Dragon Age: Origins

These three achievements, Grey Warden, Master Warden, and Blight-Queller, are gotten from killing Darkspawn, respectively 100, 500 and 1000. This can theoretically be done in one playthrough, but require some luck and finding random encounters when travelling.

Luckily, the key here is that the achievement description should have an added "Across all playthroughs", as the count will tally up how many you have killed on all your characters. Saving, killing darkspawn, and then reloading to kill the same again will not count.

To see how far along you are, with the back button, find the leftmost book icon and then scroll right to Heroic Accomplishments. On the Party Accomplishments page, look at kills and Darkspawn killed, on all your characters, for the grand total.

If you are close to 1000 but have finnished the game, the easiest would probably be to start a new Dwarf Noble story for some quick access to more Darkspawn, or play through to Ostagar and then do the Korcari Wilds and Tower.

This Achievement is glitched. Many people have been complaining that it didn't unlock for them at 500 kills, which was the case for me as well. I was fighting the Arch-demon when it popped in the middle of the fight. I looked at my stats and it said I had 949 darkspawn kills. So the count in the stats is worthless for knowing when your going to get it. The interesting part was that my character was PASSED OUT when the achievement popped, and he had been for about ten minutes. So it does not count only your characters darkspawn kills. So just keep killing and eventually it will pop.

I, like many others, didn't get this achievement when the kill counter reached 500. I checked how many darkspawn kills my counter had which can be found under Heoric Accomplishments>Party Accomplishments>Darkspawn Killed. I did the quest The Final Onslaught/The Final Battle in Redcliffe Village as I had a save right before there and knew there were a lot of darkspawn there.

After killing everybody in the village, I checked how many kills my counter was at and figured that there were 31 darkspawn in that area. Without saving, I loaded my save before the battle. Your darkspawn count on the counter will not increase using this method, but you will still get credit for the kills. After a few times doing the kill/don't save/reload method, Master Warden finally popped.

I figured doing this 17 more times (17x31=527) would net me the Blight-Queller achievement. Wrong. It popped on my 11th reload. I'm not a genius, but I'm pretty sure 500+341 does not equal 1,000.

This was done with only one character (no multiple playthroughs), my main character was knocked out at the time the achievement popped, this was done online (with the patch obviously and I never cleared my cache), and with the following DLC owned and on the system: Stone Prisoner, Warden's Keep, Return to Ostagar, and I have the Awakening disc.

Many have already found solutions for achievement, but details themselves seem to be all over the place. I will confrim my method of earning this achievement, including savegame strategy, as I do NOT think it is bugged.

I have the latest patch (as of the writing of this guide) and alll DLC installed. I did not uninstall the patch, clear cache, or transfer my saves to another Xbox 360 as some other sources have suggested.

As many others have pointed out, I can confirm my opinion that this counts for MAIN character kills only, while the main character is under your direct control. I do not believe that it counts other characters' kills while under your direct control. I also believe that this counts only for ONE playthrough, and not across all playthroughs. Simply put, your character must kill 1,000 darkspawn, by him/herself, in one playhthrough beginning to end.

My process and Savegame strategy:
Begin the final fight for Denerim after the march from Redcliffe. Eliminate Darkspawn at the gates and choose your party. I chose Allistair, Oghren, and Morrigan. I headed first to the Elven Alienage and immediately saved my game (overwriting a savegame previously used by this character.) Begin dialog with the elf, and nearly immediately it will auto-save. I held my party back while I went to work on the darkspwan with my main character.

There are sources that indicate that the quest line, started from the elf before the auto-save, must be completed before darkspawn are counted. I do not know if this is true as I did not test it specifically, but I completed the elf quest by speaking to Shianni at the tree after all darkspawn in the alienage were eliminated. After speaking to Shianni, I saved my game by overwriting a previous save, keeping the original Alienage save intact.

After saving the game, I loaded the AUTOSAVE to continue the Alienage from the beginning since there is no autosave after the darkspawn are eliminated from this area, nor is an autosave kicked off after speaking to Shianni. After eliminating darkspawn, the general, and speaking to Shianni a second time (a second full playthrough of the Elven Alienage from loading the autosave,) I saved the game again by overwriting a different, previous savegame.

By this time, there are four saves that I am keeping track of. As far as I can tell, the actuall savegame number doesn't hold any special meaning, so I'll use it to illustrate. Assume that all 20 slots are in use from previous saves throughout the game:
Elven Alienage (10) -- the end of 2nd playthrough of Alienage
Elven Alienage (9) -- the end of 1st playthrough of Alienage
Auto Save (1) -- the autosave from the beginning of Alienage
Elven Alienage (8) -- the beginning of the 1st Alienage

I simply alternated saves between (9) and (10) above at the end of each run.
Save 8 was never truly needed again, but I kept in in case I needed to go back just before the autosave was kicked off, or if I progressed too far on the bridge to kill darkspawn which would start the cutscene and kick off a new autosave.

Master Warden unlocked as I killed a Hurlock Archer sometime around the middle of the 4th or 5th playthrough.

**other notes:
When first attempting this method, I chose Allistair, Morrigan, and Wynne as my party. Each Alienage run would crash after about two minutes of play. Some sources have observed this and indicated that too many darkspawn were spawning in the area, causing the game and the Xbox 360 to crash. I did observe the crashing, but may have identified the source: Wynne casting haste as a tactic.

Throughout the game, I had Wynne casting haste as a 'self > any' tactic throughout much of the game and didn't see a crash. It began happening regularly at the Alienage, and I noticed on two occasions Wynne, on screen, in the exact same spellcasting pose as the game froze and the Xbox 360 become unresponsive. I narrowed it down to this tactic. I then reloaded the game at the March to Denerim, chose my party omitting her, and continued as indicated in the guide above.

Darkspawn are Hurlocks and their variants, Genlocks and their variants, Ogres, and possibly Shrieks and their variants. I'm not too certain if Shrieks count though.
I can say this, that you HAVE to be at least in control of the character that delivers the killing blow on the darkspawn if not your main character only. How I know this is because I finished 1 playthrough and under my Heroic Accomplishements it shows that I've slain over 1,200 darkspawn. Yet this achievement did not pop for me. I'm on playthrough #2 and am at the point where I have to fetch the Urn of Sacred Ashes to heal the Earl in Radcliffe. My current count for darkspawn kills is at 590 and this achievement hasn't popped yet. On my second play through, I spent much of the "darkspawn" encounters by telling my party to "hold" while I scouted ahead and killed all the darkspawn myself. Playing on "easy" makes this painless except for a few battles especially when Ogres are encountered. I'm thinking that the achievement hasn't popped for Master Warden yet because some of the darkspawn kills were stolen by my other party members when they had to rush in to help me after my character was killed or if darkspawn attacked my party immediately upon entering an area. I'll update this as soon as my Master Warden achievement pops with my darkspawn kill count.

Update: 01/15/2015, Hallelujah! It finally unlocked. This unlocked during the Final Battle questline where you fighting through Denerim to get to Fort Drako to face the Archdemon. The achievement unlocked in the Alienage where elves at the tree in the middle ask you to defend them from attacking darkspawn. Right after you accept the quest there's an Auto Save point that happens. I had my party "hold" while I ran forward at killed the darkspawn. The general will be pain in the behind and ended up killing me the first time around. What I did was used my rogue character to pick off the darkspawn near him then shot him with my arrows a few times which lured him to chase me. I then ran back to my party and removed the "hold" from them and we ganged up together and killed the general near the big tree in the center of the map. I then requested my party to "hold" again and then went forward and started killing all the darkspawn myself after that. My achievement Master Warden unlocked during that battle. I hit select and went to my Heroic Achievements and my darkspawn killed counter was at 742. This leads me to believe that only darkspawn kills with the PLAYER CONTROLLED character (possibly even only with the MAIN character, not confirmed though) count. It's important to note that this is place I used to farm Blight-Queller (1,000 Darkspawn kills) and was able to get it to unlock successfully as was recommended in other guides on that achievement. I simply created a save after all the darkspawn were killed and then reloaded the Auto-save checkpoint, replayed the battle, saved at the end and then reloaded Auto-save, and repeat. At the start of the battle, my darkspawn killed count was 705, at the end of the battle it was either 767 or 768. Which meant about 61-62 kills each time. After about 8 or 9 times of reloading the Auto-Save checkpoint, Blight-Queller popped for me. 61*8 is 488 so it sounds like pretty much every kill counted with my main character. Hope this helps others.