Remembering Dragon Age: Origins

Eurogamer took advantage of a sleepy weekend to publish a retrospective piece on BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins, in which they pay close attention to the game’s development influences, the game that ultimately ended up making it into stores, some of its strengths and weaknesses, and how the Dragon Age series has evolved from this original foundation to what we were delivered in Dragon Age: Inquisition. An excerpt:

Dragon Age: Origins was so often torn between its inspirations – dark, gritty and with a relatively realistic brand of low fantasy – and the needs of a big budget game. Magic is canonically rare, with mages locked up in Circles for everyone’s own safety and every spell putting the user at risk of demonic possession. The idea was that most people would never even have seen magic performed in public, at least, nothing more dramatic than the pulling of a rabbit out of a hat. In practice, mages are everywhere, and nobody blinks an eye at spells like Walking Bomb that turn the screen into a swimming pool of gore. Why? Because people like throwing fireballs, and mages make for better opponents than endless enemies wielding the old sword-and-board.

It’s not hard to find similar examples, and they’ve only become more pronounced with age. The sex scenes for instance, in which characters blankly pet at each other in hideous beige underwear were hilariously twee even before Game of Thrones came along and moved the bed posts. More jarringly, they were often totally inappropriate for the characters. It would take until Inquisition for both the bras and pants to come off, and more importantly, for most of those scenes to actually feel like character moments – to be naughty, funny, heartfelt, individual, even a little bit sexy.

Despite all this, Dragon Age: Origins knew the game it wanted to be – and when it gets down to it, that game holds up pretty well. It’s a half-way house between the hardcore RPGs of old and a more modern style that was taking over, with an emphasis on the former. Magic with no concept of friendly fire, making every fireball a potential disaster; huge dungeons full of puzzles; grand moral choices to be made, with tangible consequences; a world full of lore, lovingly built, with more complex characters than people often care to give it credit for.