I haven’t exactly been keeping up with Dragon Age: Dreadwolf news since most of it was bad (layoffs and MMO beginnings, mostly) but I caught a glimpse of a newish trailer and once again, I’m salivating.
There’s a lot of talk about what made Dragon Age “good” in Origins, where Dragon Age 2 dropped the ball, and where Inquisition started juggling said ball with mixed reviews from fans.
Let’s start with what keeps me talking about Origins over a decade later and what I hope for in Dreadwolf.
Characters
When I first bought it, Origins landed in a new territory of gaming that I hadn’t seen before (for a high-schooler with very little money)—a character-driven game.
At the time, Morrowind, Fable, and Pokemon didn’t have anything like that. Sure, they had their stories, but I think they were driven more by gameplay mechanics than alluring characters.
Actually, now that I think about it, I might have had New Vegas at the time which I would consider character-driven, but I didn’t get around to playing Fallout till later.
When you think about Dragon Age, either a specific entry or the whole, you think about the characters.
What do I think of when I think of Origins? Alistair and Morrigan, Leliana and Zevran. But also Duncan and Loghain, Bhelen and Zathrian, Anora and Caridin.
Your companions were a huge, make-or-break part of your experience of the game, but they weren’t the only complicated characters that drew you back time and again.
The characters in Origins felt real and complicated and conflicted.
Wynne’s pro-Circle attitude despite the Templars ripping her newborn son from her arms. Zathrian’s righteous anger that ended up hurting the people he cared for most. Ser Otto, seemingly the only human to give a single shit about the elves of the alienage, paying for his empathy with his life.
Sure, some might have been one note—or one punchline—characters (even though I can’t think of a single gag character off the top of my head), but in a game as big and dark as Origins, you need humor to remind you to take a breath.
Atmosphere
There’s also something to be said for Origin’s sense of foreboding dread.
Getting to Denerim and not being able to get into the Alienage at first, hearing whispers about a purge…
Places like Redcliffe village during the day, an eerie hush over a town about to be besieged by undead at nightfall.
Haven, where you feel, you know something is deeply off, even before a little boy shows off his prize fingerbone.
Or the growing corruption of whatever that flesh stuff was as you climbed the Circle Tower, seeing firsthand why demons are feared.
And let’s try not to remember the Deep Roads and Hespith’s poem that still sends shivers down my spine. You think you know why the darkspawn are bad. Your understanding falls miserably short.
I can still go back and appreciate the graphics over a decade later, but something about the way the devs adding to the setting with music and creepy dialogue and enemies (or lack thereof)… It still gets me every time.
And that’s just the scary bits.
Walking through the Hall of Paragons, awed by the ancestors of the dwarves, just to see one murdered in front of you as you enter Orzammar in all its splendor.
Or crossing the bridge at Ostagar for the first or hundredth time, seeing the world drop out from under you and the mountains towering in the distance. Open air on either side welcoming you to the true beginning of your story.
The nonsensical dream logic of the Fade—bookshelves spiraling into the air, enemies in impossible places, doors leading to places they shouldn’t, changing shape as quick as a heartbeat, then back just as fast…
Say whatever you want, but Origins nailed making you feel a certain way about a certain place.
Background
Before you can even begin, Origins takes a relatively common component and really fleshes it out.
Sure, for your character customization, you’ve got your base stuff like race, gender, class—things most RPGs try to give you—but even then, Origins had its unique take on it.
Its namesake, the origins of the player character that acted as a tutorial of sorts, had (if I’m counting right) six different versions.
Six different backgrounds to choose from, six different settings that grounded characters into the stakes of the narrative.
The slaughter of the human noble’s entire house, the betrayal of the dwarf noble’s own blood, the innocent curiosity that upended the Dalish’s entire life… the list goes on.
And then, once you’ve started the real game and you’re in the thick of things, almost forgetting where you started—bam—a call back that kicks you in the teeth.
Gorim, alive and well, married with a kid on the way in the Denerim markets.
Jowan in the Redcliffe dungeons, doing about as well as could be expected after the last time you saw him.
Finding out Rendon Howe is up to more than murder and has the ear of none other than Loghain himself.
Discovering Tamlen amongst the Darkspawn that attack your camp…
If there was any downside to the origins, it was only that some had more plot relevance and callbacks than others.
Choice
At the top of Origins’ replayability (and one of the biggest reasons you’d want to replay it) was player choice.
Every. Single. Major. Questline. Had at least one significant choice that directly affected the game.
Redcliffe? Are you going to help the town defend themselves against the undead or leave them to their fate? How are you going to get rid of the demon responsible? There’s always the quick and easy options but those cost lives.
Circle of Magi? Can you keep Irving alive to vouch for his people, or, even if he lives, will you demand Greagoir enact the Rite of Annulment?
Haven? You could defile the ashes and become a Reaver, or you could let Genitivi announce its location. Should probably take care of the dragon first, but no one’s making you.
The Brecillian Forest? Dalish or Werewolves? Or can you make Zathrian see that his rage, while justified, is misplaced?
Orzammar? The kin-killer whose henchmen murder someone in front of you the second you walk into the city, or doom the dwarves with tradition?
Those choices extended into the smaller stakes as well.
Would you take pity on a suffering werewolf and tell her husband she died, or let him continue to search for for?
Keep Bevin’s sword or pay him for it?
Help a dwarf apart of a religious superpower start his own chapter or warn him away from it?
It didn’t matter what we were doing, we almost always had a choice to make that had complicated, usually unforeseen outcomes.
Later Games
For better or worse, the next two games were very different from Origins.
Characters were still at the forefront of every game and narrative. I personally felt like DAII told a character story more than a traditional hero-against-evil tale that most fantasy video games are known for.
But gone were the origins of the first game, and though choice still played a big part in the later iterations, I can’t help but feel it was neutered somewhat.
While I love and miss the origins, I come back, no matter what, for the characters. What I feel the games lose out on most is the gray morality of the first.
Sure, we could choose between the mages or the templars (in both 2 and Inquisition), but where’s nuance and world reactivity?
Give Isabella and the Tome to the Arishok or kill him. Either you skip a boss battle or keep your companion. Either way, there’s a statue of you in the Docks.
Conscript or exile the Grey Wardens. You’re fighting the Nightmare regardless and the only other choice you make is a personally significant one. Neither choices feel like they have consequences for the game or the world.
In 2 and Inquisition, there always feels like a “good” and “bad” choice, and nothing else. Black and white, cut and dry.
Where are our choices like crowning the King of Orzammar? Where’s our “nice” choice that is objectively worse for the crumbling kingdom and our asshole that might actually make things better for his people?
Maybe Zathrian offered you a pretty clear view of the werewolf situation until you find out that, just because he’s not wrong, that doesn’t make him right either. Werewolves or Dalish for the final battle, but by whose blood did you settle things?
It’s not that we weren’t given choices in the other games. It’s more like the teeth of those choices were blunted.
I miss having to consider the outcome of a decision, or thinking I made the right choice, only to see consequences I wasn’t expecting.
Horror
In that same vein of blunted teeth, the games don’t feel as… eerie? Unsettling? As Origins could get. I’m not as confident on a reason why though.
I imagine it could just be that I’m older and jaded now, but I don’t know that it’s all a matter of experience either.
The games, despite some atrocious things happening in them—like red templars and Hawke’s mother—don’t feel as dark. I think part of it is that despite the revulsion from the first reveal, they don’t hit as hard the next go around.
I felt like the red templars had a great design, and the explanation that the lyrium was using them like the cordyceps fungus should have been a wonderfully horrible revelation, but it just… fell flat for me.
I wasn’t horrified. I don’t even think I was taken aback. Something about the reveal (and the Blight infection later on), doesn’t hit the mark the way it should.
Same thing with Leandra. If you weren’t staring at the screen mouthing “what the fuck” when she fell into your arms, I don’t believe you. Her bride-of-Frankenstein death—the capstone of Hawke’s shitstorm of a family life—had all the right ingredients to incite horror.
It just… didn’t for me. Not like the broodmother, which, by all rights, was the parallel in Origins.
That slow lead-up of clues to what’s happening, a familiar body turned grotesque by the unspeakable acts of another, that uniquely feminine terror…
It could be the graphics too, although you would think it would work for the newer games, not against.
Or it might be that I like the Lovecraftian elements of the darkspawn and Blight better than serial killers. Something vaguely human with inscrutable, near-unstoppable goals, part of a much larger, much worse entity whose very presence corrupts all around it…
Versus a man who couldn’t deal with the loss of his wife, and decides to take from others what he lost.
Murderers coat the news like flies on rotten meat. I see enough of that shit. I want my (dark) fantasy to be something that doesn’t stare back at me from my screen every day.
Villains
Which brings me to the antagonists of the games. Origins had the archdemon (or the whole Blight) for a main antagonist, and Loghain as a secondary antagonist-potentially-turned-ally.
DAII had the Arishok and Meredith, and Inquisition had Corypheus.
I thought the Arishok was more interesting than Meredith, though they were both compelling as authority figures with extreme mindsets driven to extreme actions.
Though we met Sten in Origins and learned about the Qunari through him, the Arishok and the grounded armatta were the first time we experienced them as a culture. Sten was an individual that could have been an outlier. The Arishok was the head of their military with an army at his command.
Meredith was similar in that we had seen the Circles and what could happen to them in drastic circumstances, but Greagoir’s prejudice against mages was nothing compared to Meredith’s militant fanaticism.
Corypheus was an interesting character, especially because he threw a wrench into the Thedas’ history, but I think the games introduced too much, too early with him as an antagonist of DAII’s DLC. He lost his mystique as an eldritch entity.
Others have said it elsewhere, but I think that not “losing” to him after Haven (and having no real negative consequences from it) takes his impact away.
By contrast, we still don’t know what the Blight is, what the archdemons really are, or how they came to be (outside of a highly politicized version that has been proven false multiple times).
The human antagonists of 2 and Inquisition are not necessarily narratively bad, but they aren’t the unknowable threat that’s still relevant and biding its time.
What Hopefully Comes Next
That’s what I think keeps me coming back to the first game in the series. The choices, the horror, and the eldritch, unknowable threat of the Blight are what the later games lack.
That isn’t to say the newer installments are bad games—far from it. I’ve put more time than I can count into both, and I love them for what they are.
It’s just that they miss some of the things I loved in Origins.
I’m really hoping that our choices get more complicated in the next game, though I highly doubt we’ll be seeing origins again. I want to agonize over what my best option is, and maybe feel like I chose wrong.
Though we already know our primary antagonist in Dreadwolf, I’m hoping concept art of monstrous creatures towering into the sky is a return to the series’ more horror-filled roots.
Maybe the Dread Wolf can release something even his chess-master plans didn’t account for. Something unknowable and deeply, truly horrible…