Bugs (Origins)

This article is about bugs in Dragon Age: Origins. For other uses, see Bugs.

Before you start

This page is for general bugs only.

Bugs that only affect specific quests, characters, items, locations, or codex entries should be described on their respective pages. See Category:Dragon Age: Origins bugs for a more thorough list of affected content in the game.
For bugs that can be exploited to gain advantages in the game, see Exploits (Origins).

It should be noted that a good number of these bugs may have been fixed in later versions or by official patches, and that all of these bugs represent contributors' subjective experiences with a particular playthrough, version, platform, and game machine. During a given playthrough, it may not be obvious whether an issue is a genuine bug, a hardware problem, or even the unexpected result of choices within the game.

Gameplay

PC: Ranged Melee

When running from enemies, enemy melee attacks will connect when player is outside melee range.

Out-of-bounds locations

In several areas, it is possible to move your character "out of bounds" and enter areas that should be inaccessible. See Ostagar as an example.

Xbox 360: Epilogue skipped

xbox360 After defeating the Archdemon, the epilogue may fail to load, and reloading the game may take you to after the epilogue. This can be fixed by resetting your hard drive cache.

Xbox 360: Specializations unavailable

xbox360 Some specializations may remain locked even after you complete the requirements to unlock them, and the manuals to teach them will be unavailable for purchase. ^{[confirmation needed]}
xbox360 Patching the game may cause all unlocked specializations to become locked, forcing you to complete the quests/buy the manuals to unlock them again. This can be fixed by recovering your gamertag:
- Sign out of all profiles, select Profile Sign-In, select Recover Gamertag, and input the information for your Xbox 360.
- Load an old save file, unlock one specialization, and save in a new file.
- Exit the game completely. When you reload, all specializations that you previously unlocked should be available again.

Xbox 360: Action circle

xbox360 If you bring up the action circle (left trigger) when entering a new area, but prior to your view fully loading, the game will not pause while you have it up. After you select an action or close the circle, the game will pause. To fix this, pause and unpause the game using the start button.

PS3 infinite Frozen Lightning

Have a mage with Death Syphon,travel to the west side across the bridges in Ortan Thaig. Find the dead Stone Golems, activate Death Syphon, go up to a dead Stone Golem and use a little bit of mana. You will absorb mana from the dead golem and be able to loot it for 1 Frozen lightning. The golem will not disappear like regular mobs. Repeat as many times as you want for as many Frozen Lightning you want.

Enemies won't stay dead

Enemies that have already been killed may rise from the dead and become an invincible menace to your party. The newly-risen enemy has no HP, so it cannot be damaged, but it can still do damage to your party. You may be able to kill the enemy using a knockdown ability such as Stonefist or Shield Bash, or by interacting with an NPC or object to force a dialogue. Otherwise, you must reload, as you are unable to leave an area while in combat mode.

Delayed quest triggers

After completing a battle or task, the conversation and quest update that comes after said task may be difficult to trigger. This often occurs during The Fade: Lost in Dreams when visiting the companions' nightmares. This bug usually resolves itself if you wait for the trigger, or if you save and reload.
When passing through a previously blocked area (such as the doorway blocked by Wynne's forcefield at the beginning of Broken Circle,) the rest of your party may fail to follow your character through. This can be fixed by selecting each companion individually and sending them through.

Ranged attack speed bug

Haste and Swift Salve slow down aim speed, increasing animation length by +0.8s and +0.9s, respectively. Sadly, this bug is not patched as of v. 1.03. This is the relevant script:

// spell_constants_h

const float HASTE_AIM_SPEED_MODIFIER = 0.8f;

// spell_modal

eEffects[3] = EffectModifyProperty(PROPERTY_ATTRIBUTE_RANGED_AIM_SPEED, HASTE_AIM_SPEED_MODIFIER, PROPERTY_ATTRIBUTE_ATTACK, -5.0f);

A workaround of sorts exists, effectively allowing your party melee attackers to benefit from Haste without making archers useless: Shale's Rock Mastery aura, especially in a duplicated form, overrides any aim speed penalties (-2.0s/4.0s aim speed modifier will offset almost any combination of penalties). Some testing was conducted during this scenario: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFkR2qF7zs0

Note: ps3,xbox360: Rock Mastery is bugged and increases aim speed rather than reduce it.

Another viable option is equipping Repeater Gloves, which grant a Rapid Aim bonus of -3.0s aim speed.
Both the Haste and Swift Salve bugs can be fixed on the PC using a mod available here.

Oghren missing

If you have used the console command runscript selectparty before meeting Oghren for the first time in the Orzammar Diamond Quarter, he will not spawn at Tapster's Tavern and will be missing for the rest of the game.

To fix the bug, go to Tapster's (preferably after acquiring the quest A Paragon of Her Kind), leave, and then enter runscript selectparty into the console again. Oghren should appear on the screen and remain there from that point on.

+X% to healing effects received bug

The +X% to healing effects received modifier is bugged as of patch 1.04: the first 99% of the effect is ignored. While it is possible to stack this effect to 100% (thus getting a 1% effect) and beyond, for all practical purposes this property is ineffective in-game. This raises some questions concerning the true value of some extremely expensive (Lifegiver) or otherwise hard-to-get (Fade Wall) gear.

A list of affected equipment, in alphabetical order:

This bug can be fixed via the toolset, or by installing this mod.

Quest board reward bug

This bug is known to affect the following quest boards:

If the player completes multiple quests for one of the above organizations and turns them all in at once, the on-screen messages suggest that the player only received the reward for the last one listed in the journal. However, all due rewards are given.

Companion dialogue graphical bugs

If Morrigan leaves the party after you give her the Black Grimoire, an invisible Morrigan will ask you to find the real Grimoire on a subsequent visit to camp.
If you are a City Elf and in a relationship with Leliana, Shianni's mention of your wedding when you return to the Alienage will prompt Leliana to ask "You are married?" At this point, the video will freeze and the dialogue will not be audible, but the conversation can still be continued via text. After the conversation ends, the game functions normally.
If Wynne leaves the party while you're at the party camp, and the Hillside Path encounter has already occurred (but the Low Road encounter has not), an invisible Wynne will explain what happened on your next visit to camp.

Camp merchant stuck

After you save the merchant Bodahn Feddic from a darkspawn attack outside Lothering, he and his son Sandal are supposed to show up at your party camp. However, after you defeat the darkspawn, he may be stuck in combat, or the game may freeze when you speak to him. There is currently no way to fix this except to start again.

Rogue: strength vs. dexterity issue

When playing as a rogue, or with rogue characters such as Zevran and Leliana, Dexterity is meant to represent the rogue's attack power, and a high dexterity is required to equip the best daggers. However, before patch 1.04, rogues' attack power was based on strength alone, meaning that increasing dexterity to use higher-quality daggers would not increase attack power as it is supposed to.

As of patch 1.04, the attribute-based bonus damage from the weapon is now properly 50% strength and 50% dexterity.

Lower Ruins

xbox360It is possible for the Warden to be teleported into the burial chamber of the Lower Ruins prematurely and trapped behind the locked door. There is no known solution other than reloading a previous save.

Xbox 360: Corrupted save files

xbox360 Prior to patch 1.04, selling too many items to the same merchant could cause some or all of the player's save files to become corrupted. A detailed explanation of how to trigger this bug can be found here. In some cases, the only solution would be to start a new game; however, some players were unable to save their game at all after experiencing this glitch, rendering the game basically unplayable.

On August 5th, 2010, patch 1.04 was released for the Xbox 360, fixing the bug.

Giving Gifts bug

If you use Gifts to raise a companion's approval to 100 (Love), then there is a small chance that the companion will express gratitude, as if they have just been given a gift, at random points throughout the game. This can happen during combat or whilst exploring. Confirmed on ps3 and xbox360.

Stuck in Strange Posture

xbox360Sometimes when interacting with an object, speaking to a companion, etc., the player's character will get 'stuck' looking at the object, giving the appearance of the character tilting its head or even leaning its body in a strange way. This will persist through area changes and cinematics. This can be easily fixed by saving the game and reloading.

Continuity

Certain NPCs will occasionally refer to the Warden by an incorrect gender; for example, King Cailan may refer to a male Dalish Elf as female, and Herren may refer to a female Warden as male. This seems to be a writing error that cannot be fixed.

Zevran/Male Warden romance: epilogue error

If you complete the romance subplot with Zevran as a male Warden and choose to travel with him in the epilogue, the epilogue slideshow will refer to your male character as "her" and "woman." It's not known whether this will be fixed by any patches or if this is just a developer oversight.

Stuck romancing Alistair

If you are romancing Alistair and choose to recruit the Secret Companion, Alistair will leave the party, but because the two of you never officially ended your relationship, you will be prevented from romancing anyone else in your party. Even with high approval ratings (up to and including Love), you will not have an option to invite anyone to your tent or partake in flirtatious banter with them once this has happened, because you are still "officially" seeing Alistair.

Alistair: continuity errors

EVERY ENDING WHERE ALISTAIR DOES NOT BECOME KING IS BUGGED. He always refers to himself as king from after the Landsmeet on, no matter which choice you made. If you are a human noble who marries Anora and has Alistair kill Loghain, the ending is impossible to complete. Anora goes invisible and Alistair will be standing there in king's armor. He also does the king's speech for leading the charge to the battle of Denerim instead of Anora.

The only way to avoid this is to recruit Secret Companion (causing you to lose Alistair) or to make Alistair king.

There is also a bug on Xbox 360 at the end of the final battle, if Alistair is king and has not married Anora. When you tell Alistair that you will take the final blow to spare his life (only if you refused Morrigan's offer), the game freezes and there is no possible way to end the game. Even if you restart the final battle, it will freeze. This glitch has the potential to induce the Red Ring of Death on your Xbox if you are not careful!

Prescient Voice Set Dialogue

Confirmed on ps3. Some of The Warden/Voice Sets refer to the player character as being a Warden, which makes no sense during the origin stories.

Installation/DLC

Profile Transfer Glitch

It is possible to lose all saved information if your Xbox 360 profile is transferred to another Xbox 360 console. Despite this, all downloadable content, as well as completed achievements, remain. There is no way around this other than re-transferring the profile. However, this is not guaranteed to fix the issue.

Achievement Glitches

Anyone who purchased and played the game in the first 4 days may not have properly received their DLC achievements. Achievements that did show did not reflect the points in the Gamerscore. Attempting to recover the Gamertag as suggested by Microsoft would cause the achievements to disappear. Achievements would show through the Dragon Age Community Website, but not on the Xbox 360 or Xbox.com.

All attempts to redo the achievements failed. Testing included: deleting the DLC, recovering the Gamertag, clearing the cache, downloading the DLC again, disconnecting from Live (as well as EA servers), and replaying.

EA are aware of the problem: EA Forum

This has been fixed as of the January 29th title update.

As of April 20, a number of Achievement glitches still exist: many players have reported that the Master Warden achievement (for killing 500 Darkspawn; multiple playthroughs possible) and the Blight Queller achievement (for killing 1,000 Darkspawn) are not unlocked.

In The Darkspawn Chronicles DLC, the achievement Ogre's Keeper will not unlock if the first ogre ever dies. If you miss it on your first playthrough, then you miss out on it entirely.

Certain achievements, such as the Recruiter and Traveller achievements, do not unlock when appropriate. Clearing the cache and recovering the Gamertag may solve this.

Steam

These bugs have been reported when installing and playing the game via Steam.

No graphics configuration

Problem: The Steam installer defaults to launch the game the first time without configuring graphics setup. This has been known to cause the game to crash (tested: Windows Vista 64-bit and Windows 7 64-bit).

Solution: Choose option 2 from the Steam launcher, bring up the splash screen, and choose Options. Create and save a graphics profile. Subsequent launches should work.

Registration codes

Problem: The Steam installer says you need to enter a registration key to play the game and get bonus items. No key is required to play the game, but they are required to unlock special items in both the Standard and Deluxe editions of the game.

Solution: Right-click on the Dragon Age Origins game in your Steam Games list and select the CD-Keys option from the context menu. In this window you will see two or more codes (depending on whether you purchased the Standard or the Deluxe edition of the game, and whether you pre-purchased the game). One of them registers the game, and the other one or more are promo codes to unlock bonus items.

Go to the BioWare registration page to register the game using the Dragon Age: Origins Standard Game CD Key.
Go to the "Redeem Promo Code" page to redeem the other codes.

Note that you need to create an account on the BioWare social site to be able to access these pages and redeem these codes, and you will need to be logged in when running the game (click the button in the lower-left corner of the game's main menu screen).

DLC and Dragon Age Updater service

The Steam, Impulse, and Origin versions of the game (and possibly any other digital download versions) may fail to display DLCs in the Downloadable Content menu, or the DLCs may be listed as "unauthorized" and the in-game items will be lost.

Solution: If Steam is not running as admin, it will not be able to install the Dragon Age Updater service when it installs the game. The first symptom of this is that the DLCs that should be available with your version of the game will not be in the list of Downloadable Content (the list will be empty).

A common solution to missing downloadable content is to go to computer, local disk c, program files9x86), Steam, SteamApps, common, Dragon Age Ultimate Edition, redist, and run "DAOU_UpdateAddinsXML_Steam" as administrator by right clicking on it.

Alternatively,to install the service, run cmd.exe as administrator (press windowskey + r, type cmd and run), change to the bin_ship directory under the Dragon Age install directory (for Steam this will be ...\Steam\steamapps\common\dragon age origins\bin_ship) and run this command:

%WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\installutil.exe daupdatersvc.service.exe

(Note: if you don't have .NET 2.0.50727 installed, you may have installutil.exe somewhere else on your system.)

The next problem you will probably have is that after downloading the content and playing for a while, your downloadable content will disappear. Do not save whenever you see this happen; just exit. In the Downloadable Content window, under the Installed Content tab, you will probably see that most or all of the DLCs will be marked "Unauthorized". This is because the service you installed above needs to be running any time the game runs, but the game is supposed to start it and stop it automatically when the game starts up and when you quit, respectively. This will happen even if you set the service to Automatic. The problem is that because of broken permissions, the game can stop the service but cannot start it. So you would have to start it manually every time you want to play the game. To fix the permissions, once again run cmd.exe as administrator, and run this command:

sc sdset daupdatersvc D:(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;SY)(A;;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;BA)(A;;CCLCSWLOCRRCRPWPDT;;;AU)(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;PU)

From then on, the game will be able to start and stop the service correctly and you can leave it in Manual mode so that it only runs when needed. Note that if you start the game and skip the intro screens too quickly, the service may not have had time to start when you load your game, and will say "This game relies on premium content and cannot be loaded". Wait a second and try again. This will give the service time to start and confirm that you have the right to use the "premium content" your savegame was referring to.

Graphics

No text displayed

When started, the game may display no text, neither in the start menu nor in the game itself. Reinstalling the game may help. If you run the game on an older graphics card, a shader incompatibility may be the origin of the bug. You can download SwiftShader and follow the included instructions to correct this problem.

Multiprocessing system bug

The game may run too quickly on multiprocessing systems, causing characters to jitter around violently. This can be fixed by opening the Task Manager (Control-Alt-Delete), opening the Processes tab, right-clicking on daorigins.exe, selecting "Affinity," and making sure that only one CPU is selected (e.g. CPU0.) This must be done each time you run the game (including after crashes.)

Miscellaneous graphics bugs

Switching between ranged and melee weapons can sometimes leave you with the wrong visual models: although the game still acts as if you're fighting with a bow, it may show the character performing bow attack animations with a melee weapon. This doesn't affect gameplay, and can be corrected by quicksaving and then reloading.
Melee weapons may sometimes be "sheathed" upside down; this may be linked to the visual model issue above, and can be fixed in the same way.
A shaded box may appear surrounding characters. This bug is unconfirmed, and its causes and fixes are unknown.
Using the console command zz_pre_debug during Tower of Ishal may result in a persistent rain effect for the rest of the game.
Disappearing characters.
Vibrating head movements.
Places where the background repeatedly switches between normal and solid black or white shapes.
Failure to show changed shape after shapeshifting.
Player character becoming stuck in a pose that will not change, even when drawing a weapon, entering battle, changing armor, or entering/leaving an area. This can sometimes be fixed by saving and reloading.

Sound

When speaking with some NPCs, such as the bartender at the Gnawed Noble Tavern, certain lines of audio may be missing or repeated. This often occurs when skipping through conversations. When the camera angle changes or the conversation moves to a new topic, the audio usually returns.
A female cook at the Arl of Redcliffe's Estate seems to speak with a male voice.