I bought Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition on Steam in the recent sale. When I try to run the game from Steam, I get the launcher. When I click play from the launcher, the launcher disappears and the game doesn't launch. I've tried going to the Steam folder and launching the DAOrigins executable, and when I open it nothing happens. I've tried reinstalling the game and I've tried running as administrator, both to no avail.
Is this a common issue? Is there a workaround?
I had this problem as well. The problem is that Steam needs to do some special stuff it cannot do without admin privileges the first time you start the game, according to the solution I found. Starting the game as an admin is not enough, you need to manually close Steam, restart it using Admin rights, then launch the game. Subsequent launches do not require Steam to have admin rights.
Another solution I found while Googling when I had the issue was to close Steam entirely and use the installer directly from Windows, instead of the game library option. Don't worry, it still opens Steam first.
If you STILL have troubles after that, there's one last alternative: the key you get for the game is also valid for use in Origin, so you can try activating it through there, downloading the Origin version (from an elevated Origin window), manually patching it to 1.05, then disabling cloud saves and putting the game to XP SP3 compatibility mode.
A friend of mine had this problem. He claims that he fixed it by setting both the game (dao.exe?) and the launcher to NOT run as admin.
I can't verify this as I've not tried it but it's a quick thing to try...
