Dragon Age: Origins Awakening

10 Review to this product

• 

  Adventure Fan
  March 16th, 2010 on 1:47 am

  Rating

  Know what you get, and what you don’t.

  NO ROMANCE / NO DLC USAGE / NO REPLAYABILITY

  To date, I’ve invested more than 150 hours in Dragon Age. I bought all the DLC. For me, all Bioware games are Must-Play. But I can’t make the argument that Awakening is Must-Own. It all depends on what you care about. Bioware games work on four pillars. Story World. Level-up System. Romance. Replayability. Awakening has two of the four. By 25% more Dragon Age, I expect to get 35 hours out of Awakening. Three play throughs, about 12 hours each. Warrior, mage, thief. I don’t count that at as full replayability. I expect to get 6-8 play throughs for a Bioware game. Awakening doesn’t let you use any of your DLC. Awakening has no romance. No old romance. No new romance. With no romance and no dlc and no full replayability, I consider Awakening 50% of a Bioware experience.

  5-STAR BIOWARE STORYTELLING / LEVEL-UP TO 35

  The same writers, the same artists, the same level of excellence. If you understand what you’re getting, Awakening is easy to love. New quests are fun. Meeting new characters are fun. It’s bittersweet that you don’t get to continue with your old companions, but that’s part of the emotional experience. You have to imagine making leather-bikini love to Morigan in that secret part of your mind while you’re splattering fresh darkspawn blood. Or you can treat this mission as optional, and never make the trip. It’s your Fantasy. You don’t have to play it. You don’t have to buy it. You don’t have to give Bioware your money.

  FOR ME, IT’S A MUST-PLAY. FOR WHAT IT IS, IT’S AWESOME.
• 

  Scott Baboyian
  March 21st, 2010 on 12:39 pm

  Rating

  Man, these reviewers are harsh! Stop freaking whining about all the little items you wanted to import from the last game (which will easily be replaced with new and more powerful stuff), quit crying about how you want to go look for Morrigan, and freaking play.

  If you do play, you’ll find a great story, interesting new characters who are fun to use in combat, amazing battle situations, lots of new items, specializations, skills & abilities, and plenty of play time for your money. The new enemy types are great–powerful and fast, the sub-quests are pretty cool, the loot is plentiful, and the art direction and creativity of the new environments, locations and such are, if anything, better than the original!

  People are complaining about the length– when most games cost $50-$60 and give you about 6-9 hours of play time, I don’t know what the problem is here. With the ability to create a new character from scratch adding even more replay value (in addition to playing through with any/all your characters from the first game) what the heck is there to complain about?

  In short, go in with an open mind, and don’t focus too much on a couple of character-importing details/glitches, and you will have a blast with this add-on. I will say that having played this both with imported characters, and with a newly created one, it works MUCH better creating a new one. The story makes much more sense, the process of equipping your character makes more sense (bringing in all that powerful stuff from your original game imbalances this one), the game is more challenging & balanced–things just click.

  I sincerely hope they keep churning these out, I’m happy to pay for more time with one of the best video games ever made…spoiler—>> the only bad news is that the finale of the game really seems to put the nail in the coffin of this tale, bringing everything to a close and basically letting you know that your character’s adventures, and the threats to Ferelden seem to be over. That makes me sad.
• 

  S. Griffith
  March 23rd, 2010 on 5:58 am

  Rating

  I want to keep it short. DAOA is not as developed as DAO, it is pretty short (I spent about 18 hours and I got all achievements, replayed all alternatives, and finished all quests), and its replay value is definitely less then DAO. But, for an add-on it is more then good. I liked new characters, new story-lines, and that I had a chance to go into the Fade once more. I paid full price for it on XBox live, and may be it is expensive for such a short play-time, but I wouldn’t penalize a game by giving a lower score just for this reason.
• 

  T. Salzman
  April 9th, 2010 on 1:08 pm

  Rating

  Dragon Age Origins itself was a amazing game, and I thought that it could not get any better but when I heard about Awakening I was very excited. This expansion was amazing, it had a mildly long and very good story line. I loved that you could import your old character from Origins into the game. I was upset that some of the old companions did not come with my old character, but I have grown fond of the new ones. Overall the game is totally worth the money.
• 

  F. Smith
  April 9th, 2010 on 10:52 pm

  Rating

  I really enjoyed this addition to the original game! As much fun as it was, though, it kinda signals the end of the series, which naturally is sad. Unless they take up a new story with new characters im not really sure where they can go with this. Other than feeling that maybe my characters were a bit higher level than the “baddies” i was really glad i grabbed this game! My copy (played through once) is up for sale as this review goes up!
• 

  Vector Scalar
  April 10th, 2010 on 12:36 pm

  Rating

  I’ve played through Dragon Age: Origins three times so far, and through this expansion once. It definitely adds to the experience with a continuation of the story.
• 

  Orca875
  April 11th, 2010 on 9:24 am

  Rating

  The game was so much fun I have played through it seven times already. The best aspect for me was being able to download my orginal character from the first game “Dragon Age Orgins” and begin playing with that character instead of building another new character from scratch! (Oh how I love my Rogue! lol) The game is a blast and I hope others enjoy it as well as I have!
• 

  Cherylyn D. Nelson
  April 14th, 2010 on 12:00 pm

  Rating

  I had a lot of fun playing Dragon age, and this expansion was a great extention to the game!
• 

  W. M. Davidson
  April 16th, 2010 on 2:21 am

  Rating

  Awakening may not have as much content as the base Dragon Age: Origins game, but its presentation is more polished and in some ways it’s a better experience than Origins.

  Most noticeably, it looks a lot nicer. Facial animation seems improved from Origins, lighting effects are more impressive, the textures look less smeary. The overall environment design has been stepped up– maybe since the designers are more comfortable with the strengths and limitations of the engine.

  Aside from Morrigan and Shale, the cast of Dragon Age: Origins mostly left me cold. In Awakening however, even with less screen time to go around, each party member adds a compelling personality to the mix, from Nathaniel Howe’s conflicted feelings toward his family legacy to Sigrun the dwarf’s endearing mix of fatalism and vulnerability. The random party interactions have been beefed up and are frequently hilarious.

  It is a shame that they removed the ability to romance your teammates since that’s always a fun aspect of the Bioware formula. And the lack of any significant connections to Origins was disappointing. The Mass Effect series has raised the bar, and it feels like a cop-out that Awakening is basically a reboot that doesn’t acknowlege the different plot possibilities from Origins.

  Like Origins, Awakening suffers from its share of major and minor bugs. I personally never ran into anything that crashed or corrupted the game so badly that I couldn’t continue playing (which happened to me three separate times in Origins), but I did have a number of times when conversations triggered incorrectly or characters got stuck in strange gestures and couldn’t reset.

  Overall, Awakening is a strong continuation of Dragon Age: Origins that bodes very well for even greater improvements in the series’ future.
• 

  L. Troutman
  May 10th, 2010 on 5:05 pm

  Rating

  It’s very simple. If you liked ORIGINS, you will enjoy AWAKENING. You really don’t need to read any further.

  But in case you do, a few thoughts.

  It’s short. 25(ish) hours if you follow all the side quests (I did), but it’s an expansion so I cannot really complain about that. I did notice a few (very few) “graphics anomalies” but no actual bugs and I’m halfway done on my second playthrough. Character development for the other members of your party is somewhat limited, and you won’t really develop the same depth of relationships as in ORIGINS. You will encounter some (OK, two) “old friends” from ORIGINS, but only one will actually rejoin your party (one of my personal favorites though). And, as you may have heard, the ending is somewhat abrupt. I would’ve preferred something like the ending of ORIGINS where you talk with your party before you all go your seperate ways and they roll the epilogue cards. And AWAKENING’s cards are not necessarily in keeping with events as you experienced them.

  HOWEVER, it’s a good story, the gameplay is there, the voice acting is still very good (IMO), and the interface wasn’t overhauled so you will feel very comfortable very soon. I suppose that could be good OR bad depending on how you felt about the interface, but I liked it so I consider this a plus. AWAKENING does play a little differently if you don’t import your ORIGINS character, but not significantly so. Mostly in the sequencing of events and how people react to you. I’ve tried it both ways and it works quite well either way. The only reason I gave it 4 stars for the overall rating is because I can’t give it 4 1/2 stars. It’s really a great expansion, but because of that there are fewer surprises and some of the “WOW” has now worn off.

  But if you liked ORIGINS…, oh yeah, this where we came in.