Dragon Age™: Origins - Ultimate Edition

Just a warning that this is a real-time combat heavy experience with a high degree of violence. This may not be what you want to spend your time on. The GOG game description does not properly reflect these aspects of the game.

A legendary game. The story is alright. Everything is straightforward: bad guy is bad, good guy is good, you've got to put no effort to figure out what is going on and how come. Tons of reading, but none of them notes / books you find do really matter. Adds to the ambiance a little? Maybe. Fighting my way through the story has been extremely boring. Maybe I had too many good games and the original Dragon Age has been just a little more boring? But fighting my way through the first three locations for more than four years really forcing myself to take a look at the next room or dungeon? Boring, empty rooms - empty or filled with some deceivingly interesting-looking rubbish - but you can not interact with this rubbish. Encounters with enemies are all alike, except for few ones. You can not loot most chests unless you are a 100% lockpicker, looting enemies is worth 0,00001 coins and encumbers you so much that you are unable to pick up anything worth picking up, merchants are selling some sophisticated gear for hundreds of coins, which you can afford by the endgame only - if you know exactly what shall make sense in the end and what doesn't, and if you are ready to be starving for it all game long and if you don't mind going back to the cleared locations to pick up all rubbish ten times over. Two stars for the dialogues. You'll have to talk to every character 10+ times, try all an every dialogue option in order to refrain from offending him/her, in order not to make him/her hate you. Not intuitive at all, there's really no option of being honest with your companions - you can only follow their whimmy whims or you lose. So that's what it feels like: chore, following whims, starvation, trial and error, having to know the endgame if you want to reach it. I really forced myself to make each next step in order to find out what this legendary game is a all about. Boring. Extremely boring. Waste of my time, waste of money.

Don't buy GoG version; it is completely broken and will spam you with C++ error crashes; get the original version on disk or from EA.

A star for trying. Everybody keeps saying how great the story is but I can't even get to the story because of how badly designed this game is. The combat is a mess. It's boring, non-engaging and confusing. Camera control is from early 2000s. Most of the time I'm looking at the minimap because I can't look around freely. Stealth is a joke. I can pass the guards right in front of them but I can't pass the character that starts a cutscene that seems optional at best. The game does nothing to tell me how to use the interface or what skills do what. It's a shame, really, because the world seems so good. I wish I could explore more but not with these mechanics.

I just spent an hour trying to find zombies that weren't there at the Redcliffe night fight. The thing just doesn't continue. Big bug.