Dragon Age: Origins Awakening: Mystical boys feeling alright, raggedy wisdom falls from my hand

Peculiar as the word expansion usually coexists with the notion that owning the original is a must, Dragon Age: Origins Awakening is one of the very few “stand-alone expansions”.  Brought to us by Bioware, DA:OA builds on the hefty success of its company’s namesake as well as its predecessor.  For those that never played the original, there may be some major elements missing for the player to truly grasp the game’s entirety.  For those that have dived deep into the ideal dungeons of our youth in the first, you may be slightly surprised at DA:OA. 

By tossing around the term “stand-alone expansion,” confusion and jaw dropping anger are just a couple of the mental states that can result not to be mixed up with a Rick roll while cruising around Youtube.  On the one hand DA:OA feels like a large amount of extra downloadable content that’s wrapped into one extra large present you didn’t see coming especially with it’s quick release date after the original (four months apart).  On the other hand it isn’t as obviously advertised and priced as such.  Bioware has been known to be able to keep the drive and gameplay experience felt in an original game willing and able in its sequels.  If Mass Effect is any measure at this momentous achievement then players expect the same level of brilliance in other releases from its parent company.  Expectations run higher as companies show us they can make the high jump into success when others have failed.

The cause and effect of DA:OA is shown in its display and contours.  For a player to understand and begin to enjoy themselves while playing DA:OA, the original needs to have been conquered first.  A player can create a hero from scratch and hop right into DA:OA but the journey will begin at level twenty, the same level cap DA:O left us at.  The abilities available at this point can confuse a new player as well as trying to setting up not just one, but a full party of characters.  By comparison it would be as if a person was invited for the first time over to Bob’s house for a classic D&D pen and paper session and asked to roll a high level character and join in out of the blue.  That person might have a grasp of D&D but Bob’s house rules can be a bit different and everyone else’s eyes in the room are a bit bloodshot and glazed over from the 36 hour session filled with Monster energy drinks and Pop Tarts.  Yes, scary and intimidating just for a pen and paper game.  Much of the same can be said for never playing DA:O and hoping to somehow piece together a joyful experience in DA:OA. 

Sure DA:OA does fulfill the term “stand-alone expansion” in a sensible manner even if they don’t plaster a nice neon sign on this factor.  The story continues on from the end of DA:O as years have past.  An interesting twist on the end of the first as some darkspawn have begun to rise again.  As the darkspawn had been thwarted and driven back, most of the land has become complacent with their time of peace.  A new uprising of darkspawn occurs only this time the mindless zombie routine has been dropped and intelligent spawn leaders have surfaced.  The story references many portions of the first and the gaps in a knowledge base for the second will frustrate a person trying to piece it all together.

Characters from the first are found throughout the game, some joining your quest for glory while others become part of the backdrop.  Choices made before do affect you in this game although most will barely tweak the storyline.  An unbalanced mix of character classes are prevalent in the expansion (I had no tank/sword + board type of character and instead had an over abundance of casters) due to not being able to play all the previous characters or being unable to foresee the classes of upcoming party members.  The significance of some interactions with characters/npcs for a newcomer would add another level of scrambled nonsense as the player would ask themselves, “why do I have five minutes of dialog with someone who has no quests and won’t join my party?”

Controls, visuals, sounds, and almost everything else are identical to the previous game. The difficulty however is on scale with getting lost in the bird’s nest known as Justin Bieber’s hair.  Where the first was a die, respawn, die, respawn, routine of roulette, on the hard and Mountain Dew X-treme settings, DA:OA was quite a breeze.  This may be due to having access to high level abilities from the get go or working strategies already in use from all the dying the first caused.  Either way the only real challenge encountered in this entire expansion was the very last portion giving quite the sigh of relief to an expert of the first but causing a craving for the feel of accomplishment after it’s completed. 

With the very successful franchises Bioware has employed, Dragon Age: Origins Awakening is a small blip on the radar that will soon be forgotten unless an odd reference to a highly priced expansion has to be made in conversations of the future.  While fans of the first will somewhat enjoy this extra release, it is by all means an unnecessary whimper of an achievement to play through to the finish (10-15 hours).  Unless my judgment is clouded and narrow minded somehow, after completing DA:OA I found it hard to believe that another sequel will be made to import characters into without the same issue of ease with childlike difficulty. 

Rating: 3.5 {on a scale of –10 to 10} 

Vampire Weekend – Boston (Ladies of Cambridge)

 

------------ Upcoming Reviews still in the works ------------

Splinter Cell: Conviction / King’s Bounty: Armored Princess / Red Dead Redemption / Lost Planet 2 / Alpha Protocol