Dragon Age: Origins - The Darkspawn Chronicles
Spawn to be mild.
But that's as far as the ideas stretch, and once it becomes clear that there'll be no more bright ideas to come, what's left is a deathly grind that once again manages to completely miss everything that made the full game so damnably addictive. There's no dialogue, no interaction and no room for sophisticated combat tactics. Just keep killing until you get an on-screen prompt telling you to go somewhere else and kill some more. Seeing a masterful story factory like BioWare put its name to something so thin is downright depressing.
More depressing is what the developers have in store for their heroes. As you progress through the handful of areas that make up Denerim, you'll encounter the characters whose company you enjoyed previously. Zevram. Wynne. Sten. All the gang. Then you'll kill them. You may not start blubbering like a fanboy mourning Aeris, but there's still something that feels a little crass and wrong in the way these fantastic characters are reduced to mute loot drops, wheeled out to be slaughtered. It's as if BioWare has become a petulant child, smashing its favourite toys. Cathartic, perhaps, but ultimately pointless and rather sad.
There are numerous technical problems as well, something that is fast becoming a recurring theme of DLC for role-playing games. At least one of the three new Achievements seems to be glitched ("Ogre Keeper", since you ask) and the gameplay itself is plagued by constant stuttering pauses and a weird bug where you'll be hacking away at a character model that is frozen in place. Suddenly it unfreezes and all the damage you inflicted happens at once. It's nothing that will break your game, but given that this mission is simply an exercise in recycling existing assets from a game already patched several times, it's hard to forgive such unpolished hiccups.
It's not even as if all this creaky mayhem is in service of a particularly lofty goal. You're simply replaying the final stage of the game as the bad guys, with a finale that finds you defending the Archdemon rather than slaying it, for no particular reason. The promised "alternate history" which assumes your character died while joining the Grey Wardens never materialises. The existing characters, when killed, provide a short biography buried in the codex that explains how they came to be in Denerim without your influence, but that's slim pickings even for the most devout fan of in-game fiction.
So, another Dragon Age episode, another hour that just offers the bare minimum of gaming, another shrug of disappointment. Of course, there's a very boring practical reason for this: new stories need writers, voice actors and animators, all of which cost time and money. A quick loot grind through an existing map? That's a far more economical prospect. They can't all be Awakenings, of course, but it's becoming increasingly clear that only the very naive will still be holding out for lovingly crafted bite-sized stories in future instalments. For a narrative powerhouse like BioWare, that seems like a terrible waste.