It’s late. The fire is burning low. The sardonic elven rogue who joined your party a few days ago pulls up a log, flashes a grin, and tells you (cheerfully) about his former employer, who would love to see him dead. The elf flirts with you like it’s a survival skill. Which, given said former employer, it might be. How nicely you take his jokes decides how much of the person underneath he lets you see, and whether he ever stops treating charm like armor.
If you’ve picked up a controller in the last three years, you know exactly who this is: Astarion, the beloved disaster from Baldur’s Gate 3. Plot twist: Wrong game, wrong decade. This is Zevran — Zev, to his friends — from Dragon Age: Origins, released by BioWare in 2009. He’s been hired to kill you, so your meetcute could be deadly. Proceed with caution.
Origins is a dark fantasy RPG that many tend to overlook because of its age. It’s got dated graphics (the game is so very beige) and glitches galore. But, if you’re a fan of Baldur’s Gate 3 and you’ve got about 50 hours to spare, there is no better use of your time than meeting and falling in love with Origins’ merry band of misfits — and experiencing the well-written, responsive world of Thedas for the first time. You’re going to see some similarities. BioWare’s co-founders themselves have described Dragon Age as a spiritual successor to their own Baldur’s Gate series, and there’s quite a lot that Baldur’s Gate 3 and Origins, specifically, have in common.
Image: Electronic Arts
Think: the camp where companions confide in you, the approval you earn or squander, the backstory that changes how strangers treat you. It all starts here. So if your favorite part of RPGs is getting to know, and maybe romance, a set of catastrophically broken and real-feeling companions, what on earth are you waiting for?
You’ll start by figuring out who you’re going to be — your own origin. Dragon Age: Origins invites you to start your journey with a unique backstory and purpose that changes how you see Ferelden and how every NPC treats you. Will you be a city elf? Feel like a dwarven noble today? Want to be a rebellious mage? (Spoilers: You’ll have to deal with some pretty intense baggage, either way.)
Image: BioWare/EA
As you pick your way through the game’s initial objectives and fill your inventory with blank vellum, you’ll start to meet your found family. Never has there ever been a game more full of gloriously dysfunctional, deeply traumatized teenagers saddled with changing the fate of the world. Meet Alistair, the junior Grey Warden whose jokes cover for his insecurities; Leliana, a sweetly devout bard with a past she’d rather forget; Sten, the strong, silent type who murdered a family but could be the most honorable person in your camp; and Oghren, a drunken dwarven berserker you will first tolerate and eventually adore. And, of course, Morrigan, your new favorite sarcastic bog witch. Grimdark Magazine called each companion a “mini-game” to explore through dialogue, which is exactly the right way to describe getting monosyllabic Sten to finally open up.
Having a hard time getting to know your companions? No worries, they’ll talk behind your back nonstop. Alistair and Morrigan snipe about templars, Leliana tries to hold a conversation with your mabari — a breed of war hound — who the game implies is smarter than half your party. Alistair has thoughts about this: “Just how smart are mabari supposed to be, anyway?” So does Morrigan: “Alistair is still the dumbest one in the party.”
Image: BioWare
While you’re bickering with each other, you’re tasked with uniting Ferelden’s squabbling mages, elves, dwarves, and nobles against the Blight, a darkspawn horde led by an archdemon. Your choices do matter quite a bit: Every companion you talk to, every fight you pick, every arl you insult and every ally you spare or betray changes you, your cast of characters, and the world at large…permanently.
If you loved how BG3 remembers everything, from who you spared to which companion you drove away, listen closely: Dragon Age: Origins came first. The time you — and the writers of this incredible game — have invested to make the people around you feel real serves to make the stakes feel searingly personal, and the choices you’re forced to make nearly impossible. Select a morally-dubious dialogue option during a political showdown, and Alistair will threaten to walk; pour dragon blood over a prophet’s sacred ashes, and Leliana will suddenly try to kill you. Very often, you’re left with no choice that will clearly please everyone (Read: You’re going to feel bad. If “Karlach Disapproves” felt like a knife through your heart, you may want to sit down.) And, don’t worry, there are cinematics that let you watch and really take in the consequences of your own actions, a trick that BG3 capitalized on 14 years later.
Is a 2009 game still playable in 2026? I’ll be blunt: The graphics weren’t great even at launch, the melee can feel like “shuffle, shuffle, stab,” and the early hours are clunky. But yes, it’s playable, and a few quality-of-life fixes make it much more so. If your game crashes on a modern PC, this 4GB patch should fix it. Qwinn’s Ultimate DAO Fixpack and Dain’s Fixes handle bugs and combat quirks, and the Unofficial Remaster upgrades more than 1,000 textures if the endless glossy brown JPEGs get boring. (I also cannot recommend this mod enough if you want to date Morrigan regardless of who you play as, but I will warn you that it does make certain late-game proposals from her, uh, interesting.)
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Then play Origins the way it was built. Save often. Use the tactics slots to automate behaviors like having your healer restore an ally before they die so you can focus on the real-time-with-pause combat. Make sure to play the Awakening expansion, if you’re into things like demonic possession and ominously haunted marshes. By the time you finish (and, let’s be honest, start over at least once with a different origin), you’ll recognize what you’ve been looking at. The campfire confessions, the approval you earn or squander, the party members who seem like unfixable messes: Baldur’s Gate 3 perfected a recipe BioWare was already cooking with in 2009, and Origins is where you can watch it come together. If BG3 changed what you expect from an RPG, this is the game that taught the genre to expect it.
Dragon Age: Origins is available to play on PC and Xbox Series X through backwards compatibility.
