What did you hate about Dragon Age: Origins?

[The Avatar]

It's been a while since I played it but overall I liked Origins. The individual origins at the start were a great intro to the world and adds some replayability to the game. The origins were probably the best part of the game and I wish they continued on with them for longer before having to join the Wardens.

It does become a bit of a drag towards the end both in terms of the story and combat. From the temple to the last battle just felt unfinished. The combat lost it's challenge and there were lots of filler battles that didn't need to be there. So, I guess that's what I hated about it.

Before that though, it was pretty good and moderately challenging. You have to use spell combos and backstabs to be effective. Or equip everyone with arrows and shoot volleys before engaging in melee. The boss battles were quite memorable, like the ogre dude in the lighthouse. The Fade and sloth demon encounter was good too.

I didn't mind the combat mechanics(at least in the beginning) and I liked the approach of passive abilities/spells taking up a portion of mana/stamina. It's good way of allowing you to keep your buffs up all the time but still paying a cost for them. I'm not sure if they came up with it or it's been used before, but I'd like to see more of it.

 

[Anomander Rake]

I will be honest, I played it and appreciated it.

The issue is that I forgot all of it, apart from the ending.

So, it probably means that it isn't memorable nor good.

Ah, I remember to have been frustrated that the choices you had done in awakening weren't ported into the expansion. I appreciated awakening, but I hated the fact that everything you did there was useless for sequels

By the way, I also remember that I got pissed when I saw how shitty the spells were for the reaver, even if you had to do a badass thing to unlock the class.

Oh well

 

[KK1001]

Still better than PoE.

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

The control scheme kinda sucked.

 

[sullynathan]

Back in the day, I liked Origins.

I have put in a few dozen hours recently and it very much felt like a chore. It's true, there are lots of trash fights in the game. The fade section is also not very good, I endured it back in release because I knew it like the back of my hand but now it's not interesting. This was all done recently on a Nightmare playthrough, the hardest difficulty, the game was not fun and enemies had so much HP bloat it was ridiculous.

 

[Herrick]

The environments, story, and the combat didn't do it for Herrick. Towards the end, I changed the difficulty to easy just to blast through the rest of the game. I did the same thing for Dragon Age 2 except I changed the difficulty about half way through.

 

[DalekFlay]

I liked Origins and still do. No edgy bullshit here. It did of course have some flaws though, like some fucking ugly ass level design here and there, too long dungeons and a lack of feeling "open" as much as it could have.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Played a while ago (close to the DLC releases i think )

It's funny how people nitpick about optional stuff like gifts.

I enjoyed it overall, found it better than BG1 & 2.
The golem character alone, Shale, made it worth playing for me, he was clearly inspired by HK from KotOR and they did a great job.

The customizable AI was also very good, plus, it reminded me of a multi-player browser-based tactical arena game i was playing back then, Challengers, i think it's long gone, now.

I don't enjoy those games battles systems anyway, wasn't worse than the rest, just search and destroy, the customization reduced the micro-managements, which is invaluable.

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Mediocrity

 

[Chippy]

Going of memory from about 5+ years ago:

- Camera sucked. Felt like it was attached to a string/baloon tied to my character's back that kept bouncing off everything.
- AI was shit. Backstab an enemy with your rogue, hide in shadows, and then watch the enemies make a beeline for your party through a hill several hundred game feet away.
- Elevations didn't work. As an archer you could be on that same hill, and if you tried to fire down at the enemy, your archer had to run down the hill and shoot the enemy in the face once he was on the same elevation.
- Difficulty was low IQ. "Enemies hit harder - therefore the game is harder". That was Skyrim wasn't it? Same thing.
- Certain party members were miserable qunts (insert Qunari joke). I don't think David Gaider appreciated the concept of 'love to hate'.
- I HATED the fact that even if you turned ai off, the fucking mages would still fire their candy floss staves at the enemy. Fucking winds me up just thinking about it. Bastards.

 

[Barbalos]

I like real time with pause, so I did like the combat. But like others have said there was way too much garbage filler combat that gives trash loot worth 2 pennies or whatever. They could've cut 2/3rds of the regular encounters, added some more mini-boss types, and it would have been way better. Also the romance I did (Leliana) was cringe as hell.

 

[Lacrymas]

DA:O's quality is hard to judge, especially in the context of contemporary gaming. I can say it's playable and the writing, while not great, is not grating like some other games I can mention. It has some good ideas and good moments, Fade aside. There is nothing in it that I actively hate, more dislike, like the enemy variety, most of the companions, mages being all-powerful (again), the MMO cooldowns and spammable potions, dumb enemy AI, difficulties that only bloat stats, non-existent character development, etc. But there are a lot of things I like as well, the religious iconography and canon, the mystery of the Darkspawn, the not illogical unpredictability of the lore (Inquisition shat over that), the not terrible combat system even if it was a bit simple, the aforementioned not grating writing, achievements that grant items, Awakening was a pretty good expansion and didn't just retread Origins and it built up on the foundations, the origins and surprising amount of C&C, the general design of the quests wasn't bad, etc.

The hard part is actually judging it and saying whether it's bad, mediocre or good. It's somehow neither. It feels uncanny, like whispered sweet nothings in your ear.

 

[sullynathan]

oh yea, and the fucking camera is so annoying to manipulate especially directly coming from Baldur's Gate. The camera has a limit to how far you can move and is tethered to the specific character you're following. Oddly enough, it was better on the Xbawks 360. I was chugging so much healing when I played it, it was funny and I remembered my old tricks of potion making.

 

[Chippy]

I don't know what David Gaider did in Inquisition - didn't play it - but he is the writer that gave us HK47, and he wrote BG2 quite well. DA:O also had it's moments. I know the Codex will fling shit at me for saying this, but if the game Beamdog made was functional and was set in the FR, I would have at least considered buying another game written by David Gaider in a sale at least. He always struck me as a Canadian Stephen Fry - a classical liberal type that you could at least have a joke and a conversation with, without any autistic screaching on his part.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Origins is one of the better examples of the Bioware formula. I can understand people not liking the Bioware formula, which is fine. But this, along with Mass Effect 2, are probably the best post Baldur's Gate Bioware games.

 

[Lutte]

best post Baldur's Gate Bioware games.

Being the best post BG Bioware game is like being the best at the special olympics.

 

[Cael]

DA:O's quality is hard to judge, especially in the context of contemporary gaming. I can say it's playable and the writing, while not great, is not grating like some other games I can mention. It has some good ideas and good moments, Fade aside. There is nothing in it that I actively hate, more dislike, like the enemy variety, most of the companions, mages being all-powerful (again), the MMO cooldowns and spammable potions, dumb enemy AI, difficulties that only bloat stats, non-existent character development, etc. But there are a lot of things I like as well, the religious iconography and canon, the mystery of the Darkspawn, the not illogical unpredictability of the lore (Inquisition shat over that), the not terrible combat system even if it was a bit simple, the aforementioned not grating writing, achievements that grant items, Awakening was a pretty good expansion and didn't just retread Origins and it built up on the foundations, the origins and surprising amount of C&C, the general design of the quests wasn't bad, etc.

The hard part is actually judging it and saying whether it's bad, mediocre or good. It's somehow neither. It feels uncanny, like whispered sweet nothings in your ear.

DA:O was a game that was hamstrung by one massive millstone: It was the first game in a completely new setting. I mean a living breathing whole setting, not the one dimensional Disney caricatures that tend to populate many games these days (HBS game, I am looking at you). That meant that it had to be lore heavy and have a lot of exposition which tends to bog things down, and in subsequent runthroughs, it made things repetitive and frustrating.

Incredibly, this exposition was also its greatest hidden strength. It is the depth of world building and exploration that masked a lot of the problems that DA:O has: bad writing. Yes, it had a lot of funny moments and memorable lines, but at the end of the day, the plot and the story itself was pretty forgettable. Some of the NPCs were, as you pointed out, cardboard caricatures.

DA:O had great promise, but was let down by the bad writing. The same bad writing doomed DA2 and DAI, where it couldn't hide behind the world building and exposition any more.

 

[Theldaran]

Not being Baldur's Gate.

 

[Harry Easter]

I didn't hate Origins, back then. I still don't hate it, today. I thought the companions were bland and found the concept behind the Grey Wardens forced, but I could have lived with that. What annoyed me the most was that most aspects of the story felt unconnected to the mainplot and that I never felt the threat of the Darkspawns. Those are cardinal sins in an RPG.

What upsets me today is the presentation of the combat encounters. It doesn't fit what the combats are: the movements of our characters are fluent and daring, while the actual combat is slow. Bioware wanted to infuse the players with a sense of drama that didn't fit to the actual mechanics or the progression of the story. This is what aged the game badly in my opinion and why I can't get into it. Sad though, Awakening is quite good and I liked the Origins themselve. At least storywise, DA 2 was better.

 

[Nano]

That Alistair didn't want to bang my male Warden.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

The worst was just how tiny and limited the world was. Even the capital city was about as large as a tennis court.

 

[Siveon]

Honestly the game felt very routine, which is the main problem. Go to this hub, go to that hub, to that big quest, do that other big quest. I thought the minutiae was entertaining, the writing wasn't too bad, and I quite liked the combat but it did have a sense of blandness to it. You feel that especially on replay.

EDIT: Actually I just remembered. Two Handed Swords being shit in that game killed me. I love a good longsword but I hate being gimped like that.

 

[Galdred]

Honestly the game felt very routine, which is the main problem. Go to this hub, go to that hub, to that big quest, do that other big quest. I thought the minutiae was entertaining, the writing wasn't too bad, and I quite liked the combat but it did have a sense of blandness to it. You feel that especially on replay.

EDIT: Actually I just remembered. Two Handed Swords being shit in that game killed me. I love a good longsword but I hate being gimped like that.

Indeed, what I hated was that I expected much more of the game, for a "spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate". It was serviceable, but nowhere near its Infinity Engine predecessors.

 

[Bigg Boss]

I stopped once I got to the Dwarven city. I really just don't like fantasy that much.

 

[Egosphere]

I stopped about half way through. There was little to nothing that would motivate me to continue. Setting, gameplay, characters were not very memorable.