Dragon Age: Origins

   At the end of Dragon Age: Origins there are many questions left unanswered and many of them involved your party member Morrigan and her adoptive mother Flemeth. We were never told much about the dark ritual that you could have done at the end of Origins, we were never told much about what happened to Morrigan once we finally killed the Arch Demon. That is to be expected of course, we need hooks at the end of the game to make us excited for the sequel. After many DLC's and an expansion was put out, Morrigan and the dark ritual ended up slipping from my mind. With Dragon Age 2 growing ever closer to release it's only natural that Bioware wants to finish off the story of your Warden to focus on Hawk. We still had morrigan out there and she was a large part of our Wardens story, what better way to transition from Origins to Dragon Age 2 than to have the final DLC focus on Morrigan.
 
   In theory this sounds like a perfect way to send Origins off with a bang so that they can focus on finishing up DA2. In practice however it doesn't stand up to any of their earlier DLC or the expansion pack. You get what you pay for and obviously seven dollars was not enough to make this DLC the send off that it should have been. Witch Hunt is criminally short when you think about the fact that this is the last DLC and it's supposed to tie up loose ends with morrigan. This is a lore DLC through and through this wasn't about combat or difficulty that was taken care of with the Golems of Amgarrak . The only problem is that you do more fighting in this DLC than you do anything else. You do not have any old party members along with you in this quest aside from the Mabari Warhound, if you had him in your imported character, if not you are given a new one. Instead you are introduced to two new companions a mage and a dalish warrior elf. However they are so completely underused for story purposes that it might as well have been two faceless Grey wardens fighting along side of you. There is no party interaction whatsoever aside from the conversation you have with them when you first meet them. Aside from that you cannot have a chat with them, it ends up being a moot point however when you realize that you actually only converse a handful of times with anyone.
 
   This is a DLC though right we should be able to travel to places that we normally wouldn't, maybe put some new locations on the map to visit? Sorry but no, there are no new areas in this mission at all you start out at Flemeths hut which is exactly as it was the first time you were there. This is where you meet your first two party members the dog and the dalish elf, the conversation with the elf ends up leading you to go back to the mage tower. Again, it is the exact  same as before only less ramshackled and destroyed thanks to having it not be full of abominations. Your restricted to only the first floor of the mage tower and after eventually finding your new mage companion, you are led into the basement of the tower. This part uses the same area from the mage origin story.  You are then whisked to a thaig in orzammar, again we are greeted with another used environment this time it's from Shale's side quest, only this time you are going through it backwards. After that you are whisked to again another origin story area, the dalish elf temple environment where you found the mirror. Taken this time to an area from Awakening the dragon bone yard area where you fight the one new enemy type, however there is only one of them and it's the equivalent of a boss fight. We then go down to the boss fight area of Awakening where you fought the brood mother. You find morrigan there and you have a short conversation with her, in which you can choose to either let her leave or kill her. Killing her does not trigger a boss fight, just a short little cutscene of you stabbing her. This is what the DLC was leading us to the confrontation with morrigan to find out what she is doing and why. However you never are actually given a real answer it's all very vague and in the end you don't find out anything about morrigan that you didn't already know. The DLC then abruptly ends, I'm not kidding when I say that it feels like there was more after this that just wasn't put in. So at the end we haven't learned anything new about why morrigan did this or what she plans on doing, and the new questions that were brought up in this DLC regarding your new companions are never explained.
 
   All in all I can't recommend this DLC to anyone even if you are a lover of the Dragon Age universe like I am. The combat is basic and is really just there to pad the game, you don't learn anything about this world or plot that you didn't already know. Even if you just want the new items for your Origins or Awakening you have to play through the hour or two of the game. There is only one merchant in the entire quest that you have access to and he doesn't sell armor or weapons, so you are stuck with the items that they come equipped with or that you specifically are given during the game.
 
In the end take the seven dollars that you could have spent on this DLC and go and buy The Lair of the Shadow Broker, for Mass Effect 2. It's obvious that more time and effort was put into that than it was put into this.