Reviews: Dragon Age Origins - DLCs & Expansion Pack

Dragon Age: Origins - All Download Content and Expansion Packs
EA, Bioware
Available for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC

Dragon Age Origins is probably the best RPG game available on the market right now and while you can play the main disc over and over again for multiple endings and different game play experiences, it’s still nice to know that there is add-on content available for the game. Currently you can download 2 new quests, 1 expansion pack and 2 item packs for the game and I’ve reviewed them all to save you from wasting some good coin on unworthy content.

Dragon Age Origins: The Stone Prisoner
Downloadable Content

This downloadable quest was available as a free extra when you purchased the initial game, so this review is really more for those who buy a used copy of the game. The Stone Prisoner starts with an encounter with a merchant who gives you a control rod for a Golem and information on where he got the rod. Following his information, you arrive in a small town which is under a Darkspawn attack and there you find the rod’s matching broken stone golem, and its former owner’s son in need of much help. Once you complete the son’s mission, you will walk away with the key to a new party member, a stone golem named Shale.

While the main quest of The Stone Prisoner will only take you a couple of hours to complete, the new character and items you gain are quite worth the money spent on the download. Not only do you get a new powerful ally who uses crystals as armor and weapons but you will gain new dialog with this character and eventually a new companion quest which is both funny and enlightening.

Honestly even if this content hadn’t been free with my game purchase, I would have purchased it anyway because Shale alone is worth the spending the all those points. If I had to recommend any download quest as your first, this would be it.

Buy it!

Dragon Age Origins: Return to Ostagar
Downloadable Content

Dragon Age Origins: Return to Ostagar was the first real download made available for purchase after the release of the game. The add-on content was setup as a quest to find the body of King Cailan and Duncan as well as important documents but what the quest really turned out was a poor excuse to get King Cailan’s armor. You end up battling random Darkspawn in the snow for a bunch of armor pieces that aren’t even worth the time unless you decide to download this quest early on in your travels. The rest of the quest is just fluff as far as I’m concerned because even though you manage to find and give final rights to King Cailan, the developers left out finding Duncan’s body which to me should have meant way more to my characters. Sure, you get to slay the ogre that killed him and Cailan but who cares ... I wanted to lay Duncan’s body to rest as well.

The quest is just too short and completely lacking any good items to make it a worthwhile download. Basically this quest was so useless to me when I downloaded it at the end of my main game that I could compare it to the horse armor download for Oblivion, so unless you are really obsessed with having every download available from this game, I would avoid this add-on like the plague.

Pass on it!

Dragon Age Origins: Awakenings
Downloadable Content or Purchase as Hard Disc

I would think that any game that starts you off naked is probably not a good sign. Dragon Age Origins: Awakening was the first true expansion to Dragon Age Origins. Available both as a download or hard disc purchase, Awakening offered a new story, new characters and a whole new land to go killing in. Playing as either your previous Dragon Age Origins character (possibly resurrected) or as a new Grey Warden from Orlais, you arrive at Virgil’s Keep in Amaranthine as the new Grey Warden commander, just as the keep is being attacked by Darkspawn. Once the stronghold is retaken, you discover the Darkspawn are different than before: they are intelligent and split into two feuding factions. With this new information, you must quickly rebuild the Grey Wardens’ defences and defeat the Darkspawn before they destroy everything.

While I can’t say this expansion was a horrible follow-up to the initial game, I can say that it sure as heck wasn’t worth its sticker price. When I spend cash on my games I expect the dollar value to match the game value and if you compare the value of the first game to the value of this game, they don’t match up in the least bit. The first game took me a week to finish roughly and cost $64.99 while the expansion took me 2 days and cost $44.99, so you can see already this expansion isn’t earning its worth. On top of that, they destroyed my favourite part of the first game which was the great characters and their dialog. You get one character in your party from the first game which is Oghren and the rest are all new plus you don’t get to talk to them whenever you choose, only when the game lets you.

There were a couple of new features that made the game a little bit better than the first like the storage chest which would have been handy in the original game and there were some new skills that allowed characters to built up health, stamina, etc. Ultimately I think the storyline is worth a walkthrough if you want to keep saving the world from Darkspawn but I would honestly wait for the price to come down as I feel the expansion is not long or good enough to paid full sticker price for.

Pass on it!

Dragon Age Origins: Blood Dragon Armor
Downloadable Content

The Blood Dragon Armor was the first item you could purchase for Dragon Age: Origins and it came as a free item with your game purchase. Again this review would be for people who bought a used copy of the game. This armor purchase had a couple of good and bad points about it which made it a 50/50 either way purchase. On the good side, it was a strong armor that once purchased all components could be found easily for sale at the camp and a couple of components were placed in your inventory for free. Also the DLC came with a bonus armor download for Mass Effect 2 which was good because it was like getting two items for one.

But on bad side of things, the armor isn’t useful until later on the game when your characters were strong enough to wear it, so you have to cart the extra two pieces around in your inventory which took up precious room and the armor could only be worn by strong characters so buying the armor for the first time is only a good idea if you have a fighter as your main character, otherwise expect a companion to sport the new goods.

Ultimately I think this armor is really only good as a freebie and I wouldn’t personally have downloaded it even if I had bought Mass Effect 2. But hey, some people are item buyers and I’m just not one of them so if you want to jazz up your characters with hot looking armor, then go for it.

Pass on it!

Dragon Age Origins: Feast Day Combo Pack
Downloadable Content

Now I know I said I wasn’t an item buyer on a general basis but I can make exceptions if the items help me rule the world as Queen. The Feast Day Combo Pack was released on April Fool’s Day and it was filled with custom gifts and pranks for your companions plus a bunch of mini gifts and pranks. While the custom pranks aren’t exactly useful in my mind unless you are trying to drive everyone in your party away, the custom gifts are extremely useful as were the mini gifts. The custom gifts will give you a 50 point boost with each companion which is some cases is enough to start a flirtation with a character. Add on the mini gifts and you have a guaranteed flawless relationship with any one as long as you don’t do anything huge to tick them off like defile an urn of sacred ashes.

Now both the custom pranks and the gifts are available in separate download packs but you can’t get the mini gifts without buying the prank pack, so honestly you may as well spend the points and buy the combo pack which is cheaper than the two packs combined. It’s worth it just to see all the funny pranks and their effects but just remember to save before you use them.

Buy it!

Review: Dragon Age: Origins

Dragon Age: Origins
EA, Bioware
Available for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC

If you’ve been an active RPG player over the past 20 years, then you have probably played a Bioware game at some point or another. As the creators of such amazing titles like Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, Bioware has been the developing team behind the games that dominate a mass portion of your gaming life and now they have another one for us.

Dragon Age: Origins is new Bioware game that has been dominating my life and probably others for the past few months. This dark fantasy game follows a young recruit of the Grey Wardens into the fight of their life against the Dark Spawn menace that is slowing taking over the land of Ferelden.

You start the game with the task of making your character from scratch: choosing their gender, body types, hair style, etc., as well as their race (dwarf, elf or human) and class type (rogue, mage or warrior). Once you have picked all these details, the game will give you 1 or 2 origin stories to choose from which fits your character type. There are 6 in all to play through, so do check them all out for the fun plus the bonus achievements/trophies. You will also have to add some additional points to your attributes and skills like much like a Dungeons and Dragons character.

Dragon Age is basically an open world which means you are given a set of tasks to perform in order to complete the main quest but you can go anywhere you want once the map is open to you. Of course, if you choose to ignore your main orders, then you must deal with the consequences. Once you get into an area, the game is all dungeon crawler which means you kill everything that attacks and strip it bare for loot, or talk to the village folk for information or to sell your new goodies.



While you’ll start off with one character, the game will introduce you to multiple party members who in some cases, you can choose to add to your party or not. Some party members will only stay for a brief time, while others will actually leave you if you fail to impress them over a certain amount of time. Over all, it’s better to recruit everyone you come across for the achievement/trophy and for the character options in battle.

If you ever played a Bioware game, you’ll know that the developers love to give you mass options in their storylines, rather than have you play out just one linear plot. Usually you have a basic good or evil path, but Dragon Age goes beyond that and really branches out into multiple versions. Depending on how you handle each situation you come into, you can affect how each character in your party reacts to you, how a future situation will play out and ultimately how the game will end. I’ve only played the game through once but I heard several different versions of this game’s story from friends which are pretty darn cool when you think about it.

Same game – several different game play experiences. How often you get that from just one game?

I think what was the probably the coolest part of the game for me was how it made me feel when I turned it off. Believe or not, I actually walked away from this game feeling guilty for the choices I made even though I knew it was just a game.

I chose to play a female city elf on my main play-through and had to play through an origin story where I was taken along with several other female elves to be raped on my wedding day. I managed to help us escape after I brutally slaughtered every human male in the castle but I failed to save my cousin from being raped. After playing through this disturbing situation and downing a bucket of ice cream, I found myself actually wondering if I took too long during the mission and that’s why my cousin was raped. As gamers, we always do what comes naturally which in this case was to kill everyone and loot the castle before I finished saving everyone to end the mission, but I actually wonder if the game was setup to punish me for taking too long. I doubt it did but I couldn’t help but think it.

Later on I had another mission where I had to choose between killing a demon-possessed child and saving the child with the help of a mage. Problem was I released the mage in the dungeon that could help me save him and I hadn’t finished a mission that earned me a mage in my party yet, so I was forced to kill him. This unfortunate turn of events earned me a spot in Alistair’s bad book and also guaranteed that I would never be able to romance his character and earn a special ending. I actually felt mad at myself for this. Could I have left the palace and complete the mage mission in order to save the boy? Did I really do all I could do?


This game was so good I was actually walking around feeling guilty about my choices. Sure, I’ve played moral choice games before but honestly I never felt bad when I was beating a hooker in Grand Theft Auto, so why did I care now? I think it’s because Dragon Age is setup to make us pay for our sins. I knew Alistair wouldn’t forgive me for my choices, and the game actually kept reminding me about my cousin and my delay in saving her. Despite my guilty, I loved this take on the moral path game and I think this is how games should be made - with actually consequences throughout the game for the things we do and not just different prizes or two varied endings based on how good or bad we are.

I’ve laughed, cried and felt a little tingle in my special spot because of video games, but never has a game made me walk away feeling regret or guilt. For this, I salute the developers at Bioware.

On a side note, this game seems to have a lot in common with Lord of the Rings and I’m not talking about the elves and dwarves. Homage to the late J.R.R. Tolkien can be seen everywhere in this game from characters to the cities, but honestly that’s not really a bad thing as I have been waiting for a good RPG Lord of the Rings game for a long time and this is probably the best we fans can hope to get.

The music in this game is pretty sweet especially the opening load screen score which is so epic summer blockbuster. I was a little disappointed that my character didn’t talk especially when you get to choose from a selection of voice tracks in the beginning, but those only cover battle mode sounds. I guess there was just too much dialog to record multiple voices for.

The graphics were pretty impressive especially for such an epic size game. Each character was well modeled, especially Alistair (meow!) and there were enough hair styles, face types and clothing options that you didn’t feel like you were talking to the same 10 villagers over and over again. Your party’s clothes changed with every cut-scene to match what you had put them in which is always a big plus with me and the enemies were quite creepy as were the g-strings people appeared in while nude.

Going out to the movies costs the average person $15 after ticket price and concession stand treats, while a videogame costs $60 on average. This makes purchasing a game all the more difficult because you can’t afford to buy a bad game, especially when resale values are at least half or less. I can honestly say without a doubt that Dragon Age: Origins is not only a great game but it worth the sticker price and more. There are so many choices to this game, you could play it 6 times and still never get the story twice over. If that is not worth $60, then I don’t know what kind of game is.

Rating: 10 out of 10
Buy it!