Customer Reviews

Dragon Age: Origins Awakening

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I love that Bioware is still pushing content for this game. Given, the DLC's to date have been hit and miss, but I still liked how they added more enjoyment to the game. Awakening plays more like a DLC than what I would expect from a full on expansion.

The story is well written (though this is usually a given for Bioware games) and the playthrough is fun enough. But due to the linear playstyle and lack of any character development, there is really little reason to play more than once. All previous downloaded content is incompatible with this expansion. Rather sad to try and play my previous character and find that I started out completely naked.

I had hoped that loading a previous campaign would fill out the story and world I made through my previous actions and encounters, but it actually changes little. You see a familiar face, but not one anyone really cared about.

The new skills are nice to have. Each class has a new row of advanced skills which have level requirements rather than any stat pre-requisites.

I didn't try out the mage campaign, so I can't comment on how well the new spells work but I can't see how this should make or break this game.

In the end, I would have given this a higher score, but the price tag is nuts for an expansion. After buying the game, all of the DLC's and now this expansion we are looking at $80 to $100 just to get everything. Not being able to use your download content items is rather sad as well. Expansions should "expand" a game, not add a disconnected tangent to a story.

I was looking forward to this game and preordered it. Maybe I was expecting too much. My biggest problem is how short the game is. Easily beaten, including all side quests within 15 hours. Way too short. What was made out to be a sprawling epic felt more like a weekend in the life of a Grey Warden. When the other reviews say it felt like DLC, they are right. Companions were generic with little redeeming qualities. I pretty much could have cared less about any of them. The character Nathaniel turned out to be the best of the bunch as far as back story goes. The rest of the companions seemed to be thrown in so you'd have a complete group. Companions in Awakening = easily disposable. Side quests were easy to the point of being unnecessary in some cases. The City of Arimathine is the most drab city you'll run into, more like a very small town. Anybody who has played Origins will feel underwhelmed by Awakening. The graphics are as good as the first. The storage container at the Vigil is a welcome addition. All in all, too little game to warrant the price tag. Wait for the price to drop if your thinking about purchasing this.

First, let me state that I LOVED dragon age origins, I would give that game a near perfect score. So with a great disappointment that I have to give such a low score to awakening. For whatever mind boggling reason, They took out the very things that made origins special, for example, they took out the interacting with your party members at camp and instead, have this non intuitive way of party members where they will say something only if you are at the right place, at the right time, with the right item. Its very confusing and I know I have missed out on much conversational dilog simply because you have no idea on what to do. On top of that, even when you do get to interact with characters, its pretty shallow and doesn't feel so much as you are interacting with them, than simply hearing what quest they want. There is no deep emotional stories, history, banter, romance, philosophy,etc that was present in the first game, its just the bare bone facts and then they shut up like clams until whatever random activation mechanism gets them to talk again. In origins I truly cared for my comrades and would go to the ends of the earth to help them out with their quests. In awakening, I felt nothing, I did a couple of companions quests, but gave up after a while because you do not care about them and when a couple died at the end pf the game, I said "meh".

Then there is the liner generic rpg quests that seemed mostly just time killer, search all over map for dragon bones, search all over map for rare seeds, search all over map for particular tree...etc, much of it was pretty boring leg work. There isn't any unique quests besides the main ones, also, there are very few places to go, I know this is an expansion, but you only have ONE city you can go to and its very small.

Then there are the bugs, not ingame bugs, but software bugs, You will run into them fairly often, freezing screen, quests not updating correctly, missing items. So a fair warning about that.

Finally, the game just feels unfinished, *spoiler warning, do not read past this*


*you were warned*
After the big boss battle at the end, expect a huge disappointment that there is no epilogue, literally, right after the fight it jumps to a quick text telling about what happened to all the areas and your companions. The game does not even save your character after the end of the boss battle, so you will always be right before the boss battle if you continue.


Then the price is outrageous, I preordered based on the fantastic experience I had with dragon age, now I have buyers remorse. I highly suggest waiting for this game to come down in price, you will feel ripped off if you get it now.

I have always been a fan of fantasy RPGs. Although found VERY few that really excited me. For the longest time Baulder's Gate was the only franchise I loved...until I found Dragon Age. Excellent plot, great graphics, voice acting...amazing game all in all, never had a single thing to complain about. In fact, I found the "choose your own adventure" style very refreshing...so many paths.

When I saw the sequel coming out I was very happy. I had hoped to pick up with my guys right where I left off. But as the game began, only one of my previous companions was present (and not one of my favorites either)

The plot was great and even had some interesting new challenges. But what made the first game so amazing (character development, relationships, romance, etc) were gone. No more camp, interacting with your companions is now "forced".

I played nearly every quest. Completed the game in about 14 hours (which is way too soon for this price). At the end of the game...after beating the last boss...nothing. The end of the first game offered a long drawn out compliation of conversations and cutscenes...this time...the last thing you see is your character walking away from the dead boss. It was almost like they fired the game's writer when he was 95% done and decided "eh, its close enough just end it there"

While I am grateful that this franchise is going to continue...dont mess up such a good thing. The original was truly the game of the year, one of the best games Ive ever played. Let's make sure that the following are a requirement for the next expansion/game...

1) Keep your existing companions
2) Pay close attention to the character and relationship development
3) Don't rush...if you arent going to do it right, dont bother

I'll start out by saying that I really enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins, just to establish a point of reference. But in my opinion, Bioware just phoned it in with this expansion pack.

The story is about as generic as imaginable. The Darkspawn are back (again); please kill them. OK, it is a *bit* more sophisticated than that, but better that I avoid spoilers. What surprises me is that, with such a weak story to work with, Bioware didn't leverage the one thing they could assume players would care about: the characters they just spent ~80 with during DA:O. This should have been a no-brainer (but apparently the scope of Awakenings isn't sufficient to address the plotlines established at the end of Origins. For this, we'll have to wait for DA2.) Instead, they start you out with a clean slate of new party members (excepting your leader, whom you can import from the previous game, if you like.) These new characters are 99.8% impossible to care about in the course of this very short campaign.

Yes, short. I rarely complain about this, but this game surprised me, especially in light of its price. When the price has dropped to, say, $15 or $20, this may represent a reasonable value, but considering I paid $40 (and had only paid $50 for DA:O in the first place) I was astonished to finish the game in just a handful of short sessions. Personally, I don't mind a short game, and the price wasn't a major consideration, but be warned. What concerns me more is that the game starts and ends before you can really get invested in the characters, or before any real level of challenge is established.

There is evidence of a few sidequests that I didn't complete, but honestly, doing so would have merely added inventory to (possibly) make the main quest easier, and it was already a ridiculous cakewalk - this with a new main character, on normal mode. (Another way of putting this is, the game never gave me a chance to do these sidequests, it simply ended, unexpectedly.) I would strongly recommend that anyone starting Awakenings go straight to hard mode, at least, in order to get some satisfaction out of the game's strategic element. Otherwise, you're really just going through the motions, and waiting for the credits to roll. (At least you needn't wait very long.)

I eagerly paid $40 for this software. I was stupid.

Dragon Age: Origins was an instant Classic. Brillant, deep and bone shakingly great to play. The story line in Origins was one of the best ever. The Origins segments added depth and feeling to each character at a gut level. The NPC characters like Morrigan and Alistar, etc. were so real you began to feel like you were making new friends. Sten and Shale and Ohgren all made me LMAO.

I think Origins is a sign post to the future of RPG.

Awakenings, on the other hand, is a total rip off. This is a $10 extension being sold as a full price product. The lack of an Orlesian Origins story was totally UNFORGIVABLE. The story is thin and flat. With the notable exception of Justice, the new NPC characters are sketchy and totally uninteresting.

Save your money. Do not buy this until it is discounted below $15.

There's no reason whatsoever to play this game if you haven't already played Dragon Age: Origins, which at this point is down to almost the same price as the expansion. If that describes you, go get that game! Seriously. It's awesome.

The expansion is a solid game, but it's nowhere near the level of its predecessor. It's excessively easy (the original was a challenge at certain points even on Easy mode, but it's quite possible to get through nearly this entire game without ever reaching 3/4 health), not terribly well-plotted, and very short - especially in comparison. The clever sidequests and elegantly unfolding main plot of the first one are replaced with what are pretty much exclusively fetch quests, to the point that characters sometimes even give you actual recipe lists of loot to gather for them. A few of the original voice actors return, but they're not given a lot to work with - the story is rushed and the script lackluster, and most of the characters aren't very well fleshed-out. Even the levels are brief and full of padding, and a lot of it felt like they were just ticking off boxes to reuse existing stuff from the first game (the four main components are a city level, a forest level, a Deep Roads level, and a creepy village level, plus there's a lengthy detour to the Fade - sound familiar?). Even down to reusing character models for what were cool and unique challenge fights in the first one, like the Broodmother and the High Dragon. It was a little difficult to escape the feeling that I'd seen all this before, even with the new content. It can't be easy to try to make a direct continuation to a game as versatile and complex as Dragon Age, but the plot to Awakening is self-contained to the point of feeling irrelevant to the larger story. Most of the characters from the first game don't even get cameos, and the one recruitable returning character is also the weakest by far of the original cast. And a few components just feel like outright self-parody, like (antagonist) the Mother's endless scenery chewing.

There are some things that show quality work, though. The new monsters are cool-looking and well-animated, and there are a bunch of interesting new skills and specializations. Although they do sometimes contradict parts of the ending sequence for the first game, the ending slides are satisfyingly varied, and most things you do in the game play a role in shaping how Amaranthine turns out. And a couple of the NPCs do show signs of life, as abbreviated as their subplots are - particularly the Architect, one of the principle antagonists. There's just not really enough to this game for any of the key strength of the first one - the extremely high-quality writing and voice work - to come into play, and the things that the game does competently enough just don't compare on any level with the (admittedly high) standard set by the first game.

But the game's most fatal flaw is that it's *insanely* buggy, especially in the graphical department. Abrupt cuts to black in the middle of dialog trees, character faces simply disappearing, permanently looping cutscenes, characters getting stuck in ridiculous-looking fight animation cycles during dialog, characters turning invisible, clipping errors, invisible walls, cutscenes that didn't trigger for several minutes after they were clearly supposed to, even loot drops that took upwards of a minute to appear on corpses - I encountered all of these in the roughly 6-8 hours of play time this game took to get through, at rates that made it rare to make it through a half hour without encountering a glitch. Quality assurance and bug-fixing aren't easy tasks, but this is just sloppy. The game doesn't even support BioWare's own existing DLC.

Overall, the game is about par for the course for a short, linear RPG, but far below the standards set by the first game in nearly every way. People who loved Dragon Age might appreciate the chance to continue playing. It'll probably make a decent middle chapter once a patch is released, but there's little evident of the obvious love that went into crafting the first game. Hopefully when an actual sequel emerges it won't feel as rushed and unsupported as this - an average-quality game that's far too truncated and padded to feel worth the $40 price tag.

The previous review is most excellent so I'll keep it brief. Dragon age awakening is very linear. The new skills only apply to a very specific character build. Cunning rouges will not get any new cunning talents and the same goes for non combat mages, only blood mages and arcane warriors will benfit from the new mage specilization and dexterity based warriors won't get as many new talents as their strength based counterparts. On top of all of this all the new skills are level based. This means that it doesn't matter if you have high constituion or have never put a point in it you can still take maximum points in the vitality skill which doesn't make a lot of sense. If you liked the blood powers from the Warden's keep DLC forget it their gone (which is troubling if you built your character around it)Also make sure your not using any DLC armor or you'll stroll up to the keep in your underwear.

The story is okay but the character interactions are a little lacking and I'm annoyed that the characters wait around politly for you to give them permission to speak before giving their two cents on a subject. The story is engrossing enough which is good because with the previously mentioned limted choice advancment there's not a lot of character customization. All in all the game is just what the other reviews say a tacked on addition to a truly excellent game.

The Awakening expansion for Dragon Age is nothing short of awesome. It makes you feel like you've picked up where you left off in Dragon Age, allowing you to even import your main character from the previous campaign.

As far as the gameplay is concerned, it is the same great Dragon Age, but it has an entirely different feel than Origins in that you're starting from level 20 so you have lots and lots of abilities to play and work with. There is also a large increase in the number of sustained abilities that one can utilize. This can be quite effective when you start stacking auras and/or sustained abilities. Consequently, Willpower becomes a sought after statistic in order to actually utilize the plethora of abilities at your disposal. Fighting itself is more intense and some of the new abilities, like Massacre, are extremely entertaining.

I play on Nightmare difficulty and I found Awakening to be easier than regular Origins for two reasons: the first is because there are so many more abilities to work with and the second is because there are books that one can buy for 12 gold to customize characters' abilities entirely from level 1. This allows you to craft your group to have an unmatched synergy. It also allows for trying new and different tactics / builds with your characters. Unfortunately, the ease of play also means that you breeze right through the game, so it can feel rather short in comparison to the monster that was Origins.

The group and party dynamic feels different in Awakening as well. To gain approval rating, you have to have a member present in your party and happen by some object in the terrain that invokes a conversation. This means you can't just spam-talk to your party members to gain approval like you could in regular Origins.

Finally, the storyline is fantastic and Awakening does a great job of bringing good moral choices to the forefront, setting new standards for games. In Origins, despite all of the different factions and gray areas, there was still the feeling of "good" verses "evil" when it came to you verses the darkspawn. Without spoiling anything, Awakening does an excellent job of turning this polarized standard on its head and it even brings the darkspawn themselves into the gray. The questions it forces one to ask and the choices it causes one to make imitate moral choices in real life instead of keeping the polarized fantasy outlook that so many of us are familiar with. It is refreshing and it really puts a huge twist on the storyline, making one question their own purpose as a sort of hero of Ferelden. I do feel it could have been explored a bit more and perhaps the ending was a bit rushed in its conclusions, but I'm sure we can look forward to exploring that storyline further in the next expansion.

For those more interested in the character development aspect that is present in Origins, while some of the basics still remain in Awakening, Awakening is more fighting and less songs by the fire. Even still, I don't think it will disappoint as the loads of action can make up for it.

In short, if you loved Dragon Age, Awakening is a must have and it is a blast to play.

While I miss the lack of interaction between the characters, including absolutely no romance options, what bothers me the most about this expansion is the buggy, beta feel to it. Essentially, everyone who buys this game and plays it is doing beta-testing for Bioware/EA. That's the only explanation. People who THINK they had no bugs may want to research the various questlines they might have missed because they closed them off by doing things "out-of-order".

This expansion seems to force the player through the game even moreso than DAO. This is NOT Morrowind or Oblivion, games in which a player could actually explore. It is essentially Resident Evil with a bit more routing choices (that is, you can decide to go to point A before point B. But once at point A, you can only stay on the path presented. Knee high rocks provide insurmountable obstacles).

The new Runecrafting skill is tedious and slow. I've played through the game without once creating more than a couple. You can't actually create runes while in the Vigil Keep throne room. You have to get whatever supplies you need, leave the throne room, wait for the load time to complete, then start crafting. Rinse and repeat. Snore.

The game story itself does offer some unique twists from the original. The darkspawn seem more fleshed out - less than the simple cannon-fodder they were in DAO. But the characters you are playing are more one-dimensional than the original. There is little to no interaction with them. All the major interaction is forced (i.e. you get a new party member. When you return to the Vigil Keep throne room, they will immediately talk to you. Any other time, when you click on them, they just state something like "Let's get going". No dialogue options, no depth).

As for technical bugs: their presence is inexcusable - especially the sheer number of them. I won't list them here. Just look on Bioware's forum or the dragonage wiki to see a list of all the bugs that have been discovered so far.

All in all, some interesting features, but none worth full price.