Review: Dragon Age Origins: Ultimate Edition (2010)

• December 17, 2011
• James Skemp
• gaming, review

Amazing value, for a great RPG

A while ago a friend lent me his copy of Dragon Age Origins for the Xbox 360. While I enjoyed the game, I had a number of other games that I was playing, and I returned it without finishing it. With the price drops of the Ultimate Edition, I decided to finally pick up a copy, for the PS3, but it sat unused until a short time ago.

This collection comes with the original game as well as all the DLC. You'll still be prompted about a new DLC when you're on the start screen, but it's actually telling you about one that collected two of the DLC together, which I think is just an oversight on their end.

The DLC display as a second disc when you put the game in (there's only one physical disc) and require that you install each separately. I have an idea of why they did this, but it's unfortunate that you have to install each, as you can't just start the process, walk away to do something else, and then come back to have them all installed.

As for the game itself, I wanted this because of the RPG elements, and that I had played games of this type on PC many years ago. While initially people were worried that PC gameplay wouldn't cross over to the consoles, I don't think that was really necessary for this game.

However, there are times when I wish I had a mouse so I could better control which enemies my character attacks, but over the course of my many hours this only came up a handful of times, and in all but a few cases it didn't matter much.

The story for this game is actually quite good, with a nice variety depending upon your actions. There are different origins for each character type (with race, birth, and class all determining who you start as), and whether you care about the trophies/achievements or not, I'd recommend playing through them all, especially since you'll meet a number of the characters later, no matter your origin.

I ran into one glitch where a battle never ended, but at this point there's enough information about the game to know what to do to prevent it. I also found the initial loading screen to take a heck of a long time. I don't think this is related to the number of saves I had, and my network connection is fairly quick, but I didn't care enough to actually research it too deeply, so I can't complain.

This was my 10th platinum trophy, so I obviously enjoyed the base game enough to play the heck out of it (although the base trophies are more time consuming, depending upon what you do, than hard).

I honestly have a hard time finding any faults with the game. Is Dragon Age Origins: Ultimate Edition really a five-star game? I could certainly see myself finishing the DLC that I didn't get through (including Awakening, which was once a game sold by itself), and have basically gone through all the main story options, so ... I supppose it is.

• review
• rpg