When it released in 2009, Dragon Age: Origins wowed young and old alike. To younger gamers, it was a hardcore fantasy RPG with a storyline far darker than that of other games. For veterans, it was great to finally see a major studio put out a classic CRPG again. Not only that, but Dragon Age was available on PC as well as consoles. For many, this was either the first RPG they ever got to play or the most complex they'd seen on their system.
Dragon Age: Origins went on to become a massive success whose legacy lives on today. Unfortunately, the game itself was left to wallow. Playing it now in 2023 is an arduous process. And in that frustration, faults that were easy to ignore in 2009 have begun to irritate.
The setting is a very traditional fantasy one. You got a world of humans, elves, and dwarves, who long ago faced an existential threat in the form of a monstrous horde. The darkspawn are vicious creatures who hail from deep below the surface. To oppose them, an order of legendary heroes was founded: The Grey Wardens. With their help, the Darkspawn were forced back underground.
Many years have passed since then and people have grown complacent in their safety. The Grey Wardens have fallen into decline as the people who they once saved became preoccupied with politics and infighting. Now a new Darkspawn invasion looms on the horizon; a blight. What remains of the Grey Wardens must now rally the people to their cause, but things are looking bleak for everyone.
Starting up the game, you are prompted to first design your character. This is unfortunately restrictive. You can be a human, elf, or dwarf, with class options being limited to fighter, rogue, and mage. Keeping in mind that dwarves can not be mages. This is restrictive even by the standards of console RPGs. After that comes the game's namesake: your origin story. You get to pick from six different starts, which drastically change who you are in this world. You can be dwarven noble or an elf living as a second-class citizens under human society. While these are really cool and impactful, it's a shame there are so few. If you're a human, you only be a nobleman. Same if you're a mage, who always start at the tower. Why can't I be an apostate or one of the sorcerers under the free elves?
Even if it had to be through DLC, it would have been great to see more options here. It feels restrictive when you're presented with six options at the start, only to have them filter down to just one as you finish designing your character.
Regardless of your origin story, your character soon meets with a terrible tragedy. You're then recruited into the Grey Wardens and take part in a pivotal battle at the fortress of Ostagar. There you are betrayed by the king's trusted general Loghain. The king and the wardens are abandoned to die in battle as darkspawn swarm the fortress. You are rescued by a local witch, but you and one friend are now the only Grey Wardens left. Your reputation is smeared and the darkspawn are free to overrun the world as they please. All you have are a collection of treaties, obliging various races and factions to help the wardens in time of need. With these, you have to raise a new army. Both to defeat the darkspawn blight as well as oppose the ambitions of Loghain.
While it builds on familiar fantasy tropes, the story & setting of Dragon Age: Origins are ample interesting. The world is fleshed out and complex, with a rich history. A lot of this is background fluff, though a lot of it also comes up during gameplay. There are politics and religion, each culture has its own deeply-rooted beliefs that can clash.
Take mages, for example. Though incredibly powerful, magic is tied closely to the demonic realm known as The Fade. Mages are therefore at risk of becoming possessed, either by accident or as a result of being tempted by the promise of vast powers. As such, mages exist under the close supervision of Templars, who are the resident knights of the world's foremost religious institution. You'll have many opportunities to interact with mages who either live under this system or reject it, and you can choose whether to sympathize or mistrust either or both of them. Likewise, playing as a mage opens you up to all kinds of new interactions.
I also appreciate how Dragon Age: Origins separates the optional and essential lore. You can find hundreds of documents that give you a few paragraphs of background story, but you don't have to read all of it. If it's important to the actual storyline, it'll inevitably come up in dialogue. You can read like twenty pages of background on The Chantry or just ask an NPC for the quick rundown when you actually need that info.
Enough story for now, let's talk gameplay for a bit.
Dragon Age: Origins is an RPG with a heavy reliance on strategy. You have a squad of four characters to command, one of which is always your custom character. You can freely switch between any of your squad members, but there is also a tactics menu. Here you set behaviors that determine how the squad reacts when you are not ordering them directly. Like having a mage cast healing if any party member dips below 50% health. You can extensively customize these behaviors yourself or pick from a number of templates.
You explore areas or dive into dungeons, where you fight enemies, do quests, and acquire tons of loot. You get better equipment for your character and eventually level up, allowing you to upgrade your stats and learn new skills. Exactly what you expect from an RPG. What sets it apart is that Dragon Age is big on choice. You're often allowed to resolve quests in several different ways. Like you might go into some tunnels to track down a mother's lost son, only to find him a deranged shell of his former self. He pleads you to tell his mother that he is dead because he is beyond saving. Do you lie to the mother or tell her the truth? Maybe you put the guy out of his misery to give both of them closure. Maybe you're a complete asshole, so you kill the son and then give the mother false hope anyway.
These choices can be small and isolated like the example above or change the direction of the game entirely. Like when you petition the mages for help, you find them in the midst of a crisis. While helping them resolve this, you can choose to side with either the mages or the templars. This then affects the future existence of mages in this region and decides which of the two will join your makeshift army. As with Mass Effect, these choices also carry over into the rest of the Dragon Age series.
Replaying this game, I was very disappointed to see how barebones the rest of the RPG gameplay is. Leveling, for example, is not particularly interesting. You assign some stat points and sometimes get to pick new abilities. These abilities feel especially uninspired. As a warrior, I started out with a shield bash. Later I unlocked a double shield bash. Then a triple. Then a quadruple. I could also unlock a bunch of alternate stances, but only one could be active at a time. It looks like you have a lot of options, but most are for entirely different playstyles. There's no point in investing in the archery branch of the rogue tree if you're an assassin. As a result, I soon ended up not spending points at all because there was literally nothing I wanted or could even use.
Mages have the opposite problem. They unlock so many different spells that you can't even fit them all into quick-select slots or make enough tactics to utilize most of them.
Combat feels stiff, both due to technical issues and a lack of feedback. Characters just kind of stand around swinging at the air around each other, which sometimes causing damage numbers to appear. Special attacks look unimpressive too and tend to be buggy. Don't be surprised if you use a skill with a long wind-up and then find yourself swinging at the air while an enemy across the room dies. At least there are some really cool animations for finishing blows.
Pathfinding during combat is especially annoying. All your party members follow right behind you, so when combat breaks out you got mages and archers in the thick of battle. If the enemy has magic, you can expect to immediately be hit with fireballs and other devastating area-of-effect spells. Trying to account for this and do tactical positioning is arduous process that you'd have to repeat for every encounter. You can't even ambush enemies. Magic won't do any damage to foes until combat has been initiated—bullshit in and of itself—and starting a spell just before you charge into combat will often see that spell be cancelled the moment enemies aggro.
Characters are constantly jittering around trying to position themselves, getting stuck on everything and everyone. Mages will move in so close to cast spells that they get hit by their own area-of-effect damage. Sometimes the AI will run after enemies and straight into traps, even though there are enemies closer by they could attack instead. You have to really keep an eye on things to prevent chaos. Honestly though, you should be doing that already anyway.
While the combat has its technical issues, it is very challenging. The encounter design is devious, with powerful enemies in clever positions. There are traps and ambushes mixed in, it's downright evil at times. This makes it all the more satisfying to take control of these battlefields. Hitting a cluster of enemies in an explosion or having my dog rip a mage's throat out just before they cast their next spell felt great every time. It feels like you're solving a puzzle. Better yet, you're solving a puzzle with brutal violence.
As for the adventure itself, Dragon Age: Origins is a game of incredible highs and frustrating lows. Many of the big quests you'll undertake can take hours to resolve. During which you'll be politicking, negotiating, picking fights, and undertaking dungeon crawls. You might be asked to beat up some werewolves in the forest, only to find yourself three floors deep into a dungeon—getting gently roasted by a dragon—an hour and a half later. That's what passes as a minor detour in Dragon Age.
Many of these quests main and side alike are super memorable. They come with interesting characters and major decisions for you to make, and awesome fights. The issue being that some are memorable for the wrong reasons. Or you only remember the highlights of that quest, but forget about all the annoyances leading up to it. The Mage Tower is somewhat infamous for the tedious dream maze wedged right in the middle of it. The point where I suffered the most personally was in The Deep Roads. Everybody remembers the fantastic battle with The Broodmother there, but nobody quite remembers the five separate cave systems you have to traverse before reaching that fight. It is so incredibly long and you'll be fighting the same darkspawn and spiders every step of the way.
What makes these issues worth sticking with it is the cast of characters who'll join you on these adventures. The party members you'll meet over the course of this game are all fascinating folk who hail from interesting niches of this world. In those Deep Roads, for example, you'll be teaming up with Ohgren. A has-been dwarf hero who lost everything for a city that wouldn't give him anything back in return. He seems like your typical drunk dwarf archetype on the surface, but keep him around, do his optional quests, and you soon learn there is a lot more to the guy than readily apparent.
Ohgren is one of the simpler examples too. I personally really like Sten. He is a powerful frontline fighter, but he hails from a culture that is incredibly difficult to comprehend. Not just in-universe either. Even as the player, it's hard to figure out what the Qunari are about going by the in-game descriptions. Getting on Sten's good side is difficult, especially because he is not with you of his own free will. He wants to solve the blight and be done with it all. So any time you waste, any optional sidequest you agree to do, pisses him off. Waste enough time and he'll outright challenge your command of the party. He's so fascinating and wanting to have him around means you'll have to either keep your adventure focused or be prepared to deal with his outbursts.
Which party members you take with you often changes the adventure a lot. They react to your choices and comment on the story as it happens. They'll even reply to NPC dialogue sometimes, which can draw out additional details that you would have missed if they were absent. With certain party members present, you can even find alternative conclusions to certain quests.
A problem that isn't so easily overlooked is the game's abysmal performance. Dragon Age: Origins will boot up just fine in 2023 running on Windows 11. Everything beyond that is a crapshoot and has been that way for many years now. It crashes constantly. At first these were sporadic and tied to me doing weird things, like taking screenshots or alt-tabbing to desktop for a moment. Later on, these become persistent. Entire areas can't be played unless you run the game at the most barebones visual settings possible. That's after sorting out several other problems like the CPU thread usage and directX-related issues.
Running the game like this is a travesty. The texture quality is barely on-par with that of games from the early 2000s. Meanwhile the rendering distance is so low you sometimes can't see your squad members on the larger battlefields. Or a merchant on the other side of a sizable room. Even then there are visual bugs all over. Trees flickering in and out existence, rays of light being rendered as solid objects, entire textures disappearing. It's garbage. I had a miserable time playing through the game as it looked like this, but even slightly improving it would lead to non-stop crashes. If you can, play on the game on consoles. It's going to save you a world of hurt.
There are also bugs aplenty, mostly in the quest progression. One quest I sequence-broke by accident because I got a dialogue option that shouldn't have been available until I learned certain information. Another quest I couldn't finish because an NPC wouldn't initiate the final battle. Every time I entered the room the cutscene would play and then nothing. That's one of the quests whose consequences carry over to later games too, so that sucks a lot. It's DLC too so I paid extra money for a quest that's broken. Thanks Bioware!
It's a lot to put up with, but beyond the bugs and the shit graphics and the low points, Dragon Age: Origins is still a game that can grab you. Its combat is a real treat for those who miss challenging RPGs or who rarely get to play games this complex on consoles. The game's world is also deep and interesting to learn about, with a cast of party members
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