Dragon Age™: Origins - Ultimate Edition

I spent 12h playing, wondering whether it was wasted. The game has too many things to take care of (I may be a control freak, though). Inventory (no stash yet, only expensive backpacks), approval of you party members, gift mechanism, choices (this is of course at the heart of a RPG, so not so much a problem). Combat mechanism: ARPG with pause (some people seem to know the game enough and be quick enough to play without pause), where you control a team of 4 (why not 6 by the way or even 8?). Control is supported by a rule-based system : you can edit complex rules that the AI will use to take control of the party members (even the main player). However, you don't have enough slots (around 5, more by spending leveling points). Nevertheless, when your choice of rules (i.e., programming robots) come to a hole, your party members run like chicken here and there, and area magic becomes inapplicable. Of course I may have not played enough to fully appreciate the model, but this is a matter of choice of gameplay; I preferred to invest points in Intelligence for a mage or strength for a warrior, and disable the automatic control. Then it becomes a feast of pauses during combats (e.g. to prevent the warrior to nevertheless run into combat while the fireball is being cast). Then you also have to fully understand the skills of everyone. This quickly ruins some of the fun. Party management: morale+gift to balance the effects of certain choices. (not enough room here to expand). Do you need, for completing the game to nurture all you 5-10 potential party members or can you take care of only 3 at the risk that your progression will be blocked. You get the point: when engaging in a 60-90 hours of gameplay, you would like to get some reassurance that time will not be wasted. Bugs: random crashes while playing on Windows 10. Changed parameters, affinity set to 1, to finally no avail. My last save does not reload, and do not want to waste more time with support (if any).

Dragon Age: Origins is now a classic cRPG game. It is decent and has captivating moments (particularly at the beginning and at the end) but it also has a ton of problems. Some things are well done: - The game does archers and warriors with shields enjoyably overall which was quite unusual at the time. - Dialogues and VOs are superbl. Expect a lot of witty banter amongst party members. - The RPG system, although restricted to only 3 base classes, is surprisingly flexible and offers good character customization. - The origin stories are well done and seamlessly blend into the game. You will really have a bit different experience depending on which origin story you played. Some of the (not so small) problems: - The story is "heavily influenced" ( = borderline criminal robbery ) by The Witcher universe. Sadly, it doesn't nearly have similar quality. - The game hasn't aged well in both technical and mechanic terms - for example, the combat often feels clunky and there are identical trash fights everywhere. Unmodded graphics were painful to look at then and are painful to look at now. - QoL improvements RPGs had for years now are non-existent here, unless you use mods. - The engine is horrible and has memory leaks that will force you to restart the game periodically to avoid crashing. In the endgame, you will be doing this every hour or so. With texture mods, ~1/2 hour. - It has extremely long and tedious parts that are mandatory and anti-fun (Deep Roads, Fade). - It has lots of boring back-tracking. - Loot is useless and exist only for you to sell it so you can buy the best stuff. - When you want to loot something you will often unwillingly initiate a dialogue with your party member due to the stupid camera and pathfinding system. - Camera is a mix of third-party and isometric perspectives and does neither well. TL;DR: Wait for sale if you must have a nostalgia injection of DA:O. Otherwise there are better RPGs to buy.

Unmodded, the game is a 3.5, I would say. The reason is that the game needs to be modded to a 5. Which is okay, as I would even argue that old games need that treatment. The vanilla game is unplayable to me after installing Dragon Age Redesigned, Combat Tweaks, and basically half of the other stuff on the Top 100 List over at the Nexus. I'm not talking about overloading a game with eye candy and items, but actual improvements to the original vision of the game. Redesigned in particular does things that you're shocked to see gone if you replay without it. Once you've really sunk your teeth into the game, I've always found the difficult curve to crack and I'm ripping stuff apart with two-handers and a mage. Difficulty mods need to be toyed with to fix that. On top of that, faster animation mods (there are many) are key, as well. I'm guessing they made it so slow because it helps the player and the PC from bottlenecking, which leads to the last point that I think is the most critical for any PC player. If you're coming from console, just because this game was fun on an Xbox, or even on your old computer, you may run into a problem playing it now that I haven't seen anyone else talk about. I have one of the best i7's, 16gb ram, and a decent card, but there are still times when the game suddenly stops calculating numbers. Animations are running, abilities are used, prompts are carried out, but the processor hits a bottleneck. Suddenly, the computer would chug and spew all the numbers out at once. This happened on four very different processors, which means this is a programming issue. Too many things happen at one time. This can happen without mods. That is why the unmodded game is a 3.5, I'd say it loses an entire point to this occurrence alone. Modded, the game is a 4, but almost no mods seem capable of fixing the bottleneck 100%. It's a beautiful game, maybe one of the best to ride the LotR films' stylistic coattails, and Alistair's story alone makes it worth it.

Now don't get me wrong, I love this game and it is one of my personal favorites but the game is not without flaw. First off the story is fairly straight forward with some twists and turns. You are tasked with uniting the land against the growing threat of the Darkspawn; demonic creatures lead by an elder god called the Archdemon. A pretty simple defeat the bad guy and bring peace to the land story but the story is made more livelier and fun thanks to the characters and to the decisions you get to make. Dragon Age's story is also a bit darker than other fantasy games, now it's nowhere near as dark as say the Witcher series but it has its moments. It isn't going to blow your mind but it isn't bad either, it's just good. When you create your character you get to choose between three races: Human, Dwarf or Elf. After that you have to pick an "origin story" based on which race you chose. These origin stories differ wildly from each other but they all end up with you joining the Grey Wardens. Depending on which origin story you chose some unique quests and decisions open up. The graphics isn't anything to brag about. The game is seven years old and it shows. The graphics are serviceable but nothing spectacular. Now for the part you're either going to love or hate; the gameplay. The gameplay is in the style of the old CRPGs such as Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale except in Dragon Age you can zoom in the camera for a third person view or zoom out for an overhead view. And keeping in the style of CRPGs the game has more focus on tactics rather than action. This element is either going to intrigue you or make you bored out of your mind. There is as much gameplay as there is story in this game, which is a lot. If you don't find tactical gameplay fun then this game might not be for you. There are good characters and stories to be had with this game but if you can't stand the gameplay then perhaps it's not worth your hard earned cash. Oh and Awakening is kinda cool I guess.

Must Have