Dragon Age: Origins and Awaking Review
I finally got around to playing Dragon Age: Origins and the Awaking expansion over the last few weeks. Frankly, by now everyone should have heard that it is an awesome game. What made it so enjoyable for me was the story. Sure, killing lots of enemies as my Human Mage was fun, but really what I liked was that my choices in the story carried weight through the rest of the game. Characters I chose to help came back later for better or worse. The dialog was funny at points and I could get the info I needed either through fear or gentle persuasion. The lack of any kind of good/evil meter was a nice change from other RPGs I’ve played recently. If one character was annoying I could be rude to them without having to worry about the rest of the game being labeled as a “bad” guy.
I thoroughly enjoyed both the main Origins game as well as the Awaking expansion, but there was one frustration for me in there. Towards the end of Awaking one of my side-quests glitched and would not let me complete it. Because of this I could not save everyone at the end of the game and had to choose between a couple different options on what to do. Ultimately it did not end up being that hard of a choice, but I was annoyed that a bug in the game forced it on me when I had worked to complete the challenges leading up to it.
Still, if you have not played Dragon Age you really should check it out. The Ultimate Edition is out now with all the DLC and since you can carry over your story arc into Dragon Age II (which comes out next week) there is good reason to play it before starting the sequel.