldur's Gate: EE earlier this year and this game felt truly like the culmination of what they'd been trying to do there. As the game wore on, though, a lot of the systems felt flat. I played the first 25% on nightmare difficulty, then next 50% on hard, and the last 25% on normal--it just kept GOING and I was getting more and more anxious to be done. A couple of plot-related events having to do with your party's composition toward the very end of the game soured about the last 5-10 hours of the game for me, which was disappointing. I would say that pacing is the primary problem with the game. My playthrough took 60 hours, during which time I got to about level 19--more than 3 hours per level up, averaged across the whole game. I got a tier 7 weapon for my main character very early and didn't find an upgrade from the next 30+ hours, which was disappointing. The last 12 hours of the game or so featured a mix between epic, story-culminating battles and weird fetch quests and city guard work, which felt out of place that late in the story. Over all, I recommend this game for real fans of the genre, but I recommend AGAINST playing it on anything other than casual or normal mode. It's not that it's too hard, but the game simply has WAY too much combat without enough variety to support a game that long. I think I liked it more than Baldur's Gate, but paradoxically I would prefer to play Baldur's Gate again before I played this one over.

The game is broken if you use AMD hardware, it requires NVIDIA drivers which cannot be installed due to AMD conflict, do not buy this, I have repeatedly tried to bring this to someone's attention but have been blown aside like I was some raving lunatic. I wish someone could fix this but since it's pretty much abandonware at this point I am out of luck.

The GOG Preservation 1.05 update for Dragon Age has broken the game. The DLC is missing for the offline installers since the update, and GOG still hasn’t resolved the issue despite multiple reports from users for weeks. Adding to the frustration, the old installers are no longer available on the site. I’ll gladly update my review when this is fixed, but as it stands, this is unacceptable for a platform that prides itself on preservation.

Dragon Age: Origins is one of the last great RPGs, and certainly BioWare's last great RPG. I don't think anyone would recommend against playing it, but playing it on PC in 2023 is a hassle. The game crashes seemingly at random. There are plenty of recommended solutions to be found, but none of them seeemed to work for me. If you were hoping to buy this and just play it without issue, just know that it might not be so easy.