I replayed all three games this year so I can be even more throughly disappointed at the decline of this series when this releases.
Origins by a mile. There’s just so much thought put into the overall story and the gameplay really harkens back to bioware’s heyday of crpgs. Mages are a blast to use and there’s still some strategy in the combat.
DA2 was rushed in every sense of the word and it’s blatantly apparent. The whole story takes place in one city, there are like 3 unique dungeon maps that are reused over and over again, and the gameplay was changed to basically be an arpg i.e. hold down M1 and you win.
Inquisition was like they tried to return to form but EA said fill every pixel of the map with fetch quests and herbs to gather. What should’ve been like a 25 hour story driven game becomes a 90 hour slog fest.
I’d honestly just say play origins, then watch a story summary on YouTube for the other two.
Would you say seeing your choices reverberate through the story by importing your saves makes it worthwhile, or no?
I’ve played and really enjoyed Origins, but haven’t (yet) taken on the other two. With the size of my backlog I’d be happy to leave the other two unplayed as I was satisfied at the end of Origins, but the fact that you can import saves and have your decisions matter does interest me.
Thanks. Sad to hear that. I’ve played and liked Origins, but quickly soured when playing 2. I was hoping that maybe 3 would be worthwhile… Maybe with some mods to reduce grinding, if they exist?
Is Origins worth playing?
I’d say so. The biggest selling point is the Origins-system itself and the player agency from both that and your gameplay choices. The extent to which your chosen Origin affects the game is staggering and very few games (perhaps none?) has even attempted something similar. I can tell you this, it puts the “background” choice in Cyberpunk to shame.
The overall plot is fairly standard-fare boilerplate fantasy stuff but the world is decent and the companions are mostly very enjoyable, though some are more well-written than others. Alistair is - in my opinion - one of the best companions Bioware ever produced. Morrigan is also a great character.
The combat is okay, RTwP is a divisive system and I personally think it lacks the depth of Baldur’s Gate II (though I always play the latter with Swoard Coast Strategems). I installed some mods that expanded the built-in “Tactics” function that lets you set triggers for your companions to execute actions, and I had great fun in programming my party to play itself with me completely hands-off.
It’s a fair bit dated low, but also by far the best of the three IMO.
The second was quite good in a lot of ways but also very obviously super rushed and partially unfinished.
And then the third was just a sad grindathon with a Dragon Age mask pulled over it. Some good ideas again but covered in the worst gameplay of the three.
If you enjoy crpg’s, definitely. There’s a lot of player agency and the companions are for the most part interesting to talk to. Completing every quest will you burn you out fast, but if you just finish the ones that seem interesting to you you’ll have a good time. DLC is pretty hit or miss though.
theres a lot of negative comments in here so I’m gonna say how excited for this I am =D.
i cannot wait. i love dragon age. I love Thedas. and I am so bloody excited! <3
Yeah, I get not wanting to get too hyped about games ahead of time, but it feels like these days people are online to look for the next game to get angry about.
Is this going to play anything like Origins?
