The Countdown is over! Dragon Age: Origins released (Spoiler Free Discussion)

You’ve hit two major unbalanced parts of the game that some people were unlucky to encounter before consensus was established: archery is weak in the Origins base game, and you’ll do a lot better with a healer.

Someone will come along to pick at that, but I’m getting a bad case of deja vu from your post. I’d spoil yourself enough to find out which area has the healer, then go there. It’s better than being frustrated.

Looks like this is free on Origins, for anyone who didn’t already have it.

Wondering if anyone knows how to manage this. I had the original collectors edition, expansion, numerous DLC, etc, but when I get the free Origins on Origin, it “updates” my install but doesn’t note that I have all the other components. I tried putting in one of the DA:Origin CE codes, but it just says the code is already used (yes, by me). Any thoughts how to get everything in Origin?

I don’t understand. I fyou have the collectors edition, expansion, DLC… how are you trying to redeem the normal version?

Yeah, not clear. I have physical CE copy of DA:Origins bought before Origin existed. When I purchased Awakenings, DLC, etc, they still weren’t Origin. Now, I redeemed the free DA:Origins but Origin doesn’t think I have any of the expansions and DLC. Wondering how it can be made to know that I don’t have to buy all that stuff again is all.

Or your original keys from the physical version could redeem on Origin (did you try?), or they couldn’t. If they couldn’t, no, there is no way to redeem them, all or just a few.

If they could, you didn’t need the free version, you could have redeemed your own key.

They make you manually download and install all that crap from Bioware’s site anyway as far as I know.

IMPORTANT! Pull up your Services on your PC. Look for one called Dragon Age: Origins Updater. Make sure it has “Automatic” listed under Startup Type. If not, right-click it and change it from there. Also, make sure that you have DA:O set to run as admin.

After reading this, I decided not to get DA: Origins for free on Origin. After all, I already own the complete edition on Steam. So maybe owning it on Origin as well will interfere with the game knowing that I own all the DLC. Better leave well enough alone. I don’t need to own it on two platforms.

A Bioware employee even tried to help me but I recently could not get all the DLC I had “bought” in the old system once upon a time to appear in Origin. :/ The part that started out on the social.bioware.com never ever fully registered properly with my Origin account with the same email address despite applying several different DLC codes and keys.

Yeah, I’ve had so many troubles with the social bioware site, their registration, and being offline at times that I hated the game for a while. Every single time I tried starting the game, it either woulnd’t connect, didn’t think I bought any DLC’s, or just failed to load the Mass Effect Armor so poor Alistair went around naked.

This reminds me… I really need to play the last 3/4 of this game.

Yeah, Bioware’s “solution” for their DLC in this was quite poor, probably brought on by the lack of a proper digital distributor and the need to ride the fence between retail and digital consumers. Nowadays, all DLC for new games would just be kept in Origin or Steam. But the need to effectively do a double-login with a service up and running and an elevated prompt while staying online just in order to get full access to the game is “cumbersome” to say the least, and incorporates more potential points of failure than anyone in their right mind would ever want. The whole “manager” system in addition just reminded me of old FTP interfaces.

That said, the game is worth it. Well, the Fade part gets annoyingly long, but it’s still waaaaay better than the dream sequence in Max Payne, lol.

I’ve only ever had DRM prevent me from playing purchased DLC twice: Borderlands and Dragon Age. I only got about an eighth into this game then gave up in anger and frustration that I couldn’t get the DLC for the Ultimate Edition to load properly or activate.

-Todd

I haven’t replayed Dragon Age: Origins since my original playthrough, but I also found this pretty jarring even at the time. It was kind of strange that your character was the only one that spoke through text.

Irony being, that technique was likely chosen so as not to be jarring - the player wouldn’t hear someone else’s voice in the role of the protagonist, and could therefore better imagine themselves in the game. That said, I had great fun with the D&D games which let you pick from various voices (of course, that was just party banter and exclamations).

My Commander Shepard is taking a break from saving the galaxy, so I thought I’d try to finish up the game from my last playthrough. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what in the heck my rogue’s motivation and story was, so I started from scratch this afternoon with an Elven Mage. Just pissed off the Circle for aiding and abetting a Blood Mage. Off to the Wardens I go!

I’m playing through this as well. I’ve gotten much deeper than on previous attempts. Enjoying it quite a bit, surprised I left it this long.

A nice long read about maps, framed around discussion of Dragon Age’s map.

Dragon Age: Origins eventually found its setting in Ferelden, the kingdom in the bottom right bulge of the sketches, so it left a huge portion of the sketched world unused, which the team presumed no one would ever see. “We thought that was going to be the only one,” he says of Dragon Age: Origins. “That’s why when you get to the end of Origins, there’s so many epilogues that cast off far into the future, which, if we’d known that we were going to keep going and keep going with history, we wouldn’t have said, ‘Oh, in fifty and one hundred years, this is going to happen.’ I think we would have played our cards a little closer to our chest.”

Thanks for sharing. It’s interesting but only in so far that people continue to follow Tolkien’s lead I guess. You don’t even have to have a fantasy map per se if you’re not into that kinda thing at all. Still waiting on a fantasy world with a mango economy myself.