Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening Reviews

The editors at Mana Pool appear to be playing role-playing games for 36 hours a day, as they’ve just finished reviewing both Dragon Age: Origins and its Awakening expansion pack. The scores are 8.8/10 and 8.4/10, respectively, with a snip from the former to follow:

For non-combat, interactions with NPCs is done well, with few empty NPCs. There are normally a few different (moral approaches for each NPC, as well as a variety of ways to handle these approaches, e.g. persuasion, fighting, bribery.

Wealth is also done very well, as I never reached a point where I felt that there I had too much money and it became worthless, and neither did I feel that there was nothing worth saving up for. Likewise, there was a nice balance of equipment to purchase and loot. The implementation of crafting in Dragon Age: Origins is a nice attempt, but felt like far too much of a grind to me, working very much off an MMORPG manner of resource purchasing/collection. Additionally, only consumables, such as potions and poisons, can be crafted, making it very limited in scope.

The last note on gameplay will, unfortunately, not be a positive one. There are a number of bugs in Dragon Age: Origins, two of which irritate me immensely.

The first is that the existence of corpses is not properly registered sometimes there can be a very long delay before the game properly recognizes the corpse for the use of abilities. Given that there are number of abilities which influence/are influenced by corpses, this can massively nerf some abilities and classes/specialisations such as the Reaver, which was a specialization I chose on my last playthrough to the point of absurdity. This is mainly a nuisance, however, and can be played around.

The second bug I will discuss is vastly more problematic. Sometimes when playing, one experiences something very similar in feel to lag, whereby commands take a while to take effect, spells/abilities don’t fire off properly and if they do, the graphics will display, but nothing will happen, and so on. This, apparently, is a result of the scripts sometimes not firing properly or becoming clogged in some manner or other, and mainly happens in very busy battles such as almost every single combat I was involved in during the end-game. Whilst one can survive it, it significantly hampered my enjoyment of the last areas of Dragon Age: Origins.