Posted on 4 October 2024

I'd heard plenty of things about the Dragon Age series over the years, but never saw quite enough to get me interested in playing any of the games. Then the previews for Veilguard came out and the games went on sale as part of the Steam Summer Sale, so I figured that now was a good time to get into the series. I'd just finished playing Max Payne and didn't want to go right into Max Payne 2, so why not take a bit of a break with a completely different genre?

I wasn't planning on reviewing each of these games – up until the middle of September, I only had plans on writing up a review for Inquisition, since that was the only game that provoked some actual thoughts that I felt the need to share with others. But I realized that those thoughts don't quite make sense without discussion of the other games, so here I am.

This game came out in 2009. That's not that old, by my perspective, so I didn't think I had anything to worry about. I'd played some previous Bioware games (KOTOR and Mass Effect 1) and never encountered any serious bugs, so I imagined this game would be the same. I booted it up without doing any research whatsoever.

I should have done my research. I experienced my first crash at the Ostagar Bridge, which happened because I was looking around and trying to take screenshots. The crash kept occurring at the same place while I was doing the same thing (looking around and trying to take screenshots), so I just didn't do that and was fine for a while. I got a few more crashes, but they weren't unmanageable until I left Lothering and went to the Brecilian Forest.

That area had crashes and glitches galore. I spent a lot of time troubleshooting and learned that Origins has a serious memory leak issue on PC. I did find a way to fix it, to an extent – by creating a desktop shortcut that forced the game to launch using only one CPU. That lowered the number of crashes by 95%. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough.

This is the particular text string I had to paste into the "Target" field of the shortcut:

Shortcut properties image

I'm pretty happy I got that figured out, because I was seriously considering abandoning the game and jumping directly into Dragon Age 2. That's how frustrated I was with the crashes.

Another strange bug I encountered was being unable to take Steam screenshots in Cadash Thaig, and only Cadash Thaig. This occurred not just in the base game, but also in the Witch Hunt DLC. I have no idea what the problem is there.

Before I get into the rest of the review, I have one more complaint: the character creator. Bioware was never the best about putting proper lighting into their character creators, but Origins's stood out as particularly bad – especially in comparison to the following Dragon Age games – because there was no way to fix your character after initial creation. Having minor issues with your character's appearance is one thing, but I genuinely had no idea what colors I was picking for half the options.

I knew nothing of Dragon Age lore when I started the game, so character creation took a while. I settled on a Dalish (I had zero idea what that meant) Elf warrior, with an intent to focus on archery...because an elf should know how to use a bow. Yeah, that was my thought process behind it. Later on, I realized I probably should have gone with a rogue if I wanted to use archery. But that's how first playthroughs go – you make tons of mistakes and don't know what to do to get "ideal" outcomes.

For the most part, the game responded pretty well to my character being an elf. Elf NPCs were friendly to me, and there was a surprisingly large amount of racism from human NPCs, which definitely affected me roleplaying my character. There was only once instance (I unfortunately can't remember what it was) when the writing seemed to default to the player character being a human.

Like in KOTOR, the player character isn't voiced, and like in KOTOR, there are a variety of dialogue options to choose from. Some of the more evil-aligned dialogue options are pretty damn evil, but there aren't nearly as many unhinged evil options as there were in KOTOR. I remember a lot of the dark side-aligned responses being pretty ridiculous and petty (to the point where I couldn't justify picking them because of how ridiculously petty they were), while for the most part, they're a lot more toned down in Origins. I'd have much less of a problem doing an "evil" run in this game, I think.

The combat is a bit...well, I don't exactly want to call it boring, but I didn't find it particularly enticing or fun. My previous experience with the RTwP (real-time-with-pause) system was exclusively limited to the KOTOR games, and I struggled with it there – enough for me to consider RTwP a negative. Here, I had to turn down the difficulty until I got used to it – and thankfully, that didn't take too long! My previous negative opinions are now neutral.

I have some complaints about the abilities (spells for mages and talents for rogues and warriors). There are combat abilities (both active and passive). Included in those combat abilities is...lockpicking. Putting points into lockpicking means you can't put points toward some kind of combat talent. I found that my rogue characters suffered due to this in a way that the mages and warriors did not. Not to mention that it seems like lockpicking should have been a Skill (other skills include things like Herbalism, which allows you to make potions, and Survival, which allows you to detect enemies), not a Talent.

Each companion has a personal quest you can do for them. Some feel more fleshed out than others. Alistair's felt half-baked (even though it can lead to some pretty major consequences later on), while I thought Leliana's and Zevran's quests were done better.

Companions can approve and disapprove of your actions, and higher approval leads to conversations that can allow you to unlock a companion’s personal quest. Lower approval can provoke a companion into leaving the party. I imagine this was more of a problem with the game was first released, but the Ultimate Edition (which I played) has a shop where you can infinitely buy gifts that increase companion approval without consequence. Keeping them happy was never a problem after I learned about that.

There's a good balance between main quests and side quests. Side quests never felt like busy work, and I can remember only one quest chain going on too long for my liking. The DLC that's integrated into the main game (The Stone Prisoner, Return to Ostagar, and Warden's Keep) don't feel like filler – in fact, they feel like areas that were carved out of the game to sell as DLC.

There is plenty of DLC that isn't part of the main game. Of them, I only played Awakening and Witch Hunt. Awakening is better described as an expansion. It's much longer than the other DLC, and has its own unique maps, quests, party members, and plot. It takes place after the main game, and introduces some new skills and talents that I found made gameplay easier.

It also introduces some characters and plot points that I assumed would be more important, but turned out not to be. The Architect, who has quite a few similarities with a character who becomes a major antagonist in Inquisition, becomes much less significant in the following games. There are a few mentions in Dragon Age 2, but zero in Inquisition, which I thought was quite odd. Alas, maybe it will be more relevant in a future game.

Overall, I'd say Origins is a good game that holds up 15 years later. There's plenty of it that's outdated – it's very brown, and some characters' hairstyles are very 2000s – and getting it to run on a modern PC can be genuinely difficult. But with all the choices you can make that affect the game later on, as well as the following games, it has quite a bit of replay value. I already have future playthroughs planned.