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Dragon Age: Return to Ostagar DLC
The first paid-for DLC to Dragon Age disappoints in scale and ambition - not a fitting addition to such a great game.
Written by Dave Taylor, 03 February 2010
"A man's reach should exceed his grasp," Robert Browning once wrote, and with the release of Return to Ostagar, you can't help but wonder if Bioware has for once over-reached itself.
Cailan has been strung up, but we can rescue him and either feed him to the wolves or burn him. Lucky guy.Dragon Age: Origins was a brilliant RPG - for me, the best Western fantasy RPG ever, taking a crown I personally bestowed on Baldur's Gate 2.
The Risen Ogre is the main boss at the end of Return to Ostagar.Bioware worked hard to make the most of the game - special editions shipped to different retailers, giving different codes for in-game items. A fully-fledged social site launched alongside that updated itself with your own character's progression, so you could share your game experience. A separate, free-to-play, Flash game allowed you to get into some of the Dragon Age lore, and earn in-game items for your characters, and Bioware had a massive DLC plan to roll out for the game. All of this running on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.
The social site sort of works, though rarely seems to update my own character information. It has been improved, but finding a game patch would strike me as being the most important reason for visiting the game's site post-launch, and it's hard to find the downloads. Given the social site knows so much about me and my game, it should be actively telling me when my game is out of date.
Why is this important? Well, because Return to Ostagar has been delayed due to technical difficulties, and in my experience, it wasn't delayed long enough. Until now, while I know of others who have had technical problems with Dragon Age, my own glitches have only run to the well-known, and still frustratingly unsolved, Shale bugs.
Return to Ostagar though proved a painful experience, even though I do have the latest patch installed. Firstly, the game refused to show it within the Downloadable Content section, and then after sending me round the houses to allow me to buy it and download it, the first load of the content failed, and I sat staring at the Loading screen for 10 minutes before giving in and re-booting. The game had decided to grey out all my equipment, leading me to do several tests to ensure it was all still functioning (it was), and then halfway through the DLC, the game slowed to such a crawl, it fell over.
PCGZine Issue 40
For our latest Dragon Age coverage, click here to download PCGZine Issue 40 for free.These bugs need sorting out before Awakening, and having played through Return to Ostagar, you have to ask why Bioware hasn't put its resources into solving them and making Dragon Age a solid platform for its fully-fledged expansion, rather than turning out this vapid release.
If you've finished the main game, you will get a special save that allows you to play Return to Ostagar. A brief cutscene introduces the soon-to-die survivor of Ostagar who sends you off to retrieve some royal documents, King Cailan's armour and to try and find his corpse. Leaving this location, you can now, erm, return to Ostagar.
When you're there, there's basically just set places where mobs spawn who need killing. There's a key to a royal chest, which gives you the documents - which seem to be the only whiff of a plot in the whole episode, but actually goes nowhere.
Within each main group of enemies, you'll find a lieutenant of one sort or another with a quest icon above, thus mocking the very idea of quests. Kill them and retrieve the unique piece of Calian's armour that they hold. These fights are so ridiculously easy for a character that has completed the game that I started making up my own rules - first, no heals were allowed, then when that proved too easy, I decided to hold my party in position and solo a group. Not a single character came within a whisper of being killed by any mob in the whole episode, and that was with me just leaving my character on auto-attack. Bioware really needs to address the scaling issue in Dragon Age to ensure future DLC poses a challenge to the high-end players, who are the ones most likely to pay for DLC.
The path through Ostagar is completely linear too, so there's little to be had in way of exploration, and what cutscenes there are consist of 90% re-used material from the original game.
What this leaves us with is a DLC chapter that takes less than an hour to complete, has no plot and no challenge, and is, frankly, boring. The only possible draw for gamers could be the gear, and Cailan's armour is decent. All of my end-game armour is of a similar spec, but I will admit that its fatigue reduction, which is the bonus, alongside health regeneration, for the set is pretty good.
Before I started playing Return to Ostagar, I was worried as to how I would be able to rate it. How can you score something that only costs £3? If a cinema trip costs me £10 and keeps me entertained for 2 and half hours, how long does DLC have to entertain me for to be considered worth it? I needn't have worried. Return to Ostagar offers 45 minutes of play, with some OK armour as a reward - if you think that's worth your money, go ahead. Me, I'm off to play Mass Effect 2.
Dragon Age coverage available in PCGZine Issue 40 - click here to download it for free!
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