Despite playing games on the regular and maintaining a presence on boards like this that discuss current gaming events, I have pretty huge blind spots. I've never played any of the Uncharted games. None of the God of Wars. Never beaten a single Metal Gear Solid. It wasn't until 2011 that I finished my first Assassin's Creed. I fell off of GTA around San Andreas, for whatever reason. I had never played Minecraft until, like, a month ago. I play games all the time, but I tend not to follow the hottest-latest. Dragon Age: Origins was one of the many things that just sort of passed me by. When everyone else was seemingly obsessed with it, I was spending my nights with Final Fantasy XI and recovering from recently removed wisdom teeth.

It wasn't until much later on, probably around the time of Dragon Age 2's release, that I figured I had missed something big; the sort of game people talk about being "important." I picked up the 360 copy in anticipation of diving into the series as a whole all at once, and then Dragon Age 2 sort of set the internet on fire, and not in a good way. Listening to various rants of the game being repetitive and dumbed down, the awful "Hamburger Hepler" crap, "when you press a button, something awesome has to happen." It was the Summer of 2011 and hating on EA was in full swing. I didn't even want to bother. I wrote off Dragon Age: Origins until I was given hope that the series was ever going to be in an upswing again because the last thing I wanted at that point was to fall in love with a series that I knew just ended up going to shit.

2014 and Inquisition seems decent. Dragon Age: Origins pops up in a Steam sale, and I have a new computer. It turns out Dragon Age: Origins is pretty good. Who knew.

Dragon Age: Origins rewards patience and careful consideration, which is nice.

Right off the bat, this game was no joke. I was aware of the game's difficulty before getting into things, but I wasn't expecting party positioning to be so paramount to most of Origins' combat encounters. If you refuse to pause, put thought into building a decent macro set for your companions respective AIs, or carefully position your group depending on their strengths, you will get wrecked.

Unfortunately though, I have the @mooseymcman problem of being more motivated to talk about what irks me about these systems more than what I loved. As much as I appreciate the game's insistence that positioning in the battles matter, many of these encounters aren't exactly all that fair. There are numerous times where new combat encounters begin with you just being immediately surrounded, which isn't very fun to try and fight your way out of. In fact, one of the most common enemy placement layouts that consistently pissed me off was "Here's a few strong melee fighters backed up by a long line of archers that will kick your shit in because they're impossible to get to without swallowing a dozen or two arrows first."

(It's a shame that my arrows seemed nowhere near as effective. In general, being an archer sort of sucked, actually.)

In an average fight where enemies are laid out naturally through an environment, positioning yourself around them, and having that go so well for you, can feel incredibly satisfying. Just throwing your entire party at another group of enemies isn't a particularly effective way of fighting, due to friendly fire or other ability ranges, and people just have a tendency to mash up against each other and get stuck. That itself doesn't bother me, because that's what would happen if two guys, a mage lady, and a dog just decided to blob themselves together onto someone else. It would be messy and ineffective; you'd constantly be getting in each others' way. So when you can position your party members into a great formation, it feels fantastic. Like a puzzle where everything fits together beautifully, even if it does lend itself to lame strategies like "just draw these enemies together and use Cone of Ice constantly."

Worrying about how your opinion on things impact your companions is also a nice change of pace from the Mass Effect games, where you can more or less be a huge cock to everyone and nobody really does anything of consequence about it. Knowing that how I handled certain matters impacted my standing with Alistair, for instance, made me given great consideration to certain decisions, because I liked and respected Alistair quite a bit and wanted him on my side. Torturing Morrigan with helpful fetch quests was also a devilish delight.

As nice as it is that the focus on keeping your ragtag group of misfits together and on the same page adds an element of self-doubt to much of the decision making in the game, though, your standing with the group is all-too-easy to manipulate with gifts. I couldn't help but feel like that aspect of the game was far too easy to, well, game.

I have a love/hate relationship with Bioware's approach to sexuality.

Let's back up for a second to Mass Effect 3. When it was revealed there would finally be gay male relationships in the game I was super psyched. (Though, to be fair, my initial reaction was probably something more like "It fucking took them long enough!") Gay dudes get short shrift in a lot of romance set ups in games, and this goes without saying. But then I played Mass Effect 3 and realized my Kaidan had died back in the first game. I was subsequently left with nothing but Steve Cortez as a gay romance option.

Cortez is also, in my opinion, one of the worst characters Bioware has ever written. His defining characteristic is crying over his dead husband, you spend barely any time with him before you end up making out in a nightclub, his character looks like some poorly cobbled together re-hashing of Jacob's body from ME2, and the actual scene with him at the end is atrocious. It was after I had finished the game that I realized I had basically just been pandered to. I went with the gay character solely because I was gay, and Bioware knew a great number of us would do exactly that, so they get to wax on about how progressive they are for including gay romances when the only explicitly gay guy in the game is embarrassingly written. The praise for them felt incredibly un-earned, and it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

So going in to Origins with the intent on once again romancing another dude, I was sort of expecting the worst. Thankfully Zevran winds up being a very charmingly written character, with a great deal of back story, stand-out voice acting, and fantastic sense of humor. I learned far more about Zevran's life as a member of the Crows, and his personal life in Antiva, than anything I ever learned about Steve Cortez.

The concept of a character who's raised from birth to treat sex in an almost utilitarian fashion is sort of awesome, giving a unique perspective on sex and sexuality that most other video game characters don't really bother with. This isn't some sort of wounded boy who keeps his sexuality to himself, or overcomes some sort of contrived, overly saccharine ordeal; Zevran was merely raised to think of sex with guys or girls as equally valid pleasures and chuckles at someone who's restricted to a single sex, or treats sex as too sentimental.

Honestly, most of the sexual relationships in Origins feel like a breath of fresh air. Not because they're treated "seriously" or "maturely," but very specifically because they are not. Not across the board, at least. Each character has a very distinct approach to how they appreciate sex. Alistair is a virgin due to years of being under the purview of the Chantry, so takes it hyper-seriously. Wynne appears like a wholesome old lady until she makes remarks to Alistair about how she used to enjoy fooling around with other Circle members to blow off steam, but doesn't enjoy flaunting it. Zevran treats it as harmless fun, and most conversations end up loaded with innuendo.

Affection meter aside, hokey sex-music aside, the varying approach to the importance of sex (and how quickly it can occur depending on the person) sort of sneaks up on you as a nice, pleasantly realistic touch.

The Bioware formula of RPG may be a bit predictable, but that's not inherently bad.

Some allowance, of course, should be made for the fact that Dragon Age: Origins came out in 2009. The complaints about Bioware's formulaic plot structure weren't really in full-swing then as they are these days, particularly in the wake of Mass Effect 3. It's probably why they've felt the need to change the structure of their games with the more open-world nature of Inquisition.

Despite trying to accept the game for what it was, though, Origins lays that traditional Bioware formula on pretty thick right out of the gate. You're an every-man (or woman, as the case may be) who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it turns out you have a particular talent that makes you into a special someone, and you have to go about resolving the great crisis with a list of priorities you can do in any order. Add in some moral choices, conversation trees, and some snark, and you have The Bioware RPG.

Though there are obvious patterns to these beats, I don't think it's fair to hold it against these games, or that adherence to a certain formula is even all that new. The Tales series is an example of a long-running RPG series that sticks to certain familiar concepts, systems, graphical styles, and character tropes (TV Tropes would call those games "cliche storms") but those games are also beloved, and the formulaic structure of the series at the very least ensures a reliable baseline level of quality. It may not blow your mind or be all that innovative, but you can be sure what you're getting is tried and true. That it works, and works well. The important stuff is the details of the story itself, afterall, not necessarily how its packaged. Though complaining about the familiarity of it all may be easy, complaining about it also feels rather pedantic.

The world of Dragon Age is still exquisitely detailed, its characters well-realized and acted. Learning how the Chantry, Templars, and Mages all interact, how The Blight comes and goes, or how The Grey Wardens are structured, is not negatively impacted or reduced in any way just because of the narrative structure of how plot elements are doled out to you or how certain gameplay systems are present in most Bioware games. These things and others remain highlights of Dragon Age that are incredibly compelling to learn about, and are merely told in a manner that feels familiar to the player.

In a lot of ways, how Bioware has structured many of its games feels like a marrying of JPRG plot tropes with CRPG gameplay systems. Innovation can be overrated.

To be honest, though I really liked Origins, I don't think I love it as much as some do.

Parts of Dragon Age feel amazing. That Bioware had the balls to release a game like this as one of their flagship games in 2009 is sort of incredible in itself. Yet, and I just feel really bad for admitting this, I don't think the combat was that great. The systems at work have the potential to combine in ways that demand careful strategy and party placement, but the actual combat encounters themselves do not always play to those strengths. Playing Origins, I kept getting Mass Effect 1 vibes; the combat was just super uneven in that same Mass Effect 1 way of dying constantly, and not always feeling like I had a very clear, fair understanding of why.

Many class abilities also seem sort of pointless. Sure, I could use Morrigan as a shapeshifter; were I a complete idiot. Her animal forms pale in comparison to using her as a straight-forward mage, and my experience of playing as an archer prior to getting animal familiars to fight alongside me felt sort of miserable. Healing can also be a chore. Either bring Wynne with you, or make an unholy number of potions and keep them on your hotbar at all times for spamming, because one of those things will be necessary, if not both. This wouldn't be so bad, if it didn't take so long to travel around collecting potion ingredients from different stores.

And sections of the plot are simply a slog. Two in particular: The Fade section, and most of the Dwarven city. The Fade section of the Circle of Magi plot completely blindsides you, and takes forever, dragging the game down with a shitty puzzle section where you have to fight totally alone, and depending on your class and when you decide to take that part of the game on, it could be a pulling-hair-out level of frustrating. As for Orzammar: though I love a good political intrigue story, the game actually spends very little effort fleshing out the back story of the two political factions, instead sending you on various combat encounters in the Deep Roads that simply take far too long and seem tonally out of place, delving into weird horror stories from out of left field instead of the far more compelling plot to resolve Orzammar's throne itself.

On some level it feels unfair to say my overall opinion of the game is soured simply because of two sections, but those two sections are two of the major plotlines of the game, mostly consisting of combat that is not always well-balanced.

I adore the characters, I love the world, and I was intrigued by the plot elements that didn't involve the Fade. The universe is dark and compelling, and I am eager to see more of Dragon Age's world. In these respects, I come away from Origins feeling much like I did with the first Mass Effect; I love it more than it probably deserves to be loved, but I love it nonetheless for what it does so well, despite its flaws.

Well that's a coincidence, I was getting into FFXI at around the same time (though I didn't play much till 2010). I also found the combat bland in DA:O, and didn't get far enough for the characters to really make an impression

Origins is a game that managed to win me over by the end kind of in spite of itself, simply because it did a few things very well that managed to outweigh the negatives. I really liked several of the characters and certain elements of the plot (even if the overarching plot is bland), but I really didn't enjoy the combat. It wasn't for a lack of trying. I tried more than a few times to give it an honest go and find the fun, but it always inevitably turned into a tedious slog that only got in the way of the good stuff. The excessively long combat sections of the fade and the deep roads definitely did not help.

It hasn't stopped me from playing through the game close to a half dozen times, but a large part of me wishes it was a turn-based tactics game instead.

I love Dragon Age Origins because it is the closest thing to a Baldur's Gate 3 as we are ever going to get. It definitely has problems, the most glaring of which being The Fade, but there is a heart there that isn't in Bioware's newer games.

DA: Origins is one of my absolute favorite games ever. Is it perfect? Obviously not. And you're right when you say it doesn't try to break the mold but it doesn't need to. (Funny, you mention the Tales series since that's far and away my favorite JRPG series.) I think it had a perfect mix of great characters, an engaging world, solid writing and most importantly, incredibly deep and satisfying combat.

One of my favorite aspects of the game is the origin stories for whatever race and class you pick at the beginning of the game and how they actually have a huge effect on the story going forward. I played as a mage and it completely changes how you view certain events that take place later in the game. It doesn't change the events of the story, it just gives you information that you wouldn't have otherwise. It's a concept that I really haven't seen in any game since Origins.

I completely agree with your comparison of Cortez from Mass Effect 3 and Zevran in Origins. With Cortez, it seemed almost like BioWare was trying to trick you. "Oh man, I bet you didn't expect this big buff guy to be gay" but it didn't come across as subverting a stereotype, it just seemed like, as you said, lame pandering. Zevran, on the other hand, is almost a stereotype in himself. The whole concept of gay elf is a pretty played out joke in RPGs but he's always the one making the joke and never the butt of it. (lol) It's a shame they pretty much gave up on writing sexuality into their characters in Dragon Age 2 and just said "eh, fuck everyone, we don't care." I remember Dragon Age 2 being praised for letting the player "romance" anyone in the party no matter the gender or sexuality but I found it really disappointing. Sexuality should be a large part of someone's character and I would much rather have one really well-written gay character in a game than just a blanket "everyone's gay if you want them to be."

My memory of DA:O is very fuzzy but i remember archery being horribly overpowered. I basicly had an archer in my team who slaugthered everything and the rest of the team was just meatshields/supporters.

I remember having a rogue that would crit-backstab the fuck out of every thing that moved.

Dragon Age Origins is a top ten game for me--at the time it was fucking incredible that such a straight-up CRPG was going to be released, and I think I dumped something like 100 hours into my first playthrough when all was said and done, and that was on the 360 (which controls poorly). When I finally built a gaming PC, I snagged Origins almost immediately and spent another 80 hours or so on a second playthrough. I'm currently on a third playthrough, which will run all the way through Dragon Age Inquisition when I get around to it (I've been vocal about my soft spot for Dragon Age 2--in spite of its numerous, numerous flaws there's a lot of enjoyment to be had in there, especially on PC. You can almost get the combat to behave like Origins' combat, but with a little less fiddling than Origins required).

Archery gets super, super overpowered (I took down the Archdemon with arrows--both my rogue and Leliana teamed up to BRING THE PAIN).

Fuck, now I want to play Origins some more.

Now I want to hear your opinion on Bioware's first "full gay" (I still don't know what Gaider meant by that) character in DA: Inquisition.

I love all of Bioware's games, but I do not see the need for the sexual relationships. Honestly, what does it add? The characters never actually make you fall in love with them. Like I don't ever say "Man, I love Miranda with all my heart". No, you go to the character between missions, choose the dialogue options you think lead to that encounter (and solely so, not because you ACTUALLY want to say those corny lovey-dovey lines that are horribly written and awkward), and then you talk to them before a final mission and go at it. It's not engaging. The characters don't grip you emotionally, and they fall "in love" with you based on the dialogue options you chose. Also, why does the player have to initiate the whole relationship? Wouldn't it be more satisfying if the character either fell in love or despised you based on more meaningful consequential actions in the game that you made? If you're a paragon, maybe Tali likes that but Miranda thinks you're a wimp. But that's not how it works. It's whoever you want to get with, and it's all built by choosing poorly written dialogue options.

@mbradley1992: I think that depicting the sexual parts of the human experience is definitely worth exploring in a game, especially a long rpg about human relationships. Sexuality is a pretty big part of being human and its absence in most games is a bit odd. However, the way Bioware has traditionally married relationships and love to mechanics is deeply flawed. Bioware games, and most other games with romance elements, put the player in complete control of what relationships they engage in and how they progress. The objects of a main character's affection are solely objects to be acted upon for the most part. You put in input and get out the desired effect. I think the way relationships intermingle with the larger game should progress a little bit from the rather oversimplified way they work in games like ME and DA. In other words, I agree that the way Bioware games address sexuality is deeply flawed; however, those attempts at depicting human sexuality in a game are necessary to move the industry forward towards better depictions and systems.

MMOs probably do this more than anything, but you're absolutely right that the focus on tailoring a lot of individual dialogue to your race, and the added perspective of your Origin story (even though they're not all that long, really) adds so much to the experience. It's probably my preferred approach for trying to write a game's story differently for each player. Mass Effect flirts with doing this when you first create your character but it never amounts to more than one or two vague references. The idea of branching off into completely different sections (The Witcher 2 supposedly does this, though I never finished it to know) is nice, but that takes oodles of effort, and doesn't feel as authentic as the way Origins handled it. It's a shame to hear the other Dragon Age games have sort of abandoned the concept, as it would've been nice to see that approach refined.

I was consistently the least useful member of the group by far. It just made me regret not playing as a mage, instead, since that would've allowed me to diversify my party a bit more instead of carrying my dead weight. I never figured out how archery was all that useful. Eventually when I could summon familiars things felt a lot better, but then there was the inability to set macros for the familiars for some reason that just frustrated me more.

In some way I think it's sort of weird that they advertise stuff like that; it gets to what I was saying about Cortez and feeling a bit pandered to. Just make a really good character that you don't need to reduce to "Hey, this guy's gay! That one's for all the boys!" Some of the best gay characters in games have been pleasant surprises, and not necessarily something I went in expecting. I suppose it's at least better than what @milkman referred to with DA2; I would rather have an explicitly gay character than going down the 'everyone is bi' route, which sort of cheapens their characters.

Besides, wasn't Cortez "fully gay"? Maybe they're just trying to forget he ever existed.

I agree insofar as I feel Bioware should stop shoehorning in different types of characters for romance plotlines until they focus more on making the romance stories they have more believable and personalized. I enjoyed Dragon Age's because some of them do actually come on to you rather than the other way around, and each character has a distinctly different attitude about what sex means to them; it's not just the lame Mass Effect approach of every single relationship following the same predictable template. Whenever I see something like Bioware saying they want to "include polyamorous and asexual relationships" in future games, I sort of roll my eyes, because at this point they're just throwing darts at random unrepresented relationship groups instead of focusing on actually making them compelling enough to truly buy in to. I appreciate Bioware's interest in portraying characters that don't often get portrayed, but something about their approach just rubs me the wrong way.

Sadly I'm the sort of person that feels compelled to play all the games in a series if it's something like this, so I feel obligated to go onto Dragon Age 2 at some point before too long before experiencing Inquisition. Which just scares me.

You monster.

Good blog post

@marokai: DA2 isn't remotely as bad as the Internet would lead you to believe, especially if you're not actually head over heels in love with everything about Origins. It has more than its share of flaws, but it has some good qualities that make it worth playing at least once.

I regret letting the Internet convince me it was terrible far more than playing it. (I only played the game first time a few months ago.)

Thanks for this blog post, @marokai! I like your take on it! Now I'm really curious how you may feel about the other games in the series. Though, I can understand maybe not wanting to jump straight back into a big new RPG, but I look forward to when you can. :)

I remember I crammed Morrigan full of gifts (wine and shit I had the dog dig up in Lothering) and talked her up enough to where I was able to bang her on our first camp-out. That was my sole goal, admittedly, for that character. Man, those sex scenes were so bad. So bad. They never got any better in the later Mass Effects, either, at least in the "cringe"/"this isn't how anyone looks or acts while doing anything oh god" department.

And yeah, archery was pretty widely agreed upon to be the worst combat choice. I think they might have patched the hell out of it with Awakening, but I can't remember. Anyway, now that you've beaten it, it's time to download a million mods to fix the million small problems and add a million awesome things. I recommend the Monk class mod. It single-handedly made me replay... well not the whole game, but like up to the last act. My favorite mod, though: Skip the Fade.

I musta invested like 500 hours into Origins, across four completed playthroughs (including all DLC) and maybe another six that I got bored of... I was simply obsessed with Origins because of the vast amount of versatility there was to roleplaying your character! All of the races and origins, and not's even before you get into the decision making. Unlike the Mass Effect games in particular, Dragon Age: Origins actually gives your decisions impact and shows their repercussions. A lot of it is cordoned to the epilogue text, but all of the biggest moments such as Redcliffe can go in vastly different directions.. I was kinda shocked to find that the game will actually let you keep on moving, leaving all of the survivors to die. The Landsmeet is also an incredible moment, which can also go in some pretty drastic directions depending on choices made before and during the landsmeet itself.

Origins is undoubtedly a top 3 game of that generation. The combat is a little stodgy, but it's also easy to exploit and i always played on Hard mode without much fuss. The Fade segment does indeed suck, however, though I actually really liked the Dwarven segment. The Deep Roads in particular, while I can see why some would find it goes on for far too long, I'm seemingly in the minority that enjoyed the combat enough to enjoy the huge stretches of fighting -- multiple times of course! I've always wanted to go back to it again sometime, but I feel I may have exhausted my time with it I played it for so damn much... I've begun to forget certain elements here and there too, which is depressing to think about... With the amount of time I've put into it you'd think it'd be blueprinted onto my brain! But apparently not.

I'm also on the side that holds the sentiment that Dragon Age II isn't nearly as bad as most people make it out to be, but... it's still not great or anything. Pretty much the poster-boy of a 3/5 game I'd say. It narrowed down and chopped away most of what made Origins so engaging, with little to make up for it. It has a much better way of handling friendships with its opposing 'Rivalry' meter, though. That way you don't have to pander to your party members so you can 'unlock' their dialogue and all that. Plus, every gift in the DAII is unique and will initiate a conversation, so there's another advancement for the series, but otherwise... eh. Its first act was boring and utterly aimless, and the third was something of a mess. The second act I seem to recall was rather intriguing at least, but it's been long enough now that I can't quite remember the particulars of much of it. I did also admittedly still complete DAII twice at that, so... it done just enough right to keep me engaged up until a point.

EDIT: Oh, you plan on playing Awakening? It's exceptionally short, but the combat is significantly easier (archery is insanely overpowered at that) and it has some interesting story beats. Plus, it has one especially fantastic antagonist in The Architect.

naw I think you are very fair to the game. It's real good stuff, it has some flaws as you noted but it makes many noble attempts to do some thing you just don't often get in High profile games these days.

Great blog man, I appreciate seeing your perspective on this.

I loved my time with Dragon Age: Origins, mainly due to my fascination with the lore and the characters. As much as I liked the worldbuilding though, the art direction they presented it with always felt bland and uninteresting to me, it was as generic fantasy as you could get. I also never really enjoyed the combat either, except when using magic as Morrigan. Killing enemies with Winter's Grasp or Crushing Prison or casting Waking Nightmare on a whole group of people never felt so satisfying. While I would say Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect count as some of my favourite RPGs, I simply cannot replay them due to their respected flawed combat mechanics, which is a shame.

There is a concept page for "strategically obfuscated nipples", it is Conveniently Obscured Nudity.

@audiobusting: Much love. <3