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If you want to go back to the original Dragon Age today, you’ll need some help. Origins was made in the Eclipse engine, which had some long-standing bugs that never got patched and given there are “maybe 20 people left at BioWare” who understand how it works, aren’t likely to ever be officially fixed. Unofficially, they’ve already been solved and all it takes is a dive into the PC Gaming wiki and Nexus Mods to sort them out.
Without these patches, running Dragon Age: Origins is likely to make your PC overheat, performance will degrade the longer you play without a reset, and you’ll probably see flickering red squares appear underneath dead bodies. These issues are fixed, or at least mitigated, by two mods. The first is the 4GB Patch, which makes Origins large-address aware. By default it’ll only use 2GB of your RAM, but as the name suggests the 4GB Patch doubles that. It’s an easy install in either the EA App or GOG versions of the game, but if you’re playing on Steam you’ll need to follow a different installation guide.
Next up is the Performance and Memory Leak Fix. Take the d3d9.dll and dxvk.conf files out of the archive and put them in the “bin_ship” directory of your Dragon Age: Origins install. With that done, you’ll have the game in a much more playable state—one that won’t melt your laptop—and you’ll be ready to install some mods for fun instead of just to make the game run properly.
How to install Dragon Age: Origins mods
Almost every mod for Dragon Age: Origins comes in one of two formats. Some you can paste into the “BioWare\Dragon Age\packages\core\override” subdirectory of your documents folder, and will work automatically the next time you launch the game. Others will be dazip files, which take a bit more effort to get working.
To install dazip mods, find daupdater.exe in the “bin_ship” directory of your Dragon Age install. It’ll probably be in “Program Files\EA Games\Dragon Age”. When you run daupdater.exe it’ll open a window you can drag and drop your dazip mods into. Then highlight them and click on “Install selected”.
Next time you launch Dragon Age: Origins, go into the DLC section of the menu. Your dazip mods will appear here next to whatever official DLC you have. Make sure they’ve got a green tick in the box next to them, and they’ll be activated. With all that out of the way, here are the best Dragon Age: Origins mods.
Does it bother you that ugly animations for buffs like the angry red tears flowing down threatening warriors or the glowing fire of burning weapons remain on even in cutscenes? Or that rogues drop out of stealth the moment they steal things? Or that you have to loot everyone manually after every fight? Or how slowly you have to jog around outside of combat?
All these annoyances and many more are fixed by Dain’s Fixes, a modular set of tweaks that incorporates quality-of-life improvements as well as fixes for bugs you may never have noticed, like the fact that Mighty Blow doesn’t actually halve the speed of anyone it hits like the description says it should. Each of Dain’s Fixes comes in a separate folder, making them easy to pick and choose between.
If Dragon Age: Origins released today instead of in 2009 there would be a legion of YouTubers telling us about how its “cut content” proves it’s actually unfinished and borderline unplayable. While obviously that’s not true, there is a lot of dialogue and a fair few codex entries, items, and alternate quest options restored by Qwinn’s Fixpack—including 18 interparty banters you’d otherwise never hear. It also fixes a bunch of bugged items and scripting.
“Follow the Gourd” is a modder who has done the vital work of boosting the size of Origins’ UI so you won’t be squinting at your screen to read the text on a modern-sized monitor. Subtitles, codex entries, tooltips, and the inventory can all be resized to your liking, and the subtitles moved to the bottom of the screen if that’s where you prefer them.
The mabari warhound is a Grey Warden’s best friend, with their snappy jaws, pointy ears, and muscled chest. They’re fantastic, happy partners, and essential tanks for mages and ranged fighters. Still, it’s easy to let your canine companion get left behind in favor of more useful companions who can carry inventory, equip items, and, you know, talk.
With the Extra Dog Slot mod, your dog joins you as a permanent fifth party member. Adding a bloodthirsty mabari warhound isn’t the most balance-friendly addition to the Dragon Age combat system, but have you seen those big, sad eyes? You can’t leave him behind. Who’s a good hound?
Once you’ve recruited five companions, install Extra Dog Slot. Then on the party select screen, highlight four of the non-dog party members. When you return to the game, your faithful hound will still be by your side.
A dark raven appears on a fencepost. A sour elixir full of evil portent is strapped to its leg. Drink it, and… respec your skills and attribute points at any time! Well, that was unexpected.
As strategies shift in Dragon Age, it’s great to be able to rebuild a team to better support each other. The Character Respecialization mod pulls this off in a (mostly) lore-friendly way, and can be used at any time. After installation, find the dark-but-slightly-stupid-looking raven perched in most of Ferelden’s major cities.
Equal Love erases gender restrictions on companion interactions, so you can flirt, kiss, and get freaky with any companion you’d like to, regardless of your player-character gender. Best of all, the new genderless rules carry over into the storyline’s conclusions, so now male player-characters can [spoiler] with [spoiler], provided he chooses the [spoiler] ending.
Interpersonal politics, as we all know, begin and end with the giving of gifts. In vanilla Dragon Age though, finding a special “gift” item only leads to a bunch of hassle as you try to figure out who is supposed to receive it. With the Madd Gift Guide, the item descriptions of gifts suggest which of your companions would enjoy them, saving a lot of trial and error. For anyone trying to win the Most Popular Grey Warden contest, this is a simple but essential mod.
You can get a gift guide for the Awakening expansion too.
Every once in a while, a melee fighter will kill an opponent with a combo of brutal finishing moves straight out of Game of Thrones. These are supposed to be a rare treat, but if you’re the kind of person who rejects the idea cookies are a sometimes food, Forced Deathblows can dial up the carnage. A variable setting makes the special kill animations happen slightly more regularly, most of the time, or for every single melee kill. The highest setting is recommended for the folks who played Sniper Elite with the X-ray gore animations turned all the way up, as it leads to the same amount of repetitive, gratuitous spleen-smashing.
From Mass Effect 2 on, BioWare’s games featured a simple checkbox that made helmets invisible so you could see your characters’ beloved faces at all times, even when they were strapped into a thousand pounds of high-tech armor. Back in the Bad Old Days, helmets would only go away in dialogue scenes. The rest of the time, you’d have to see them running around in a daft wizard hat or leather bonce protector. Enter No Helmet Hack, a simple little mod that gives each character a weightless, valueless book to read. Using it toggles their helmet visibility on or off. Beautiful, simple, and efficient.
The Human Nobles among you may remember Ser Gilmore as your well-intentioned, but only briefly relevant, childhood friend. Originally thought to be the next Grey Warden recruit, Ser Gilmore instead sacrifices his life to give you and your mother time to escape your burning castle.
Thanks to the retconning of this mod, however, Ser Gilmore is back. Even better, he’s ready to join your quest and features full voice acting. The voice acting isn’t half bad, and it’s remarkable how well he fits in with the other companions. After installing this mod, you can recruit your miraculously alive childhood chum near the Lothering chantry.
For a taste of something a little different—and a break from Dragon Age entirely—the Baldur’s Gate 2 Redux mod is a thing of beauty. The first dungeon, Irenicus’s Dungeon, has been entirely recreated by a team of modders, including the original audio and famously snappy dialog. Though this project was supposed to eventually recreate all of Baldur’s Gate 2, unfortunately it went on hiatus in 2014 when the project lead got a job at Beamdog. Still, this bite of BG2 is good for about an hour of nostalgic dungeon-diving.
Alley of Murders is an add-on campaign that introduces a serial killer in the grungier areas of Denerim. The local constabulary aren’t having any luck solving the case, so it’s up to the Grey Wardens to step in. This mod is fully voice-acted (to varying degrees of success) and should take about half an hour to wrap up.
Alley of Murders was the first fully voice acted Dragon Age: Origins mod, and an impressive proof of concept. The Shattered War is the real deal, a standalone expansion of near-professional quality with more than 3,600 lines of recorded dialogue. Set after the events of the game, it casts you as a member of a military expedition sent to investigate a darkspawn threat in the Frostback Mountains, and should give you around 10 hours of bonus adventuring.
By your second or third playthrough, you’ll probably be pretty sick of Deep Roads dungeoneering. This mod lets you skip straight to the Brood Mother, though you’ll have to be careful not to get turned around after defeating her, because if you wander into the Dead Trenches you’ll get teleported back to the Brood Mother Fight. On a similar tip there’s Skip the Fade, though some users on Nexus Mods report issues with it and it does conflict with mods like Ser Gilmore.
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Kurt Indovina
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