Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition

Delist EA. Forcing third-party accounts and banning for inactivity with no appeal is predatory.

Once you apply 5-6 stability and QoL patches, DA:O is very playable in 2025.

RTwP + several companions to choose from + mages being OP + party banter as you run around the game world + tank/DPS/healer archetypes just works for me, I'm willing to forgive other shortcomings when that classic RPG formula is right.

Obligatory downside: interior maps and dungeons are repetitious. You spend a lot of time breaching and clearing rooms -- in fact I think there's even a recent game about that. DA:O's outdoor maps are more fun given that combat is about positioning, zone control, and crowd control. All that happens more fluidly on an actual battlefield.

This is a yes with a massive caveat. The game itself is great and stands the test of time as an amazing RPG. However the technical side is AWFUL. This game crashes consistently over and over and over. Turn your textures to medium. If you're ok with the game crashing(save often!) then it's worth it. But if you think that'd be too much hassle than don't bother

I've been told that this game was pretty good and I'm sure it is, however, I wouldn't know because this is completely unplayble on Steam and should not, under any circumstance, be sold here. Most of my playtime was just sitting in the main menu (after booting up the game again) trying to figure out how to stop the game from crashing, I tried the best I could to fix the issue and nothing seemed to work. I'm glad I at least bought the game when it was on sale because I can not imagine how much more painful it would have felt after spending 30 bucks on this dumpster fire but don't let my words fool you, even if it is on sale, don't waste your time and money on it, you'd have a more memorable experience buying a 10 piece at McDonald's and waiting for them to get cold before eating them.

If there’s one RPG that stands above the rest for me, it will always be Dragon Age: Origins.

Years ago, this game gave me a truly unique and magical experience — one that has stayed with me ever since. It’s epic and thrilling, yet deeply grounded, allowing you to be not just a hero and a savior, but, above all, a person.

With time, the overarching story only feels richer, and when seen in the context of the later games, the foundations of its core conflicts become even more compelling. Every playthrough brings something new — different choices, unexpected consequences, and fresh perspectives.

The heartfelt locations, unforgettable companions, emotional romances, gripping intrigues, and intense battles — Origins has it all. A timeless masterpiece, through and through.

Liked the game a lot but on reinstall could not get any of the DLC from Bioware. Decided to buy it on Steam so I could get The DLC. It would not run And apparently Steam knows it will not run as sold. Had to download an executable online now it will run but not through Steam. So if you want this game be prepared to have to find a fix for it.

Not sure what happened but this game is currently unplayable. Just crashes all the time. Very annoying. Gem of a game if you can get it to work.

Ridiculous. Fix this or remove it from the market. I have literally been scammed. Steam has really been slipping. Incase anyone is wondering, game does not launch for some reason. More reason to start giving my money to GOG (which is where the game works).

While I wholeheartedly recommend this GAME, I can not recommend purchasing it from Steam. I spent several hours screwing with mods and guides and whatnot and was never able to get the game to run correctly. I ended up buying it from GOG, and even then I had to bypass the DAOriginsLauncher.exe and run DAOrigins.exe directly to get it load (but I was at least able to get it to load).

Defy the laws of the Fereldan Government and take back your homes from the very Shemlins that took them. Partake in a shadow organization known as the Grey Wardens and complete the task for them by defeating the Darkspans. At the end of the game, make sure to grant the Dalish their own lands back.

Great first game in the series. Sets up good concepts, plays them out well, very good writing for the political complexity and interpersonal relationships.

Is it just me or this game is unplayable. I downloaded the game played for an hour, but now it keeps crashing. I fiddled with the settings, but no help it just keeps crashing.

This is a great game, but it no longer runs and EA's support for DAO is non-existant. The game crashes the very moment I try to start it. I've backtraced the errors in Event Viewer (Windows 11) but any of the proposed fixes like running it in Windows XP mode do not work.
I wish I could play this game, but I refuse to waste any of my life trying to deal with EA.

great game. but be prepared to have to download the dlc and the fix that will allow the game to not crash when it wants. EA terrible company.

immediate disclaimer you MUST get the patch online for this game or it is UNPLAYABLE due to crashes

fantastic rpg one of the best of all time there are a few annoying sections and the combat is a tad dated but it is amazing start to a great franchise your choices really do matter characters are strong as hell aswell

awakening is a strong bonus story is well done and the ending is fantastic

GOA is ok it doesnt have lasting impact and its a bit clunky

witch hunt ends the HOF character amazing and is a worthy dlc

*remember to log your decisions in dragon age keep so you can have a world state reflecting your choisest in the 3rd game as the 2nd does it manually

Great game.

However it is unplayable due to frequent crashes.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME ON STEAM

It won't let me play the DLCs that it's supposed to come with, no matter how I try to troubleshoot it.
what you're doing if you're buying the game here is essentially rolling a dice hoping that you'll get the experience you actually paid for.

It's a shame too, because the game is absolutely amazing

Main campaign is still great, you instantly become invested in the narrative. Combat is a bit dated by the today standards, Pillars and Pathfinder games are better RtWPs now. DAO, although, has presentation on it's side, as it was AAA at the time. That greatly immerses you in the story as dialogue an the characters are very good. Motivations, stories from the past, bickering, all the good stuff. All that kinda carries you thorough the game. Side quests overall are nothing special, but the main ones are decent. DLCs are pretty underwhelming. Much weaker writing, uninteresting characters, uninteresting quests, asset reuses. Overall, great game but feels dated now.

(G)old game, replace .EXE File and use 4GB patch (found online) and there is no problem playing this in 2025.
Great game, they dont make them like these anymore; sadly

Look I love this game and series, but THIS APPLICATION is unplayable in its current state. Just check out any forum to see the gauntlet of fixes you'll need to attempt to get it to *maybe* launch. I personally never made it any farther than the character creator.

It's a shame, because I would love to replay this game.

game constantly crashes in the same area to the point i cant progress in the game. i tried many fixes i saw online, but nothing worked. waste of time and money.

Simply a masterpiece. Objectively one of the best RPG-s of all time, and also in my subjective opinion, a game that has its place in the all time hall of fame of gaming.
When it comes to the elite of the RPG genre, it's all very simple: you have Baldur's Gate, Dragon Age, Fallout and Witcher. These are the 4 best game series - in my opinion. You can't miss with buying these ( of course, if you like the genre ).

All the elements are top notch: the story is epic, fantastic, with a cast of many interesting companions to chose from and build friendships with. An incredible amount of main quests, secondary and side quests.
Bioware created a wonderful fantasy world - Thedas with a complex history ( lots of lore to read ), many kingdoms ( each with complex traditions, history, religion, politics...), races, factions, etc......
They should make movies about the Dragon Age games and they would be 100 times better then Lords of the Rings.
Your actions and choices shape the story and the world of Thedas, it's very rewarding to see the effects of your choices afterwords and the consequences of how you opted to resolve the problems and quests.

Combat is also brilliant: pure RPG old school style ( which means its "serious"/challenging, complex with dozens of skills to chose, very tactical ). It's real time, not turn based. You have to constantly pause the fights to issue commands to each companion. You can also program companions to have preset behaviours but I always played with total manual control of companions, which means I had to pause every few seconds.
The difficulty is as follows: those who aren't veterans of RPG-s should play at "normal", those experienced in the genre I recommend playing at hard. It's very challenging at times, especially when you fight bosses like dragons, but nontheless rewarding and epic.
The skill trees are interesting, you have classes with lots of different ways to build them, lots of gear to chose, all the elements are here.
The soundtrack is epic, the graphics was great at the time of release - which is 2009. Some youngsters will surely skip buying DA:Origins because the graphics is a little dated, but they should understand that gameplay is the most important element in the world of gaming, not graphics.

It should be stated for those who aren't familiar with this title - this Ultimate edition is actually comprised of 2 games, not 1!! It's Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age: Awakening. The latter is not just a DLC, is a standalone game. At the time they were selling the DVD and I bought it. Also all the dozens of DLCs are present here, that add many additional story quests, item packs and even 5 new mini campaigns.
So if you buy this game when they have big sales, it's a steal! You get so much for what you pay.

A classic. I enjoyed every second of it.

Amazing RPG with great characters, story, gameplay mechanics and high replayability, the DLC only makes the game even better and even more replayable.




Spoilers
Altho I do have to point out an interesting parallel with the Awakening DLC of this game and Inquisition, both have a talking Darkspawn as the main boss (Awakening has 3 if I remember), both have a mechanic based around closing Fade Portals and both have a Main Base that you upgrade and gain further benefits from the more you upgrade (altho Awakening you have a Helms Deep moment at the end). So I prefer Awakenings rendition of the Inquisiton story and gameplay the only thing Inquisition wins is the Dragon Boss fights.

Excellent game, but the steam version is unplayable due to constant crashes before the game even starts. GOG version works perfectly though

Peak Bioware, the Atlas that held RPG name on its shoulders back in the days
Still can whoop that Fraud called Veilguard even without mods

DO NOT BUY!!!

Dragon Age is a Fantastic game. Unfortunately the steam version is completely unplayable. To be clear by unplayable I mean that the game can't even launch! If you really want to play this game you can still play it through EA's launcher. That or PC Game-pass which still uses EA's launcher. But whatever you do, DO NOT BUY THE STEAM VERSION!

Also for anyone that does play it through the gamepass/EA if you are still having issues with crashing in game turn the graphics down one from the highest settings. This show fix any crashing and stuttering.

With modern OS', the game is unplayable with how glitchy and prone to crashing it is.

THIS GAME DOES NOT WORK ON MODERN HARDWARE. Even with the community patches that were a pain to install it just does not function.

one word !BROKEN! do not buy, i mean every time you try to start the game it crashes
and I'm still waiting for my refund to go through :C

DO NOT BUY THIS. It doesn't function on steam, if you want dragon age anything, go to EA

You would assume that when they made it so the game WILL NOT START unless you have steam running they would maybe you know fix it to be used on new OS's after hours of reddit and google the crashes persist. It will play when it wants to and when it doe's its a great fun game....but selling a broken game and leaving the users to find the fix should be a crime "its probably not" cant be bothered for a refund because someday I might get it working but this is ridiculous

Great game that holds up well despite it's age. Too bad you need to mod it to work due to memory leaks. The game shouldn't be sold in this state

Dragon Age was the first game I played all the way through--without any help from my older brother. I decided to revisit the game since it was so discounted and boy does it hold up. I love the complex decisions that affect the whole game world, while somehow not making the decisions so weighty I can't decide how to act. I'm barely back in the game yet but It's still just as good as I remembered and I can't wait to complete it again.

That said, obviously there are some bugs and other issues. If you're playing in 2025, I suggest quick saving often because the game has randomly closed out on me a few times without a clear cause. Oh well.

I'm certain all the great things I've heard about this game are true, and if I managed to play it perhaps I would've agreed. As it stands, the current ultimate edition is completely unplayable, I've spent hours trying small fixes to simply get the game to run past the launcher, and now at the Grey Warden camp I have simply not managed to progress any further because a crash is around every corner. I've seen a 4GB RAM patch available, but to be frank I do not care enough to bother.

I would have really liked to play this, but it seems impossible to do on more modern PCs, at least without a level of extra work on my end that I should not have to bother with. If this is ever fixed, I'd like to come back to it, the bits of the game I did manage to play were very enjoyable.

The game crashes at random times and the Gameplay is Trash and Tedious. but the story and characters are great and are the only reasons why I enjoyed this game. the DLC are great too especially Awakening and Witch Hunt.

sorry to inform anyone who really wants this game on steam but it crashes on start up. don't listen to the mostly positive reviews because they're all based off the xbox versions. PPL say you can mod this game and it will run, i'm fairly experienced in modding games and I was never able to fix 100% of the issues. EA puts this game on sale for very cheap, very often and its a total cash grab in hopes you forget about it and never request a refund.

This game is completely unplayable on steam. With or without mods. With or without patches. Its unconscionable that Steam would continue to sell a product that is unplayable on a PC setup made in this millennium. Bioware online support doesn't exist, so be prepared to search the web to access dlc YOU payed for. Once you finally get it working and running, you will inevitably run through a gauntlet of game breaking glitches and bugs that no forum, how-to list, mod, or anything can accurately diagnose or fix which leads you turning into a monkey and slapping things at random hoping against hope. Save files will no longer load for no reason. The game crashes and crashes and crashes and crashes and.... What an endless source of frustration that somehow I willingly payed 30 dollars for. Be more intelligent than me and buy this on another platform.

Great game ruined by multiple game-breaking bugs that were never fixed. It is also a pain to even get working properly on Steam.

It seems like a good game but i had so many crash/freeze/technical issues with it on my 3070 laptop... I gave up in the end.

This is one of my absolute favorite games, but the Steam version DOES NOT WORK.

It's really difficult to describe in a few words what Dragon Age: Origins means for the RPG genre. It's role-playing at its roots, with an incredible story arc, deep gameplay and an atmosphere no other game can deliver. You'll hope the game will last forever.

Dragon Age: Origins is still very much a masterpiece even in 2025. The replay-ability of the story is wild, the characters and companions are some of, if not the best in gaming. The gameplay, although dated by modern standards, is fun and enjoyable, especially if you are playing on a higher difficulty and you deep dive the in-depth tactics system.
One slight negative is this it isn't really optimised for modern hardware and you may run into a few crashes here and there however if you have even the slightest idea on how to mod games then this is an easy fix.

It's really hard not to recommend this game, especially if you either enjoy older games or are looking to try out the Dragon Age franchise, if you can get passed the dated visuals (which were only really an issue to me for the first hour or so) then you have a genuine bargain on your hands, even in 2025.

One of the most well-written RPGs I've played. It's on Baldur's Gate 3's level of writing.

Companion characters have depth, it feels like I'm talking to an actual person instead of NPCs. They will doubt you, question you, logically challenge you. Some will look to you for comfort and allow themselves to be vulnerable near you. So very real and immersive.

The combat is unique among "real-time with pause" systems, thanks to its "coding" feature. Yes, you can literally setup conditions and response for almost every situation in combat for your characters. It saves you the hassle of micromanaging and instead makes you feel like a grand strategist.

The freedom of choice is real. The impact your choices have is immense, affecting the character development of your companions as well as the course of the whole story. You can choose who to ally, who to betray, who to please and who to provoke. Almost total control over the narrative.

I recommend this game to anyone looking for an immersive, personal, choice-heavy narrative experience.

Also Morrigan.

I have no idea what I could possibly be doing wrong, but this game does not run past the first cutscene. I've uninstalled it, started new files, even downloaded the LLA and the 4GB patch. Seems like this is an issue other people have had as well, really unfortunate because I've heard so many great things about this game and would love to play it.

For a game so old now, released 15 years ago, I wasn't expecting it to actually keep my attention very long and was convinced I'd flog the game after a dozen hours but that never happened. Instead I quickly played the entire thing in a week and was kept hooked. Solid 9/10 experience just for the surprise and great story. Game play while not easy wasn't overly difficult and not monotonous at all given it's slower nature but keeps itself engaging by giving you endless interesting encounters which make you carefully consider the choices made second to second.

Probably won't play the other games this one did it right.

As for whether or not I'd recommend this game, my answer would be yes with an asterisk at the end.

I'd like to call Dragon Age: Origins an absolutely timeless classic, but the graphics definitely show their age and there's the occasional glaring texture bug (like square shaped blood splatters and flickering textures) and crash. Not enough to make you want to jam a stake through your cranium out of sheer frustration, but certainly enough to be noticeable. You'll also probably want to install some bug fix mods depending on your interactions and choices involving certain characters: for example, in my first run through of this game, Alistair's dialogue towards the end had him talking as if he was the new king of Ferelden when he was very much not due to the choices I'd made, and that was more than a little immersion breaking. It can also be a right pain in the ass trying to get certain class specializations depending on the way you play the game. For example, if you choose not to take a deal offered by a demon at a specific point in the game, then you're just SOL if you wanted to play a Blood Mage. Makes sense in the context of the story, sure, but that doesn't make it any less of a bummer for players who wanted to experiment with one of the more broken class specializations in the game.

Obligatory f*ck the Fade, by the way. I'll shill for the Deep Roads until I look like the real life equivalent of the crying soyjack meme, but I'd rather sandpaper a crocodile's arsehole in a phone booth than go through that part of the game again. Play through it once normally and then just install a mod to skip it in any subsequent playthroughs unless you hate yourself.

Now that I've gotten my nitpicks with this game out of the way, I can start absolutely glazing it as our lord and savior Morrigan intended.

Dragon Age: Origins is the game that damn near ruined other RPGs for me as growing because of just how stellar its characters, world building, and story are. This game embodies the 'role-playing' part of role playing games perfectly. Almost every single one of your choices in this game impacts the plot greatly, and there is no greater example of this than the game's titular origin system. Depending on the race and class you pick, the dialogue options you have to choose from and the way other characters treat you varies wildly. Many of the choices you make will also impact not only Ferelden itself, but also how the game's last couple of hours and final battle plays out. Also, the characters. God, I love the characters in this game. Morrigan and Alistair are beloved fan favorites for a reason, and the rest of the party members are really interesting as well! I won't go too far into depth on them in case anyone who stumbles on this review wants to avoid spoilers, but even the lawful good old lady healer (Wynne my beloved. I would die for you) has some interesting bits of lore and party banter that make her feel very fleshed out.

To sum it up, while Dragon Age: Origins is certainly not without its flaws, I'd still give this game a solid 9/10. It's a game so good that I still find myself coming back to it fifteen years after its initial release. If you can look past its issues and don't mind not so great graphics, this is still hands down one of the best RPGs ever made. No, that is not an exaggeration. I genuinely enjoy this game's story and characters more than Baldur's Gate 3, and I absolutely adore BG3. That's how darn good Origins is.

Forth time playing this game and even with how old as it is I enjoyed it better than whatever Bioware did in most recent times.

The best CRPG till date. Fantastic writing, meaningful choices, a rich world, an engaging and believable story, and real characters. And all of this with voice acting?

Bioware has always crafted brilliant character driven stories that felt comparable to some of the best written novels. The problem is that the game simply does not work. I went through a fair amount of effort playing with the settings to get it optimized in order to play it, pro tip stick to the 1980 x 1020 resolution or less or it will say their is no supporting graphics card, but upon launching, creating my character, and going through the intro story, I tried to save my game and it just crashes to desktop. No clue how to fix this. I know it is an older game, which I somewhat understand as games are not always compatible with newer systems, especially for 16 year old game, but if you are willing to update or remaster it and have a defunct version on the store, allowing people to pay for a non-working product, that is just wrong in my opinion. I'm fairly new to PC gaming so I'm only becoming aware this is an ongoing issue as I play more games, but this sucks to have payed for a game, built up the hype to replay it after so many years (was hoping to play all 4 games in order), only to find out I wasted my money. This leaves me rather frustrated and disappointed.

If you plan to buy it despite the warning, do yourself a favor and play test it right away so you can get a refund if there are issues. Don't make the same mistake I made.

Too broken, even with 5 hours of screwing around I still cannot get it to work for more than an hour. If the game requires work to play then it shouldn't be for sale. The Devs are too fat and lazy to fix a good game and instead spend millions making a trash heep.