14 DAY TRIAL // Last week saw the launch of The Awakening, a full-fledged expansion pack for Dragon Age: Origins, the best role playing videogame of 2009 in our view. It's not the sort of limited DLC companies rely on heavily these days but more like the Throne of Bhaal add-on for Baldur's Gate 2, a new narrative in which you take control of powerful characters, chief amongst them being the Godslayer that you built up in the main narrative of Origins.
The problem created by delivering this sort of expansion, which pushes the level cap further and introduces a slew of skills that can be used on the battlefield, is that it's pretty hard to get the balance right.
On the one hand, developers don't want to make the basic Genlock or Hurlock too powerful; after all, they were easily dispatched towards the end of Origins. On the other hand, an overpowered player could feel they lack a real challenge and could drop the expansion altogether. BioWare seems to have erred on the side of the overpowered player. I took my Elf rogue, with the Assassin and Duelist specializations and a focus on dual handed backstabbing, into The Awakening expansion and, six or seven hours played later, I failed to die one single time on the Hard difficulty and I plan moving up to Impossible. It will be interesting to see whether tougher challenges await, like towards the two thirds section of Dragon Age, or whether combat will remain mostly a cakewalk.
Another issue with The Awakening is that it does not allow the player to keep the exclusive gear shipped with the Deluxe edition of Origins. The problem is that something BioWare declared to be hard to do, the community managed to solve pretty much immediately after the launch of the game. Check here for a simple to use mod to bring those nice full armors into the expansion.