Dragon Age Origins is hands down one of the worst rpg games ever made. Do NOT believe the hype on this one.
Take for example GameSpot's very own review. Everything that they loved about the game, I felt exactly the opposite. Let's start with the gameplay. It's beyond the point of boredom. You do some much footwork and so much time talking that you might as well be reading a book about how to ship cardboard, while you play this game, for excitement. Lines, and lines, and lines, and lines, and lines of needless dialogue are expressed through the monotony that is your "every decision has a consequence" style of gameplay here. Don't get me wrong, there are some pretty neat decisions to make that can really alter how the story pans out. But, if you're lucky to last long enough to get into some combat... oh wait, you just got into combat and realized that it's actually more exciting to talk to Random NPC over in the corner. Seriously, the combat is very slow paced. It takes your characters about 3 seconds to swing a weapon. You can't jam on an attack button and expect results because, for some incredibly ridiculous reason, your character auto-attacks on his/her own. And that's not the only thing they do on their own. They also ignore commands often. You'll be in the "heat" of battle wondering why your not killing these guys fast enough, when suddenly you realize your main DPSer is wanking his doink over there in la la land. You can choose to switch control from your main character to the off characters in your party, which can help this problem sometimes. But, you better believe that as soon as you swap back to your main character that other guy immediately begins dreaming about what life is like on planet Noschtwaga in the Eagle Nebula. He may be fine in the next fight, but inevitably a combination of dementia and ADD set in, and he's back thinking about what size underwear Antarctic wears for mangling at Hanson.
Let's talk loot. I would prefer an actual lute here, but I'm just trying to speak the truth about this... something. Everything drops loot in this game. Everything, all the time, ever drops loot in this game. That's great! If by loot it meant picking up useful equipment to better my party and not picking up useless junk all of the time. Your bags will runeth over with junk. There is a specially marked tab in your inventory called Junk. As for why a dev studio would bother with writing code for actual useless junk in their game is so far beyond me. I might as well join Doinky McWank over there and ponder the outcome of mixing cherries but refer unto lightning swim. Unfortunately, other games have this as well. I don't get it. Don't want to get it. But, it is what it is I suppose. Consider this my overall rant for every game that has this useless looting feature in them.
As I said before, your bags will runeth over with junk. So, when you finally do come across that random, mildly helpful item you will most always have to empty your bags in some way. Sure, you can sell the junk. (If you're lucky enough to be in town while your bags are full) You can also destroy the junk. The irony in this however, is that you may find yourself having more fun "breaking" junk in the game than actually playing the game. Of course you can always just not pick up the junk, but let's face it, we RPG gamers are a lazy bunch for the most part. Admit it. Some of us may weight 300 lbs., and some of us work out daily to maintain our eight-pack abs, but when it comes down to sitting with a controller to play a game we go on ahead and hit that "loot all" button. Don't we? Yes, yes we do.
If you're playing this game on consoles then you will notice something about the game's combat system. It's infuriatingly difficult. And not so much difficult as in "man, I can't play this game. It's too hard for me" kind of difficult. It's difficult in that the controls suck, your team is so dumb, and your enemies can easily down a single character if you fail at one little thing. The camera is also rarely helpful. It stays glued to the character you're currently controlling. So on consoles, you never have a good vantage point to really see what's going on around you. Which is why you didn't see Mr. McWank dilly dallying over there soon enough to try and make something happen. If I could sum the entirety of DA:O's combat gameplay in one word, it would be apoplexy.
How about them graphics, huh? Don't they look spiffy! Hmm... oh, sorry. I was just looking at some old gameplay footage of Devil May Cry 4. What? Oh, no. Dragon Age Origins graphics look bad. Not terrible. Just bad. Fable on the Xbox had better graphics than these, seriously. The first time I booted up DA:O and saw the in-engine graphics, I literally cringed. Not to mention the loading times. The system didn't have much to process in way of AI and other processes, but to take this long to load something up that looked this bad... I almost wanted to swear just then. Just... just... fail. I don't know what happened with Bioware on this one, you would have thought that they would have just used MEs graphics engine. Which actually looks pretty good. I don't know, that's all I have to say about the visual quality of this game. No one can possibly argue the validity of the graphical quality of this game, they just can't. It's a (roughly) third generation ,current-gen game that looks like a last generation PS2 title. God of War looked better... enough said.
What I did like about the game was some (SOME) of the VO cast. And Alistair is about as big of a jerk as I am. One of the best characters ever in my book. But, that's pretty much it. Mind you, the PC version of this game is void of almost every complaint I have about it... almost. Doinky still plays Hide Mr. Peeps over there sometimes, and the overall build up of junk in my inventory still bugs me. But, overall on the PC (which is where this game should have belonged exclusively), thanks to numerous extra methods of control and processing, the game is actually pretty decent; though, mind you, still on the boring side.
The game sucked overall, trust me. Like I said before, the only reason I think people still talk up this game is because it was some kind of crazy, stupid fad. A fad that I didn't understand why someone would buy in to. I'm no hater, I just hate bad games. And this is definitely one of them. This game is proof that you definitely can not trust the critics all of the time, also the "players". DA2, though not an entire improvement, was at least so much more fun than it's predecessor. Yup, I just went there and said that. Deal with it. I speak the truth.
This game blows @3/10, a truthful score.