Sometimes you just get an itch. Not one you can scratch with your fingers or a stick, but an imaginary itch that tempts you with visions of a food, film, text on a page, or even a game. You recall elements of a story, the placement of your thumbs on the controller, and the thrill of watching big numbers fly on screen as a dwarf showered in blood hacks with one hand before slashing with the other.

This is how I came to playing Dragon Age: Origins again, a game that I’d love to say has aged well in the past few years. It hasn’t, which is strange to say of a game that released not too long ago. That doesn’t mean it’s horrible to play now, but there are some choices in design and presentation that just feel archaic, as if they belonged to a previous generation of game design.

I invested roughly fifteen hours into Dragon Age: Origins in a matter of three or four sittings. Of course, having the sky vomit snow onto Philadelphia and closing down offices will provide that sort of spare time. I was excitedly invested in my Dwarven Noble, a warrior taught to be polite but preferring a much less pretentious sense of humor and a craving to bash some skulls. I took him to Redcliff, vowed to save the boy with the help of the Mages, and skipped off to recruit the Golem Shale before shoring up at the Tower of Terror.

There are few places in Ferelden that can crush the spirit for adventure as easily as the Mage’s Tower. It is The Library of role-playing games, or at least, one of them.

When I say “The Library”, I’m specifically referring to the level in Halo: Combat Evolved. Whenever someone wants to criticize Halo, they inevitably bring up The Library as the final straw. It was a repetitive, boring to look at level that provided no real sense of progress, visual or otherwise, through its lengthy halls. Even the Covenant ships had their hangar bays to show the player getting higher, and thus progressing further through the levels. Yet in The Library, everything looks the same. You can’t tell that you’re ascending, just that you’re on a floor that looks like all the others. The only real purpose of The Library is to have the A.I. character 343 Guilty Spark babble off some exposition, dragged out by wave after wave of The Flood.

In that one level alone, Bungie managed to turn The Flood from an intimidating threat to a burbling horde of bullet sponges, crushing any excitement developed from the gameplay or the story.

The Mage’s Tower suffers from a similar oversight, only made worse if you chose to go to Redcliffe Castle and hold off on completing the quest there. Instead of slaying the possessed boy or sacrificing the mother, you choose to seek the help of Mages. This means one quest is stalled, awaiting you to finish climbing a tower littered with demons, ghouls, and the undead. If you choose to complete the optional sidequests within the tower, you’ll find yourself doing a lot of walking up and down stairs, retracing your steps around the spiral. While there are certainly doors you could pass through to shorten the trip, the designers left them locked in order to force you through each encounter.

In order to make descending the tower to complete a side mission more bearable, the simple ability to unlock those doors from the other side should have been permitted. That way the player is still forced to progress through each encounter, but is able to cut down on time spent returning to previous locations in order to complete a small errand.

That is just a minor matter of pacing, and optional at that. The real error in design is when the party encounters the Sloth Demon, putting everyone to sleep and trapping them in the Fade. You had just completed several floors of beasts and are no doubt already feeling your resources deplete. It’s getting close to wrapping the quest up, but instead BioWare chooses to pad on the length.

Dropping into the Fade with your companions gone puts a screeching halt to the quest line. You are now sidetracked. Any exhilaration or sense of progression you had developed is wiped away by this new location, one that requires the player to learn a brand new set of skills and play completely differently than they had been playing before. It also takes a lot of time, forcing the player to figure out the precise order they should tackle and march through the different sections before being able to battle the Sloth Demon and move on.

The Fade has completely killed my interest to replay Dragon Age. It is not a short quest, and is dropped right into the middle of another more important mission that I had already spent more than an hour on. I’m encumbered with items and gear I’d like to sell and am starting to hurt a bit for restorative items, yet now I have to progress through this maze just to kill an insignificant monster.

I can only imagine that Bioware wanted to include The Fade somehow, and this was the best they could come up with. Or perhaps they had already created the gameplay for the fade, but the original quest or mission it was attached to had to be removed. Either way, it does not feel as if it belongs in the middle of the Mage’s Tower, and if you can use dialogue to skip past it, then the penalty for succumbing is way too great.

The only other part of the game that I can think of being more of a slog are the Deep Roads, whose greatest issue is not only its length, but it’s inconsistent difficulty curve.

If I want to go back and replay Halo, I can simply skip The Library. But if I want to play through Dragon Age again, I have no choice but to take on this mission, one which might have been a lot more enjoyable if it were located outside of two primary quests I’m itching to complete.