Dragon Age™: Origins - Ultimate Edition

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

The game is constantly crashing and I've tried every fix in the book. For me, wearing witch robes, vestements of the reaper, etc. will cause conversations to crash every time - otherwise, crashes are random. It is unplayable for me at least. One star.

I got DAO on sale. I haven't tried the Awakening dlc yet but so far the first 5 hours in the main story have been great. I have an ok laptop with windows 10 and haven't had any issues gaming. I don't know if it'll crash later, let's hope not. Im not good reviewing games because I think that's very personal, from gamer to gamer, but I like what I'm seeing and definetely what I'm hearing. The conversation's between the characters crack me up a lot. cool stuff, to me. Anyway, my main worry was just being able to play it with windows10. I did some youtube research (because it is my first DA game) and so yeah, Im loving this type of story. gave it 3 stars cuz im not even half way done but seems like I'll probably give it a 5 eventually.