Yay! I dunnit.
After 2663 kills, 2266 conversations and 84:26 hours I have finally managed to finish the main campaign of
Dragon Age Origins plus all of the DLC that integrated with the main game as I played the Ultimate Edition.
I played on normal difficulty (had to switch to easy once for one particular fight in the Deep Roads) which provided a decent challenge in the tougher fights without any need for excessive micromanaging.
I was surprised by the rather sudden ending so I had some unfinished business in my quest log that I could not get back to due to the way the ending is set up. It was a hmm… ~90% completionist run though.
My main was an elf mage (finished at level 22) and my default party was Alistair, Leliana + Wynne.
I actually played through all of the origin stories back when the game came out, abandoned it, started another attempt in 2012, abandoned it, and this time finally did it.
In hindsight I'm not even sure what kept me from finishing the game earlier… maybe the extremely generic premise of a demon invasion by the even more extremely generic sounding "darkspawn"
horde?
I guess I had the advantage this time that I barely played any games this summer so it was easier to simply forget about the generic stuff and instead focus on the smaller picture, take the game step by step, enjoy the progression and the gameplay and to just do it.
It definitely started to drag a little towards the end, also because there was barely any new stuff to be found anymore. It seems I got most of the best-in-slot equipment from the DLCs rather early on so there was barely any loot/equipment progression in the last half of the game or so. I finished with over 250 gold in the bank because there wasn't really anything sensible to spend it on.
On a whole I really enjoyed the game though. The character progression in terms of attributes, spells and skills was motivating. The combat was (mostly) fun as it required crowd control, prioritizing targets etc., and in some fights you really had to use pretty much ALL of your entire arsenal.
The story, or the sub-plots rather, ended up being rather decent in spite of the lame, generic premise. They could have done a better job with the choices & consequences. It was hard to tell the impact sometimes when you actually had a real choice and the one rather important choice (involving Alistair/Anora/Loghain) was executed very poorly because the dialog options were kind of weird and unclear and led to totally unexpected results (I believe I reloaded three times and then looked up a guide).
At the end it still all felt like a nice classic epic RPG with a grand finale.
Now I'm looking forward to playing the expansion and the standalone DLC.
I actually started The Witch Hunt right away as it was on the top of the 'Other Campaigns' menu from the main menu but I luckily had a hunch to google for "Dragon Age Origins DLC order" since I was curious if there was a "best order" and there sure enough is if -like me- you want to keep playing with your beloved main campaign character.
So instead of The Witch Hunt I will now be playing the Awakening expansion first, then Golems of Amgarrak and The Witch Hunt last as that seems to be the only order you can import your character from one DLC to the next.
And then after that comes the totally standalone Leliana's Song and Darkspawn Chronicles.