Dragon Age: Origins

BioWare's 2009 return to old-school party role-playing opens with one of six origin stories - a dwarf commoner, a city elf, a human noble and three more - each a self-contained hour that changes how the world addresses you for the rest of the game. You become a Grey Warden, and the main structure is a treaty hunt: four allied factions, gatherable in any order, each with a substantial branching questline where the obvious moral answer usually costs you something concrete. Combat is real-time with pause, closer to a tactics game than an action one, with positioning, spell combinations and a tactics editor for automating companion behaviour. The companions are the reason people still replay it, particularly Morrigan and Alistair, and approval is tracked well enough that a party can fracture over a decision you thought was minor. It is deliberately grim, and the Landsmeet pays off dozens of small earlier choices at once. Fifteen years of sequels have taken the series elsewhere; this is still the one the fanbase means.