Dragon Age™: Origins - Ultimate Edition

no scalies but they gave me a white boy just for me

good boss fight, but the rest parts of the game is just... sorry i played witcher 1-3 before the game

People that like this game must be more into stories than actually playing games. The story is deep and interesting, however the game play is boring and repetitive. The character development is slow and uninteresting. It takes ages to get a skill, which will inevitably underwhelm you. There are no meaningful or interesting skill combinations. Items are extremely limited, so collectors won't have fun in this one. The fighting is fun at times and while there is some skill component to the fights, it's mostly not skill. Most of the hard fights will simply involve you being ambushed or surprised by units or skills which you had no way of anticipating, dying, and then beating it the second time by proceeding in the right way. There is almost nothing you can do to improve the way your fights go, except maybe by buying a lot of potions and try to survive ambushes by excessive healing. I only finished this game because I already 75% finished when I realized what a bad it actually is. In short, great story, boring game. .

Combat and world building is what I think DA:O does best. It is also very combat focused and is limited when it comes to choosing how to solve situations it presents. The stats system allows for some interesting decisions in character building, combat allows for things like flanking and spellcast interruption and spells have some tactical usage as well. It is quite satisfying to block the doorway and torch entire room of enemies with inferno. The world created here cought my interest. There is quite a bit of lore to find during the game and while you can find things in there similar to other fictional worlds when looking at it from far enough, it still put an interesting spin on it. Unortunately there is just too much combat in this game. Places like deep roads were especially tedious. Game starts a bit hard since on low level you don't have many abilities and you can't afford to buy any worthwhile equipment. Later it gets better until you start to wonder how many more things you still need to kill. Overall there just isn't enough variety in items and abilities (with exception to spells). Also game loves to force you into ambushes, which implies focusing build on survivability. Story and characters were fine and there were some interesting moments. However, too often I found myself unable to convince characters because game didn't offer me any good arguments. Of course developers can't think of and implement everything but in case of the landsmeet I am convinced the game does not provide you with good dialogue options in order to force you into making a choice. I'm not saying player should be able to talk down anyone, sometimes people just don't listen, but at least let me try and fail, don't just ignore the obvious. You can also often hear the exact same response for multiple different dialogue options. And you can forget about being clever, like dispelling magical ward on a door with glyph of neutralization.

DA:O is a good game in its core, but it is troubled by too much meaningless combat as filler material. It wants to be a storytelling game and it has some niece pieces. Sadly the combat and the codex entries are in its way. It should be a 20-30 h experience, but they did stretch it to a 70-80 h experience. The game is not bad, but highly overrated.