Is the Farmer the new Shepherd (from Ultima)?
Well, after finishing Origins, I felt like importing my Warden into Awakening. Yes, I am aware of what I'm doing. Still, here are some random moments from the game.
After some sidequesting, a peasant mob starts complaining about lacking food and basic stuff. Since I have Persuasion maxed, I try to use that... but they attack anyway. After slaughtering them, the reaction was something like "gee, sometimes you have to kill all those peasants for things to go back to normality". My white male human noble warden clearly didn't checked his privilege.
Dorf city, like the black marsh, was an interesting location. Dorf lore was interesting in Dragon Age, at least it was more than just beign fantasy jews. But the giant golem is ridiculous, I mean, it's not even hard (more on this later), but it's confusing, since you have to deal with the graphic effects of their fire attacks. You spent the whole fight looking at flames. However, you find a cool set of armor here. Not everything was lost.
This will be under spoilers just in case:
Ok, so in Bio's logic a brood mother can have nipples but a regular woman can't. I mean, we all know how atrocious sex scenes are in DA:O. Some Biodrone told me that people often wear clothes during sex, and yeah, they do because of kinky reasons, but it's not that fucking fantasy bikini. I demand nipple freedom, goddamnit!
This is one of the last scenarios of Awakening - I already fought the good fight at Amaranthine, and I'm chasing the "mother" now. I took this one because I literally laughed at this: there's this architect vs mother conflict, which has darkspawn fighting some sort of civil war, and during one of those fights, this huge dragon arrives out of nowhere. I can't take this seriously, I really can't. Dragon Age is a good source of humor.
So, having 80-90% of the game completed (from what I gather), I can tell you this: Awakening is better than Origins, and that can be a compliment if you want it to. It's like 1/3 of Origins in terms of completion time (if you do
everything), there are no romances (source of butthurt among biodrones), the areas are smaller (no Derp Roads of Mage Towers here), and the quests are brief, to the point, and more related to the main events than the usual Origins crap. Also, there is some vague sense of urgency about solving quests, since when you provide resources for your keep you feel you have accomplished something. On the downside, you can't lose/die. Origins wasn't hard, but in Awakening you're ridiculously overpowered. You have three specializations, gold is not an issue, magic items are OP as fuck (+3 to all atributes is normal here), etc. In general lines, I'd say Awakening feels like the Icewind Dale to Origins' Baldur's Gate. More fights, less talk, but this is still modern Bio, so YMMV.