Bioware’s Dragon Age: Origins is as ambitious as it is inconsistent
There’s something to be said for the ever-shifting parameters of Bioware’s Dragon Age games.
Visually, the first installment evoked the classical aesthetic of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films while later games moved in a stylized direction more synonymous with the world of comic books.
Tonally, Dragon Age often pulls from the moral greys of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire or Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher — though it never reaches quite the same extremes as either of those stories.
Finally, the series’ gameplay and design has gradually moved from the realm of linear old-school roleplaying game experience to a more contemporary open-world one.
Held against the grain of the popular mainstream, the political subtexts and allegories of Dragon Age distinguish it somewhat — but in the grand scheme of things, the series isn’t favors tropes of the genre more than it subverts them.
In Bioware’s own words, the series is best described as a “dark heroic fantasy”. It walks the line between the high and low fantasy sub-genres and that versatility is crucial to the series’ appeal. I’ve written before about the types of fantasy that the series works to evoke but if anything stands out as a defining trait of the series, it’s this notion of ambition.
Bioware set out to make an epic fantasy adventure that would see you play a hero on a mission to save the world from an unstoppable menace, develop friendships with fascinating characters and fight alongside them in the game’s challenging combat encounters. However, for all its merits, Dragon Age: Origins was a game less interested being the best playing fantasy RPG ever made and more interested in being such a compelling introduction to the setting, characters and story of the Dragon Age universe that the game’s technical and design shortcomings don’t even matter.
From the grubby textures to the stilted animations to the frustrating ‘Enter the Fade’ sequence, there are plenty of aspects of Origins that haven’t aged all that well. However, one aspect that has held up is the writing.
As the storytelling foundations of a franchise as big in scope as Dragon Age, it’s hard to envision an opening chapter that lands better to this. We’re introduced to hundreds of years of history, imagery and ideas and culture that most of the main plot never really involves itself with: from the labyrinthine politics of Orlais to the militarism of the Qunari.
The events of Origins itself are a drop in the pond of a much larger tapestry. To put it more concisely, it feels like Bioware weren’t looking to craft a game so much as they were looking to craft a world — and that’s reflected in the way that the structure of series, as a whole, has evolved.
Post-Origins, each installment has taken the series’ focus further and further away from Ferelden and looking back, it’s hard not to see that first game as anything but the first verse of a much larger epic. Unlike Mass Effect, Dragon Age sees the player take control of a different character in each installment. Bioware don’t want Dragon Age to be a series about Hawke or the Inquisitor or the Grey Warden, they want it to be a series about the world of Thedas itself- a world with hundreds of characters, cultures, places and stories and a world that expands in new and exciting ways with each addition to it.
However, to bring the focus back to Origins, their first efforts to build this universe were often as flawed as they were ambitious. There’s an enormous and disappointing discrepancy between the size of the world that the game’s story describes and the physical spaces your character is able to traverse. Bioware often infer more of the world in Origins than they build — but even when they do, Ferelden isn’t all that important or interesting of a place.
Ferelden is often painted as a feudalistic backwater only recently freed from the yoke of oppression. It comprises less than 1/7 of the total landmass of Thedas and when in taken in comparison the more-stylized and cosmopolitan places explored in Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition it’s hard not to find it a little vanilla. Were it not the unlucky target of the Darkspawn in the first game and the birthplace of the Christ-like Andraste, it’d be hard to find anything that here that sells you on its importance.
The events that take place in the game are described as hushed tones and emphasized as a big ‘end-of-the-world’-level catastrophe. However, in the context of the way that Bioware build-up the rest of Thedas, they never really feel that important.
There’s additional inconsistencies at work in the way that the universe’s fiction grows around the game designs conceits of Origins. The appearance, gender and race of your character in that first game is entirely player-driven, and later when later games reference that character, something unavoidable given their importance, they are forced to be vague and non-specific in a way that hurts the consistency of their own narrative.
Bioware’s goals for Origins as a game and Origins as a story trip over one another and create an inconsistency that’s often shared the stage with the ambition that defines Dragon Age.
One minute, Ferelden is a sprawling land where the main plot takes place. The next, it’s an unimportant backwater and the focus is on the city of Kirkwall. One moment, Dragon Age is a series differentiated by numbers and subtitles. The next, the franchise has abandoned both numerical consistency and its trademark red-and-white aesthetic.
Ambition drives Dragon Age to be more than the sum of its parts and while no amount of inconsistency can take away that achievement, it’s important to acknowledge that it does leave a mark.
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