By 
If you don’t know it yet, Dragon Age is a RPG developed by Bioware in 2009 and intends to be a “spiritual” successor to the Baldur’s Gate series. It has won several awards, including “Game of the year” award. There are so many things that can and must be said about this great game but that would take me tens of pages. Suffice to say that if you like RPGs you simply must play this game. A short review for Dragon Age can be found here.
After I finished “Dragon Age” the first time, new official DLCs appeared and I simply HAD to play the game again with the new content. And to make the second playthrough even more unique I decided to use some mods. My first source of mods was the official Bioware social site but it proved to be very cumbersome to use. After some more googling I discovered a new repository of mods called “Dragon Age Nexus” hosting a bit more than 1500 mods. Unlike the official site, it sorts them all by category making it very user friendly. With the release of Dragon Age Toolset, making a mod has become so easy that new mods are uploaded daily.
There are two ways most of these mods can be installed. If the mod has the “.dazip” extension then all you need to do is open the “daopdater.exe” found in your installation folder, “bin_ship” subfolder and click and drag the mod in the updater’s window. Then select it and press the “Install selected” button. Some mods might simply be archives and have a “.zip” or “.rar” extension. If that is the case then you need to manually extract the content of the downloaded archive into “My Documents\ BioWare\ Dragon Age \packages \core \override”. There are a few mods that may require you to copy them somewhere else, that’s why you should always read the description from the website or/and the readme.txt file found in most archives.
Here is a short (-ish) list of some great mods that I have used and enjoyed:
This is probably one of the most useful mods out there. It spawns several ravens in different locations and in the party camp. You can initiate a dialog with a raven and find a vial attached to its leg. If you choose to take it, a potion of respec will be added in your inventory. Using it allows the player to reset the base attributes, specialization points, spells, talents and skills of the main character or any of the party members to the default values and returns the remaining points so they can be spent again. You will not lose any bonus points received from tomes, bonus points received in the fade, points from DLC items etc…
In order to install this mod you need to download the “Character respec mod 1_6.dazip” and install it using the daoupdater. To uninstall it simply delete the “WRK_RESPEC_MOD” folder from “My Documents\Bioware\Dragon Age\Addins\”.
2. Madd Gift guide and Gift guide-Awakening
Have you ever found a gift that you didn’t know who it was for? Then this is the mod for you. It will add “(Intended companion name)” text to the front of a gift item’s description (as you can see in the picture to the left) and will also inform you if the item is plot-related. The second mod, “Gift guide-Awakening”, does the exact same thing but only for the “Awakening” expansion and for “The Stone Prisoner” DLC. To install these mods, simply download the latest versions, create a new folder in “My Documents \BioWare \Dragon Age \packages \core \override\” for each of them and extract all the files there. To uninstall simply delete the folders you have created above.
With this addon, the game doesn’t choose the starting abilities and characteristics of your hero and your followers in your place. For example, if you start with a human noble character and decide to use two handed weapons you’ll find the “Shield bash” ability useless. With this mod you can put the starting point into something else. If you already have the respec mod described above, you won’t need this one, but you can install both without conflicts.
4. Level 50 A player with an unmoded version of the game might find it hard to reach the level cap of 25 for “Origins” or 35 for “Awakening” but with additional content from official DLCs or custom mods (or by simply bug-abusing or cheating) the level cap can be reached pretty early in the game. With this mod the cap is increased to 50, a large enough number to satisfy most players. In addition this mod increases the level cap for several attributes (for example physical and mental resistances now can exceed 100).
With this addon you improve the way characters behave when they are not being controlled by you. It adds several new conditions and actions in the tactics menu, as you can see in the picture above. For example you can now use “if [dead] then Use ability: Revive”. Also the AI’s behavior is improved; for example a ranged character will try to stay out of the melee range if possible or a mage will not cast an AOE spell set via tactics if an ally player is in the AOE area. For a complete list of changes please click on the mod’s name to see it on dragonagenexus.
Installing this mode will make your mabari warhound the fifth member of your party. The dog will appear as a summoned unit, but it will behave like an extra party slot; meaning that all dialog options, banter and special events and abilities involving the dog will still work. You can, at anytime, unsummon it by using an whistle that was placed in the inventory. If you don’t feel like your mighty mabary warhound was a full functioning playable character (since he has only 8 talents, no specializations and only 2 slots of armor) then this is a mod for you.
7. Loot and gameballance revision
In my first playthrough I found so few of the end game items that the last few boss fights were an agonizing repetition of death->quickload (partly my fault for wanting to finish the game on nightmare difficulty). With this mod though, everything changed. By the time I reached the Denerim siege I had enough high quality items to fully equip each character (granted not all of them were the best possible items).
This mod basically allows you to modify the drop rates of items (from weapons to crafting ingredients) and it also adds about 600 weapons and armors (none of them are game-breaking godlike items). The new items can be found at various vendors around the world but can also be picked up from corpses or from containers. You can tweak the loot system to your liking by modifying over 30 different settings. There are many other changes that this mod brings like allowing the player to increase the difficulty of the game or spicing up the fight against the Archdemon by adding 4 new scripted abilities to the Archdemon’s arsenal of spells.
In order to avoid using this mod as a cheat and ruining your game experience but still improve the game I advise you to use the “high” drop setting and the normal or hardcore armor settings.
This is a simple and small mod that adds 4 interchangeable quickbars for each character. It is especially useful for mages and for people who use a lower screen resolution (since the amount of quickbar slots is directly affected by the resolution of the screen; the bigger the resolution the more the slots you have). This mod is installed using the “daoupdater.exe”.
Since your mabari warhound usually has an approval rating of 100 its specific gifts serve no real purpose. With this mod the usual approval reward is replaced by various bonuses, for example “Tangled Ball of Yarn” will give a +2 Dexterity bonus instead of the +10 approval it usually gives.
10. No kill steal
Normally in Dragon Age, only the character dealing the killing blow gets the full XP amount. His party members get 95% and the characters “resting” in the party camp only get 90%. Some players deem this system to be a bit unfair to tank characters and healers. With this mod everybody gets 100% XP from each kill.
11. Camp Storage and Misha the hoarder
Both of these mods are useful for packrats like myself who collect all sorts of armors and weapons. The first one simply adds a storage chest in the party camp that never resets it’s content. The second one adds an NPC merchant, called Misha, that basically does the same thing, but, unlike the storage chest, she will sort your items just like a regular merchant via the merchant’s interface. Please note that she will not charge you for any items you withdraw nor she will give you money when you deposit items.
There is, of course, a third option: increasing the maximum backpack limit. In your adventures you might find merchants selling extra backpack storage but the game does not allow you to exceed the limit of 125 units. A workaround was discovered with the release of the toolset. It is advisable that you make a new savegame first. The go to “My Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\ Characters\*your character* \saves \*the save you just made*” and open the “.das” file using the toolset. Then go to savegame_partylist and expand it. Find the tag “savegame_max_items” and replace the number to the far right with 999 or less. Save and close the toolset. When you will load the savegane you’ll be able to carry 999 items. Do NOT buy additional backpack increases from merchants, doing so will reset your limit to 125. If you have 4Gb of RAM or less it is advisable to edit the savegame as early on in the story as possible, because otherwise a bug in the toolset code will cause it to crash when loading a savegame.
This mod is intended for people with “The Stone Prisoner” DLC. It will add 4 new talents to Shale, making her more enduring. It is true that if you get the golem early in the game she will feel a bit overpowered but in mid to end game she will be comparable to the mabari warhound (personal opinion). You’ll notice this especially if you’re playing on the nightmare difficulty setting.
The new talents don’t increase the golem’s dps, just her resistances. Three of them are passive abilities which increase the magic resistance by 15%, the fire and ice resistance (these bonuses are cumulative with any bonuses from Shale’s crystals) and the armor. The forth is a sustainable ability which gives Shale a bonus to physical and nature resistances.
There is, of course, a mod called “Extended Dog Talents” which improves your mabari warhound by adding 4 new talents: two passive ones that give a bonus to stamina and mental resistances and two which can be activated: an aoe fear ability and a jump attack ability similar to “Overwhelm” that causes a bleed effect.
13. Personal Annoyance Remover and Weapon VFX Remover
If you have an old computer then you will like these two mods. The first one removes the (annoying) visual effects of some sustainable spells like “Cleansing Aura”, “Rally”, “Threaten” and so on. The second one will remove the weapons visual effects from fire, ice and lightning bonus damage either native or rune enchanted. Both of these mods should bring a noticeable FPS improvement. If you want these mods then download them and extract into “My Documents \BioWare \Dragon Age \packages \core \override” directory.
This is a mod that adds more variety to the in-game character creator by adding extra skin tones, eye & hair colors. It also makes the PC’s tattoos a much more solid shade, so the tattoo intensity slider is more useful now.
This is a simple mod that, in my humble opinion, should have been included in the original game. It brings a major change in the look and feel of the game by changing the equipment icons to look as the individual equipment actually looks like.
16. Alley of Murders
There are some mods that add new zones in the original campaign or that add a completely new module. But these mods are few and the good ones are rare. The exception is this one, “Alley of Murders”, which brings some 30-60 minutes of high quality content. This mod adds new quests which can be started by visiting the Denerim’s Market District and interacting with a sign post. You’ll experience the danger of Denerim’s streets by investigating a series of murders that may involve a vengeful, rebellious elf or a maleficar that keeps eluding the templars.
This mod features full voice acting of the characters involved; all new NPCs that can talk are voiced. It is also fully integrated into the main campaign so that some of your actions within the main story can cause NPC and companions to react differently to you during this quest chain.
In order to access the content of this mod, Lothering must be destroyed, and you must not yet have access to the alienage. A trailer for this mod can be viewed below:
I truly hope you’ll enjoy these mods that make this sublime game even greater. If you have any questions please submit a comment below. Also, if you want to download one of the mods above, or you want more information about it click on the mod’s name.