What is your favorite Dragon Age Game?

Dragon Age Origins and Awakening - 3rd place: When I first played this (which was less than a year ago) I loved it for filling me with nostalgia for NWN, which I played in college. It has the same feel, in a lot of ways, with its environments. There was something so mystical about NWN environments, to me, and Origins feels much the same way. Maybe it's the fact that the graphics just aren't good enough to look remotely realistic, so I'm forced to use my imagination more. I love the large scale battles and the humorous companion banter, and now that I've got Shale for the first time, I think he/she/it is one of the coolest companions in the series. However, now that I'm on my second playthrough, I'm finding the game very tedious. I've finished Redcliffe and the circle tower, and partially completed Orzammar, but I am seriously dreading the amount of time I will have to spend in the deep roads and in the Brecilian forest. The combat is ok, but I'm playing a mage and there aren't that many loot-able staves out there, for some reason. I'm lumping Awakening in with DAO because I don't remember much about it other than Justice, Anders' cat, and the glitchy broodmother (ugh).

Dragon Age: Inquisition - 2nd place: DAI is just behind DA2 for me. According to Origin, I have spent over 360 hours on DAI alone (two full playthroughs and one partial that I plan to finish later). I love this game. Love my Inquisitors, love the companions, love the story. I prefer the combat here compared to DAO and DA2, though the tactical camera seriously doesn't zoom out enough. I do wish the game was more balanced between character-driven quests/cutscenes and aimlessly roaming the countryside. If the next game is this long with sooo many side quests, then I hope we have more time with our companions to balance things out. (And I know you don't have to do all the side quests, but you still need to do enough to get power for main missions and earn XP. Plus, I don't like to leave too much undone because I know by the time I get to the end, I am going to miss my Quizzy and wish to spend more time with them.) And I wanted Varric to be a romance option, dammit. Give me more Varric!

I liked the DLCs quite a bit. Descent was surprisingly good, and unlike the deep roads from DAO that felt claustrophobic to me, I found these deep roads breathtaking. JoH is fun, with a beautiful location, and Trespasser is a really good epilogue to the game. I wish there was more companion content, but I guess I'm just being greedy at this point.

Dragon Age 2 - 1st place: I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but to each their own, and so on. This is my favorite of the games because it has my favorite PC, my favorite companions, and my favorite story. I love taking Hawke from refugee, to Champion, and (unfortunately) back to refugee again after Kirkwall screws her over. I know some people prefer playing larger-than-life heroes, but the fact that Hawke has so little control over what happens to her and her friends is precisely why she is my favorite PC. She feels so much more real to me than either the Warden or the Inquisitor. She doesn't have her own army, or her own castle, or treaties compelling a bunch of ingrates to provide her with troops. She does the best she can with her small band of followers whose loyalty she has earned just by being herself.

Also, this. 

I think DA2's balance between companion-driven quests and "other" is very good. I really enjoyed MotA for the humor and Legacy for the Hawke family history and intro to Corypheus. I don't like the recycled environments or the endless waves of squishy enemies that appear during combat, but that isn't enough to drop this game out of my top spot.

You know, this is hard because I liked each of them for different reasons. I liked the Origins for the story, DA2 for the lay out and DAI for the CGI and the characters. I think my favorie was DAO though with DAI a close second because of the Cullen romance.

I find that each game had different strengths and my opinion on which is my favorite (Origins or Inquisition) will depend on... how I'm feeling that day, how much bacon I have or have not eaten, the telepathic urgings of Cthulhu, and so on...

Dragon Age: Origins
I think without the Origin stories in this game, I would not be the fan of the DA series I am today. While I thought it was a good game, I had my heroic Warden death and was ready to put it aside after my first run. It was really on a whim after playing Awakenings that I tried a 2nd playthough, and picked a different Origin... and that's what put the hook in me. I was surprised just how solid each of the Origin stories were and how you would gain a little more insight into the setting each time.

And of all the games, I felt this had the strongest cast of companions, just slightly edging out DA2's very strong cast. I missed the days that your ability bar was not limited to 8 slots. I also miss the depth of the Tactics settings in DAO, the cinematic kills as well as the great little summary page of your heroic achievements.


Dragon Age 2
DA2's greatest strength was in its protagonist and strong cast of companions. (Sarcastic) Hawke easily had the most memorable lines and banter of any of the protags in the DA series. And the banter with Varric, Izzy, Aveline and Daisy was gold, among the best (if not the best) in the series. That and the Arishok (one of the best villains the series) carried that entire game.

And I won't belabor the weaknesses in this game, as we know them all too well.


Dragon Age: Inquisition
The move to Frostbite, as painful as it was for the Dev Team, was clearly the right decision. We used to joke how you don't play Dragon Age for the graphics. This one... you could play just for the graphics. And even today, the environments still look better than RPGs that came after it (Fallout, Witcher...).

I loved the variety of regions, each with it's own colour palette, light, wildlife, sounds and ambient music. And while secondary quests definitely need to be fleshed out more in the next DA, I personally loved the exploration side to this game.

However, I thought the cast of characters, while good (it is BioWare after all), to be the weakest of the 3 games. The just don't have that... magic the prior games had. Maybe because the banter was so spread out, with trigger issues t'boot, and in much longer game, that they didn't really feel like they were bonding. I think it needed a few cinematic scenes where you have all the companions (or larger groups of companions) having discussions among themselves throughout the game. Just so you get a better sense of how they feel about one another and how those relationships change over time.

I was also mildly disappointed in the Inquisitor's dialogue. While they are involved in a lot of interesting situations, they're written so close to "neutral" that they probably have the least memorable dialogue of the 3 protags. The VAs did a great job I thought, but the material could have been better.

But I did like the main quests and the variety. I thought the War Table was a good idea, the crafting was awesome, the Black Emporium returning, as were the mounts (WAR NUG!) - even if there was really little use for them. The music - varied from good to awesome (eg. The Siege of Adamant).

1. Best for me was DAI. I liked the graphics, the breadth of the game, the characters (Solas, Cole and Cassandra in particular) and the lore. DAI presented a story which unravelled fascinating aspects of DA lore in a way which left me questioning and wanting more. I also found Solas' character incredibly compelling.

2. DA2 for Hawke and the fascinating, often conflicted characters. I really liked how DA2 felt like you had a ragtag bunch of crazy friends fighting to keep a semblance of order in an even crazier city. I think Hawke's snarky comment, "So... care to explain your particular brand of crazy?" sums up the game pretty well.

3. DAO. I placed DAO third, but it's still in my top 10 list of favourite games. I just happen to like the characters in the other 2 games more.

Good to see the DA2 love.

I gravitate most to DA2 (Sarcastic male Rogue Hawke is my favorite cRPG protagonist ever probably), but love them all for their various strengths.

1. Inquisition, marginally. It has my favourite cast of characters, and it's the only one of the three that improved significantly after launch and became a better experience on my fifth run than it was on my first. (Thanks to the Trespasser trials, Black Emporium, and the Golden Nug. All the new gear and the improvements to the wardrobe didn't hurt, either.)

2. Origins. Still has the best-told central story of the series (although not the most inherently interesting) and does a great job of introducing the world.

3. I adore Dragon Age 2 and have finished it eight times, but it could have used another coat of paint. The lack of race selection also knocks it down a point for me. Still a great game, though, with the most original plot so far.

I enjoy all three but..

1st place: Dragon Age Origins
2nd place: Dragon Age Inquisition
3rd place: Dragon Age 2

DAI would have supplanted DAO if it had had origins or hadn't changed the combat so much from previous instalments.

1. DAO
This is perhaps my favorite game of all time (or maybe KOTOR). I loved the different origin stories so much that I sometimes started a playthrough just to try different ones out. The story and characters were great. The banter between Alistair and Morrigan was awesome. I remember my first playthrough being so connected to my character in a way I've never felt in any other game. We also had more abilities and dialogue options were the best of the series. Combat was a bit clunky but I still liked it. Some sections probably dragged on longer than necessary but I only noticed this after multiple playthroughs.

2. DAI
A very solid game that I've enjoyed putting hundreds of hours into. The characters were great as always and the story was good though short. My biggest issue is the poor quality of side quests. Also Val Royeaux. It is a beautiful game and that almost made me want to collect things for the side quests...almost. Liked having race and voice options.

3. DA2
Didn't enjoy this too much and as a result I've only ever done 1 playthrough, which is unusual for me with BioWare games. The story and characters were good but not much else. Same city, same cave, same enemies, same enemies, same enemies, same enemies, rinse, repeat. The monotony of it all was too much. I didn't enjoy diplomatic Hawke, though I guess I should've done sarcastic based on what I've heard.

1. DAO
Story and characters were good, but what made it stand out was the complexity of many quests, the different ways you could choose to solve them - dealing with Connor, Orzammar's main quest, being captured in the endgame, even small quests like the one with the demon cat. Compared to that, most of what came after felt simplistic and continued to feel so to this day. Also, DAO has my favorite character (Morrigan) and all in all, the world felt more natural, neither parodistic like DA2's nor sanitized like DAI's. I liked the open-ended ending with its "write your own epilogue" aspect and I liked the ending of Witch Hunt even more.

And perhaps its best feature compared to what came after: no paraphrasing. I hate paraphrasing with a passion. It destroys roleplaying.

Because of all this, my main Warden Eorlin Amell is still my most favorite DA player character, and perhaps my best-realized roleplaying character in a video game of all time.

2. DAI
In many ways, DAI has this place because of the things it's not, that being not as good as DAO but not as bad as DA2. For me, it stands out for its breathtaking vistas and the quality of the character creator, which is the best Bioware has ever made - but those are cosmetics. The substance of the game, while solid, appears incomplete, and as usual in Bioware's games (as opposed to, say, the old Troika games), its roleplaying works mainly because what it leaves to the imagination of the player. While this is very much preferable to having to say the wrong things (see ME3), rarely do we get to say anything of substance. At certain critical times, we did, though, which is more than many other current roleplaying games offer.
 
One of the more dislikeable aspects, along with "too many collection quests", "too much wilderness" and "too much religion", was that it's sanitized, carefully cleansed of everything that might personally touch even the most senstitive player in an uncomfortable way, which is why its horrors remain remote, as well as its very blatant social commentary when it comes to certain characters. It is handled quite well, yes, but it is all too recognizeable as what it is, featuring allegory ("the purposed domination of the author") rather than applicability ("resides in the freedom of the reader" - both quotes by Tolkien). As a counterexample: Mark Charan Newton has handled this quite better in "Nights of Villjamur".

Having said that, I played DAI a lot, and my Inquisitors are much more memorable than my Hawkes. Some of the side-plots were very enjoyable and there was almost none of the roleplaying-related frustration I experienced in ME3, and almost none of the groan-inducing parody of DA2. Character design and writing ranges from good to truly outstanding, Cassandra is one of the most well-realized NPCs I've ever seen in a game, Cole's alien-ness as a spirit comes across convincingly while he remains completely relatable as well, and Solas - the likely antagonist of the next game is a fascinating enigma for most of the story. I am now sick of Southern Thedas and its Chantry, its templars and its religion, though, and I never want to see another end like Trespasser's again. I do not want to lose in the epilogue, damn it.

3. DA2
I hate the combat. I really hate the combat. I can't stand the combat. That's what repeats itself in my mind whenever I think of playing DA2 again. Too fast for comfort and ridiculously over-the-top in its aesthetic, for me it's only bearable if I play on the lowest difficulty AND use a damage-reducing mod on top of it, so that the combat basically plays itself. I'm usually not bothered by combat mechanics I don't like, because then I play on easy so that it doesn't bother me, but DA2 manages to make me *seriously* hate it, to the point that it's become a reason not to play the game.

"Over the top" and "parodistic" are the most appropriate terms for DA2's aesthetic and character design. Many characters and Hawke themselves, almost in all their incarnations, are extreme realizations of certain types and tropes, soemtimes to the point that any individual personality is completely lost in the barrage of stereotyping. On top of it, the designers' way of making locations interesting was clearly "throw a lot of meaningless combat at the player". Did I say I hate the combat? The teleporting enemy waves certainly did not help.
It is a shame, really. The story setup was refreshingly different, featuring more personal plot elements rather than the epic but impersonal main plots of DAO (and DAI). Roleplaying wasn't altogether bad within the annoying personality constraints. It couldn't been a really enjoyable experience at least with regard to roleplaying, but that, too, the designers managed to almost ruin by reducing player freedom to almost zero. Even conversations with your companions could be neither brought forward nor deferred.

In the end, my Hawkes were the least memorable of my DA protagonists. Between too much definition from the writers' side and too much parody and stereotyping where there was some freedom for roleplaying left, most of them remained mere shells of what they could've been. I did like the sarcastic Hawke personality, but even that was soured since I couldn't rein it in when it would be completely parodistic.

I especially loved Hawke cartoonish character. It was caricature, yes, but despite this fact, was surprisingly personal. The same applies to the other characters. (For example, I found Dorian's character and backstory as annoying stereotype.)
I enjoyed DA2 combat system too: It was dynamic, but if needed, I had stop it, and used the tactic. The pop out of nowhere enemies at the first play was annoying, yes, but later did not cause any difficulty.

(If it was the plan, the implementation pretty lame, as I see...)

Origins is and will always be my favorite. It was the first Bioware game I played, and I loved it instantly - story, characters, its humor! I remember I forgot to go to sleep once while playing

DA 2 and DAI - I don't know which I like more. Or less Both were a disappointment, but for different reasons.