I've been re-playing Dragon Age: Origins and I was shocked how much things changed in writing in such a short period of time.
It's not the plot but the characters. Flemeth appears intelligent and commands respect without being a girl boss, even Morrigan does not appear as a girl boss despite her jabs at Alister - being voiced by Claudia Black does help.
It is also a lot grimmer, the 2 that die during the ritual to become wardens are made to be liked, the guy that was newly wed with a baby is killed by Duncan because he was afraid. The mages being turned tranquil or killed if they fail a test. You understand why but it is incredibly dark.
The writing is totally incompatible with what ever the DA: Vailguard is. in Origins we understand that killing an innocent father is ok in order to protect the world but in Vailguard it is a problem if you use the wrong pronouns?
I know all the woke leftist crap but did they ever read books or played games written before 2015?
They sure did: Harry Potter! And nothing else!
Anyway, Dragon Age: Origins was a game seven years in the making, made while Baldur's Gate was still fresh in the devs' minds and while they still wanted to make a game like that. Not only a game like that, but one set in a world of their own making without Wizards of the Coast breathing down their necks or charging them for the license.
Unfortunately, seven years is a long time. People often change. Or perhaps they become emboldened about what they really want. Whatever the case may be, I think it's pretty clear that at some point, Origins was not the game a lot of the devs and writers wanted to make, including Mike Laidlaw, David Gaider, and Jennifer Hepler. They did not want to make an old-school dark high fantasy spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate that took its narrative cues from A Song of Ice and Fire; they wanted something that looked more akin to what Joss Whedon would have made if he wrote a fantasy. Heck, that was already bleeding into a lot of the writing in Origins; if you were to look at interviews on the various companions, you'll see the writers claiming an awful lot of them were inspired by characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That was especially evident with Alistair, a wishy-washy frontline combatant who constantly cracks bad jokes to hide how insecure he is, and was written purely to appeal to a female mindset.
And I suspect that growing divide within Bioware is why DAO's original lead, Brent Knowles, departed shortly after the game's release. He had his ideas for how the series should look, and most everyone else had others, and while he might have been able to tard wrangle them for most of DAO's development, either he was losing out or he did not want to work with these people anymore. Especially with EA now looming over the company, seeing no value in an old-school fantasy RPG, and wanting everything to be more like Mass Effect. Which I'm sure the other DA devs wanted to copy as well.
That's what I think anyway. The devs were hostile to Origins throughout DA2's development, throwing shade at it in every interview, which leads me to think they were indirectly attacking Knowles and that his parting was not a friendly one. It's also why they sought to distance DA2 from DAO by giving it a wildly new art direction that only a bunch of blue-haired faggots would think looked good, and wrote the game as a soft reboot of the franchise where a huge bomb would be dropped onto the setting, changing it irreversibly...after only one game in.