Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening Video Review

I just finished dragon age 2... And god, the awakening was better in all aspects... The main game was even better... Why the hell EA did this? just for the money?

great but too small..i m playing now da2 and everything fro the first is missing :(

At first $40 for an expansion pack sounded ridiculous to me but when I thought about it I read that this takes 15-20 hours to beat and I buy games like Modern Warfare 2 for $60 where I only get 4-5 hours of gameplay. So I went out and bought Awakening and I think it's great. :D

I'm playing Dragon AgeOrigins for the first time.I paid $20-$25 on Steam for it and I'm wondering if it would be worth it for me to pay $40.more to basically get DA Awakenings plus the 9 dlcs.

I suck at RPG's haha. I loved Dragon Age Origins but i COULD NOT beat the archdemon at the end, totally had to turn the difficulty down to easy

Will try to get this soon.

Everyone forgot how an expansion was suppose to be..Remember Diablo 2 expansion pack..all it did was give you one more act two characters and more items and weapons...no one complained at all...I think people are just use to DLC now and forgot about the true expansion pack

It's like this game has been compared to Dragon Age: Origins way to much. They keep comparing it and saying stuff like "It's not as long as the first one" well the first was great so you can't compare an good game with an great game. Probably deserved a 8.7 or 9.

While I agree with you on the the time and effort it takes, $40 seems pretty out-of-hand for this short DLC. It's not just these " true gamers" as you put it, it's anyone that wants as much value for their money as possible. At any rate, great game, hope Dragon Age 2 rips.

I can't wait till these old self-proclaimed "true gamers" die out. You're so full of crap and all you do is whine and whine some more. I'm a decently old gamer myself, playing since the 80's, but i evolved. It's an expansion, not a full-blown game, ofcourse it's shorter and with todays more advanced technology games takes way longer to create, so unless you feel like waiiting an eternity for a expansion. which in my honest opinion was well worth the buck it costed i suggest you evolve too.

graphic wasnt really that impressing

Its interesting and fun to play but I would much sooner wish for an expansion that focused a bit more on the story. This just makes everything feel like they tell us to wait for it over and over. Though I think its a great way of increasing the games lifetime and after all, isn't it just fantastic to get back in to the game to slash some more dark-spawns? For me Dragon Age ended too quickly (even though I actually played it about 20 times just to see what would happen if I would have chosen another way to go). I recommend you to try it and if you like it then please support the company.

i enjoyed the expansion a lot. the tough decisions a the final boss battle was a lot better then fighting that dragon. all i did was shoot the balista at that thing. the only dislike i had of it was in the start when Allister come by to check on things and he sounded so disappointed in the fact that i didn't die. like he hated me. in the main game he was basically my best friend. making jokes all the time back and forth then he gives me the cold shoulder. i felt betrayed

this is boring to me and i loved origins

@lozvil: You said I was your favourite :(

hey dude can you try to not sound like you're reading a script for once.

@Lord_Sesshy No. You're stuck with the worst character from Origins... Oghren. Though there are guest appearances by Alistair and Wynne. The focus this time around is less on your party members and more on the new badass talking darkspawn.

lame....

Does anyone know if you get to choose which old character from Origins you team up with?

Yeah, 40 bucks is a bit much. I already paid for GTAIV liberty city stories bc I live for GTA. Yet dragon age forty bucks plus the 30 for the little add-ons. Makes me think i'll wait when its 30 or 20. 15 hours isn't enough for 40 bucks. It's not even finishing out my story with Morgan so. I'll wait when ever the sequel comes out I would be down.

The people who decided against buying this are missing out. Amazing looking new armor and weapons, fantastic epic bosses that put Origins to shame, level cap raised to 30, bunch of new abilities, and a different aspect: giving commands to the kingdom as the Warden leader. The new characters aren't as deep but they aren't annoying. Anders is funny and loves his cat... and the undead dude just looks badass. Buy this whenever you can afford it.

I'm still undecided on this expansion. I nearly bought it but then had to stop and ask if i REALLY wanted it. The original was amazing, but i certainly don't want a scraped together expansion, full of bugs and less plots and no romance with party members, to ruin the game as a whole for me...(EDIT) I wanted to make a correction, im not knocking the expansion totally as i understand it is simply an expansion and not meant to be a full length 40+ hour game. I just would have like to hear that they kept romance in and maybe kept more party members or at least kept the same interaction with and between party members, thats part of what made DA:O so good to me...i mean, whatever am i going to do Without Morrigan!? @starscreamPL I was just curious as to what you mean by the atmosphere being too "heavy", and why you thought there were too many battles in the game. It is a story about how fereldin is under siege by a horde of evil creatures and an evil man trying to become ruler of all...i think it would kinda throw the game off to have a "peaceful" area full of unicorns and prancing bunnies in a meadow of flowers...Just me though, i like the dark setting and dead bodies, since fereldon IS in conflict. I also thought that there was just enough battle and story in it to keep me plenty entertained, it has much less battle than some RPG's out there. i'd like to know more about your side to see if i can better understand where you are coming from.

i love Dragon Age-origins for dialogue in the first, you feel the story interacting with chars.,in fact this is the reason i play this game.A lot of Hack and Slash games don`t have this spark and fall in a boring time lost and i`m sorry to say this but Awakening is far from Origins.First Ogren ok a fun char. but nothing more ,i can`t feel the story anymore,i miss old chars like Morrigan with dark humor or Wynne old and wise,Sten and Shale.True it`s a playable .many darkspawn to kill ,some new chars.,with a small bug Main character's equipment may disappear during the Silverite Mine,but don`t expect like me to be D.Age Origins.Well the final conclusion Awakening worth to play is not money lost.Bioware great job with K.O.T.O.R and D.A.Origins ,i wait to play Old Republic

noobcake reviewer... spoiler much?

I like Dragon Age a lot but I will skip the expansion. It is just not enough good for me. I was a little tired of so many battles in Dragon Age and I see expansion is full of them. I would prefer a little softer atmosphere too, original was quite heavy. I t would be nice to see some relaxing locations and lighter quests in this game.

It is quite a bit of money for a short add-on, but it was worth it. I became kind of fond of the original characters, so it was disappointing to not have them in the party. My least favourite character was Ohgren. There's nothing new in here. Just a continuation of a great game.

i'll wait until/if there is a price drop 30 dollars is the standard price for a pc expansion pack

40 quid seems expensive for 15 hours

how come all reviews point to a darkspawn that can talk,the codex on first game says darkspawn emisarys can talk and there loads of them

i gotta say i kind of like awakening better than origins...

what?! the story in awakening is much better then in origins, it's just to short.... and the archdemon is hell lot more fun then awakening's final boss

@Havoc10K: You have got to be kidding, right? The AoE mage spells in DA:O were insanely powerful. Have you even tried using Inferno, Blizzard, or any of the cone spells? And you can't compare this game to WoW; they are two completely different types of games.

l was kind of wanting some sort of AOE abilities comming in, the ones already in the game aren't impressive at all, it's probably one of the reasons l still play WOW, cos zome of the AOE spells and abilities are useful enough to do a decent job.

[This message was deleted at the request of the original poster]

(cont because of space limitations) my original point was how games used to get free updates, content, patches, and now something like that is somehow "too difficult" and so instead of doing small fixes and upgrades that would cost them about a couple days worth of work (okay, an obvious exaggeration, but my point still stands), we now have a ridiculous focus on DLC. and we (should) all know how much of a ripoff most DLC is. mega man 9 and 10 is a great example, the game costs $10 but the extras that are already downloaded into the game send the total to $20, thats double the cost, for just a few minor extras. the reason we see so much of this is because of how much of an obvious money maker it has become, and since there are people who dont understand the amount of work that goes into these DLC's, or lack of in this case, they'll buy them, which enables them to milk the DLC cow even more, which ends up limiting everyone else who either cant afford it or disagrees with it. dragon age: origins was sold for $50 ($60 total for the extremely expensive DLC version), and this expansion is sold for $40, thats a $10 difference, and they used tools previously made to make content easy to make, while the original game was made from scratch. its a no brainer. the cost is so high so that all they need is just a small % of people to buy it to make money, however if it was generally a lot cheaper, more people would buy it, and could potentially make more money, and at the same time, not piss off a large chunk of fans.

@ poeticwind im sorry but i have to disagree with you with just about everything. fable 1 and 2 is a perfect example of how NOT to hype a game, it actually caused a tremendous backlash against the company from a lot of gamers, people dont like being lied too or led on. it actually damaged lionheads reputation. we all can agree that the mako was done poorly, however cutting out exploration all together turned out to become a tragic mistake as most people will also agree with me on that, it made the world of mass effect into a series of hallways, good looking hallways, but still, what made mass effect stand out was its openness, I would have taken the old citadel over the new one, just if they fixed transportation so that getting around wasn't so confusing, the warping around everywhere wasn't helpful unless you really learned all the areas names. wow definitely has a story, and theres no buying anything to succeed, this is just wrong. there is gear grinding galore, way more then it used to be, which is why i stopped playing, however the greatest thing about this game is its massive world. you log in, and theres a massive spread out world and theres no invisible walls in between areas. it gives the game a great sense of epicness. as for people complaining, yes people complain, but its usually different people complaining about different things. its just you read them all in the same place (the internet) so it feels like its the same people contradicting themselves.

@gringbot Lionsgate does the same thing with fable 2 its the media representatives job to get people to buy the product just like any other business i like mass effect an i like dragon age mass effect 2's exploration was changed to save the players countless hours of doing nothing productive. i for one didn't like climbing over impossible mountains on a 4 wheel vehicle nore did majority of the people who played the game. they listened to the publics gripes about number 1 an people still complain after they fix it. dragon age is an awesome game just be happy it isn't like WoW and has no story at all and the game play is geaed to make you buy things to succeed . every other company makes there money off game content why should bioware be any different. its just sad that people who actually like the game have to read such negativity yes the expansion is overpriced right now but if you like the game it real'y isn't that serious it was rpg of the yr last yr just like oblivion it will be on xbox hits game list an be cheaper with all expansions all together in 1 buyable pack.

check it out http://www.crucialconnexion.ca/

Love that. "It wasn't broken so they didn't fix it". That is got to be the worst thing a good game can do to fans is fix something that didn't needed. I found that a lot with sports games the most. One year NHL by EA had a the best game and then in 07 they messed it all up by "fixing" the controls. But they always end up #1 again somehow.

This looks great...I can't wait until the price drops to $20 so I can play it without feeling like I got robbed.

@ humorguy_basic yea i totally agree, i did some research on the expansion, decided to pass. really does not look like an "expansion" at all, its really just more overpriced DLC disguised as an expansion. whats even more sickening is the new contest going on bioware, you get credits to spend in an auction thingie, but you get those credits from buying their products, which isnt so bad except for the most amount of points comes from buying this expansion. a obvious move to coax people into buying it. bioware, in my opinion, really dropped the ball in the way they handled dragon age and mass effect 2, they made it sound like it was going to be so much more then it was, but it really was just more of the same from bioware just slightly flashier. also, their "project 10 dollar" can die in a fire. you also mention the witcher, just look at how many patches they put up for their game, for free, latest patch is 1.5? (i could be wrong) dragon age has had minimal patches with an extremely strong focus on DLC, same with ME2. also the story on ME2 was terrible, sure there were cool things with in the story, but the overall story was extremely weak, and really didnt take us anywhere, it felt like instead of pushing the story forward, they just hit a "reset" button and "DID IT ALL OVER AGAIN!! JUST THIS TIME YOUR A ZOMBIE ROCKSTARRR!!!" not only that but the RPG elements and exploration were completely butchered, and obviously catered its gameplay to the gears of war fanboys.

Bioware got me. Maybe the hype got me. But it was only after finishing Dragon Age that I released how linear it was and how little freedom there was. I yearned for the open world exploring of Oblivion, but it wasn't there. The grey decision making of The Witcher, versus the black and white of this game. It's a good game, and it came out on the PC - a format getting less representation by the month - so I am not going to knock it. But this game was more Mass Effect than it was ever Baldur's Gate - despite the 'Origins' in the title. This $40 15 hour expansion seems to have been happy to walk all over the Mythology of the original game and content to just be a money-maker. To say this is 'an old fashioned expansion' is completely wrong! Expansion packs in the past were much more careful about continuing the story and maintaining coherence - and they were generally much better value for money! For example, in the mid 90's Looking Glass Technologies released Terra Nova: Task Force Centauri. They also released two demo's. They had a total of three missions between them. These demo's had 10 hours of gameplay, were free and were DIFFERENT missions than what were in the full game! Now tell me DA:A is an 'old fashioned expansion' and is value for money! I think that maybe just Valve and Stardock, care about the games any more. Everyone else is just interested in the money. The direction Bioware have taken since the days of Baldur's Gate/Planescape Torment show this better than most!

The only downside of DAO as I see is its dated graphics, expansion pack never improve this issue. :(

awesome , cant wait :D

The game is a shadow of what origins is, It just feels like a big rushed DLC. It's decent but not worth $40 imo

dude i want my freakin elfroot fix and i want it now

[This message was deleted at the request of a moderator or administrator]

@Ladiesman17 i tried it and i don't like dark games(yeah i'm hard to please)

Guys I gonna be honest, so far I am not very impressed with the expansion. Although I DO Feel like its an awesome game etc, its like the hype ain't there anymore. Oh i am a grey warden commander... awesome.. or is it ? I don't "feel" awesome to be honest. Its like something is missing here in this game, its more about the feel of it rather than how good it is, because its high quality that is for sure. ps: OF COURSE Your char is naked, you were problably wearing DLC armor. Pay better attention, these kind of things are obvious.

@ B1ackDr4g0n You mean like the GTA 4 expansion packs that cost 40 for BOTH of them? you know a good deal -_-.