Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition Reviews

Dragon Age: Origins is a classic — but this version is broken on modern PCs. Even after hours of technical fixes, it still crashes instantly. Steam and EA should not be selling this game without built-in compatibility or at least a warning. If you’re not extremely tech-savvy, expect frustration. I requested a refund. Avoid unless they update it or buy it on GOG instead.

I just recently purchased this game and after about 20 hours of trying to get it to load/play properly was able to do a full playthrough (took me less than 20 hours to play through the game itself). Now, I guess I'll spend another 20 hours trying to get the DLCs to actually load, too. I love the lore, the stories, the characters, but trying to launch and play this game is HARD WORK. EA and Steam need to fix the issues or pull it from sale. (Says only 70 minutes of play at review because I had to manually launch the game, couldn't use the steam launcher without it crashing.)

Unplayable. Keeps crashing. One in five launches works, lets you play for a few minutes, then crashes. Not even the *.exe fix from the forum works.

It can be playable again, if they release a patch fixing all the constant random crashes and something corrupting save game files making those unloadable. Too bad I cant refund, and bring back all those 26GB SSD cells I wasted on this trash of a game.

My favourite game of all time but it won't run on modern machines. I've tried numerous fixes but it keeps crashing near the beginning of the game.

Only played for three hours as of writing this---and I do like it so far---but it's like pulling teeth trying to get this game to not crash on me, go black, or even load at all. I've tried everything to fix it, but it just seems like the game decides for itself whether or not it's going to crash. I shouldn't have to read paragraphs of how-to-fix advice just to run a game that should *already* be functioning, and because of that, I really can't recommend this.

The game has severe tech issues on current systems and potentially (at least for me and many others) requires additional manual tweaking to run it smoothly in the first place. The "4GB Patch" was enough for me, but it seems like that is not always the case. EA being EA, they of course won't fix this ever, so take this into account. After using the patch however, the game was PLAYABLE just fine, with 1 or 2 crashes in total. Also the game does have WQHD resolution support, but the UI stays very small and it took some time training my eagle eyes, but maybe there is a mod for it, no idea. A lot of quests in the game however also have fairly consistent bugs that can happen. In one case an NPC wouldn't trigger their wave event and I had to quickly run away from them after the dialogue so they would move (this is unironically how to fix it). In another quest you have your gear stripped and you are imprisoned, having to kill mobs to get your loot back. The gear of your main character can essentially just bug out and be lost forever. Luckily the game saves for you regularly and as you play more, you will learn when you should save etc. BUT, the game being so old and having a very dedicated fanbase, made it easy to figure these things out. The wiki contains a great listing of each bug that can appear in a quest, in case something seems fishy while playing, and numerous Reddit threads give good enough advice on everything. Is this acceptable? No. Should you ever buy the game at anything above 5€? No. Is it worth to go through all of these issues to play this game? Sadly yea, I kind of think so. I was genuinely impressed by the game's structure, the story and the characters. The game has everything a great RPG needs and more. The story outline is fairly basic (as is in most RPGs like BG3 etc), but requires you to make tough choices that impact the whole game and rewards with meaningful character progression, starting right from your original heritage. There are multiple pretty creative class choices, which you can overlap and combine, tons of gear, a camp system, fully voiced amazing characters and great voice acting and sound design in general. There is romance, non-combat talents/jobs and stats matter. The combat itself can take some getting used to, as it is a weird "combination" of turn based and RTS combat, but it's preference. You have nice extensive customization options for your whole group in terms of their auto-pilot modes and it works really well, meaning technically you can decide between just manually controling your own character and letting the others do their semi-customized job, or you can treat it as a turn based game and select each skill in every second of the combat individually. There are also some spell combinations that interact with each other, but I found myself not using those often. The game also has a number of DLCs that you also can import your character to, with Awakening being the most important and longest one. It is roughly 1/3 of the main game's length, and quite important to play considering future games, and also quite good. The others are all like 1-1.5 hours long and are set in different stages of Origins' story and are more something akin to scenarios. You can honestly skip all except Awakening, although Witch Hunt gives some nice closure on some aspects of the story and Golems of Amgarrak is alright as well. After that, you can carry over choices you made in this game to Dragon Age 2 as well, giving the whole series a more connected approach. (TLDR) Overall a fantastic spriritual successor to BioWare's Baldur's Gate games that layed amazing gameplay ground works for Larian's BG3 and other RPGs, and is honestly kind of a must play if you are into single player RPGs. It's a little old and cranky by now and of course plagued by those (fixable) tech issues, but in hindsight I am glad that those didn't stop me from experiencing the game.

The original game was amazing, but this release is broken on current hardware. Save yourself the trouble of getting into a great game that'll ultimately disappoint you with so many crashes that makes it unplayable. Edit: I had to do some digging to find a patched .exe file that allows the game to use more video memory to get it to run without crashing. So if you're willing to go that extra mile, you'll enjoy this game.

I got this during the steam summer sale. This is a classic game that is fun to play...when it doesn't crash! Its so frustrating how bad this game runs. I was going to give this a thumbs down and request a refund but did some research. You can mod it to fix the issues but if your not good with that sort of thing this person here shows you how to get the game running without mods so you can play. Its a short and to the point video that worked for me Youtube.com/watch?v=U1eJpy46SYQ&t=13s

I have spent more time trying to fix this game than playing it. It's such a shame as it was a classic over 15 years ago. I don't recommend buying it in it's current state sadly, it is full of game crashing bugs, texture problems and needs some real attention. It's wrong that it's for sale really when it can hardly be played.