Dragon Age™: Origins - Ultimate Edition

At this point, saying "Dragon Age: Origins" is "good" is akin to saying, I don't know, the German football team is good. Of course it's good. It's exceptional. There are times you want to punch it—the random difficulty spikes being the major caveat (your party will be able to take on all sorts of armies, enemies, etc., but get mauled to death by wolves; there's also one battle where one enemy has set traps everywhere and blows both your team and hers up)—but my god is that irrelevant by the end. The writing! The music! The sense of goddamn adventure! The mix between crapshoot world and high fantasy. Just...great, great game that's stood the test of time. I played it two years ago and I can't stop thinking about it.

Played in blind, I am absolutely loving it

I wanted to go back and experience this masterpiece again. While the content is holds up the same, the technicalities and bugs completely ruin the experience. If you want to get into this anyway, these are some things of note: Change texture detail from high to medium. This "saved" me from dropping this after Lothering where the crashes became almost constant. When you notice textures getting buggy (every couple of loadscreens), the loading screen not looking right, quicksave, alt+f4, and start the game again. (Some kind of memory leak I guess?) In the configurator you can elect to skip the intros, which will save you tons of time. And finally, the issue which made me drop this altogether, happens in Awakening. When you recruit the elven mage, make manual save beforehand. After continuing into the mines you might get a bug which deletes the gear of your party. Unfortunately, without knowing about this, you will advance trough the location and you will overwrite your autosaves, and possibly your quicksave (if you like to save before fights). At this point about 3 hours of progress (since the start of Awakening), is lost if you dont have a manual save.

I had to uninstall the game, but now when I install it again, I have no dlc at all

This is an attempt to dumb down CRPGs and widen the target audience. If you're not much into roleplaying and you're also not very demanding when it comes to story and character developement you might enjoy it. The good things about the game is that they made it very dynamic. You don't get lost walking around looking for things to do or get bored of extremely long and repetitive dungeons. The action is very well delivered and the progress is well paced. Mechanics are simple and easy to learn and the combat is fluid and entertaining. Also, you can start the game very differently depending on the character creation. Now, overall the game seems very lackluster. The design is dull and generic. Armours, weapons, the characters... They look very similar and uninspiring. Usually, in games that supposedly pay attention to cosmetics and graphics you should be excited to get a new good looking armour or weapon. Doesn't happen here. The story is a miscellanea of plagiarism. First of all, the main story is a chopped off version of Neverwinter Nights 2 without any flavour or seasoning. The premise is exactly the same: A big evil is threatening the world and you need to gather forces to destroy it. This time, without any adventures. You go straight to the point: Get all your party members quickly then rush to call for the aid of a bunch of people. One of the missions is a blatant copy of Indiana Jone's lost and the Last Crusade. Puzzles are forced and lazy. They also skip the amazing castle/fortress feature and all you get now is a caravan/camp that doesn't let you do or manage almost anything. The class system is the most simplified aspect of the game as you only get 3 classes (that can specialize into 4 variations each) but only the mage really gives you enough micromanagement to not leave them for the AI. Oh, and the expansions are pathetic, nothing but recycled scenarios with absolutely stupid short stories as opposed to NWN2's whole new campaigns and hours of gameplay.