I picked up Dragon Age Origins again lately to break in my new rig and it has been a breath of fresh air. It's really the last time Bioware was in proper form as far as I'm concerned and it's a grand send off. The whole siege at Ostagar just has this classic feel of an epic to it, from the rain to the drums to that one guy who falters and the guy behind him steadying him as they prepare to face the oncoming horde. I can't say that it's a game devoid of the mind virus of the current age, but it's nice to see a high fantasy setting that's just overbearingly white in essence and in depiction. Hell even the characterization of Ferelden as a country that adores its dogs is just quintessentially European. It's a quirk that's uniquely pronounced in white people and I don't think they even realized they were leaning into that. Then we've got Sten, who has long been a favorite of mine. He is resolute and unabashedly opposed to the very concept of women being warriors to the point where he will chide your companions and even the player for trying to be men. His dead pan delivery of it all is just the icing on the cake. He knows what is true and does not hesitate to state it plainly.
It's just been nice to go back and remember what a AAA game can be when it isn't completely overflowing with poison.
DA:O was my first exposure to a lot of tropes, so I hold it in high regard. But it also executed on them really well.
The Wardens slowly dying from appropriating the curse of the enemy. The religion being appropriately nuanced. Morrigan's third option in the finale. It's got so much going for it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Dragon Age 2 one of the first games that went woke? I remember it getting murdered online by actual gamers.
It's why I never bought Dragon Age Origins during Steam sales.
You're saying I should grab it on sale and give Origins a playthrough?
We weren't using language like "woke" at that point. There were some obnoxious politics in DA:2, but I remember what annoyed me most about it at the time was the shitty writing. DA:O had a fantastic story full of nuanced player choices that could make each play through different, but there was solid logic behind each choice you could have made. In 2, it was just transparently "Here's the 'good' option we want you to pick and here's the 'evil' option, but that would make you a bad person and we're going to punish you for it.' It was just Fable with more gore.
DA2 just built off a lot of the setups that DAO already had. Like, the wierd "Mages are Jews" to "Elves are niggers" thing is a DAO creation and DA2 just ran it into nightmarish levels.
You can actually trace Woke as a whole through the original three DA games, as each one reflects how Wokeness was at its time. So while DAO is pretty standard and offers a lot of rebuttals to the Woke talking points (like Sten and his entire race), a lot of it is being set up there for DA2 to run with it.
But, DA2 is also one of the funniest uber woke games. Because its still very early in that culture, so its super clumsy and almost every time proves the "racist/bigot" completely right by accident.
Like the mages are oppressed and watched because people are afraid they'll mess with blood magic (demon shit), which is "bad." But then almost every mage you meet from random rabble to their leader uses blood magic the moment they stub their toe (meaning they were messing with it before). So they are 100% in the wrong and belong in their camps being oppressed.
Origins is a good game on its own and it mostly completes its own story so you can play it and not engage further with the trainwreck.
Maybe my favorite thing in DA is that demons 100% always hose you. No matter what they offer, you come out behind if you deal with them. The objectively best course of action is kill on sight.
And because of that, anyone dealing with blood magic must be dealt with in the exact same way. And because mages just can't fucking stop messing with the blood, mages need to be permanently dealt with themselves.
The "Tranquil Solution" wasn't just a funny holocaust reference, it was legitimately the best thing for everyone in the country.
There are plenty of mages that don't mess with demons and such. It doesn't help that they have natural affinity to be able to become massive nukes if they simply wished for it. Only takes one guy to mess everything up. Which is why mages are on a very short leash.
Sorry, but when the Leader of the Mages in DA2 goes "yep I'm scared, time to become a demon" and reveals he and all the people saying "not all mages!" were in fact secretly messing with it to have such level of powers they really lose the ability to pretend like they aren't all just a stubbed toe or curious night from fucking with it.
Its the Xmen problem, where morally they probably shouldn't be treated that poorly out of fear. But when they could just have a bad day or even just lose focus once and fucking kill an entire town, its well passed "well but we pinky swear we won't!" levels and a correct choice to just not even run the risk of letting them live period.
Don't forget the leader of the "not all mages" group literally funded and protected the serial killer/rapist who kills your mom.
And unlike the leader of the Templars, who was being driven literally insane by a cursed sword tainting her with Darkspawn nonsense unknowingly, he willingly went into blood magic out of fear.
You go too far. Even in Origins (yeah i don't remember 2 that well) the reason for Circle going nuts was that, apparently, a lot of the mages were actually blood mages in secret biding their time to overthrow the templars in the tower and butter up to the demons. Templars couldn't sniff out a conspiracy in their own base of operations. Oh and enemy mages are the worst. Hate fighting them. I still saved both circle and templars because you kinda need all the guns you can get for the blight and you can sort out the mages later but i agree, i wouldn't want to live in the same village with a mage. Then again, they're more of a necessity than a friendly neighbourhood fireball man. Like trained killers for the feds in case Qunari come, or the Orlesians, or the... i dunno... darkspawn. And then they conveniently turn on each other...
Nope. You can deal with the demon in the Connor quest and come out on top, having both gotten something from the demon and casting it away. In Shale quest you can trick the demon. In the circle of Magi... i forgot... I don't think there were any demons there you could talk to without fighting them thereafter. In the Mage prologue you correctly figure out the trick Mouse was pulling on you as well. Demons are not unbeatable which is the whole point of defeating them.
In the circle you don't need to fight the desire demon who just wants a happy life as a wife of that Templar.
Elves are gypsies. What are you on about?
I'm not a European so when I see dirty ghetto rats that everyone hates, I think blacks not your trailer people.
Ferelden is Britain, Antiva is Spain, Orlais is French. Thedas is Europe.
I'm not doubting you, I'm just saying that when I play an American made game with people speaking American English I, as an American, will fill in with our own racial stereotypes.
Especially as the divide between City Elves and Dalish is very much a "African vs African American" divide more than gypsy, who as far as I know don't have a long storied history of being proud tribal people living in the wilds before getting enslaved by another group.
So I think we can go with "its a bit of both" as they used a lot of "poor oppressed minority" tropes to create them.
From my understanding all the subsequent Dragon Age games descended into [Current Year] garbage, but I can vouch for Dragon Age Origins. Get Sten in your party and enjoy.
I also recommend a handful of mods like the extra party slot for your dog and a bunch of bug fixes. Let me know if you want the full list and I'll hook you up.
Lmao. I don't understand, you look like a woman. Why would women have a wish to be men? I don't know what to make of you.
Perfection.
Haven’t played since my original playthrough. I would love some mod recommendations.
Here's my current loadout:
AddItemScript - utility for using the console to add items to inventory
DAO modmanager - utility for managing mod installations
Lock Bash - smash chests open instead of bringing the rogue
Dain's Fixes - a whole bunch of combat/meachanics fixes and tweaks. Need to configure the loadout yourself though.
No Helmet Hack - No more dumb hats, unless you want them. Configurable per character.
Qwinn's Fixpack - the other batch of fixes that cover everything not combat related such as quests and dialog.
storage chest - persistent storage in camp so you can engage your inner pack rat.
Character Respec - Adds a raven that lets you respec your character
Dog slot - add the dog as a persistent fifth party member. Does require you to disable it at a certain point in the game towards the end but I don't recall the particulars since it's been years.
Unobtainable item fix - There's a couple items that never drop properly from a few enemies and this fixes that.
Origins is great. Worth a play.
DA2 was definitely proto woke. Your first female companion is one of the earliest instances of obvious man-jaw.
DA:O and the first Mass Effect were peak Bioware before EA bought out the company.
Shadows of Amn is peak Bioware. Dragon Age is just what the generation after got to sample.
Bg1 was much better as far as feeling "lived in" and grounded. The problem was, d&d s at its best for a short time between "random crit kills from full hp" and "one failed save=incapacitating=death" and it is a NARROW window.
Replaying the Mass Effect trilogy right now with a shitload of mods but DA is next on the list after that, to remind me of what we’ve lost.
As far as I am concerned, Dragon Age Origins was the last good Bioware game. And I also refuse to acknowledge the sequels, as they all detract from the original, especially inquisition.
Agreed on all counts. The Qunari were way cooler when they were just giant people with purple eyes and strange philosophy and a penchant for conquest.
Its been however many years and I still can't get
Out of my head. The PC lines really were so snarky that it really was emblematic of the era.
"Swooping would be bad." I don't even remember the context, just the delivery.
Morrigan confronting the Grey Wardens in the Korcari Wilds as they try to retrieve the treaties from a chest.
She says something to the effect of "oh you fear barbarians will swoop down upon you."
You're going to make me reinstall. I generally don't replay games, but I never did play Awakening.
I never played Awakening either. I was really invested in my party and companions, and starting over did not feel good!
That makes three of us.
I recall Awakening being pretty good. Certainly much better than DA2.
For a different flavor of the era, give Jade Empire a try. Plenty of different fighting styles, magic types and weapons. Controls similar to a fighting game but it's a narrative RPG. It's one of old Bioware's diamonds in the rough.
It's on my list of things to get around to, but I still need to finish a playthrough of Icewind Dale first and KOTOR should probably be in the mix as well at some point.
Yeah. I'm replaying it now. I like the overall feel of the world though i'm a bit more sore about the gameplay now. Though there are some things that you could definitely notice as woke. Can't remember them now, they're pretty minor. Leliana was mentioning how orlesian knights could be men and women and there are not a whole lot of options for player character to not be a liberal.
I need to get that
When I first played DA:O, I remembered liking Alistair well-enough. Not my favorite, but one of my main team members. Played again recently and I could not stand his Whedonesque Millenial Snot. He only stayed on my team for as long as he did because I disliked Morrigan even more.
Ditto. He has that proto-MCU character vibe in that he's a person written to be quirky, awkward in a "LITERALLY ME" way, and who almost won't stop spouting one-liners that only he thinks are funny. He doesn't feel like he belongs in a quasi-medieval fantasy world; he feels more like some horny virgin girl's fantasy simp-husband, whos' handsome, sensitive, physically strong, a good fighter, but also completely submissive to her.
Worse, it seems like Alistair was used as the baseline for more and more characters in every subsequent Dragon Age game.
isnt that the one where the horse sprinting is fake and not faster at all?
No, that's Inquisition. There's no horse-riding at all in Origins. Heck, there aren't horses period in Origins!
Dragon age is kust doscount, off brand, low quality mass effect knock off. I was extremely disappointed with the first game for being so shallow in thst regard. It was like the fallout 4 to fallout 2, an imposter pretending to be something greater. The entire series would carry that pretender status all the way to the grave in veilguard.