I just played through it with my fave mage, doing all the quests and stuff I could,just don’t blame me if I missed out on things that resulted in some criticism.
The Addon started great. Pitched battle right at the beginning. Feels likehome, battling and pausing, seeing the blood squirt all over the place - ah,gods how I enjoy that. Overall, the battles are really fun, always entertaining, difficult at times - though less so than in the main game; I'manything but a hard core player, usually being content with normal difficulty, but I died a lot less than I did in Origins. So I sometimes moved to hard, which I never did in Origins. Fine with me, just saying for the nightmare guysand gals out there. On the purely aesthetic side, I missed the finishing moves.
Only a handful in the whole expansion, though the final final move is just SWEEEEEET. *class-specific I think!*!!!!!
The added content is of great quality; the new specs are quite nice to explore- battlemage just kicks ass:wizard:, as does spirit warrior - and the new skills are really awesome in part. I'll need another play through of Awakening just to really test them out all. Quests are Origin-quality; you get a lot of those job-board thingies, really nice in as a whole. Again, very much like Origins in the most positive sense. The new party members (and the old one, of course...) are again really great. Kudos to the writers on all the squabbling you get when on the road - one of the things I loved most in Origins, making me want to play through the game again just to see what funny dialogues you get when varying party composition. It's just the same, especially when good old Oghren is
involved. Somehow makes me feel warm deep inside.
What doesn't make me feel warm are the characters themselves; I just cannot connect to them. Sure, I love Anders, just my type of companion, but Awakening just lacks much of the interaction Origins had. Come on, where's the party camp? You can only really talk to people for the companion quests. Other than in Origins, I think I chose my party much more looking at maximum bashing power (maybe part of the reason I died more often, back then
... ) The characters DO have a lot of potential, mind you, there IS a background, there ARE distinct and interesting personalities, but the thing is, you just don’t have a chance to get to know them. Adding to that is of course the impossibility of establishing a relationship. Oh, how I’d have enjoyed the sizzling moral conflict of what would have felt like an affair - I really think it’s just ashame I missed out on that fun.The world as a whole is nice, environment seem more refined than in Origins. They somehow, I cannot pin it down exactly, seem more like a whole than in Origins –maybe has something to do with everything taking place in a rather confined area, though still the maps are very diverse. What I missed were the cameos of old friends, though. Come on, I got a shiny new fortress and no-one even writes me a letter? None of my old chaps coming by for a cup of tea or, if preferred, two or three barrels of ale? No trace of my lost love (Yeah, I’m into Morrigan)? I expected a lot more.
The new foes are really fun – Children give me the creeps, really – and, as to new equipment: forget everything you brought from Origins, there are AWESOME new things. Wasn’t taken in by the new crafting options, though – Runecrafting just doesn’t do it for me. But I never was much of a crafter inany game, so just don’t mind me <_<
As to thestoryline, it just feels right at the beginning; slow build up, oooh, there’s anew foe, maybe he’s the one that’s gonna be the final boss, aw, no, tragic turn of events, surprise attack, look there, new companion out of nowhere – marvellous. Really. The first ten hours are just pure story-driven RPG fun. But then it turns bad. You get into the story, seem to start to get to know your party, despite lacking interaction,scramble together theories about the foe and there it comes: The DAMNED ending! Awakening just cuts it short! The places you visit are really nice and atmospherically dense, but there isn’t a single major map in addition to what I knew from the preview footage. None! I completed these, equal to the starting recruiting missions from Origins, maybe a bit shorter – and then I suddenly was approaching the final battle! That’s where the only achievement-determining choice takes place and that’s it. There seems to be a HUGE gap, hours of battling through darkspawn hordes to gather some morsels of information just gone missing. Even worse, that very info is somehow missing, too; there’s no build-up to that ending, it just passes through like a rocket launching into space disturbing the flight of a condor. And the effect is just the same. I just feel empty. You get a satisfying final battle, but no aftermath, just plain text, you know that from Origins – only this time it’s of the bad sort. Real bad. After that battle, the story just seems terminated. No real openings for further adventures – except maybe for some in Orlais. Everything just gets fast-forwarded some years. No new threat, all seems just fine. This just seems so unlike Bioware. The game was just cut short after ten hours, as if a new set of writers, not really knowing what to do with the notes of their predecessors, had taken over for the ending that, in my opinion, should have come at least ten forced gameplay hours later than it does! Hell, somehow I feel like my character just died! For no reason at
all!!!!
Okay, that’s about what I had to say. You didn’t really read all of that, didn’t you? No, of course you didn’t. I’d be amazed if you had, honestly, so I’ll just try to give a "short" verdict (I'm not a man of few words, as you might have seen
;As expansions go, Awakening is a good one. Sweet new specializations, items, environments, enemies and companions, the great quality of battles (QofB
) and quests you know from Origins. Writing and lore are detailed as usual and you can prepare for some sweet new squabbling between party members.BUT (yeah, big one), it’s just too short. Not enough for a game of Origins’ magnitude. The story starts out very promising, but everything just seems to get cut short. The final scenes just explode out of nowhere, and there’s no fade-off – a whole lot of the game seems to have gone missing. Unreasonable as that is, I just had to shake the retail box real hard to make sure I hadn’t missed a DVD. Sadly, I didn’t. For any other game, something like Awakening would have more than sufficed, but not for Dragon Age: Origins. A lot of potential, story-wise and in terms of party interaction, was just wasted[/i]. A real shame.
Still, I think anyone who really enjoyed Origins should get the expansion (make a better deal than I, though – damn, Switzerland’s expensive...). The first ten, twelve hours were pure fun to me. And, despite all the criticism I voiced, I really enjoyed it and am going to play through the expansion again – although I still feel vaguely and greatly disturbed because for the ending....
If I had to put a number to it , it would be something like a 7-7.5/10.
Modifié par Datolbrandir, 14 mars 2010 - 10:41 .
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