Dragon Age Origins has more in common with old school RPG's (like BG) than it does with more modern games. It was certainly transitional, but most of the streamlining occurred later. I liked it.
The systems for Origins were built from the ground up for a computer game, rather than adapted from a pen and paper RPG, so it was more sophisticated that Kotor in many ways. It also had a fairly powerful mini-programming language that allowed you to fine tune to a great degree how your companions (or the MC) would act when you are not controlling them directly. Other games have done this too, but I think the system in Origins was the best, and I'm quite irked that Bioware gave up on it.
