Dragon Age Origins has given us tons of content, but is the final DLC worth your cash?
**Warning** the following review will contain mild spoilers
At the end of Dragon Age origins, your mysterious companion Morrigan disappears with only one message, “Never follow me.” In Witch Hunt the final DLC mission to the Dragon Age 1 storyline you do exactly that, as you chase down your missing comrade (or lover), for some much needed closure.
The story here is decent, if a little anemic. At first the thought of questing to find Morrigan sounds intriguing, but in the end you just kind of feel like you are floating through areas without much purpose.
You pick up two new party members over the course of the journey, along with your trusty Mabari War hound from the main game. The two new recruits are fun, and have some awesome background banter, but they really don’t feel a part of the story at all. Your given reasons why one of them wants to find Morrigan, but it never actually affects the story or the final conflict.
When you do finally reunite with your lost compatriot, that is when things start to flow really well, and if you have been a devoted fan to the series you start getting all excited for the sequel, but the exchange feels short, and you might end up feeling underwhelmed by it all.
The gameplay is competent, and remains the same fair from the standard game and the game still holds up. It’s your standard tactical Real time role playing game, that you have come to expect from Bioware, it’s still good still fun, and still deep. However if you’ve played D.A. for a while you will start to notices some balancing issues.
For those of you running an imported character, who by now has probably gone through all the other DLC’s, expansion, and the main game, you will undoubtedly start to feel the overwhelming nature of just how powerful you have become. I was running a warrior with a full skill set coming in only one level away from the cap coming in, so right off the bat the difficulty seemed highly unbalanced. After that they begin to hand you even more powerful items, and skills to help you through. All the power ups or items you receive at this point just really feel like a drop in the bucket anyway, (A fourth specialization!? Thanks Bioware, I’ll get right on not using that) and since this is the final DLC you won’t use any of them anyway. Frankly by now your characters play style is set, and isn’t going to change anytime soon, so I have to express apathy to much of this DLCs’ ability to challenge you.
For those of you not running an imported character, well you’re probably not playing this pack anyway, so I can only feel justified in saying this DLC is far too easy. After the “Golems of Amgarrak”, “Witch Hunt” feels like a piece of cake anyway, but this is was way too dull of an experience, even on the higher difficulty settings.
As for visuals Witch hunt doesn’t do anything new. The graphical quality was always on the lower side of things, but now it really feels dated. It doesn’t help that you are running through reused and recycled areas to begin with, but it’s really gotten quite stale. It’s no surprise they are changing up the art style in the sequel. As for sound design, the music has remained largely (or entirely) untouched, but it unlike the graphics it has always been, and remains awesome. For the voice acting Claudia Black’s Morrigan remains great, but she is given far too little to do, the same goes for the rest of the cast of this short mission.
As a Finale to Dragon Age Witch hunt is possibly worse than a sour note, it’s forgettable, unimpactful, and unforgivably dull. There is so little of value here, I cannot bring myself to recommend paying the full seven dollars for this content pack. For hard core fans you have probably already bought it, for everyone else; Please, Please, Please save your money, and buy it with the Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition (which includes all the DLCs), or wait for a good sale or price drop. It is not worth full price.
*If you’re wondering why this review is like three months late, well… I was busy.
*You can probably find Ultimate Edition for a steal price of 50 bucks nowadays.
*Oh, and yea that bug that effs with your relationship status with Morrigan got me, on my first playthrough of this. :P
*I still can’t wait for DA2 in spite of this.
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