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Hot Stories
Dragon Age: Origins and Awakenings is Worth All $100 and More
Mike Rohde, Executive Editor
March 22, 2010
New environments with a Wow factor, number of gameplay hours with no rival, new story lines, new and old characters... BioWare could have easily sold Dragon Age: Awakenings as a stand-alone game and charged another $60 for it on top of Origins. They could have called it a sequel and it would have been a better sequel than what other developers have published lately. But they didn't. They called it an Expansion pack and chopped $20 off the retail price. Between Dragon Age: Origins and Awakenings, is it a game worth spending $100 on? Let's put it this way, would you spend $1 per hour of entertainment? Dragon Age: Origins can easily give you over 100 hours of gameplay, with different results, strategies, characters, skills and talents. Throw in Awakenings and you add considerable hours of gameplay. BioWare and EA have provided two top-notch titles for the close to the equivalent of paying 50 cents an hour of gameplay. You would be hard pressed to find any other title that matches this level of number of hours and number of significantly different playthroughs. Activision, Treyarch and Infinity Ward could definitely learn a lesson from BioWare and EA.
When you first open Awakenings, the first thing you might want to do is install it to the hard drive. Many players have become very accustomed to a quiet 360 while playing games. The problem with this is that the 360 reads the Awakenings disc as if it were Origins. Instead of seeing the option to install Awakenings, you will have the option to delete Origins. Grrr. As of now, the Internet forums do not provide any good answers. It appears that many people are simply deleting Origins from their HD and installing Awakenings.
In addition to this little problem, not all weapons and items from Origins will work in Awakenings, which is a major bummer. If your imported character was using items that are not available in Awakenings, then your character will not have it equipped when you start your new game, which could prove very problematic in the opening sequences. This sounds like two major oversights on the part of the developer. BioWare was contacted with these questions and concerns, but as of yet, they have not answered.
When you start Awakenings, you must decide whether or not to import an old character or to start a new Orlesian Gray Warden. If you're like me, the prospect of starting a new campaign with new skills and new talents means starting with a new character. After all, this is all about new, new, new, since much of the old is gone, gone, gone. There really doesn't appear to be any crossover game play intended between Origins and Awakenings. It's almost as if BioWare really did make a stand alone game at a reduced retail price. That's a major win for the player.
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