Dragon Age: Origins Expansion Coming In March

ishanjain tipped news that BioWare has announced an expansion for Dragon Age: Origins, called Awakening, that is due out on March 16th. Awakening "is supposed to run about 15 hours and will allow for players to import and edit characters they've broken in from the core game," and it will take place "in the in the role of a Grey Warden Commander who's been tasked with rebuilding the order of Grey Wardens and finding out how the darkspawn survived following the death of the Archdemon dragon." A trailer is available at the official site, as well as some information on a new bit of DLC that will be out shortly, entitled Return to Ostagar. (It was originally due for release on January 5th, but was delayed.)

At least they are doing DLC the right way...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm normally not a fan of DLC but at least the are doing it the right way...the game is complete and at 18% completion (hey I just got it for christmas and have a job) i have already put nearly 10 hours into it. From what I have read its around 45-60 hours for most people, decent value for the money IMHO. It appears they plan to support it for quite a while, DLC is affordable and offers a good amount of content for the money. I have the Wardens Keep and will likely buy them all. It was a bit obnoxious though to find a character basically asking you to buy Wardens Keep to "help" him, it was kind of cheap but at least gives the DLC some continuity within the game and is in no way necessary to continue. Between this and Torchlight I'm going to be busy for quite a while.

Another game with no options

[bonch]

Dragon Age is another live-action roleplaying game where you have no choices, and the options you're given are all in dialogue trees that all lead to the same results to give an illusion of freedom. Why people keep buying these heavily scripted rollercoaster games, from Dragon Age to the hugely overrated BioShock, is beyond me.

Re:Unlock the camera in Dragon Age please

[Your.Master]

That's not fair. Dragon Age had a frustrating camera that you occasionally had to fight with (I found), particularly when trying to use magic or otherwise plan around enemies not in your immediate vicinity. This is quite unlike a fixed-perspective game which will generally not have camera issues because they are trivially solved.

How does EA manage this?

[Lorcas]

First they make DLC that can be covered in 30 minutes for 5$, then they make an expansion that is said to take 15-20% of the time it took to complete the original game and sell it almost full price (for a PC game). I preferred the not so old days where an expansion meant something as good, as long, as awesome as the original game (or better). Now it seems that they are just throwing bits and pieces and charging the big price for it. And don't get me started on DLC which is an even bigger joke, very small feature for 5$ most of the time. I bought the original game as part of a special, so I had both the DLC of the launch for the price of the game alone. But I doubt I will be getting the DLC this time unless the reviews are pretty damn good. Same with the expansion because it's hard justifying 40$ for something that's a fraction of the original game.

Anyway, I am currently going through my games I bought during the holiday sells and hopefully, by the time I'm done with them, the expansion will have gone down in price or someone will inform me that it's worth the price and I need to stop crying.

Re:Another game with no options

[Tynam]

Dragon Age's story isn't great; if they were going to ditch the whole AD&D/Forgotten Realms setting that was at the heart of the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights games, then I would have hoped that they would actually do something a bit more... well... different with it. Compared to... say... Mass Effect, it felt very much like they were playing it safe and sticking to a well-trodden path with Dragon Age. If that's what they're doing, then a part of me would actually have preferred to have a more familiar Forgotten Realms setting (not least because of the potential for Miniature Giant Space Hamsters). If, on the other hand, they were trying to produce a genuinely different "dark" fantasy story, then I'm sorry, but The Witcher got there first and did it better.

Everything parent said. Mass Effect does the style of star wars, but uses every bit of the freedom they gained from leaving KotOR behind, both in mechanics and in the universe, to do bigger and cooler stuff that Lucas would never touch.

With DA Bioware put a lot of effort into getting away from D&D, in order to produce... a stat/skill/feat based fantasy RPG system. I love DA, but there's nothing in it that wouldn't have worked fine in D&D rules. And DA has some genuinely interesting good/evil/nice/harsh character choices, but there's none of the Witcher's moral ambiguity. (The closest approach I can think of is Jowan in the Mage intro... a genuine moral choice there, but it doesn't actually change the outcome.) DA may be dark, but it always know who its good guys are.