The Castle Sengir

There was a time, in the late 90s, when I played a lot of Starcraft. If that statement called to mind build orders and Zerg rushes, please revise your expectations. I played single-player nearly exclusively, and I played with cheats on. There was an official expansion, Brood Wars, which added new units and a new campaign. Beside it on Best Buy's shelves, there were numerous other Starcraft products, making grand boasts of "900 NEW MAPS!" in generic fonts. These map packs didn't have the novelty of new units for me to click on ad nauseum or new single-player missions to play for ten minutes and then skip with a code. They just couldn't satisfy me.

Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening is an expansion pack for Dragon Age, but perhaps that's giving it a bit too much credit. It behaves more like a map pack than a Brood Wars. There are more things to kill and more XP to get and more levels to gain, but there's not truly more meat to be had here.

For the record, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening is a confoundingly mouthy title. "Dragon Age: Origins" alone gets me with its presumptuousness - it suggests not merely a predestined trilogy, but a trilogy of trilogies. It's not so much a title as a marketing plan.

Dragon Age's setting was quite often described by Bioware as "low fantasy," which seemed to be an awfully nice way of saying "generic Ren Faire." Its plot wouldn't seem out of place in a relatively unambitious NES game. But that was redeemed when you talked to your party. See, when it comes to my party members in RPGs, I always roleplay as an opportunistic schmooze. It's kind of a min/max feedback loop: I tell them what they want to hear, and the game often rewards me for it. In Dragon Age, I found myself saying kind words to these people-simulacra because I liked them and wanted them to be happy. Well, all of them except Oghren, that horrible little thug.

Awakening does away with the bulk of your interactions with party members. They have their little quests and snippets of dialog here and there, but the presence of the characters is thin. Without getting down and dirty with some dialogue trees, I didn't feel any connection to my party members, removing the part of the game I most enjoyed. All it had left was the combat, which remains satisfactory. I felt over-leveled for most of the expansion, so most fights had all the suspense of Hot Knife Vs. Butter.

The game is more than a bit glitchy. I spent a sizable amount of cash on a backpack which failed to expand my inventory. The auras projected by your character's passive abilities can kill the frame rate (I should note that I played the game on the 360,) and often make the talking-head conversation scenes unwatchable. There was a city guard mysteriously appeared next to herself when I talked to her. Perhaps this mute doppelganger held secrets to the Darkspawn invasion? She was not forthcoming on the subject.


When I started Awakening, I was surprised to find that Leliana, the woman I had fallen in love with and pledged myself to during Dragon Age, had disappeared completely, with no explanation. Maybe it's better this way; I can remember her fondly, instead of through the prism of this hatchet job.