What went right

What went right

The core design: Isometric pausable real-time combat, silent protagonist etc. No open world memes or "awesome button" combat or any of such things.

The setting and characters, while very unexpectional, are strongly characterized (say, Oghren is "the drunk dwarf"). This is obviously worse than actually novel and creative world, but tropes and stereotypes are vastly preferable to setting and characters lacking clear identity. You kinda care about stuff in DA:O, as opposed to something like Pillars of Eternity (even if it wasn't for garbage Kickstarter backer fluff water it down even further).

It enjoys the benefits of modernity (native high-resolution support, solid UI and such like) and is a generally polished game with a lot of attention to detail (things like pretty much every NPC treating a returning Dwarf Noble in Orzammar).


Overall, DA:O has no standout features, art, design or content (main story is poor, side quests range from all right to good), but it doesn't have obvious critical weaknesses either which is a strength in its own right, and the style of game the devs set out to make is a fine one.

Not much. Just made me want to go back and play NWN or NWN2:MotB

Difficulty, grimdarkness, visual aesthetics, the 100/10 music, the world/setting. It was BioWare's last truly great game. Dare I say it, it was the last good non-tableop RPG for everyone in the world till this day.

Nwn2 is garbage compared to 1

EA didn't get a chance to fuck with it.

>concise experience, doesnt overstay its welcome
>great companions
>decent story
>decent combat system
>consistent from start to finish (although awakening was lacking in my opinion, but thats DLC so it doesnt count really)

sound and music were great and althought the graphics didnt age well at all its still refreshing in times of the skinner box filled open world trend that plagues modern games

They took their long while making it instead of being rushed by EA, it was also before they were filled by faggots

Character creation is probably the strongest part for me.
It's right in the name. All the origins and the way they fit into the main narrative is fun.

>the 100/10 music
god yes, that music is so good

The soundtrack was good but it doesn't really stand out or anything, I wouldn't praise it so much

Companion AI settings.

Everything else ranges from OK to embarassingly bad.

Not that much, It was a fun combat system, overall good game but didn't make an impression on me like truly great games do, even though I've came back to it several times

The campfire song was relaxing but other than that, I can't remember anything and I've played the game three times

I only remember the title screen song which was pretty cool

>Concise experience
Fuck off. Mages tower.

it was supposed to usher in a new era of the crpg. instead we got da2 which helped kill the crpg

Awakening is a lot better Tbh, also the game allowed for some pretty interesting builds.

This. You can't fucking overstate how important having a silent protagonists is for RPGs.

not saying every part was super good, i was more talking about the fact that the game didnt drag on too hard with meaningless tasks and was overall a compact experience compared to modern open world games which have a lot of shallow mechanics and tasks

i disagree, couldnt finish awakening despite loving the base game

it would have been great if they found a way to use the old companions since they are infinitely better and more fleshed out than the new ones in the DLC

although you could argue it would undermine the event of origins but eh

and while the new abilites were fun and all, they seemed like more gimmicks on top of everything and encounter didnt seem balanced for the high level count at all even on nightmare difficulty

I liked the quests, they were short and sweet.

But again, I don't really care that much about the story and all and just like seeing big numbers fly

Awakening has nicer areas, better pacing and superior main quest. On the other hand, it's a far shorter game, there's fewer side quests with proper story content (as opposed to Chanter's Board kind of quests) even relative to the overall game size and there's generally less meat in its bones (for example, you can't just chat with your companions and there's less character building for them).

In terms of builds, I don't really know. On one hand it enables a whole new kind of character archetypes (say, willpower-based warriors) that previously didn't even exist and more builds are "viable" in a sense of not being just dead weight, but conversely some others (archers being the most obvious) get completely out of hand: is 50dps cunning-based rogue "viable" when an archer would do 200dps and kill the targets before a backstabber-archetype even gets close? You have more freedom and options in a sense, but in another sense the good stuff is even more pronouncedly strong in relation to the weak stuff so are they really legit options instead of player deliberately choosing to handicap themselves?

>doesnt overstay its welcome
Wrong

Shit sequel made people compare the two. Think Morrowind and Oblivion.

They accidentally made a solid, fun game.

Don't worry though, Bioware realized the error of their ways and quickly rectified that issue with Dragon Age 2.

Oh, and besides being much leaner, Awakening is also substantially more buggy. Crashes to desktop using some spell combinations, quests getting stuck or not being able to get one (even when extremely basic conditions are concerned, like starting the smuggler/guard quests in Amaranthine blocking you from Sigrun's companion quest) and even stuff like losing all your equipped items for good when you get captured by the Architect (apparently based on some imported gear from Origins). There's a bunch of broken stuff in Origins too of course but Awakening is way more broken.

Deffinetly not the fucking fade in the mages tower. That's for sure.