Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening Review

30 Mar 2010 at 11:50:50 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (PC)

Dragon Age: Origins (hereafter referred to as Origins, for simplicity's sake) was one of those games I waxed lyrical about. It happens more regularly than I'd like to admit: cynical, hateful, and spiteful I might be, but when something really good comes along I get the urge to scream and shout about it for weeks on end. Great characters! Great locations! Best BioWare romance system yet! Grey decision making! Proper old-school RPG combat! It was like I was playing an early 90s RPG that I'd somehow missed out on, but with gorgeous, gorgeous 3D environments, a modern interface, and all the recent trappings and updates that BioWare has made its own.

Then the DLC packs came out, and they were a bit shit. Generally adding small adventuring areas and some new items, it's not fair to say that they were bad, but they weren't worth getting excited about. Or buying, for that matter.

Still, we had high hopes, taken even higher when we spoke to BioWare producer Fernando Melo who got us excited about what was new, and I can confirm that Awakening is not one of these DLC packs. Awakening is a full-fledged expansion, and those of you old enough to remember Throne of Bhaal will know that every now and then BioWare releases an expansion that, were it not BioWare, would be marketed and released as a sequel. Awakening is one of these expansions. Awakening is very, very good.

Awakening has given BioWare a number of opportunities. First and foremost amongst these is the opportunity to fix problems presented in Dragon Age: Origins, and make no mistake, it had them. If you're anything like me, your party was composed of a fighter to soak up the damage, a rogue to pick any locked chests, and two mages to abuse the game mechanics in hilarious fashion and brutally murder every opponent in seconds.

This is still possible. Mana Clash is still unbelievably powerful, as showcased by my killing an otherwise challenging miniboss in one single cast (the floating damage numbers, I believe, popped up with a frankly ludicrous 2500) and Cone of Cold is equally abusable, but it's not all about the mages anymore. Ignoring specific numbers for a moment, fixes to fighters and rogues have made them far, far more viable than they were, with new abilities upping utility.

Yes, new abilities. As you've doubtless heard, each class has new specialisations and new abilities in their base skill tree. These new skills have fairly steep level requirements (yes, levels, rather than Origins' stat requirements) but work not only to round out the utility of each class, but to make them far, far more effective. Yes, there are some new damaging abilities, but there are some genius additions like Second Wind - restoring a fighter's stamina instantly - and Time Spiral, which instantly refreshes all of a mage's cool-downs. The new class specialisations round these out further, with the poster child for the bunch being Guardian for fighters, granting a variety of party-saving abilities. If you want your fighter to act as a tank, give them this and they can buff allied armour and pull enemies towards them. Whether the improved gameplay balance is down to these new abilities or to more careful encounter design I can't say, but one way or another there are fewer difficulty spikes, with only one or two battles coming anywhere close to the monitor-lobbing, abuse-hurling battles that popped up at least once every few hours in Origins.

There are new skills too which, once again, act to round things out. Runecrafting lets you, er, craft runes, which can now be put into armour in addition to weapons. As runes are considerably less common than they once were, and most high-level weapons have slots for this sort of customisation, it's rather essential and works as a fitting addition to the previous system. The other two new skills - Vitality and Clarity - grant bonuses to health and mana/stamina, respectively, letting you put your skill points to use if you don't feel as though you need a third character capable of making potions.

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