Mod matters, with Ashton 'there's a mod for that' Mills.
With the release and subsequent popularity of Dragon Age: Origins you can bet your Hip Flask of Drunkenness +10 that modders were going to dive right in.
At the time of writing, there are already 270 mods available, and while 90 per cent seem to be re-makes of Morrigan's looks (just a wee bit of teen angst there) there are a number of excellent game-altering mods.
And none more visually impressive, or gigantanourmously large, than the JB (Just Better) texture pack. If you're playing on the PC you may have noticed the high-res textures included in the game kind of aren't, well, high-res. Your eyes don't deceive you, for Bioware accidentally shipped the game with a whole swathe of high-res textures incorrectly replaced with medium-res ones. Bioware has so far made no commitment to fixing the issue and very likely won't due to the size such a patch might be.
And so it's left to the modders. The JB texture pack resizes and sharpens the original game textures which, while they aren't as good as high-res original sources (which only Bioware can provide) they are none-the-less a noticeable improvement over the current ones.
Put simply if you're playing DA:O on any half-decent system, you need this mod. As it replaces a good chunk of textures in the game be warned it weighs in at just under 750M compressed for the basic pack, with another 600M compressed of updates and optional upgrades (such as the very high-res terrain pack). If you opt for both kit and kaboodle they'll all install to an impressive 3200 files totalling more than 3GB.
Such is the price of quality gaming, fairly paid for an experience worth having.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012