Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition

[DF]

Well, nobody can say that I didn't try.

I originally started to play Dragon Age: Origins because there was a little argument between friends. Since I had the game forever and since I hadn't played it yet, I decided to give it a shot and weigh my own opinion on the matter. After 39 hours and 15 minutes, I ended up stopping early. I had one graphics card die after nine and a half years of service while playing this game, and the errors leading to "NO SIGNAL" on the screen made me fear the second would soon join the first. After trying to turn down the graphics, after turning off V-Sync, after trying to assign the game to one CPU core, I just don't want to risk the donor machine's life any further.

What is Dragon Age: Origins?

It's an RPG, party-based, real time with pause. You can three companions explore the land of Ferelden, beating the crap out of monsters and bandits in a bid to get stronger and get better equipment. True to many Bioware RPGs, there are many opportunities to talk to your companions and your responses and actions affect their opinion of you--some may leave the party in disgust while some may see you as more than a friend.

The Blight is coming, a surge of Darkspawn headed by the Archdemon, and they're intent on overrunning Ferelden. Good thing the Grey Wardens, the best counter against the forces of evil, are on the job! But oh, they got wiped out in a betrayal. As one of two surviving Wardens, it's up to the both of you to form a small army, visit the major cities of the country, and entreat aid to combat this coming threat. And solve everyone's problems because they're too deep in their own or worried about the brewing civil war to lift a finger to save the world.

Gameplay

The "Origins" part of the title refers to the different origin stories that make the foundation of your character's story. Instead of having something like 'you are a recruit to the Galactic Republic Army and it just so happens that you're Force-Sensitive', you pick a race, a class, and if possible, an origin story. So if you go for a Dwarf, you can either be a Dwarf Commoner or Dwarf Noble, and their starting stories are naturally different. There can even be differences if you play as a male or female of either. While the rest of the game will be more or less similar between the different origin stories, there are still callbacks and mentions of things that happened, though the game implies that all of the origin stories happen at once...just the one you picked is the one who survives/escapes/etc.

I came into this with a familiarity with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age plays pretty similarly to it. You explore 3D areas, either interacting with people in town, or going through the wilderness or ruins and fighting off all sorts of nasties. This is a team-focused RPG, so you can have a party of up to four people to cover every necessary role to see your team to victory. There is a robust Tactics system that reminded me of the Gambit system from Final Fantasy XII, where you mold the character's AI with a number of basic if-then statements. 'If Ally: Health <75% then Use Action: Heal' or 'if Enemy: using weapon type: magic or ranged, then Attack' and so on. This allows you to play the game more like an action RPG, though there are still turns being taken in the background. You can also just repeatedly pause the game and queue up a single action for each member of your party if you don't want to bother with Tactics.

As with most RPGs, beating up monsters and even minor things like reading books confers an amount of XP. Hit a certain threshold to receive a level up, gaining three stat points to split between Strength, Dexterity, Willpower, Magic, Cunning, and Constitution. Each stat does something from allowing you to equip heavier/better gear, to giving you harder-hitting spells, to just giving you more options in dialog sometimes. Depending on your class, you may also receive a skill point and/or talent/spell point. Skills are abilities everyone has access to. You can invest in Herbology to be able to craft Health Poultices to heal allies, or Poison-Making to develop bombs, or put points in Combat Training to unlock certain Talents. Talents differ between Warriors and Rogues, and Mages instead get Spells to play with. You're able to allocate all of your allies' points as you see fit, at least.

Specializations must be unlocked to be used, either by convincing one of your allies to teach you and thereby the rest of the team (Alistair for Templar, Leliana for Bard, etc) or by buying a manual from a shopkeep. You are able to take one specialization at level 7 and a second at 14, and picking one confers a stat bonus plus gives you additional Talents or Spells to put your points into. Warriors hit things with melee weapons and may use a sword, but Templars have abilities that counter mages. Rogues can fire at enemies from afar with bows, but Bards can apply a party-wide buff with their song on top of their usual kit.

There's a lot of dialog in the game, and the responses you can give can change how your present allies feel about you, with "(Name) Approves +2 [gold heart]" or "Morrigan Disapproves -5 [black cracked heart] pop-ups. Or maybe you can squeeze a little extra money out of your quest-giver. Or you can convince a band of mercenaries to scram without getting into a fight. You're not timed on your responses, but you have no warning how well your response will be received...though context clues ought to be able to help in most cases. You'll sometimes be given "{Persuade) ..." or "(Intimidate) ..." responses which use your Grey Warden's stats. You might not be very intimidating if you're a 10 Strength wimp, but 25 might be worth not fighting. You can talk to your allies at any time, but you'll sometimes have conversations thrust upon you in the camp you can visit from the world map. Sometimes you'll talk about plot-relevant things, sometimes people will have something for you to do or a detour they'd like to take, and sometimes you'll end up in a relationship with them...and then have to break things off with the other party member you were dating already. Oops.

You can buy and find Gifts to give to your allies and increase/decrease their affection towards you, but I don't think any will move you from 'friends' to 'lovers'. A perfect way to no-effort the system or to at least smooth over some poor decisions nobody liked.

With combat, you have your usual gamut of damage types (mostly on the magical side, though sometimes you'll find weapons that have a bonus elemental damage type, or you can use certain potions to apply them instead), status effects, and even positional damage. Some enemies like skeletons might be immune to cold damage, so your mage using a cold staff won't really be useful, and you might want to knock down or stun an enemy spellcaster before his cast bar fills. Rogues in melee are able to inflict backstabs on enemies as long as they're given a clear shot at someone's backside, but you'll have to steer them into position yourself. Mages get mana, Warriors and Rogues get stamina, and both are used to power their skills/spells but are also reserved for sustained abilities, like a Champion's Rally giving nearby allies a boost in Defense score, but it lowers the effective maximum Stamina of the Champion by 50 until turned off. The things you wear can incur a Fatigue penalty which increases the cost of your skills/spells, so loading up the resident tank with the bulkiest gear possible can cause him to only use a few skills in combat before he's reduced to simple attacks.

Once you clear the first few areas where you're railroaded through the story, you're given quite a bit of freedom in where to go on the world map. Some places like the Frostback Mountains are very dangerous to a low-level party, but there's no established order for you to tackle places. And nobody said you can't visit a place, do some shopping, and then leave. Traveling between two points on a map opens you up to random events, but they're not always combat encounters, though. Sometimes you'll meet characters you've read about or are related to some sidequest you're on, sometimes there'll be plot-relevant encounters like assassins coming after you after you saw a cutscene of someone hiring said assassins, and so on. You can't seem to use these to grind, even though you should be waist-deep in Darkspawn after some point in the game.

And there's a pretty robust Codex system in the game. When you read books or encounter enemies, you get a notice about the Codex being updated, and here holds various bits of in-universe information about whatever topic you read about or whatever you just killed. It's a nice touch but also completely ignorable so if immersion isn't your thing, you can just not ever read any Codex entries. Each one fits into some category and has a number assigned to it, so that can help with trying to complete the collection for whatever reason. Books typically had a few paragraphs about them.

How I Played

Instead of making one of my OCs in the game, I decided to keep the default name of my character and somewhat roleplay her instead. I picked a female City Elf for my origin story as I heard it was quite dark (and was it ever), and I went for Rogue for my class. Due to the events of her origin story, I decided to intentionally avoid romance, even to the point where I wore a certain ring despite better options being available. Kallian ended up going for the Assassin and Duelist Specializations. I focused more on the diplomatic side as I figured as half of the last Grey Wardens in Ferelden, I needed any help I could get to grease the wheels of the rest of the country, so I ignored the human-hating responses when they came up and mostly played heroic. I went for dual-wield daggers since the only other option they get is ranged weapons and someone took care of that already. I'd often put her in Stealth mode and send her alone forward into danger to detect traps she could disarm or to find enemies lying in wait. I'd either bring the rest of my team forward or blast the enemies with bombs while still in stealth. When the fighting really broke out, I'd steer her towards the most dangerous enemy in the mix and try to stun them not only to stop their attacks for a moment, but to allow me to get backstabs from their front. From there, I'd address other ranged targets and clean up from there. I originally tried to steal from everyone I could, but I got remorseful (even if I'd just reload a save before my attempt if I failed) and stopped pretty early on.

Alistair was my tank and the second source of melee damage. I focused him on the shield/defense side of the Warrior talents just to keep his ass alive and to help take heat off of Kallian so she could do her thing. Even though he comes with the Templar Specialization by default, I never really had him take on mages since him dashing off to bash their heads in would've left my backline exposed. Of the people who hit zero HP, Alistair naturally had it happen the least amount of times since he's already set up for defense, but I didn't put very many of his stat points into Constitution as some of his later defensive skills needed a lot of Dexterity. He didn't get access to very many active abilities, mostly 'hit them with your shield' or 'hit them several times' or 'taunt foe'. He ended up with the Champion Specialization too, but I didn't get to really make use of it before I quit. Alistair is one of the companions you can 'harden' through certain dialog choices, affecting the rest of the story due to his role in it. I chose not to harden him, and had to reload a couple of times to avoid a relationship-starting dialog option.

Leliana was my ranged attacker. Her kit was already set up to be a designated Rogue for stealing/sneaking/disarming/unlocking, so a lot of that went to waste since Kallian had that covered. I went with her making the most attacks possible, so she went with a bow and a few pieces of gear with "-aim time" on them. I did put her in the Suppressive Fire stance to make it harder for enemies to land blows (playing defensively here), but once I got the Ranger Specialization for her, I had her just summon a wolf and use Scattershot for groupwide stuns. She kept one song buff constantly, switching to the other option when I got her to that point. I'd almost always have to manually direct her to run away from the fray since she'd just stay where she was and not care about danger being an arm's length away, but that's probably due to poor Tactics use on my part. Leliana can also be hardened, and I once again chose not to do so or enter a relationship with her.

Wynne was my healer as soon as I got her. Like with Leliana, I'd have to direct her to run from danger so she could attack with her staff at range and still be able to heal people. I don't think I gave her any attack spells, so all of hers were buffing or healing or defensive in some way. I had her use Rejuvenation on everyone when they got even a little bit hurt so as to better keep everyone topped-off, and Heal only when things really went south. For the most part, this worked out pretty well. One hard fight in an Abandoned Warehouse in Denerim had me put her in the Arcane Warrior Specialization, allowing her to wear heavy armor and use melee weapons, so she became a secondary tank/melee attacker who could also heal and buff and so on. She had to chug potions due to the Fatigue system then, but our overall combat effectiveness still increased considerably. She couldn't learn any Warrior talents for better shield use or to smack people with the shield, but that didn't seem to slow her down any.

I still recruited Morrigan (not that you can miss her), Sten, Shale, Zevran, and the dog who I named Bannon for whatever reason.

In terms of the order I tackled things, I did the sequence of stuff through Lothering, tackled Return to Ostagar and Soldier's Peak first, then I did Redcliffe up to the point where you are encouraged to leave for the Circle, then the Circle Tower, back to Redcliffe, then picked up Shale, off to Haven to get the ashes, then back to Redcliffe to finally finish that section, then to the Brecillian Forest, then did some dipping in Denerim, and I got to Orzammar before putting the game down. I was one major city away from the endgame of the base game, so that sucks.

Since several Bioware titles have a pretty big romance component, this was the first attempt at completely ignoring or otherwise trying to sidestep all that. Why not, right? I know that's a big draw to see your character get with whoever strikes your fancy, but I thought it'd be a fun experiment to just go stag or whatever the lady-equivalent term is. Or if that's even the right term for dudes. Anyway. It wasn't necessarily difficult, just I had to be careful with a few responses. It didn't help that one of the responses when talking to Alistair in the camp or in the field early on was "has anyone ever told you how handsome you are?" which was an easy giveaway for starting romance. If I do get around to the other Bioware titles (provided they don't try to destroy my hardware), I'll try this on them too, just to see how me doing something 'unexpected' goes.

As for mods, I grabbed several from this list[docs.google.com], though not all. I grabbed almost all of the fix mods, the 4GB patch, FtG UI and quickbar (but didn't use the latter), More Detailed Tooltips so I could tell what ♥♥♥♥ actually did, Madd Gift Guide for easy gifting, DLC Item Integration to keep from getting powerful gear from the onset, and Theta HD and Dragon Age Redesigned to pretty things up. Can't help but wonder if those helped the instability of the game, but whatever now. I had 31 total mods or downloads, but still didn't use all of them like Dragon Age Mod Manager. One mod gave me the ability to loot all enemies after battle, greatly speeding up my exploration, though it naturally stopped working when I hit the carry limit.

I didn't grab Skip the Fade. I decided to go through it once just to see if it was really as bad as everyone says. I can understand the dislike, but eh. I'd skip it for subsequent runs, though...if there ever are any.

Controls

I didn't use a controller this time. There are two ways to control your characters--you either use the keyboard keys to move them around, or you can right-click on the ground and they'll move there on their own. Clicking generally does better than manually moving since you can queue multiple people to move at the same time this way, but sometimes I couldn't click on the ground and never figured out why. WASD controls movement by default, I forget the default button to highlight objects/interactive things but I put it in Tab/Mouse 3 and used it constantly. You pause the action with Spacebar. You can hold down right mouse to pan the camera or zoom with mouse wheel. Your characters get their own 50-slot quickbar for all of their talents/spells/items, but the bottom-most bar's first 10 slots get assigned 1-0 on the number row for quicker use. When dialog prompts come up, they're also numbered so you can hit a key on the number row to communicate that way.

When it comes to equipping things, holding right-click on an item opens up a small wheel where you can Inspect an item, Equip it, Destroy it, or Sell it if you're at a vendor. Mousing over an item will bring up a comparison popup if you're looking at something that goes in a slot that already has something, but it took me a while to realize you can change whose gear you're comparing near the bottom of the screen. Kind of hard to shop for Alistair when Kallian keeps hogging the dressing room, you know?

Gameplay Modes

Classes, huh?

Warriors usually hit things with melee weapons, though nothing stops them (or anyone) from picking up a bow as long as they have the stats. Warriors get full access to all of the weapon talents, from dual-wielding, sword-and-board, two-handed weapons, or bows. They get a skill point every three levels, so you'll likely invest most of their available points into the Weapons Training skill to give them a better selection of combat abilities. Any race is able to pick the Warrior as their class.

For some sample Specializations, Berserkers get a sustained ability to increase their damage at the cost of stamina generation and get two passive abilities that enhance this mode. Their final skill puts all of their stamina into one blow that deals extra damage proportional to the amount spent. Champions get a move that lowers nearby enemy hit rates, a sustained buff to ally evasion, a passive buff to the prior buff that also makes said sustained buff increase attack rates, and a passive buff to their first move to make it now try to knock enemies down. In Awakening, Spirit Warriors get a mode that raises their evasion, a passive buff to this mode that protects them from hostile spells, an active ability that deals spirit-type damage to nearby enemies and especially hurts demons, and another passive to their mode that increases movement speed and their damage output. The Guardian can place a barrier on allies that absorbs a portion of inflicted damage for a duration, can buff the entire party with a decaying bonus to armor, a passive that bolsters the prior two abilities, and a sustained mode that tries to keep enemies from running away from the Guardian.

Rogues are designed around being sneaky, not fighting directly on the frontlines, but slipping behind the enemy to attack their weak backsides or to pick off foes from afar. They only get access to dual-wielding and bow talents, but they get access to the ability to sneak past foes and pickpocket from NPCs. Rogues get more skill points compared to Warriors or Mages with a point every two levels, letting them invest more heavily into skills like Stealing or Stealth or Trap-Making. Like Warriors, anyone can be a Rogue.

In terms of sample Specializations, Assassins can mark a target to take extra damage for a duration, deal extra backstab damage, can cause bleeding on backstabs, and regenerate stamina when killing with a backstab. Duelists get a mode that increases their hit rates, an ability that debuffs an enemy's movement speed and evasion, a passive bonus to defense, and a buff that makes every one of their attacks a critical hit. In Awakening, Shadows get a mode that reduces their threat gain when they're hit, a conjurable decoy, a bonus to backstab damage in their special mode, and an area of effect confusion cloud. The Legionnaire Scout gets a bonus to Strength and Constitution, an ability to completely negate damage and knockdowns, a sustained mode that uses their stamina as an extra HP bar, and a passive buff to their invulnerability power that immunizes them from spells too.

Mages do spells. These cover a wide range of effects, from single-target damage to area of effect damage to buffs, debuffs, healing, and so on. Instead of talents, Mages get spell points every level, and skill points every three like Warriors. Because of how the setting is constructed, picking Mage as your class also sets it as your Origin, and Dwarves can't be mages, either.

Mage Specialization samples? Arcane Warriors get a mode that imposes a fatigue penalty but boosts their hit rate and has their Spellpower score determine damage instead of Strength as well as a passive benefit of their Magic stat being used in place of Strength for equipment requirements, a buff to this mode that further increases damage, hit rate, and evasion, another mode that goes hard on defense but drains mana constantly, and another buff to their first mode that gives more evasion and mana regeneration. Blood Mages use illegal magic to give themselves a mode that drains HP instead of MP to cast spells, steal health from an ally to heal themselves, stops and damages nearby blooded creatures, and the ability to mind control one blooded enemy for a while. In Awakening, the Battlemage gets a sustained ability that drains health from nearby enemies, a freezing AoE attack, a passive ability to turn damage taken into mana, and another mode that randomly deals elemental damage to nearby enemies. The Keeper gets a mode that immobilizes the caster but causes constant nature damage to nearby enemies while slowing them, an ability to damage foes in the area of effect of their damage aura, a passive buff that heals whenever they deal damage with Keeper spells, and another area of effect damage spell.

And unrelated to any class, your Grey Warden gets exclusive access to the Coercion skill, allowing you as party leader to potentially get more information/results/rewards out of people either through Persuade using Cunning or Intimidate using Strength.

Microtransactions/Add-On Content

The Ultimate Edition is basically your standard Game of the Year package of all the DLCs, though there are still some assorted items that you used to be only able to get by connecting the game to your Bioware Social whatever account, but that's gone now, replaced with a Dragon Age Keep thing? Never used it, so I dunno. Anyway. These are campaign-styled add-ons.

Awakening: This is the expansion to Origins, taking place sometime after you inevitably save Ferelden from the Darkspawn. You can either import your Warden from Origins depending on story options taken or start as a new Warden from Orlais. Awakening has alternate methods to unlock the Origins Specializations plus two more available in Awakening.

The Golems of Amgarrak: Someone in Orzammar went looking for the secrets to making golems and hasn't returned, so it's up to you to go save somebody's ass yet again.

Witch Hunt: The final story for Dragon Age: Origins that explores what happened to Morrigan after the events of the base game.

The Darkspawn Chronicles: A what-if type of story where your Warden dies early in the Origins plot. Dang. Not only that, this time you (the player) control the Darkspawn at the Battle of Denerim! Topple Ferelden for good at the Archdemon's behest!

Leliana's Song: An origin story for Leliana, basically explaining her past and why things are how they are with her personal quest.

A Tale of Orzammar: This doesn't actually come with the game, but it's apparently available on the Dragon Age Wiki. It's related to the Dwarf Noble Origin, however.

And these are things you can either do within the Origins campaign or are just smaller add-ons in general:

Warden's Keep: A fort formerly held by the Grey Wardens of Ferelden surely must hold some kind of secrets or at least gear, right? You're gonna have to clear out the hellspawn infesting it first. Also includes two blood-related talents/spells (unrelated to Blood Magic) that the Warden can receive for free. Clearing this also generates a chest you can place items into for storage.

Return to Ostagar: After the crushing defeat, what remains left of the battle site? Has some nice gear to find plus a second chance at getting Dog.

The Stone Prisoner: You can recruit a golem with its own abilities.

Feastday Gifts and Pranks: Give your allies items that can grant a whopping 50 affection points...or give them things that take off just as many. Many of the items here are functional, even the pranks.

There's also a good collection of promotional gear that I won't cover.

Difficulty

There are four difficulty options: Casual, Normal, Hard, and Nightmare. Each step up from Casual makes your team less effective/enemy stronger and gives the enemy more AI options. Every difficulty above Casual also allows allied mages and bombs to hit your team, "friendly fire". So if your mage is gonna blast the enemies surrounding Alistair, he'll eat some damage too on everything but Casual. Amusingly enough, the enemies aren't exempt from that! Nothing like seeing a mage throw a fireball at us and melt his friends...

I honestly had a good deal of trouble with the game even on Normal at times, mostly at the start. Probably should not have done Return to Ostagar so early, but it was smooth sailing once I got a healer at the Circle Tower...which I should've done first, yeah. I only had trouble with a couple of other fights--the one in Denerim I mentioned above, and trying to unlock the Reaver specialization with Wynne and Leliana in my party. Couldn't win that fight for ♥♥♥♥. A couple of fights where everyone wiped, I eventually won either through trying another tactic, or just changing where we were fighting. Not having an offensive mage might've been making things harder on me, but I needed to keep Wynne as much mana as possible to keep us all alive. A little bit of offense for a lot more longevity. You could probably go without a healer as long as you had a good enough supply of health poultices, either bought or made. An animation still needs to play before they're used so someone on the brink might tip over it even if the action is queued.

I think a lot of the difficulty with the game is just the number of enemies that are thrown at you. You are only ever four (plus one for each Ranger in the group), and I'd swear I'd be fighting at least twelve to fifteen people at once at times. All relatively weak people, but you could still get cut down by repeated blows. I had trouble with the Denerim fight because the enemy mages used pretty strong AoE magic, and I didn't have much room to fight. And there were three of them, so that made things really complicated. I guess you can say that a lot of it is down to how you manage things. I remember both KOTORs being pretty easy, and you didn't really need to do anything like draw aggro or do much of anything to protect a backline that honestly didn't exist. But then you could field a team of all or nearly all Jedi, so you had plenty of spell coverage where most enemies couldn't compete. That's sure not the case here in Dragon Age: Origins.

I fielded a team of two Rogues, a Warrior, and a Mage. Two Warriors might've been better, and Wynne becoming an Arcane Warrior kind of proved that it's at least possible. So another part of the difficulty is just the team composition you run with. Tactics play a big factor too. Wynne seemed to perform a lot better when I had her stop casting Rejuvenation on everyone, saving more mana for healing, saving more lyrium potions for another rainy day. I didn't have much trouble with Tactics as I had some familiarity with the system in other games, but there are presets you can use if you're not confident in your programming ability.

Characters who die in battle stay down for the duration of it, popping back to their feet once everything's over. They gain an Injury, a stat debuff that lasts until a Lesser Injury Kit or Injury Kit is used, or if you return to camp. Reviving someone mid-combat with magic does the same, just they're actually able to participate in battle again. I don't know how many Injuries you can accumulate at once, but at least regular Injury Kits remove three at a time. It didn't seem possible for anyone to actually die unless it was a scripted event.

You can see enemy skills used as the name of the attack appears over their heads, so quick thinking can potentially save you a lot of trouble. Some mage spells have a cast bar that fills up, giving you a slight window to interrupt them.

In the Tactics screen, some presets mention that the character will automatically flee dangerous area of effect spells, but this never happened in my experience. Maybe it only works when they're not fighting?

Saving

The game is kinda weird with this. There are account-styled saves for each character, so my City Elf saves would probably be different from another one I make. You have I think two autosaves that happen at key points, you can have a quicksave, and I didn't try beyond four for manual saves. I made heavy use of quicksaves and even quickloads.

The weird part comes into play with the hidden 'meta save'. It keeps track of the things you do, and completing some of the campaigny DLCs grants you rewards that apply to all saves, even if other characters never even started them or so on. And you can exploit this when it comes to some of the Specializations. Let's say you see a shiny Book of Templar Learning in a shop. You save, you sell all of your stuff just to afford it, and then you buy it and read it. Get Equipped With: Templar Specialization. Now load your game. You have your stuff back. The book is still for sale. You still have Templar Specialization. Whoa, what?! But even outside of exploiting, it's kinda cool because you start with zero Specializations unlocked. If you're really thorough and unlock everything and do all of the DLC, new characters and other ones you've developed will get those bonuses too.

Graphics

It's not really fair to comment on the graphics given I used a few mods to fix or pretty them up. At least I can say those looked fine! Everyone has somewhat realistic proportional models, and the races have some attributes that make it clear what they are--dwarves were short, stocky, and had large noses, while elves were pretty thin, had pointed and somewhat long ears (though Kallian had hers hidden by her hair). I noticed Kallian was a bit shorter than Leliana, so I dunno if the elf ran short or the human tall.

Areas are of course presented in 3D, and you can sometimes take advantage of height variations in the terrain, like having your archer pelt everything in range with arrows while the rest of your team fights below. There was a good variety of locations, from the Korcari Woods and Brecilian Forest dense woodlands to the fields of Lothering, to the castle in Redcliffe or castle town of Denerim. Or the ruins in the Brecilian Forest, the mountain town of Haven and the snowy ruins it hides.

Conversations often focus on the other person, zooming in while they talk and pulling back when you're about to receive a prompt for responding. Banter between party members just keeps the camera where it is, but subtitles come up over their heads, same with NPCs in towns.

The first thing I noticed with the graphics is that everyone's hands look weird, like they're just slightly too long in terms of fingers, or they're really thin. The other was the texture for lips warping as whoever talked. It probably is how it works in other games, but being so zoomed in on faces makes it really obvious. But then this is a game from 2009, I know.

On the UI side, your characters' heads are shown on the upper left in a vertical column. A half-circle of red represents their health, while the other half is filled yellow for non-mages to show stamina and blue for mages for mana. Characters downed in combat have a skull icon instead of their face in their circle. People ready to level up have a hollow plus sign off the upper-left part of their circle. You don't see buffs or debuffs or Injuries or so on anywhere near their icon, but they show up above their quickslots when you select them.

There's a minimap in the upper-right of the screen. If you have anyone with the Survival skill learned and valid enemies nearby, they'll show up as red dots or red arrows if they're off the radar, otherwise you'll see nothing and not be sure if the way is clear ahead (likely not). You can hit M and bring up a big map of the area with places you've been cleared and places you haven't covered with a fog of war. There are sometimes icons in these areas, like an icon for a shop when you're in a town, or an icon for a quest-relevant whatever as a downward arrow.

Interactives don't show up by default in the UI. You have to hold down the button to get everything from books to chests and so on to show up. Helps to keep things decluttered, but how much ♥♥♥♥ do you miss by not having it held down all the time?

Enemy names take a small variety of colors. The weakest have white names. The ones a step above them are yellow. The ones above those are then orange with the toughest having red. This not only helps to identify the most critical threats, but some talents work differently depending on if an enemy is one of those colors, from outright killing the fodder to at least getting crits or guaranteed hits against elites, to just being a regular ol' attack on bosses.

The world map is a small array of icons spread over a map. You click on one to travel from your current location to the next, displayed as a trail of dark blood drips that cover the route between the two points. Traveling to and from your base camp is thankfully instantaneous, but the animation does kind of get old after a while. I know it's there to hide the game loading assets and no doubt the drips would've been super fast on an SSD, but I didn't put it there.

It's kind of funny how absolutely blood-spattered your frontliners get and how nobody comments on it. It never seems to go beyond just spatter so you're not going to see someone with big smears on their armor or the like.

I doubt the game does this by default, but your headgear appears when you're exploring and when in combat, but it disappears when you're in conversation. That's a pretty cool thing even if it's a little immersion-breaking. Most cutscenes seemed to be in-engine so your appearance/gear would show up too. Just I don't think the finale of the Ostagar section at the start of the game counts for that.

Audio

I don't really have any comments about the music, other than the base camp song is like 37 seconds long and given how long you're there (or at least how long I was there), you'll notice how short it is quickly. Ultimate Edition came with the game's soundtrack too, but I haven't given it a proper listen. None of the songs really 'got in the way' so to speak, other than the camp song above. I think the game switches music when you enter combat.

I'm pretty sure damn near every line in the game is voiced apart from your Grey Warden's responses. I mean, the Codex and item descriptions aren't too, but every bit of conversation with people or banter between party members is voiced. None of the voices bothered me either, though it sucks that the Grey Warden doesn't talk more--yes, they actually do have voice responses like being told to open a chest or move somewhere, but not being able to speak during conversations just seems like a massively missed opportunity. And yeah, I know it's how both KOTOR games and no doubt other Bioware titles do it. Mass Effect?

Stability

I'm not sure if I'm more annoyed that it gave me so much trouble or if it was just inconsistent at it. Like...Brecilian Forest, talking to the Keeper dude. The cutscene where he brings me to his wounded people got me a freeze. Restart, I'm talking with someone and the computer dies and gives me NO SIGNAL on screen. Okay. I quickly do stuff there, quicksaving like crazy, and I get into the forest proper and eventually the ruins, further eventually coming face-to-face with the source of the werewolf problem and finishing up that leg of the game. Not a single crash, freeze, or even bit of lag. What the ♥♥♥♥? Then another freeze or two in the town, one more in camp, then nothing going through the Denerim sidestreets (other than one freeze that locked the game up but not my computer this time) nor the Frostback Mountains...and then it starts happening in Orzammar. And then I get a blue screen after my computer starts back up, forcing me to throw in the towel.

I don't know if I can put more blame on the mods I used or the game itself. Friends told me it was an unoptimized game, and one friend gave me several things to try to keep it afloat--some worked, some didn't. I ended up playing in windowed mode instead of fullscreen, turned off V-Sync and that helped...until I came back the next day, and it wasn't like I did anything. I think the last crash that gave me the blue screen later was when I was trying to turn the graphics quality down. Made the mistake of alt-tabbing to chat with friends and get help when the damn thing gave me NO SIGNAL again.

The suck part is that I actually had absolutely zero problems with my last tower for the entire game up until I got near the end of the Haven section of the game. The most ironic thing is that when I got to Kolgrim (who can give you Reaver Specialization), the game wigged out hard--like, half of my screen wrapped around to the other side, and then it'd be okay, then it'd happen and switch sides and so on. I agreed to dump the dragon blood in the sacred urn, knowing I could reload and tell him to piss off, but I managed to get one hard save before things went south hard, and I think that was a blue screen. Started back up and...lines all over my screen, and then black screen only a couple of seconds after the Windows login sound. Dead graphics card. Though weirdly enough, I could use that card with generic drivers, just I'd have no sound through my TV and be forced to use a lower resolution, just as soon as I installed even old drivers, bam, dead on the next restart.

So I guess my old tower really didn't want me to do evil. Hah.

Replay Value

There's a lot of game here provided you get the Ultimate Edition. Even the littler add-ons like Return to Ostagar or Warden's Keep add about an hour, to say nothing of the expansion campaign Awakening. Hell, even the base game has a lot of content to it. I was...uh, probably ten or so hours away from the end, so that'd be roughly 50 for one playthrough, and I didn't even do everything then. You have a bunch of origin stories to do, plenty of team compositions to try, and you have full control over how your allies develop so there's a lot of customizing too.

I was planning a second run. Human male Mage, Morrigan, Shale, Dog. And for added hilarity, perhaps make both mages Arcane Warriors for ridiculous melee dominance.

What Worked For Me

I'm admittedly a sucker for real time with pause systems. It's almost the best of both worlds between full action RPG and turn-based affairs, so you get the speed of the action without the usually slow speed of turn-based, and you don't usually have to dive into menus to get the things you want to do. And it helps that most of the new talents and spells you get automatically get set to somewhere on your character's quickbar, so all you need to do is assign items manually. The option to automatically pause combat when it starts is a big help too as it lessens the impact of you getting caught flatfooted, and the game seems really generous on when it triggers this. Like, it's not always when enemies see you and are rushing to disembowel you, and I've had it trigger when enemies were well and far away and unaware. Just then because I was considered in combat, I couldn't use Stealth as I hadn't gotten up to the point to be able to use it in combat.

And I'm still a sucker for customizing. I admittedly didn't develop my team amazingly well. Kallian should've taken Trap Making instead of Alistair, though I never did check to see if the skill limited who could place traps instead of build them. There was a good bit of overlap with Leliana and Kallian's skills, and even with a respec mod, I didn't fix up anyone. I didn't really feel the need to. I doubt anyone else had the exact same everything I did, and everything I did still worked relatively well minus a few speedbumps.

I did kind of like being able to create some items through the use of skills and through things you buy from merchants. Some merchants carry an infinite supply of things so as long as you were willing to travel, you could stay stocked up on poultices and potions and bombs and so on. There probably is a finite amount of money in the world as there are only so many enemies that don't respawn and items to loot and sell, but I had a considerable amount of coin even at the point where I stopped and plenty of stuff to keep my team going too.

What I Didn't Like

Obviously, I didn't like this game being the death of my longtime gaming tower. I know it wasn't entirely to blame, but given the problems the second machine had, I have my suspicions. That it did so sporadically still bothers me. I could understand if it died at a certain dialog or whatever since that'd open the door for workarounds or fixes, but a laundry list of bandages just doesn't work.

The game felt slow, probably due to the frequent pauses in combat. I'd check the clock, do some stuff, and come back and a considerable amount of time passed, but it didn't feel like I really did all that much. Sort of like expecting to get X many things done in Y amount of time and falling well short of that goal. It wasn't like I spent a huge amount of time idle, either!

This one's on me, but Redcliffe. Don't do that first, even if Alistair insists that we need Arl Eamon's help from the onset. Go there, help the villagers fight off the invasion, get into the castle and meet the mother and her addled son. Decide not to kill anyone, necessitating a detour. Do the Circle. Have another detour through the long Fade section. Finish the Circle. Come back and deal with the son. Great, but the arl's still not awake. Go to Denerim, go get clues about the sacred ash, go all the way back past Redcliffe to Haven, deal with the people there, go through the long dungeon full of cultists and then meet their leader who makes you an offer, then go through a (thankfully short) dungeon to get to the ash and then kill the leader and his dragon, and then we finally return to Redcliffe where the arl wakes up and everything's better. Jesus! I know I approached it wrong ("I need to get this area checked off ASAP!"), but I don't remember either of the KOTORs having such a ridiculous amount of steps/trips away to solving one planet. Been a little too long, but damn.

Verdict - 4/5

I still want to finish it. I hate being relatively close to the end and having to cut things short not due to disinterest or difficulty, but just because I don't want to destroy something with my stubbornness. I still want to do a second run with someone else, too! Despite the stability issues, I did enjoy my time with the game. Sneaking up on enemies and stabbing people in the back never got old, even if the personal tactics I used never really went beyond "get everyone to attack Alistair while everyone else whittles the enemy down". There's really a lot here to do and even more to do on another run just to see what's different because you have a different origin story. And considering the things you in this life echoes for the eternity of Dragon Age II and Inquisition, that's a lot to see for the 'career of one character' though your hero is someone else in each entry.

I don't know about recommending the game despite my enjoyment. No game is worth a busted machine no matter how much you like it.