Dragon Age: Origins might just have been my favourite game of all time. One hundred and twenty two hours I’ve clocked up playing it, completing it, restarting it, playing a bit as an evil character, then recently playing it through to completion again. It is a game about its world more than anything else, and the universe BioWare has sketched out for the Dragon Age franchise is an interesting one indeed. During its adventures through this world your character is faced with any number of difficult decisions, most of which will end up hurting innocents in some way or another.
I played the game originally when it came out, in November of 2009. That would have made me eighteen. As a Sixth Former with an underdeveloped attention span, Dragon Age was the first truly long games that I finished (I believe it took me around seventy hours to complete the first time round). That it managed to grip me so much when most other games I grew tired of after only a few hours of play meant it was something very special in my eyes. In my memories it quickly became shrouded in nostalgia and it rose to the top of my own personal Greatest Games Ever list.
A few months ago, being in the empty void between graduating from a Bachelor’s degree and going off to do a Masters, I decided that the time was right to play through Origins again, with the intention of taking that character through Awakening (the stand-alone expansion to Origins) and that character’s world through Dragon Age 2 in order to have a very personal save with which to import into Dragon Age: Inquisition when it comes out. You see, my original character died at the end of Origins, which meant that I couldn’t use him or his world in Awakening (at least, not without unexplainedly resurrecting him, which is something I didn’t wish to do).
Even through my rose-tinted blinkers this was one element of Origins that I found frustrating back when I was a bonny lad of eighteen. To me, my character’s world was more important than the character itself, and I would have quite happily played Awakening with a new character but preserving the planet-altering decisions my previous incarnation had made. Sadly this was not an option, and so I instead had to create a new character who existed in some strange parallel universe to my old one, where the Queen had suddenly decided to become a King and a drunken Dwarf I’d barely heard of was suddenly a really good friend of the previous story’s hero.
My new character was an Orlesian (read: French) warrior with a neckbeard. I have no idea why I gave him a neckbeard, but it was a fairly large contributing factor to me putting the game down half way through. I played Dragon Age 2 not long after it came out, but I decided to run the Playstation 3 rather than the PC version which meant there could be no save importing of any kind. This game I did manage to complete, but once again in a slightly off parallel universe to the two previous ones I had explored.
Dragon Age 2 gets a lot of criticism for its repeated levels and simplistic combat encounters, but to me it is certainly not a bad game. Indeed, thanks to its tighter plot, more varied characters and livelier tone there were many elements which I preferred to its longer, deeper predecessor. It was because of the fact that I wanted to see my own, personal story carry over from Dragon Age 2 to Inquisition that I started playing through the series again not long ago, and it surprised me what a difference four years and a lot more critical experience with video games makes.
In a world before Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Dragon Age: Origins stood tall as a game that was about choices. Making decisions which would impact large numbers of people and where there wasn’t always a black and white answer. However now being in the position of having made quite a few games of my own and comprehending the underlying mechanics better, I realised that a lot of the moments in the game where I thought that you had to make a who-lives-and-who-dies decision actually had a nonsensical third option where actually everybody wins and there are no downsides and lets all sing songs about Puff the Magic Dragon because everything’s not as dark as it first seems.
For example, and this is a very minor spoiler, there is a moment in Origins where for reasons that make sense in context you have to decide whether a mother or her child dies. Now, even though it’s technically the child that has done horrible things to do with demons and the undead and not the mother, it’s still not that difficult a choice, and the first time through the mother died to save her child. The more recent time I played the game, however, I noticed a third dialogue option that my mind had apparently glossed over all those years ago because it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Basically, you’re in a situation where every night people are dying because of this demon child, and you need to stop it right now because the town won’t survive another night. You get to the demon’s lair and one of the options is “hey, let’s go on a month long road trip to the magical land of the wizards and get them to fix it”. The correct response to this would, of course, be “that’s a stupid idea because literally everyone would die”. The part of me that understands video games, however, realised that they probably wouldn’t actually make everyone die and so we went on said adventure to the enchanted country of the thaumaturge and lo the wizards did fix it and nobody had to die after all.
What bullshit.
Now, Origins is still one of my favourite games. But I have realised that it’s not as committed to being in the grey area of morality as it thinks it is. Maybe I’m a horrible person, but I like a story where there isn’t some whiter-than-white hero who is beyond reproach, a story where innocent people die when they could have been saved and sometimes bad people have to survive for the greater good. I thought Origins was this story and it turned out I was just playing it wrong, and this disappointed me greatly. Perhaps I should replay the original Mass Effect too...
