Dragon Age Origins - Still Amazing

[Mister K]

I'll just say that I'd rather play through DA: O than the first Mass Effect. Or... any of the Mass Effects, really

Don't remind me about damn Mass Effect 1.

"The hell do you mean I've missed?! I am playing a veteran soldier of the future and you want me to believe tht s/he can't hit a mook with a gun on a 1 meter distance because I don't have enough POINTS in gun skill?! Go eat a poisonous plant, game."

 

[Silverbeard]

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?

I really have to disagree. Origins felt like a paint-by-numbers generic fantasy game. What made it special is that it had been such a long time since we all had a generic fantasy game that the genre had gone stale. The formulaic approach that Origins brought back was something gamers had been clamoring for. When it came out, we all got to experience a bit of our childhoods again. And it was fun!
But I feel the same way about Origins as I do about Baldur's Gate. Starting up a new campaign just feel like a chore. It was wonderful to experience the first time (Dwarven culture in particular felt hugely interesting to me) but the second or third time? A seemingly endless slog through boring side quests, repetitive combat, the same dialogue trees with companions... not really a keeper, that one.

"The hell do you mean I've missed?! I am playing a veteran soldier of the future and you want me to believe tht s/he can't hit a mook with a gun on a 1 meter distance because I don't have enough POINTS in gun skill?! Go eat a poisonous plant, game."

Doubly funny if you pick the 'Hero of the Blitz' background choice. I'm just trying to imagine how fucking incompetent the batarians had to be to let my lv 1 Shepard pop them all with his frighteningly jittery sniper rifle. They must have been marching in pike squares wielding shovels or something.

 

[Sharia]

"The hell do you mean I've missed?! I am playing a veteran soldier of the future and you want me to believe tht s/he can't hit a mook with a gun on a 1 meter distance because I don't have enough POINTS in gun skill?! Go eat a poisonous plant, game."

That's how it should be...

 

[Knight Captain Kerr]

I haven't played it since shortly before Inquisition came out but yeah, I really love the game. And while I haven't played Jade Empire, I'd say Dragon Age: Origins is my favourite Bioware game. I doubt I'll end up liking Jade Empire more whenever I do play it.

 

[Mister K]

"The hell do you mean I've missed?! I am playing a veteran soldier of the future and you want me to believe tht s/he can't hit a mook with a gun on a 1 meter distance because I don't have enough POINTS in gun skill?! Go eat a poisonous plant, game."

That's how it should be...

A person, whose backstory states that they are hardened veteran of war, being unable to properly use the simplest of firearms even on small distance is far, FAR from "how it should be". If Shepard was a rookie, a fresh meat, I would've kind of accepted that. But not from a person with, supposedly, great amount of actual experience as a representative of a military forces.

I don't like when RPG's are "dumbed down", but there are certain things that make more sense a bit streamlined.

 

[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

I definitely still enjoy DA:O. The only real issue I have with it is, as one person said above, that strategy and luck play almost equal parts in how a battle will turn out. I've had plenty of times where I died not necessarily because my strategy was bad, but because I simply happened to miss several times in a row with a dagger, and then proceeded to have the computer mage crit with their lightning attack and kill me in one hit.

Or the fucking spiders with their "pin you down and maul you to death if you fail your save" attack.

Other than that, great game. Then again, I've enjoyed every Bioware game I've fully played (I've played all of them to some extent, but I don't think I've really gotten a feel for Dragon Age: Inquisition yet. Can't tell if it's bloated, or if I just suck at figuring out how to continue the story).

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Yeah it's still great fun. Challenging too. Too bad Bioware decided to dumb down isometric view in later titles. Isometric view and a harder difficulty is where it's at.

 

[Nemmerle]

The biggest problem with DAO, to me - and I enjoyed the hell out of it - was the party dialogue system. Like, I didn't explore many of the character's backgrounds purely because of how that worked. The best party system Bioware have done to date has, IMO, been KOTOR1, where it was fairly naturally inserted into the flow of events.

There's a lot of missing content there if you don't put that work in, and it is work - not particularly enjoyable work - to run around the camp after advancing the main quest a few steps and make a note to talk to these guys. It's like when you've met someone at a meeting and you put a note with your diary after having coffee with them 'Repeat every 3 months, call Morrigan and see if her quest has advanced yet.'

Other than that, it's a fairly meat and potatoes game, executed with a fairly high degree of competence. Some of the combat is laughably imbalanced. -cough- Cone of cold and walking bomb.... -cough- Some of the story events hang loose around the edges[footnote], First thing when you get out of Ostagar, IMO, would be to go introduce Loghain to Mr Stabby. Someone fucks you over, they don't get to walk away.[/footnote].

The dearth of large-world Isometric RPGs executed with reasonable competence at the time rendered it perhaps more enjoyable than its technical merits strictly allowed, I won't argue about that. It's not particularly inventive. Even today though, there aren't that many of them that aren't worse than this. It has the advantage of being more or less the only game in town if you enjoy this sort of thing - bar perhaps Shadowrun and things like that.

 

[Wrex Brogan]

...I preferred Dragon Age 2 over Origins.

DA:O had some enjoyable character interactions (Sten is my man, and Loghain was good fun) and interesting story lines, but by and large the combat was... fairly boring and horrendously balanced, since skills and specializations ranged from 'completely useless' or 'boring and generic' to 'so disgustingly powerful you'll kill the Archdemon after using it once'.

Seriously. My entire strategy on the highest difficulty was 'Cast Storm of Ages and Virulent Walking Bomb and see how many enemies make it to my 3 Arcane Warriors (and Sten, because he's my bro)'. Throw in the armour that increased dodge chance and you'd have a DPS Tank Healer that took greatly reduced magic damage and only had a 5% chance to be hit by melee attacks. Fucking mental.

DA:II to me, at least, did more interesting things with the setting (not going to rail on the setting of DA:O, but it felt like the good stories were despite the setting, not because of the setting), mixed up the gameplay a little so the answer wasn't always '3 Mages and Sten' and had an overarching story that wasn't just 'Hero saves world because they were told to'.

Shame about the copy-paste maps, but it was made in like... a year. Can't fault a developer for cutting corners in that time period.

 

[Sharia]

"The hell do you mean I've missed?! I am playing a veteran soldier of the future and you want me to believe tht s/he can't hit a mook with a gun on a 1 meter distance because I don't have enough POINTS in gun skill?! Go eat a poisonous plant, game."

That's how it should be...

A person, whose backstory states that they are hardened veteran of war, being unable to properly use the simplest of firearms even on small distance is far, FAR from "how it should be". If Shepard was a rookie, a fresh meat, I would've kind of accepted that. But not from a person with, supposedly, great amount of actual experience as a representative of a military forces.

Considering we are talking about games and that playing into its genre and setting up its own rules should always take precedent over being contextually realistic, then none of that is relevant.

For how many years games have been doing it, I honestly can't believe anyone can still complain about this kind of narrative disconnect.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

The thing I remember most fondly about Dragon Age: Origins is the story. Out of the three main games, I think it had the best story. Yes, each world/zone had it's own little adventure, but each one of those adventures were part of the bigger story. It all connected together. You want to get the mages? Okay, but first you have to deal with the crazy guy that has taken control.
Even Loghan's betrayal and dealing with him felt like a natural part of the story. Everything was just one masterful piece, moving from one stroke to the next.
Dragon Age 2 kind of lost that, and then Inquisition just...I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the writers of Inquisition got shuffled halfway through the story or something, because that thing is all over the place, and not in a good way. Trespasser showed what that game should have been.

 

[Something Amyss]

DAO is the game that beat me. Not because it was too hard, but because it was like the end of a relationship. Where every fight has been had and there's nothing more to say. I'd spent enough of my life looking into the dead, soulless eyes of bland and forgettable stock fantasy characters in bland and forgettable stock fantasy stories in bland and stock fantasy worlds. DAO took everything and made it so perfunctory, so tedious, that I just gave up. I couldn't hate it like ME2, but I couldn't stand to lie beside it in bed anymore either.

 

[-Dragmire-]

I love DA:O quite a bit, but for specific reasons.

I didn't care about the main plot except the political portion.

I didn't care that there were dwarves in the game, it's their society that was very interesting. Elves less so though.

It's the characters, both playable and npc, that were the main draw. They are what drew me in and made me care about what happened in the world.

I don't remember the vanilla combat, I think I modded that aspect of the game heavily.

The worst part of the game for me wasn't the Fade section, it's that the Fade was such a mishandled idea. A dream world where normal rules don't apply. Why they chose a sepia tone fortress/library/mountainous region is beyond me. It's like nobody in that world ever dreams of locations full of life or color.

 

[LetalisK]

I found DA:O to be the fantasy version of Mass Effect 1: a kernal of awesome dipped in so much boring padding.

But that's just my opinion. More power to anyone who enjoys it more.

 

[Darth Rosenberg]

Not played it for maybe two years? I recall playing through it and DAII before DA:I came out.

And yeah, I'd agree that it still holds up, especially if - and this might sound obvious... - you're a fan of the world, not just the separate story or gameplay. When DA:O first came out it did look horribly and hideously generic, also rather ugly, graphically. But the more I got to know the lore, the more I read and saw, the more grounded, humane, nuanced, and engaging it all started to seem.

DAII's my clear favourite in terms of story and narrative focus, but even the Ubisoft-infected SP MMO DA:I continued to build the world that DA:O began, and I'm still intrigued by the characters BioWare craft and turn loose in that universe. Sten, Tallis, and Iron Bull all give unique insights into the Qun, and Morrigan, Anders and Solas are all very distinct mages.

...I digress. So yeah, I personally feel Origins still holds up because it's where Thedas was introduced, its characters haven't lost their charm, and its combat is still the best in the series and arguably the best BioWare have designed since KotOR (all it needed were fancier/zippier animations, but in DA:I they also eviscerated all tactics/Tactics. which didn't help, to put it mildly).

Plus, in terms of story I still admire how they handled Loghain and the Blight; neither it or DAII just have rote Big Bad's to blandly trudge after, and if saved Loghain proves a fascinating and superbly written character - you get insights into him as a boy, as a father, a hero, and as an increasingly jaded and stubborn xenophobe. And playing DA:I kinda places his particular enmity against Orlesian culture in greater context, making more sense of his obsession with securing political and territorial independence for Ferelden against an old and, for him, very bitter enemy.

Also, provided the Warden survives, I just love the last scene of chit-chats in the Landsmeet hall - it's one of my all time favourite, er, game end sequences/scenes. It was like the end of a great book you never wanted to arrive, bidding farewell to characters you'd come to know and like over weeks.

...and it is work - not particularly enjoyable work - to run around the camp after advancing the main quest a few steps and make a note to talk to these guys.

As ever, that's subjective, because to me - as in most BioWare RPG's (e.g. ME's Normandy or DA:I's Skyhold. didn't Jade Empire also have a campsite?) - it felt like a reward. Maybe if someone's rather OCD and they keep popping back just to check for any minute differences in responses, sure, it could get trying.

But to me it just felt part of the natural flow of traveling and deciding what to do next. I really liked the setting, too (shame it never changed to suit each location), and the music, so to me it was also an enjoyable, [mostly] warm'n'fuzzy ambience in between the walking and fighting.

 

[OpticalJunction]

I can't play it after DA2, the combat feels very dated. Cool characters though, some of the best in any RPG

 

[Mister K]

"The hell do you mean I've missed?! I am playing a veteran soldier of the future and you want me to believe tht s/he can't hit a mook with a gun on a 1 meter distance because I don't have enough POINTS in gun skill?! Go eat a poisonous plant, game."

That's how it should be...

A person, whose backstory states that they are hardened veteran of war, being unable to properly use the simplest of firearms even on small distance is far, FAR from "how it should be". If Shepard was a rookie, a fresh meat, I would've kind of accepted that. But not from a person with, supposedly, great amount of actual experience as a representative of a military forces.

Considering we are talking about games and that playing into its genre and setting up its own rules should always take precedent over being contextually realistic, then none of that is relevant.

For how many years games have been doing it, I honestly can't believe anyone can still complain about this kind of narrative disconnect.

But here is a thing. In other games there ARE reasons for character to not be able to not possess a specific ability or to possess it. For example, in any game where PC starts as a blank slate (Baldurs Gate, Shadowrun, Fallout) you can excuse mage for not being able to swing a sword as good as warrior would, because reading books with spells and having a combat training are 2 different things. Or, if it's something like Fallout, you are basically creating a character who knows this and that and it is justifiable by PCs only trait, not being made by you, being their mission. Their talents, upbringing, etc. are on the chart and in your head.

With ME, it is hard to believe that a person, who is not able to use basic firearms, is not stuck somewhere in the office, doing white/blue collar labour, because of how speciffic Bioware were about Shepards backstory: veteran of war, military badass, etc.

It just does not click.

 

[Mister K]

The biggest problem with DAO, to me - and I enjoyed the hell out of it - was the party dialogue system. Like, I didn't explore many of the character's backgrounds purely because of how that worked. The best party system Bioware have done to date has, IMO, been KOTOR1, where it was fairly naturally inserted into the flow of events.

There's a lot of missing content there if you don't put that work in, and it is work - not particularly enjoyable work - to run around the camp after advancing the main quest a few steps and make a note to talk to these guys. It's like when you've met someone at a meeting and you put a note with your diary after having coffee with them 'Repeat every 3 months, call Morrigan and see if her quest has advanced yet.'

Other than that, it's a fairly meat and potatoes game, executed with a fairly high degree of competence. Some of the combat is laughably imbalanced. -cough- Cone of cold and walking bomb.... -cough- Some of the story events hang loose around the edges[footnote], First thing when you get out of Ostagar, IMO, would be to go introduce Loghain to Mr Stabby. Someone fucks you over, they don't get to walk away.[/footnote].

The dearth of large-world Isometric RPGs executed with reasonable competence at the time rendered it perhaps more enjoyable than its technical merits strictly allowed, I won't argue about that. It's not particularly inventive. Even today though, there aren't that many of them that aren't worse than this. It has the advantage of being more or less the only game in town if you enjoy this sort of thing - bar perhaps Shadowrun and things like that.

Both DA:O and DA II suffer from forcing you to pick specific characters and pick specific answers to be on friendly terms with them. I mean, I kind of understand what they were aiming for, but it so tedious.

...I preferred Dragon Age 2 over Origins.

DA:O had some enjoyable character interactions (Sten is my man, and Loghain was good fun) and interesting story lines, but by and large the combat was... fairly boring and horrendously balanced, since skills and specializations ranged from 'completely useless' or 'boring and generic' to 'so disgustingly powerful you'll kill the Archdemon after using it once'.

Seriously. My entire strategy on the highest difficulty was 'Cast Storm of Ages and Virulent Walking Bomb and see how many enemies make it to my 3 Arcane Warriors (and Sten, because he's my bro)'. Throw in the armour that increased dodge chance and you'd have a DPS Tank Healer that took greatly reduced magic damage and only had a 5% chance to be hit by melee attacks. Fucking mental.

DA:II to me, at least, did more interesting things with the setting (not going to rail on the setting of DA:O, but it felt like the good stories were despite the setting, not because of the setting), mixed up the gameplay a little so the answer wasn't always '3 Mages and Sten' and had an overarching story that wasn't just 'Hero saves world because they were told to'.

Shame about the copy-paste maps, but it was made in like... a year. Can't fault a developer for cutting corners in that time period.

Goddamn it, EA. If only you let Bioware to work on this game a bit longer and didn't force them to make it basically a prequel to DA:I. If only.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

"The hell do you mean I've missed?! I am playing a veteran soldier of the future and you want me to believe tht s/he can't hit a mook with a gun on a 1 meter distance because I don't have enough POINTS in gun skill?! Go eat a poisonous plant, game."

That's how it should be...

A person, whose backstory states that they are hardened veteran of war, being unable to properly use the simplest of firearms even on small distance is far, FAR from "how it should be". If Shepard was a rookie, a fresh meat, I would've kind of accepted that. But not from a person with, supposedly, great amount of actual experience as a representative of a military forces.

Considering we are talking about games and that playing into its genre and setting up its own rules should always take precedent over being contextually realistic, then none of that is relevant.

For how many years games have been doing it, I honestly can't believe anyone can still complain about this kind of narrative disconnect.

Actually I can't think of any other shooter-rpg hybrid games that did something as stupid as what the first Mass Effect did. I also suspect it became a sticking point after it was removed for Mass Effect 2 and became conspicuous in its absence, for the better in my view.

 

[pookie101]

im with the OP with this. absolutely love it and and started playing it again recently and according to steam.. 788 hours in it