gonna be honest
I was really disappointed
Its lore/world was more engaging than Kingdoms of Amalur, sure, but mostly it was... kind of a mess. And still not that engaging.
The game's combat was frankly pretty terrible. I'd have expected it to revolve more around strategization, but with just how often attacks by both the players and enemies miss, it often feels as if it came down to luck more than anything else. There were only a handful of times when I really felt accomplished.
But I didn't come in for great combat, I came in for a great story! And in that, Dragon Age: Origins mostly certainly delivers! in dialogue that honestly I wish I could just skim through or something, really, it's not worth all that much. Lots of smaller decisions only have one rewarding conclusion (that being "imma kill u"), and you can often detect BioWare's bias in just the way the lines are written. One way might have a bunch of exclamation marks, indicating that whoever chooses that is speaking childishly or rashly. This really takes away from the value of the decisions, it judges you for them before you can even make them.
The AI's so dumb, so incredibly dumb. Someone will kill an enemy, then start running a marathon with no other enemy selected. Sometimes they'll use an attack with knockback, and hit an enemy out of range, to which their reaction is to stand in place without attempting to walk close enough to reengage in combat. They'll just stand there like a fucking idiot. Sometimes I'll enter a small battle without giving my friends commands, only to see that for some reason they're very averse to walking through a particular doorway, and never followed along into the room.
Sometimes I wished that it would be more of a sandbox. The game contains a ton of themes relating to freedoms and restrictions, though often I'm not sure which angle it's pushing, and it just makes me so-so-cleverly think "if only I had more freedom here, HAH, clever Husky, you."
The game reminded me of the original Witcher in many ways. Some of its tracks sounded almost like inferior copies of things I'd heard in The Witcher, and in every other example, such as the dialogue and the different approach to combat, I only found the comparison to be a negative one. The Witcher's often hated for its different combat, but it was still fully functional. You just had to pick the right sword (out of two), the right combat style (out of three), and then click to the correct rhythm. DA Origins is much less engaging, and either calls for a healthy dose of luck, or just spamming the abilities bar. Half the time my enemies can't even attack me since every other attack also stuns them.
I did have a strange issue that would plague me every few hours: sometimes I would die, right, and then I'd load back to the last save: but I wasn't making a habit of quicksaving. I was relying on autosaves. In most games I always forget to save, hell I can go through an eight hour playsession before thinking "oh shit, I should really save." Usually for games that load back when you die though, I can bank on autosaves, but not in DA Origins, no. When I die, I'll go back four loading screens and go "wait, what? Where am I? Here? Wait, but I left here HOURS ago!" I eventually found out that the issue might not even be that the game doesn't autosave often: it's that the triggers to automatically save, which are physically placed in the map, are too small, and thus can easily be walked past without realizing it. In most games, if the game wants to save as you walk through a hall, perhaps the trigger is placed to encompass the entire hall! Not here. Nope. You can just skip right over it without realizing.