Finished my replay of Dragon Age Origins today, or more specifically, my playthrough of it's DLC and expansion pack for the first time. Took about 80 hours. My thoughts:
Graphics
Even with the graphics mods I downloaded, it's definitely looking pretty dated now. Art style was pretty good though.
Story
A proper, deep RPG story, with plenty of players decisions, some of which carry through into future games, including some fairly significant choices that carry forward.
Companions
Strong companions overall, all but a few are likeable and have good companion quests and/or romances, though a select few companions like Sten in the main game and Anders in Awakening are kind of meh. Even most of the companions in the 15 or so hour long Awakening expansion are pretty well done, and even the companions in the short 2 hours DLC's like Leliana's Song and Witch Hunt got pretty good banter with one another and a decent amount of backstory considering the short length of those DLC's. My favorite companion remains Leliana, just as in my first playthrough, but DLC companion Shale follows up close behind, she kind of gives me HK47 from KOTOR vibes. The banter between Alistair and Morrigan is also pretty great. I definitely prefer Origins companions to what I remember of Inquisition's companions, though I will soon be playing Dragon Age 2 and replaying Inquisition, so I will be able to better compare companions then.
Gameplay
Decent, kind of feels like a hybrid of Bioware's prior KOTOR and Baldur's Gate systems. It definitely has some issues, many enemies feel like sponges with too large of health bars, attack animations are lackluster compared to later games in the series.
Quality of the PC port
Honestly, the PC port seems like a bit of a mess. I had to rely on mods to fix many bugs that Bioware left unfixed, and even then still ran into some bugs and got some crashes. Could be due to compatibility issues with the game being designed for Windows XP, Vista, and 7, and me trying to play it on Windows 11, but I was running the game in Windows 7 compatibility mode, and was still getting issues.
Mods
Dragon Age Origins, much like Bethesda games, was designed with easy modding capability, and as such, it has alot of available mods, 3.6k, which ranks it at 20th place for most mods on Nexus. Mods are easy to install, most can be simply dropped into the overrides folder after unzipping the files downloaded from Nexus, while a select few instead go into the add-ins folder, both are very easy to install. I ended up with around 35 mods in the end I believe, covering everything from texture overhauls to character remodels and reskins to new weapons and armor to quality of life improvements.
Score: 8.8/10
Last edited by shikamaru317 - 3 days ago
