Dragon Age: Origins

I'm 20 hours into this game and loving every minute of it. If you are a fan of any of Biowares previous titles, such as Mass Effect, NVN, BG, KOTOR, you'll find a the best parts of each of them combined into this game. Epic storyline, hard decisions, frantic combat, this is the game RPG fans have been waiting for.

Damage Per Second, Tanks and Ranged. These MMO class staples have come to the single player RPG and it's brilliant.

Dragon Age may be the spiritual successor to Balders Gate, and the epic storyline reflects this, but their paths diverge wildly when it comes to character development and gameplay. Baldurs Gate was based on the older AD&D2 ruleset, way before the word “Trait” was coined. This led to fairly simple character builds, where the core class was what it was, with very little leeway. Then came Neverwinter Nights and things got complicated. One wrong choice in a skill tree and a restart would have been in order.

Now, you longer have to plan your character builds to the Nth degree so that you don't nerf your character by choosing the wrong trait. With a new skill or talent every level, your style will develop more naturally until you find out which way you want to play, and whether you are a Rogue, Warrior or Mage, you can stand back and ping Darkspawn, or wade in and have at the little buggers up close and personal.

This flexibility has let me focus more on the game and the story, rather than replaying the first 5 hours to get that “perfect” build under way. And what a story it is. Sure the story is one long cliche, but the way it evolves through backstory and conversation is head and shoulders above the rest.

And thats what is so great about DA. You can hack and slash it, level yourself stupid and get your character build “just right”. Or…you can go through the (wide) dialog trees and get to know your party members. Go with them on their personal quests and there's not only some great locations and set pieces, but also some great loot waiting for you. You can even get VERY personal with them if you want to.

Get it, play it, love it, then play it again and kill everything in sight!!

Perfect graphics, runs exceptionally well on my rig, diverse range of voice actors, awesome and detailed environments and a challenging fighting system. I am happy with the purchase of DAO and was surprised at how quick delivery was received!
However, the games downloadable content (DLC) isn\'t free (for the most part) and i found if i want to pay to keep a game fresh i might as well revert back to playing World of Warcraft (WoW), seems kind of low for developers to require \“points\” to purchase this content (points which are \“earned\” by paying money).
On the other hand, gameplay is hardly ever stale with varying quests and storylines brought about by each new race, class, origin and \“good\”/\“bad\” decision you make.
I must admit, i had some reservations about the \“Pause\” gameplay style since i have adapted to real time battle sequences, but DAO has really kept battles interesting and challenging; rather than slowing down gameplay, \“pausing\” a battle allows for you to ponder over what strategy would be best in the current situation as its almost impossible to win battles on the harder difficulties without some sort of plan! for example, burst DPSing one target may burn his/her life quick but if that target has high defense your party may take far too much damage from other enemies. Therefore, pausing and taking time out to assess the battle is a viable option; perhaps you can position your mage in a way so as to freeze the larger target, (positioning is extremely important, you may end up freezing your own ally!) or disable him with some bow skills. This is a simple example though, and there are many encounters which challenge you to think about resistances, armour types, weapon types and planning your skill cycle.

It has been five years since this game was first announced, and I have now been playing this game for the past few weeks. It has been absolutely worth the wait.
This is a well polished RPG, great visuals and a story with depth and replayablity.
You will be replaying this game to complete all the different Origin stories for weeks or months(depending on how hardcore you are). Worth every cent.
People have been comparing it to Mass Effect, this is not an accurate comparison. Mass Effect is a shooter with RPG elements. Dragon Age: Origins is an RPG.
If you were a fan of Knights of the Old Republic or Baldurs Gate you will be at home with Dragon Age: Origins.

This game is by far one of the most entertaining RPG's of this year, I have clocked over 50 hours and am still trying out different races and characters just to see how the story plays out, the game has 6 origins stories which are all very fun which keeps the game fresh every time you make a new character.

Bosses are hard but fun, the environments are very dynamic, cool characters that you will love, a great combat system piled with the fantastic story, this game is excellent and I recommend it to anyone who loves RPG's or even adventure games.