Dragon Age: Origins

One game of the year at the 14th Interactive Achievement Awards and Best Game at the 2011 BAFTA Games Awards.

And it landed just months after Bioware's other 2010 adjacent hit, Dragon Age Origins, which was full 2009 itself, got 91 on Metacritic.

So a massive one-two punch from Bioware.

When they did great things.

Yeah, like I said, Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age 2, that's not as good.

It was still solid games, you know.

That was weird.

Where it's it's you know.

And these were in earlier Bioware games as well, like post Dragon Age Origins.

Yeah, Baldur's Gate 1.

I think the same year as this.

This is this whole sequence, this whole everything that just happened in the lower city and under city.

This is the most, so far, obviously, we're still very early in the game, that I have felt like, oh, my God, I am playing Dragon Age Origins for the first time.

Like, I'm just walking around these tunnels.

Yeah.

yeah is a lot and every single shop i go to boy howdy let me tell you what the shit i want is like one and a half grand and i'm like i will never see this money literally ever

Which is very funny.

I'm thinking a lot again about Dragon Age Origins and the fact that in that game, every time I start out that game, just assuming I'll never have money.

And then because the early parts of that game drill that into my head so much, I end that game having never spent a fucking penny.

Well, Commander-based and Star Wars.

And I mean, like, Knights of the Old Republic, they kind of took that and did Dragon Age Origins a few years later from what Insane and Fire were, right? Yeah.

Yeah, so...

An interesting setup there.

And it feels very weird compared to what you'd expect from an RPG at the time is my point.

Dragon Age Origins, I feel, straight up a little bit closer to the original form, and then the subsequent Dragon Age games got to be a little bit more action-y.

A lot more.

Yeah, every Dragon Age game after that becomes more of a sort of open-world action RPG of the sort that takes over in the 2010s.

We recorded our first episode.

We played the origin from Dragon Age Origins and played it and recorded our first episode.

And then we did all of the Dragon Age series.

And then we did all of Mass Effect.

All the time.

I think I think something I really love.

I mean, I that I always come back to is is this moment in Dragon Age Origins, which is like.

For sure tied to D&D in an ancestral way.

For the rest of us, this is, so far, early stages still, a fun continuation of Dragon Age.

Nothing will ever be as good as the original Dragon Age Origins, but this is a worthy successor to be sure.

I don't know.

I liked it better than Origins.

Don't buy it, play two hours later, play two hours and drop a hate review.

Try it.

I've played Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age Inquisition more times than I can count, and I'll replay this one too because I liked it.

It took me about 70 hours to finish it with all the achievements, and I wasn't bored for a single second.

This came after a transitions team operated from one architecture to another alongside moving to their Linux client, introducing the Linux client.

It isn't clear if this giant archive was just recently downloaded or if it has been around for a while and is just now being made public, but it seems to include early builds and betas of Portal 2, some files linked to Half-Life 2 Episode 3, betas of Left 4 Dead 2, CSGO, a cancelled game called F-Stop which turned into Portal after that, plenty of early builds of other games that are not from Valve as well, Spore, Dragon Age Origins, Batman Arkham Asylum and others.

Now, this could give us a very interesting look into how those developers and publishers built their games, which features got cut, how games looked like in their beta or like testing versions, what got added, what got removed.

All of that could be fascinating.