Dragon Age Origins Awakening - As half-assed as the new Joining ritual

Dragon Age Origins itself isn't that bad of a game. Lots of flaws but overall its decently fun to play. Not one of my favorites but its fun enough for me to finish the game without much bitching. Now Awakening is the expansion to this game. I know its an expansion and I know its not that expensive, but that doesn't justify its shittyness. Lets start from the beginning with Dragon Age Origins. Origins when it was first announced changed from a grim RPG into a over the top bloody "dark" RPG. They tried to cater to the God of War players but failed. If they stuck to like a Witcher style RPG then it might be a bit better. Overall, it just another over the top cliche RPG with swords and magic. Nothing more, nothing less.

So the story is pretty much darkspawns are attacking and a blight appears. Blight are when an archdemon appears and lead all the darkspawn. Without an archdemon they are all mindless. They sorta have an hive mind. The game starts depending on your origins you can start as human, elf, dwarf. Noble, commoner, mage, etc. Each one has a different story and affects the game ranging from npc interactions, endings, storyline changes. As soon as you do that, shit hits the fan and you get recruited by the gray wardens after something happens, for example mages you are about to get tossed into mage jail and "rescued" by the gray wardens. Elf commoner you kill the lord for raping your wife and your cousin and friends and is "rescued" by the gray wardens. Shit like that.

So you go around blight appears and the king gets backstabbed by his father's best friend and most trusted person who was also the queen's father. And the king and almost all the gray wardens die. Now you survive and is pissed off for what that asshole did so the whole story is you going around recruiting an army and then going off to a landsmeet with him and chopping off his head and imprisoning the queen for treason. Ok you could technically let them live and let the queen rule or marry the queen etc etc. Or kill them and become king/queen yourself. Anyways game ends with you killing the archdemon and everyone calls you the Hero of Fereldan. Then the game ends.

Awakening starts pretty much months after where Origins left off. You're now the warden commander of the gray wardens and you have the land where one of the traitors had and when you start walking to the keep you realize the darkspawn had killed everyone. Those assholes. Also I want to point out that people who purchased DLC and has DLC items will be unable to use them in Awakening. When I ported my character over to Awakening, the game started with me walking naked beside some armored chick. I was going "where is my shit?" Turns out you lose everything that you picked up during any DLC content. Surprise! Continuing on in your underwear you go around killing all the darkspawn and finding out one of them can talk. So once again all the gray wardens are dead and its up to you, the Warden Commander, the Hero of Fereldan, to save Fereldan once again, but this time only in a small area around Amarthine.

Its like the world isn't small enough they have to make it even smaller. The expansion itself is pretty small. Three missions, one defend the keep or defend the city mission and the final mission. You get an extra class specialization point in the expansion and two new class specializations for each main class (mage, rogue, warrior). Also around eight new talents for every class. These are mostly useless because combat got turned extremely easy. You get new items that are completely overpowered. For my mage, I killed a boss and got a amulet that increases arcane damage by 100% and a glove to increase my arcane damage by 30% and a staff that adds 20 spell power. What does that mean? It means all I have to do is cast a single spell and a whole mob of darkspawn dies instantly. The only downside is with friendly fire I keep killing my own tanks or bringing them to near death. But that doesn't really matter because they automatically resurrect after every battle, and battle ends in three seconds at most.

One thing that annoys me is that you get stupid quests that makes "godly items" but to make these items you need materials from Origins. Which means, unless you transferred one of those items you can't make your stupid shield or staff or whatever the shit you want. But the biggest thing is the Joining ritual. In Origins, the Joining ritual is all hush-hush and secretive. No one knows exactly how its done except for the older gray wardens and some mages. You basically take darkspawn blood and use magical shit and mages to make some kind of drink where you drink it. If you survive you get tainted but keep your mind and you become a gray warden. If you don't survive you fall on the floor and die. In Awakening, you get a bunch of people and when they join the gray wardens you just whip out a cup out of nowhere and they drink it and everything is fine. No risk at all. That's not all though, most of the characters you get you get a tiny little minor story about them which takes about five minutes and is like ten lines of text on what their background is and what they are planning to do. After that they just sit around in the keep, content, waiting for you to use them.

So you go around kill more darkspawn and then the game is over as soon as the game started. There are almost nothing linking the two games together. The game feels like they didn't even put any effort into it. They simplified everything and changed elements around so it "fits" the expansion. If the expansion felt more like an expansion then it would be more tolerable. What it feels like is more of a side story than a continuation of the main game.