Dragon Age: Origins (Gameplay) - A Game of Thrones
0I don't care one bit about the overarching, supposedly "epic" storyline of Dragon Age: Origins. As far as I'm concerned, the writers at Bioware would have shown more maturity - not to mention realism about the average player's attention span - had they not bothered to come up with such a needlessly convoluted, comically lore-obsessed justification for what's basically a standard orcs-and-dragons plot device. Blights and Darkspawns might fit nicely in a second-rate sword & sorcery novel, but engaging in both the actual combat-related gameplay as well as the dialogue-oriented character development of DA:O are far more compelling activities than having to wade through endless Codex entries and tedious story exposition concerning such highly conventional fantasy material.
However, there's one very specific point at which the otherwise long-winded storytelling in Dragon Age: Origins gets spectacularly good, and that is the Landsmeet. When the nobility has finally gathered to vote on Loghain's rule, this hitherto predictable high fantasy story of a brave Warden uniting the lands against an evil usurper suddenly takes a sharply political turn, and ends up being a fascinating, messy and painful event in which none of the various possible outcomes can be characterized as unequivocally "good" or "evil". There's a price to be paid for every choice, and some actors will inevitably gain in power at the expense of others in this emotionally fraught zero-sum game of morally ambiguous political intrigue. This is easily the best combination of solid writing and complex choice-related gameplay Bioware has ever produced, and as far as I'm concerned it constitutes the game's "real" ending; with which a tediously outdrawn dragon fight cannot even begin to compete.
Incidentally, the full extent to which the player is able to influence the end result of the Landsmeet actually wasn't known to me until fairly recently, when I heard that it is possible to spare Loghain's life, recruit him as a Gray Warden and even have poor Alistair executed(!). Needless to say, that is the deliciously ironic outcome I ended up chosing for this particular playthrough...
Other Videos By Demiath
Other Statistics
Dragon Age: Origins Statistics For Demiath
Currently, Demiath has 31,953 views for Dragon Age: Origins across 53 videos. There's close to 10 hours worth of content for Dragon Age: Origins published on his channel, roughly 1.63% of the content that Demiath has uploaded to YouTube.