It cannot be overstated how bland and generic this game’s central story is (including its primary antagonist, practically a nonentity). The party members are cool and there are hints of interesting political conflicts in the background, yet the main quest is lowest common denominator Tolkien fan fic.

It’s also got some incredibly tedious copy-paste-encounter dungeon design. The dwarf knockoff Moria level in particular is a labyrinthine hell of repetition no one should have to suffer through for the wet fart that is Origins’ finale.

Why three stars, in that case? Idk, I’m a sucker for Flemeth and illusory moral dialogue trees I guess.

BioWare games tend to be very flawed pieces of work, that I generally enjoy. They're hard for me to hate on too much, as they manage to still capture a general aesthetic all the way through, and there's a considerable amount of nerdy worldbuilding they generate. Usually inspired by background politics and ideas lifted elsewhere, Dragon Age Origins is a rusty example of such applied to dark fantasy. And thankfully, I managed to enjoy myself despite the ridiculous amounts of issues and other valleys I was forced to cross over.

To get this out of the way, DA:O is still a buggy mess and unoptimized, to where I still managed to have the game crash years after this game's release, as well as run into some other unsavory bugs. Nothing game breaking, but certainly a shitton of flow interruption.

The game's biggest flaw though stems from its lackluster combat. It has some strategic depth to it for sure, and some encounters on the highest difficulty make use of the systems intertwined here, but none of it is interesting to use past the first couple hours. DA:O also breaks under several several exploits, to a point where combat becomes a chore the vast majority of time, and only being tolerable when it's at its best. Rogues and Mages just decimate anything in their way to the point of disbelief. To make matters worse, the game makes you do a lot of combat, way more than anyone should have to, especially for a game of its type. Clearly the darkspawn should be terrified as soon as they see the MC considering his body count in the span of a fucking couple weeks.

That being said, past these combat issues there's a good amount of worldbuilding to enjoy, and especially great characters to get to know. There's a couple of misses on either side, but overall what you're generally treated to is an excellently moving series of character-specific stories tied neatly to the main story. Each of them deal with a central political or personal theme that I found engaging, and in fact, found the main story to be engaging as it used its concept of this all-ending Blight pushed off by politicians worrying about their own issues. At the time of this review, COVID has us all in quarantine, and the politics above the stairs are having their own quibbles as people don't get the things they need. So, I honestly found the story to be more realistic than I think the writers had in mind. The characters especially are my favorite part, with Alistair and Morrigan's banter being the big highlights of the journey through Fereldin.

Dragon Age: Origins also ends on a high note, with the last couple missions holding the most meat in terms of story and character content as well as political drama, while also revealing interesting and legitimate motivations for the antagonists. It managed to right itself as a good game in my book, although one I have to carefully recommend, because there are still several issues that could end the appeal right then and there.

If you can get past some bugs, bleh music, several downturns of boring content, many disappointing missteps, you'll find a western RPG that I think holds up quite decently.

It's been a long, weird journey for me with this game. I remember reading about it in magazines before it came out, and I thought the origin stories were the coolest idea ever. I was ultimately pretty disappointed by them, and I really disliked the art style. I also didn't like how generic the world felt. I couldn't ignore the fact that the Darkspawn are exactly the orcs from LotR. Eventually I burned myself out trying to get all of the achievements, just like I did with Mass Effect 1, and all of these things soured me on the game quite a bit.

With years of distance between myself and those initial mixed feelings, I can say that Dragon Age Origins is one of the best Bioware games, and one of the better western RPGs in general. It's full of good and memorable content, combat is well thought out, and the characters are memorable in typical Bioware fashion.

Mother of all recent D&D High Fantasy, Dragon Age Origins is what made me discover the genre years ago and by this day I still haven’t found something similar to it that could impress me in the same way. The campaign story is familiar but functional, you play as a warrior who has to recruit multiple companions and armies to deal with the evil hordes threatening the world at large. There are elves, dwarves, orcs, dogs, mages and brothels. Welcome to writing cliched fantasy 101.

What made the predictable story interesting is how Origins has the last and probably one the best choices and consequences system of any BioWare game, or RPG game in general for that matter. Dialogues are interesting because you are often given many possible lines to choose from to expand your character and your relationships just like in more retro games and, even if the world is pretty bland and the lore is too huge to properly understand without taking a week off to study every tome you find, the companions are funny and compelling enough to make you want to explore more, hear more banters and deal some more deathblows to giant Ogres by gouging their heads with your sword.

The combat is a nice mix of CRPG tactics with a third person visual that makes you feel more ‘inside’ the action rather than an almighty but detatched God witnessing it all from the ceiling. The chance to change the camera from isometric to third person was hugely helpful both for strategic and for cinematic reasons: have you ever wanted to ride a Dragon head while dealing multiple blows to it? Boy, who wouldn't.

The world is composed by a huge overall map of the region, called Ferelden, and multiple icons composing the explorable locations. There is no open world to speak of and my most sincere thanks for it, it sure helps never getting side tracked or lost. In fact, going from north to south, from east to west, meeting different people and different races the game provides you with a diversified, multicoloured land to explore and discover, with beautiful landscapes and average looking cities, but never giving you the feeling of being completely lost as per where to go. It’s never going to take the effort to do anything original with the setting though, you might as well change the name to Middle-Earth and everything would still make perfect sense as a Lord of the Rings game.

Dragon Age Origins, as the most memorable efforts from BioWare, is better to be remembered for the incredible cast of memorable and loveable characters: Morrigan, Oghren, Shale, Sten, Leliana even if she was a skank sometimes, Alistair and so on. This is a Fellowship of the ring I would’ve loved to be part of.