Hi Jub,
Got your facebook notification today (not been checking my emails
)
Hope things are going well and everything
Just a couple things about Origins in general, might be interesting, might not.
When it came out there was nothing like it. Older gamers loved it as a clear throwback to BG, NWN, IWD type game and newer gamers loved it as a fresh take on medieval fantasy (for those that don't read a ton of this style fantasy anyway as writers have been doing it for years, esp Pillars of the Earth novels). It was gritty, 'political' and subverted *most* tropes.
At that time, Bioware had a ton of credibility and EA were even in a bit of a hate-slump, they hadn't portugaled up royally in at least 10 minutes.
Everything looked real and characters felt realistic, especially as the previous big western RPG was Oblivion where the characters felt flat and insipid for the most part.
It was most definitely the right moment for the game to be released. Since then there's been a glut of old-school rpgs, dragon age imitators and not least of all, more dragon age games (DA: II, mobile games, clicker games, TBT game, card game, DA:I. In addition to this, DA:O spawned comics, a web series, a tabletop game, six novels and three lore books. Game of Thrones has it beat in terms of popular take-up and probably length and breadth of lore as well, politics has become much more mainstream in gaming since 2009. None of what it does is now unique, nor is it's package of things it does unique.
Having said that; it's a solid game with really fun character progression and a ton of great dialogue both to and from your player. Most of what you say is just flavour text and has the same outcome but it's that thing that shapes your character in your own head. The options to really play into your ideas is great for a video game RPG.