DA was never particularly great

Wrong. DAO is great, soulful game and if you disagree then I would like to know why and what's your favorite RPGs.

da1 is the mage game, da2 is like a raid tank experience on nightmare of needing to constantly fill up on potions, da3 is for rogues, especially with the cooldown ability that lets you use stage 3 ultimate on a 15 second cooldown

da4 is literally an action game and is for rogues

It’s way too dated to be enjoyable now though.

what do you mean dated? What makes it dated compared to veilguard or BG3 lol

The origins in Origins are literally the best RPG storytelling tool ever. Each warden has a nice back story and pleanty of motivations to be good or evil in the game. Each warden also get to go home and have their own lil character arc if they want to. Nowadays youve got shit like BG3 where your entire charater's story has to be headcanon'd in.

It was for me...

DA:O was ok. It got a lot of goodwill because the last "proper" RPG was 3 years ago (NWN2) and even won rpg codex award of the year or something like that.
I played through it once and don't really consider it a classic.

It’s so stiff and jank compared to new games. It’s hard to overlook things like that after 17 years.

only 4 character party

no good side-quests

pretty linear progression, no free traveling on the world map to new and interesting locations

very bare-bones city with nothing to discover

INCREDIBLY ugly nature environments, fucking Gothic 2 came out 7 years earlier and had better looking and designed forests, swamps and villages

the fucking tower main quest

combat is chaotic and rarely tactical

very basic class system and character progression.

I didnt hate it but by god was it a huge step backwards compared to the Baldurs Gate Saga.

Same as the other anon, I liked it but I thought it was worse than Bg2 in almost every way.

examples. it plays better than modern rpg games, it has more roleplaying and nonlinearity than da2,da3 and Veilguard combined. better writing, characters, aesthetics, atmosphere, music, wtf do you need from rpg? graphics? kys pajeet

Yeah stiff and bloated with cutscenes and dialogue and every zone in the game is bad except the little farm sample zone where you meet Sten

I have the game on Steam but I remember dropping it because it had fully voiced dialogue that I didn't want to listen to and I couldn't figure out how to skip it.

It being better than the trash slop that is the rest of the DA series doesn’t make it a stellar game. It’s alright though

It came during a time when RPGs were basically dead and it wasn't until Pillars of Eternity and Divinity that these returned thanks to kickstarter

zoomer's first rpg

The origins in Origins are literally the best RPG storytelling tool ever

they really arent. i like the idea, but the implementation was very lacking. i was really hoping they'd just build on top of in sequels, but they decided to drop it, despite the whole fucking first game LITERALLY being named after that whole system.

The eldest zoomers were 12 years old when DA:O released. Zoomer's first experience with rpgs was probably Skyrim

This. It was always nothing special

How should it have been implemented so as to not be so "lacking"
I mean, if your biggest complaint was they didnt do it in the other games, then it sounds pretty great to me.

i keep hearing this, but its not really true, is it? around the same time witcher got released, me 1 and 2 by the same studio, fallout 3, oblivion was still relatively fresh and popular, fable 2, etc.
yeah, it was the era of modern warfare shooters and dudebro tps games, while in the "rpg" genre it was all about MMOs and everyone trying to create the new WoW killer s till, but its not like the genre was completely dead and DA came like some archangel from heaven to save it

Dragon Age was always about pushing the boundaries of what's acceptably woke. The first got away with what it did because it was still made by gamers and they took the Handmaiden's Tale approach of preaching by hyperreality. Veilguard's just straight-up sissy hypno.

Remaster for modern audience when

Even Lord of the Rings Online did that. Hell, even WoW did that.

Yeah even DAO had this obnoxiously heavy handed almost cynical storytelling. Sure people are real assholes and enemies, but every corner you turn it’s your superior spitting on you and sentencing you to execution by saying you saving the day was murder, so he can get away with killing dozens of townsfolk every day, and the towns are all bigoted and mean and they don’t trust anyone and they’re scared and abused and you have to trick them because they’re so stupid. It’s annoying as shit lol

Veilguard's just straight-up sissy hypno

Lmfao I gotta use this more. Feels accurate

It couldn't even maintain the grimdark setting for one game. I was already done with the series before Origins was over. DA2 is great for a laugh though. One of the best bad games.

I was mid 20s, doing the math.

Veilguard's just straight-up sissy hypno.

I wish, but its not even that good :/

well, ive played a game more than a decade ago, so i probably am forgetting something, but i remember quite clearly that at some point, your origins just dont really matter aside for maybe a conversation or two here and there.
iirc i was a human noble, and never really felt like that changed much of my playthrough. even that guy that betrays your whole family who should be a very personal arch-enemy almost, felt like a throwaway.
i remember reading that not all origins were equal, and for example dwarfs had way more optional content depending on their origins, so maybe i just picked the shittiest one, but still, game more or less plays out the same regardless of your origin in the end.
as i said yeah, good idea, but i was just expecting them to build on it and expand it, it couldve been something great after a game or two, but they just decided to drop it

was never great
but it was something between 'ok' and 'pretty good'
or something like that
but also when it was released it received a lot of benefit of a doubt - I mean people hoped it is just the beginning of something great, of both RPGs and Bioware getting good again after some drought
yeah

never. too much content. you can create your own remaster with mods

around the same time witcher got released

Dragon Age 2008
The Witcher 2 2011
And no, nobody played The Witcher 1 because it was an obscure janky PC game

It was pretty alright. Unfortunately, every subsequent release managed to get so much worse in new and unexpected ways.

It even had that retarded "your disc will self-destruct after three installations" DRM. It's amazing the game managed to sell as well as it did, considering.

And no, nobody played The Witcher 1

i dunno, maybe its because im yuropoor, but tw1 was quite popular around here

Wrong. It was and still is a really fun and awesome RPG. To this day it has one of the best stories and cast of characters of all time.

Witcher 1 was made by Poles on a hacked together NWN engine. It was the cheapest shit possible and it showed. That whole game was practically remade and relaunched with the Enhanced Edition as an apology, it was so fucking bad when it launched.

And that was generally the state of RPGs at the time. Cheap, broken, made by fans who desperately missed the old days. MMORPGs were the future and you were going to fucking like it.

It was great and I think there is still no rtwp CRPG with picrelated AI programming

That was the reason, The Witcher 2 got his fame thanks to the console port even when these didn't get the first one

This. I think since DAO release only New Vegas, KCD and BG3 can compete. I don't count small indie games like age of decadence etc.

anons, thats 2

That's literally the gambit system from FF12

Western shit is garbage.

FFS stop calling everything remotely left wing "woke". Having faggot characters in a game isn't woke. Having faggot characters in a game who preach about how faggotry is good and everyone should accept faggotry and if you don't you're a racist bigot, that is woke. Now you can say that both of those things suck and that's a fair point but get your definitions in order or else you're going to keep getting duped by slop merchants

So you never touched Final Fantasy XII

gonna try to wade through the sea of typical Anon Babble contrarianism retardation
Yes, it was pretty great, all 3 of the games were pretty great (cannot comment on veilguard as I haven't actually PLAYED it like most of the turds here)

DA:O had fantastic worldbuilding, interesting companions (bioware standard at the time but still), and great backgrounds+ reactivity. It stopped being a thing towards the end of the game, but that's because your character made a name for themselves by that point. Seriously the amount of tie-ins and variation with different factions is crazy. The story was pretty vanilla, but had its great moments too, all the lore about the old demon gods singing to their darkened hordes, don't tell me you disliked that

DA2 suffered from mad crunch, but the core stories it tried to tell were still GOOD. The mage-templar conflict boiling to a peak inside a confined city was great. The qunari going apeshit (lol) was great. Even the lyrium stuff was great. Notice how half the plot contents of inquisition were lifted straight from DA2 - they almost had too much of it.

DA:I was very modernized, but still had excellent graphics, good companions (yes even the annoying ones, Sera is an awful companion but a great character). Some parts of the story were good too, as was the music.

yall are a bunch of contrarian haters pretending that none of the above ever happened as usual

FF12 isn't rtwp CRPG

How and why did they ruin her?

all 3 of the games were pretty great

now you are just being straight contrarian

No it's a rtwp JRPG, you fucking retard.

By not using the grey warden in 2, the retards thought people liked Morrigan for anything else but as your cum dump

It's same in origin.

thats pretty deep anon
when the contrarianism gets so strong, it becomes norm, and norm becomes contrarianism

there is still no rtwp CRPG

FF12 isn't rtwp CRPG

No it's a rtwp JRPG

I know about existence of gambit system in XII but it's not CRPG. I'm have no idea why you're trying to pick a fight.

DA2's writing is so comically bad it's worth playing for the comedy. Also the endlessly reused maps and constantly spawning enemies that seemingly crawl out of everything.

DA2 was never good, you can make the claim DA:I was bearable, but DA2, fuck no.

She's a popular and recognizable character, therefore she needs to be forced into the story. Also lack of competence.

Oblivion was 06'.
Mass Effect 1 and Witcher were released in 07', the first Witcher game, while a decent first effort, was hardly an earth shattering experience or a polished one at that.
Fallout 3 was 08', as was Fable 2.
Mass Effect 2 came out in 10'.

Dragon Age: Origins' success can be primarily attributed to the fact that year, it had practically zero competition at it's release in 09'.
There were a few other western RPG's being made, Divinity 2 and Risen being examples, but saying either had the same gravitas as Origins is laughable.

I know this is a shitpost because half those games you named aren't RPGs.

The inference is Bioware came up with it, which they didn't. Like most things they do it's a copy of something else.

You could also script your team mates in Infinity Engine game, though not so easily.

one thing that stood out to me about DA2 writing was that they had quests already setting the stage for the plot events to come, even while dealing with the current one. This doesn't excuse repetitive dungeons and bad combat (product of super short development time I am guessing), but it really stood out

also anders jihad lmao

There's nothing great about it. But then, there's nothing particularly offensive about it either, the generic nature does manage to provide players with the sort of character archetypes they tend to want to play which arguably kinda is the point, and some bits are good relative to peer games: for example, I maintain that RTwP is a fundamentally flawed system (either the game is facerollable with no meaningful decisions, or it turns to pausing every couple of milliseconds), and aspects like combat responsiveness are so inferior to games like World of Warcraft it's not even funny, but ultimately I think DA:O has one of if not the best implementations of the system. After all, the scripting options for the most part take away enough of the control burden to let you focus on your main character rather than microing companions.

Additionally, while the system isn't very in-depth and manages to be even more opaque (mostly for effective absence of documentation: if you e.g. had dynamic tooltips and a combat log where you could mouseover and see all of the combat factors involved, that'd been better), I think it's directionally an improvement to d20-based systems that used to plague and still plague the space. There's just no reason to implement a system working within PnP limitations while at the same time reliant on judgement calls by a human DM when no human DM is present, and one that isn't very good even its Anon Babble context (e.g. opposed rolls work much better, in terms of offering bell curve like distributions, consistency and elegance in who rolls because it's "both" in all of the cases, and provides a sense of agency to the other guy). Make no mistake, DA:O system isn't very good. But getting rid of the DnD baggage was a necessary first step in a sense, so I still find it somewhat commendable.

Given that all competitors are also deeply flawed one way or another albeit in different ways, I think DA:O actually earns a pretty respectable ranking.

define rpg

what does rpgcodex thinks about it nowadays? i refuse to form an opinion before i hear from them!

All 'RPG's that BioWare made are mediocre.

recognizable

the irony

I literally can't tell the difference between this version of her & inquisition they look so similar!

she already looked horrible in inquisition

pissening

Origins was kino thougheverbeit

18. I liked it. Zevran died because he was a faggot and I wasn't going to recruit someone who was paid to kill me.

At the time, as a huge KOTOR fan, I really liked Dragon Age Origins.
Tried to replay it 5 years ago, and I couldn't do it.

yeah Zevran being a flaming homo was one of the first signs that Bioware was going down a Tumblr path.
At the time, I thought "its okay just ignore it" but we now realize the consequences of giving them an inch.

I can tell a difference

Get help.

same. didnt even know he was a faggot.
same faith for astarion in my first playtrough, didnt even know hes a gigafag(well, kinda did, he talks like one straight from the go), but if you pull a knife on me you die, simple as

simple as

Without fail, every post this is appended to is made by the most retarded motherfuckers on this board.

When DA:O was released, it filled the void left by BG2 and PT in the small world of cRPGs. At the time, I remember a lot of people saying that DA:O was a kind of spiritual sequel to Baldur's Gate. And they were partially right. I have very fond memories of DA:O that were partially ruined by the DA2 fiasco. And I didn't deign to play DA:I.
The successive flops of DA2 and DA:I have turned the Dragon Age licence into a minor cRPG licence, but to say that "DA was never good" seems wrong to me. DA:O was a good game.

seething mutt

I tried playing inquisition, but i quit like 4 hours in when i realized im playing single player wow and got bored of fetching boar anuses

it was somehow even worse than 2, which i at least forced myself to finish

was for

Boldly put, and I disagree but appreciate the sentiment. It doesn't compare favorably to Tyranny's backstory generator, I think it's called Conquest. Really great game if you haven't played it.