I’ve wanted to revisit Dragon Age: Origins on PC for years. I played the PS3 version back in 2009, which isn’t as bad as people say it is, though it does lack the PC version’s tactical view and, of course, mod support.
Origins has been on my wishlist for well over a decade, but I finally scooped it up during the current Steam Summer sale. It’s a negligible $3 for the Ultimate Edition, which bundles in the Awakening expansion and a bunch of other stuff (there’s no Standard Edition on Steam anyway). I probably would have gotten around to revisiting Origins earlier had it not been for the Steam Deck ‘Unsupported’ badge warning me off.
There’s a decent enough reason for this, I suppose: when I bit the bullet and downloaded Origins on my Deck, the first thing I saw was a very unpromising, antiquated 4:3 game launcher. After I tinkered with the graphics settings here, I had no option to save my changes and back out. In other words, pending the results of any troubleshooting, I needed to make do with a 800×600 display, with graphics detail set to low.
But wait! Origins isn’t one of those long-in-the-tooth PC games that makes you back out to its launcher to change graphics settings. From the game itself I was able to change the resolution to the Deck’s native 1280×800, and turn graphics and texture detail up to “very high”. At those settings I’m getting an unwaveringly locked 60 fps, though if you must have 90 fps you can do that too, though it’s not as consistent.
The next obstacle is the fact that Dragon Age: Origins for PC doesn’t have gamepad support like its console versions obviously have. Thankfully, there’s an amazing Community Layout for that. Khar’s Dragon Age: Origins marries the immersive control of a third-person action game while retaining the essential mouse controls. Movement is mapped to the left stick, while the mouse pointer is mapped to the right track pad (it’s also mapped to the right stick but that feels really bad). As I’m moving around I can use the mouse pointer to activate objects, trigger conversations, or make selections from the hot bar at the bottom of the screen.
The only problem I’ve found with this config is that, for some reason, it maps quick load to L4. I was accidentally pressing this instead of L5 (which serves as a right mouse click) and that is obviously problematic. So to be safe, I changed it to open the map instead, and then mapped quick save to to upper D-pad button.
I’ve been loving my return to Origins, and despite the ‘Unsupported’ badge it’s absolutely perfect on Steam Deck. It takes far less tinkering than some ‘Playable’ games I’ve booted. Who knows, now I may even get around to playing Dragon Age 2. That one’s meant to be good, right?
