Oghren's Joining in Awakenings

It completely ruined the grativas of the joining for me and I never again recruited him.
I even reloaded and sent him off with Alistair.
Probably just me, but I didn't like the joining being turned into a laugh track moment. I'm probably too stuffy, idk.

Well I didn't think it was funny.

Gaider did say that he regretted how they flanderised Oghren in Awakening, because they wrote him into the expansion at the last minute. That does explain why his character seemed to have regressed since Origins and why they played up him being a drunken lech more.


You could also look to his unique training as a Berserker being what allowed him to withstand the intense pain of the Joining, without passing out as others do. Oghren is used to shrugging off intense pain on a regular basis, so I doubt the Joining would have fazed him all that much?

They're at least better explanations than his tolerance being solely due to his alcoholism.

The only thing i disliked about Oghren in awakening was that his approval starts from zero(not that it's hard to raise it back again).

I understand why it was made this way though,so i just attribute his loss of memory to his drunkenness

What I find annoying is the fact that during dialogue conversations with him you're severely restricted in what you can say (assuming you wish to gain his approval).

You have to be utterly straight laced at all times, providing nothing but straight, honest, boring-but-factual answers to his questions. You can't joke with him or tease him, because doing so results in disapproval. 

This is important if you're wanting to go for 100% completion, because getting enough approval with him to do the 'Oghren Family Man' quest is pretty difficult even if you do everything flawlessly, give the 'correct' answer in each dialogue choice, and give him every available gift. Losing approval due to picking a jocular or bantering dialogue option is not something you want to happen - unless you truly don't care about losing approval, or 100% completion.

What I usually do is save up unused gifts from Origins and import them into Awakening. You can gain quite high approval with most Origins companions through dialogue and in-game choices even if you give them no gifts at all, so I'll usually just give them the important, character-specific ones such as Alistair's Mother's Amulet, Golden Mirror, Dalish boots etc. and just use the others very sparingly, or not at all. This means that I can usually import a whole sackload of unused gifts into Awakenings, each giving one approval point when given to a party member. These, combined with the Awakenings gifts are more than enough to gain sufficient approval to do Ogren Family Man, and there's usually a few left over to give to other companions.

Yeah I don't have a strong opinion about that.

That might be because as much as I love DAO, I don't really like Awakening all that much.