Dragon Age Origins - Still Amazing

[Danbo Jambo]

So I returned to DA:O this week. I've played through it around 4 times previously, and it's been a few years since I picked it up.

After all this time and the games out since raising the standard, I gotta say........ it's still utterly fantastic.

What surprized me the most, after plenty of criticism over the years towards it, was how superb the combat still was. Too slow? not for me. I find it a perfect balance of tactical combat, where each of your choices feel as if they matter, and many situations means you have to react in different ways. Yes you can develop a formula to some degree, but so many battles throw a spanner in the works so that you have to change your approach or die (I am playing on Nightmare of course), which keeps it all very fresh.

The way the quests and world evolves so naturally as well is just brilliant. It rarely feels mathmatical, whereas so many other RPGs have that "talk-kill-reward, talk-kill-reward etc." repetitiveness to it. Even though DA:O has that essential base, it's just done so well and feels so intertwined that it's supremely enjoyable.

Of course it's not without it's flaws, but overall it still holds up as a classic for me. Such a shame to see this series de-volve the way it did. If we were to see a true Dragon Age: Origins 2 then we could have an absolute corker of a game on our hands.

How does it stand up for you lads & lasses?

 

[Zhukov]

Time to be That Negative Arsehole Guy.

It doesn't hold up in my eyes.

Hell, I got bored with it when it was new. Never finished my first playthrough back in 2010. I only went back and started over when I had a long period without internet while moving house and needed something really long to keep me occupied.

The combat was initially fun. I loved being able to pause and micromanage characters and abilities and combos. However it got repetitive before long and just wasn't meaty enough to sustain a game that damn long. I eventually just fell back on freezing enemies with a mage then shattering them with rogue/fighter abilities that gave guaranteed critical hits. Over and over again.

The setting was dreadfully generic. It felt like playing Fantasy Setting: The Setting. Which is a shame because there was actually some interesting detail in the codex that felt like it should have made for a rich setting. Sadly, little of it made it through into the actual game (something that Mass Effect did way better). The ugly and generic visual design only made things worse.

Likewise, the story was very paint-by-numbers. Main quests consisted of Meet the Humans, Meet the Mages, Meet the Elves and, finally, Meet the Dwarfs. Then band together to fight off the invasion of Zombie Orcs and their Demon Dragon. There were some nice bits in there, but they were few and far between. The dwarven succession plot for example deserved to be in a better game.

Voice acting was top notch, I'll certainly give it that. Shame about the stiff rubber mannequins that the voices were coming out of.

 

[Bilious Green_v1legacy]

I love it. It's my favourite game of all time. I've owned it on two systems, played it 17 times, and introduced multiple friends to it by buying them copies and forcing them to play it.

Sadly, Bioware is no longer willing, or perhaps capable, of making a game like DAO again, so I highly doubt we will see another game of its class from them. With Witcher 3, CDPR have proved that they are the best hope for high quality story and character driven AAA RPGs in the future.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Time to be That Negative Arsehole Guy.

really not trying to be rude, but aren't you this way with 90% of games? not that I stalk you, it just seems most threads discussing games that I go into, your avatar seems to match your mood for most AAA games in the past decade.

OT: There are certainly nit picks about the game, but I feel like after all this time the "negatives" (generic story, generic setting, character movements, style of combat..these are not negatives at all in my book, but I can certainly see why people would find them subjectively not to their taste) either bother you or they don't, so you'll still love the game or still dislike it.

personally I still love it, it's been probably a year or two since I've played it due to backlog size, but it's still in my top 5 rpg's

 

[Zhukov]

Time to be That Negative Arsehole Guy.

really not trying to be rude, but aren't you this way with 90% of games? not that I stalk you, it just seems most threads discussing games that I go into, your avatar seems to match your mood for most AAA games in the past decade.

Hm?

Nah, not really, just been on an unlucky streak recently.

For the record, I am looking forward to Overwatch and Mirror's Edge Catalyst. See? I can be positive!

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Time to be That Negative Arsehole Guy.

really not trying to be rude, but aren't you this way with 90% of games? not that I stalk you, it just seems most threads discussing games that I go into, your avatar seems to match your mood for most AAA games in the past decade.

Hm?

Nah, not really, just been on an unlucky streak recently.

For the record, I am looking forward to Overwatch and Mirror's Edge Catalyst. See? I can be positive!

fair enough, overwatch looks dope but I just can't see myself splurging money on it, I hardly play fps's anymore and I have tf2 still installed if I need to scratch that microscopic itch.

mirror's edge catalyst I'm cautiously hopeful for, EA has poisoned damn near everything they've touched so I'm avoiding it until it comes out before I check it out.

 

[Erttheking]

I agree with Zhukov, but to a lesser extent. There's some interesting things about the setting and plot, but they feel generic. There's some original and unique things here and there (Love the Dead Legion) but not as many as there could/should have been. You're the special who has to stop the baddies by gathering an alliance of all of the important fantasy people, and the humans are racist, because it's a dark fantasy and racism is mandatory in dark fantasy, to the point where it feels forced. Oh yeah...One thing I find utterly hilarious is that this is supposed to be a dark fantasy. I beg your pardon? Put all of the elves in woods and make them proud warriors and it's freaking Lord of the Rings! Dark fantasy needs more than racism, violence, reference to rape and blood when you fast travel (Seriously, the fuck was up with that?). I'm still waiting for more games like Dark Souls that can do dark fantasy without shoehorning in racism and rape (Oh and without Tolken cliches). Or at the very least put in racism and rape and DO something with it. Don't just go "Oh u guyz, look how dark this place iz! The most that happens with racism against elves in this game is they say "Hey, people are racist against us! That sucks! And some of us live in the woods because of it!" I played through as an elf from the Circle and the whole racism thing came up a whole lot less than it SHOULD have. If racial slurs aren't going to be flung at me because I grew up a mage and not in the slums, then other elves should've been calling me Auntie Tam at the very least.

Overall I still enjoyed it though, I liked the characters and found them engaging, which is usually enough to get me invested in a story and here was no exception. Might even play it again someday, if only so I can properly play through the other two for the first time.

 

[Amaror]

Yes I played it again before Inquisition came out and I was honestly surprised at how good it was. Before playing I thought:
"Come on, It can't have been THAT good. This has to be just nostalgia, so don't get your hopes up."
But as it turned out: The game is just that good.
Which made it all the more dissapointing to see how Inquisition turned out.
What is one of the best aspects of the game is that after 5 full playthroughs of the game I still managed to come across different outcomes based on my dialogue choices that I hadn't seen before.
Like in the tower of mages. I actually managed to convince them to join my mage army in my last playthrough. Didn't even know that was possible before and thought it was just a binary spare/kill choice.

 

[bdeamon]

Of course it's not without it's flaws, but overall it still holds up as a classic for me. Such a shame to see this series de-volve the way it did. If we were to see a true Dragon Age: Origins 2 then we could have an absolute corker of a game on our hands.

For me, the dlc alternate campaigns (especially witch hunt), and the Awakening expansion added up to a totally different, sequel like experience.

 

[Kyle Winston]

Dragon Age: Origins is important game to me because I stepped out of my comfort zone when I played it. I mainly played JRPGs, platformers, and point-and-clicks up to that point. A western RPG was new. I am a follower of SF Debris and his LP/Review of it convinced me to purchase it for myself. I loved it. Not long after I purchased DA2. I enjoyed it, appreciating its positives and understanding (most of) its faults. I plan to get Inquisition when funds allow.

DA:O is good because I enjoyed it and made me a fan of the series and more inclined to try more western RPGs.

 

[Imre Csete]

I haven't touched the franchise since I slogged through Inquisition, but I still remember Origins' combat quite fondly.

I found the combat pretty dull at first, because you had few abilities to work with (as a mage a lot more, but honestly, apart from the few decent spells the rest are just there for to fill up your skillbar). Then I finally rolled a rogue for the third time, and really got into the stealth approach. Taking out squishy nuker mobs, trapping chokepoints, hit and run bait tactics and whatnot. Always rolled a rogue afterwards.

Sucks that the franchise all around abandoned that tactical approach, thanks to wave spawns and MMO-y group respawns in the later games. The cross class combos were interesting in DA2, but I guess they just had to abandon the only cool feature from the second game in their quest for perfectly polished mediocrity.

 

[Mister K]

Nah, sorry, can't agree.

I mean, it is not a BAD game, but it is so... average. Plot about Big Evil (not even Big Bad Guy, just some random event that happens again), 3 basic classes(seriously, there were like 10 in Baldurs gate at the very least, huge step down), party that consists of kind and funny but kind of dumb warrior, sweet girl, ***** witch, old lady healer that was kind of there, and my personal favourites always drunk angry dwarf with an axe and feminine elf guy (who are not overdine at all).

About the combat. After palying DA:O I though that I dislike when people try to mix turn-based combat and action one, but I played such games like Baldurs Gate, Planescape: Torment and KOTOR, which DID have mixed combat and they were amazing.

Bash DAII all you want but at the very least it tried to, semi-quoting Yahtzee here, get off Tolkiens playground. Plot about a person who is trying to live their life, but constantly gets into city's politics. And many of the party members were at the very least different from old and tired cliches: dwarf that isn't a party pooper, elven mage that is not using magic of leaves and flowers, warrior elf, female warrior not in chaimail bikini. It is a problematic game, sure, but problems come from EA rushing Bioware to finish the game in a year.

DA:O, however, is as generic as it gets. I'll be perfectly honest, I finished it only because when I played it I had a lot more time and I was a lot more determined to finish whatever I've started. Today, I would've dropped it after 5 or so hours.

 

[bificommander]

I really want to like DA:O, but I could never make myself play through it. I hate the combat system. You could die at any moment (preferably far from the last save of course), and I never felt as if it was my bad choices that made the difference between that failure and the next run where I got through with no problems. Maybe I'm stupid and clumsy, but I play enough tabletop RPGs like Pathfinder that I dare say I have some skill in building a party of fantasy characters and using their skills in battle. Maybe if the game was straight up turn-based I'd like it better, but the current real-time clusterfuck with pausing isn't working for me. (I played a lot of Neverwinter Nights, and I didn't have so many problems there. But I don't know if my tastes have changed or this system is worse.)

A shame, because I like the characers and story that I've seen.

 

[Nimcha]

It doesn't hold up that well because it's so generic, like others have said. In my opinion. However at the time I loved it and I think it introduced a rich world that the sequels expanded upon. The characters were top-notch in my opinion, but is there seriously anyone who wants to go through the Deep Roads section ever again?

I actually prefer DA2 now, which has its own glaring flaws (copy pasted environments and other clear corner cutting) but to me is a richer storytelling experience. Plus, I can hardly play RPGs without a voiced protagonist these days.

 

[The_Great_Galendo]

I liked a lot of what the game had to offer, but I never got that far into it (I got to the point where some village was being haunted or attacked or something and you had to go around warning people...I think? It's been a while). I was just too turned off by needing to click constantly to walk anywhere. Click. (Characters move a few paces.) Click. (Characters move a few paces.) Rotate screen. Click. (Characters move a few paces.) Repeat ad nauseum.

I really wish that someone had made a mod so that you could bring up the map, click on where you wanted to go, and let the computer pathfind its way there. Clicking like fifty times just to move from one side of a town to the other gets really old really quickly. A little bit of Warcraft/Starcraft pathfinding would go a long way to make that game significantly better.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

Fantasy Setting: The Setting.

No that would be Dragon's Dogma with the added title "ON STEROIDS!!!"

 

[Sharia]

DA:O is certainly generic, but it's still Bioware's last "really" good game. It didn't quite match their prior works, but it sure as hell bettered everything following.

 

[MysticSlayer]

I recently reinstalled Origin to take advantage of Pacific Assault being free. I realized I had picked up Dragon Age back when it was free but couldn't play on account of only having Mac and Linux at the time. So I'll definitely be getting back into it soon.

But given that the last time I played it was last year, I can still say that I still love it. It's not the best RPG from last generation, but it is definitely a fantastic one.