Dragon Age: Origins

I have long told people this is my favourite game of all time. I love the leveling up system, I love Morrigan, I love Alistair, I love being a dwarf and having a low centre of gravity for fights, I love the lore, I love everything about it.

However, it has been quite a while since I was able to play it---unlike what happened with Mass Effect, there has been no updated/remastered/legendary edition of this game. And I wonder, how has this game held up? How fresh does the writing feel in a post BG3 world? How will the fighting feel, in a world where for all of Dragon Age: The Veilguard's faults the fighting system in that game was amazing?

We're going to find out.

The DAO project

The DAO project is my fancy name for just playing my favourite game for the first time in a decade. It took some planning and tinkering, but I have managed to get Dragon Age origins running on my Steam Deck. Despite reports by many of frequent crashes rendering the game unplayable, I have had no issue in my first 11 hours of gameplay. I am still saving very frequently to protect against this in case it were to happen to me.

First impressions

• oh my god look at how cardboardy and quaint the graphics are!!
• hey I remember how to solve this puzzle, wow
• the quality of voice acting in video games has truly gone up in the past 16 or so years
• being Sereda Aeducan feels like seeing an old friend
• damn I missed Orzammar
• wow this king has no concept of boundaries eh?
• aw shit the battle started already, I missed out on getting the mabari companion
• Shale!!!!
• having played all the DA games... I obviously remembered Morrigan being young and annoyed at life in this game, but I did not anticipate how what I thought was cool when I was 22 or whatever reads as highly annoying in my late 30s