The Dragon Age Grows Longer

Regardless of which Warden-Commander you play, Awakening's campaign focuses on three goals: rebuilding the Grey Wardens, managing your estate, and figuring out why the previously unintelligent darkspawn can suddenly talk. That latter point is pulled off a bit sloppily. The mystery of the talking darkspawn does lead to a legitimately cool revelation; it's also a plot point taken from one of the spin-off Dragon Age novels, The Calling, and if you didn't read that, much of this plot thread ranges from confusing to nonsensical. Titles like, "The Architect" and "The Mother" get thrown around as though you already know them, and heck, there was a particular character whose existence is completely unexplained until I hit up the Dragon Age fan-wiki (there wasn't even a codex entry for this random cipher). Even as such, the overall story is pretty good, and involves a difficult decision that will probably have repercussions for the next game.

Click the image above to check out all Dragon Age: Origins -- Awakening screens.

This expansion does follow the BioWare formula, so you're given a handful of regions and a directive to take care of them however you want. Quests range from more imaginative than in Origins (investigating a literal ghost town) to the expected (go underground and clear out the darkspawn). In-between story-critical quests, you're often asked to deal with political matters back at the fortress, such as making, "who is right/wrong" judgments and resolving genuine dilemmas (will you allocate troops to the farms, or to the city?). Finally, there are numerous sidequests: puzzles to solve within dungeons, helping a party member deal with family issues, or taking on a spectral dragon. As good as these quests are, they also fall victim to the glitchiness from having a big game with so many moving parts within; I've had quest triggers either fail to initialize (meaning I couldn't progress), or trigger incorrectly (in one instance, I helped the cops rather than the criminals, but even after killing said criminals, the guards treated me as though I sided with the bandits, until I reloaded and replayed the entire quest chain).

The gameplay systems have a similar "pretty good, but somewhat flawed" feel as the quest content. While mages still feel overpowered (high-level mages can now reset power cooldowns), the new specializations and talents added to warriors and rogues are welcome additions. A warrior power where every hit able can stun nearby foes? A rogue ability where s/he simply doesn't take damage at all for a few seconds? Yikes at making those classes much better at things like tanking, crowd control, and area-effect. In general, it's easier to create a group of utter badasses (in fact, you'll need to bump up the difficulty for challenge; with the exception of boss battles, the combat is a complete cakewalk on Normal while higher difficulties give enemies access to the same set of new abilities).

Click the image above to check out all Dragon Age: Origins -- Awakening screens.

It also helps that these badasses are a pretty interesting bunch as well (despite how one character is pretty much Alistair-from-Origins-in-a-different-body). I don't really want to say too much about the party members, besides the awesome Justice, because I don't want to spoil much. Suffice to say, they provide even more amusing quips and rich world-building through their dialogue. The even distribution of character classes, plus the ability to respect characters via a cheap book you can buy at most any shop, makes it pretty easy to create whatever party you want. Similar to the quests, these characters are somewhat marred by some glitches (no matter how high the approval rating, I could never initiate the personal quest for one character about his/her family). As a word of warning: you can't romance any of these characters, for you BioWare-relationship-fans.

The characters and talents are almost enough to overlook the fact that the skills, which are where abilities like crafting and coercion reside, seem a bit uninspired. Sure, runecrafting is a great addition (especially since you add runes to armor now), but the "adds a health bonus" and "adds a mana bonus" skills feel underwhelming. Wheee to adding numbers to my health or mana bar. At least when Mass Effect (not even 2, but the original) has the same skill tree, that game adds a cool force-field ability as a reward for making your healthbar longer.