Dragon Age™: Origins - Ultimate Edition

Did not enjoy.

Don't buy the hype. It's a polished turd revered by weirdos who use it as a dating sim, but there's bits of it worth salvaging that would actually take inspiration from if I were put in charge of designing an RPG. Let's start with the good: The camera allows you to play from either an over-the-shoulder or isometric perspective, allowing you to choose between immersive exploration and tactical control, although the isometric perspective would be better if it weren't tied to a character. Different starting stories and location based on character's race and class is a great idea. Unlocking prestige classes through in-game decisions is pretty neat, although it kind of sucks when you want to replay with a specific build in mind but can't execute it if you haven't made the right choice in any previous playthroughs. Morrigan is one of my favorite companions ever written, and her and Alistair have great banter with each other. Now the bad: The most generic dark fantasy setting ever devised. There's only 3 base classes to choose from (warrior, rogue, mage), although they essentially have 2-3 subclasses each (archer vs daggers, two-handed vs board and sword). Enemies are also made up of those same 3 classes. You will be fighting groups of Darkspawn rogues, warriors, and mages with the same skills as you again, and again, and again. In addition to wave after wave of the same boring old enemies, the MMO combat itself is shallow and repetitive, mostly revolving around knockdowns and stun lock. Art style is terrible. The graphics themselves probably hold up pretty well, but the game is just hideous. It's very drab and brown. Even the magical dream world is just nothing but brown with goop everywhere. I could go on, but I'm out of characters. It's a boring slog, but it's the best the series has to offer. If it's on sale for super cheap (or even free on Origin) you might be able to get some enjoyment out of it, but the love affair is completely undeserved.

It follows the trend in modern game play to replace substance with more glamour. From start to finish I found the game to be simply tedious, & ultimately boring for 90% of the time. The story line ends up being what you bother playing for and quite simply if you play this game you will be rewarded by rushing through it on god mode because the narrative is too spread apart with the daily grind otherwise.

Note: If you want to play this game you need to download mods (patches) to make it work. All the necessary patches are listed on PCGamingWiki website. Even with them I got 3 crashes but it is playable. After loving Dragon Age: Inquistion and finishing it multiple times I wanted to try Origins, because I saw many people saying that it was the best DA game. And I'm very disappointed; I didn't see anything captivating about it. I played for 8 hours I guess, GOG didn't track my playtime, and like a show with bad first episodes, I don't see why I should keep playing it, and I was thinking: why do people even like this ? The combat system is very bland for a CRPG, compared to Divinity: OS2 and Pathfinder: WOTR. Maybe the music ? I could just listen to it on YouTube. The graphics ? Obviously not. So the story ? Those 8 hours of playtime were of complete boredom, nothing special happens, 8 hours of just "go talk to that person, and now that person makes you talk to three more people about mundane topics about the world." This is a game, I don't care to learn about their fictional religion or politics in a room with nothing happening. 8 hours in and the game doesn't show anything to catch the player's interest, you don't even see the main villain, there's a war happening, you should care but why ? At least Inquistion has nice graphics, better combat, beautiful effects and maps that aren't completely mud. I didn't pay enough attention to the reviews praising this game, is because of nostalgia, if you don't have that I don't know why bother at all.

Size is actually 36.1G.