Dragon Age: Origins: Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Official Game Guides)

The last Prima guide I purchased was for Fallout 3. THAT guide was excellent. Great maps, full, multi page guides for every quest, excellent pictures. It made it possible to find every quest and item in a huge world.

THIS guide is nothing of the sort. The maps are very small, (3 or 4" on a single page small) and monochromatic, with difficult to follow legends. The quest guides and walkthrough are short, bullet point summaries. They contain virtually no information you wouldn't otherwise know if you're doing the quest.

The sidequest guides are literally a paragraph long, and are basically summaries of the in game quest text. No map, maybe a single screenshot. They are useful only in finding quests you didn't know about. However, in exploring areas, you easily stumble upon all the sidequests. The guide is packed full of spoilers with no warnings. It's easy to flip through looking for something else, and spoil a story point for yourself as you glance over the...Read more

Yes I've read the other reviews. I almost didn't buy this because of them. But in the end I figured "something is better than nothing". I'm glad I did!

What's useful to me? How about:

a) A discussion of all the races and classes. Statistics, theories, backstories, descriptions and discussion of different ability choices and so for.

b) Information about setting up a party. A list and discussion of all the NPC's that you can recruit. What's good about them, what's bad, how to influence each one. Information about stuff like possible romances and how that effects the game, and how to pull it off. Suggested settings for the tactical window. Suggested builds (tank, ranged dps, etc) both at a class level and at a party level.

c) Lists of spells and equipment, along with relevent statistics about each one. Others said this is not useful, I disagree. Just having this to read "offline" lets you strategise about how you want to...Read more

The character sections and walkthrough are pretty good. But if you are looking for more information about spell damage and duration, combat mechanics, etc, you'll find that a large chunk of the guide is simply ripped straight from the in-game tooltips.