The Ship of Dragon Age
I just played through all of the Dragon Age games for the first time ever. Please walk with me through my joys and disappointments, I have no one else to talk to about this.
(This is coming from the point of view of someone who started playing these games with no idea of what to expect other than dragons, and who has not yet delved into the discourse, fandom lore, or critical reception surrounding these games; I assume all of this has already been picked clean by longtime fans of these games.)
So the Dragon Age series currently consists of four games released over 15 years. Each installment has its own visual style, narrative perspective, and player-customized protagonist, yet they are all directly linked to one another by a linear plot and gameplay elements. There's a clear family resemblance between the first three games, as they all rely on certain aesthetic, narrative, and technical principles that give the Dragon Age series its essence, yet the fourth and latest installment is so different in almost every way that I was left scratching my head and wondering what on earth possessed the creative team to steer the series so off course that they're practically on dry land.
What precisely are the principles that define the first three games? I'm sure somebody somewhere has a ready list, but here is the impression I gathered during my playthrough of the series.
The first DA game sets up the world, the tone, the themes, and gameplay standards of the series: this is a character-driven, strategy-heavy action-adventure game set in a high fantasy world with an intricate lore. As far as gameplay goes, one of the main goals is to make good strategic decisions about the team you command, the gear you wear, the inventory you carry, and the skills you have at hand to defeat your foes in combat â but the game is also as much about making moral choices, choosing alignments, and nurturing relationships, all of which may drastically affect the course of the story and the state of the world the characters live in.
Both aspects of the gameplay lend the game a sense of gravity. What you choose to do on any given moment â whether that's choosing the right kind of weapon to equip on a mission, attempting to sweet-talk your favorite companion, or persuading an influential ally â has a weight to it. You are constantly aware of the possible consequences of your actions, of how easily they can hurt or benefit you or the rest of the characters in this world. All of this compliments the themes of the game: power, justice, responsibility, and the pursuit of peace and balance in a world inhabited by factions whose interests are directly at odds with one another.
The graphics of Dragon Age: Origins may be dated, as well as many of its politics, but the writing, the gameplay mechanics, and the voice acting were so strong that I had an absolute blast playing it. My Warden was a rogue with a Dalish elf background, and I decided to play her as a morally grey character who made the most chaotic choices, just because I didn't feel like being a classic hero. She romanced Zevran (who won me over with his thinly veiled trauma and promise of erotic massage), bullied Alistair for no reason, kept supporting all of Morrigan's rights and wrongs no matter what, and wriggled out of heroic self-sacrifice by convincing Alistair to make what I assumed would be something akin to a hellspawn with Morrigan (mostly because I thought it would be hilarious). What a fun time!
I jumped straight into Dragon Age II after completing the first game and its additions, and I liked it even more than the first one. Visually, DA II is drastically different from its predecessor, opting for a stylized look over the first game's what-passes-as-realism, and the single-location setting is also a change of pace, but the themes and basic gameplay mechanics are very much in keeping with DA:O. In my opinion, this is a great direction for a sequel, as it allowed the game to keep what really worked about the first game without feeling like a repeat of it. This time, you're making difficult decisions and building ties in a city (and its vicinity) in turmoil, yet somehow the stakes feel even higher than they did in the first game, in which you are attempting to stop an apocalyptic event that threatens an entire country. This game develops the politics even further and throws you in the middle of messy societal and personal conflicts that cannot be resolved in everybody's favor no matter what you do. Again, the theme of the game is power â who gets to wield it, and who gets to restrict it â as well as the balance between liberty and order. These questions are embodied by both the different groups struggling over the city of Kirkwall as well as the player character's companions, who all have distinct moral and political standpoints.
My lady Hawke was a fetching warrior with a solid moral compass. I decided to play her as someone who would always swing her huge sword in defense of the weak and the downtrodden, but would also attempt to talk things out before reaching for her weapon. Naturally, she defended the mages at every turn because she would not stand for enslavement nor subjugation, and she romanced Anders, because of course she did. I immensely enjoyed the moral complexity of this game, and I look forward to playing it again one day as a different kind of Hawke just out of curiosity.
Dragon Age: Inquisition is spiritually closer to the first game in terms of its realistic visual style, grand scale, and vast world, though the themes and conflicts in it are directly linked to the mage-templar conflict that was so central to the second game. The gameplay has some new features (I can jump???) but the basic structure remains the same. As usual, the game is about power, but this time the focus is on the power of institutions, specifically religious ones. Your character accidentally becomes important at work by receiving a strange mystical power that many people believe marks you as the chosen of the divine, and the game allows you to choose several different way to handle the political and religious influence that has been thrust upon you. And the weight of the choices you've made in the previous games really come into play as you get to include your own Hawke in the story in a pretty major role as well as deal with the consequences of certain actions you may have taken in the first game. It felt surprising meaningful and rewarding for me to see a reunion between Morrigan, Alistair, and their weird child, especially knowing that this interaction, as brief as it was, only happened because of several specific choices I made way back in the first game.
I made my Inquisitor an elven mage, which was incidentally the best choice as many of the story's threads are specifically about elven history and the position of mages in different countries. I decided that she would be a reluctant hero who wants to better the world but does not wish to see herself sitting on a throne, that she would align herself with the common people before anyone else, that she would always be true to her elvish roots, and that she would value honesty, simple life, and freedom. I made the unfortunate choice of romancing Blackwall specifically because I was charmed by his honesty (đ¤Ą) and humbleness, and ended up breaking up with him after the trial, with Cullen becoming my character's rebound and her husband later in the story.
As stupid as I felt for falling for Blackwall's lies, I kinda liked the messy drama my Inquisitor's love life became, because I love a good sting in the heart. That's why I naturally had to go back to an earlier save and replay the rest of the game with Solas as my girl's lover just to experience the sensation of being bamboozled by him with the added heartbreak of having been in love with him. Absolutely worth the time and effort!
Overall, I found DA:I to be a grand, larger-than-life kind of game that seemed to elevate what was great about the first two games and rewarded the player's investment in the series by showing that choices you made in previously do matter. The only downside of the game is that Varrick, the sexiest man in Thedas, is not a romanceable character, because I wanted to ride that dwarf like a goddamn miniature pony.
Having enjoyed the three previous games so much, I was very excited to start Dragon Age: Veilguard, only to be completely let down by it. I can't remember the last time I was so disappointed with a piece of media that I felt almost heartbroken. My problem isn't that I thought that the game was simply bad (I thought it was okay, when taken out of the context of the rest of the series); my problem is that it ignores or changes so many of the basic building blocks of the series that it doesn't feel like a Dragon Age game at all. The visual style, the tone, the basic gameplay, the themes, and the lack of significance of past choices â none of these aspects are in keeping with the previous games, and what we are getting instead isn't good enough to justify the change.
Visually, the game looks like a Dreamworks movie. The characters are stylized to have large heads that make them look childlike, which is a design choice often used in children's media. They have expressive, cartoonish faces and whimsical outfits. Even the darkspawn and the risen dead look cute and whimsical. The game does not look badly designed in of itself, and there's nothing wrong with a stylized look in general â DA II has a stylized look, too â but the problem lies in the mood these designs evoke, and how inconsistent it is with the tone established in the previous games. These characters do not seem like they live in a grounded, gritty world where real people live and die as a consequence of your actions; they look like they live inside a funhouse mirror. This world looks wacky and bright and bubbly, and it creates such a tone problem not only between this games and the previous ones, but also between the game's look and its plot.
That wacky tone is also present in the writing and the acting. Every character who isn't from a previous game talks in a wildly modern tone using trendy contemporary vocabulary, and the actors are voicing their characters like they're members of the family Madrigal. I do not blame the voice actors for this; I blame whoever made the creative decision to direct them to perform in this cartoonish manner. The humor in the game is also quite childish and frankly dumb. Every moment that might be serious and therefore meaningful is undercut by the kind of lame joke you might expect to see in a second-tier MCU movie.
The humor isn't the only problem with the writing, either. The previous games had such great dialogue, but in this game the characters seem to be either yapping on without saying anything of substance, repeating the same talking points over and over again, or having one of those over-stated conversations where the characters just flat out spell out the lesson of this week's episode, as if the writers were expecting the players to be far too dumb to ponder things on their own or work things out by themselves. And neither the main plot nor the companion plots were very interesting to begin with. The characters lacked depth and complexity, and their personalities seemed to be parsed together out of two personality traits and a favorite food. Again, it was like this was written for children, by somebody who underestimates children. The previous games were not devoid of silly humor (let's not forget Shale, my pigeon-hating golem diva, for example) but the comedy was dispensed mindfully and not in a way that undermined the gravitas of key plot moments.
The only parts in the game that seemed to have both substance and a thematic connection to the previous games were the parts involving Solas. I found myself wading through the game with great reluctance only to enjoy the few morsels of content that felt like the Dragon Age I'd come to expect. That shouldn't happen. I should have learned to become as invested in the stories of Rook and their companions as I had in the previous games' protagonists. Instead, I found it impossible to care about any of them.
As much as I gripe about the aesthetics and the lackluster writing, my biggest disappointment had to be the way the world felt dumbed down. The intricate politics of Thedas and the way it affected both the everyday lives of individuals and the grand scheme of things was the meat of the story in all three previous games. In Veilguard, politics barely seem to matter. All the companions may come from different walks of life, but that only seems to mean as much as belonging to a high school clique. Individually, the characters do reflect on the connections they've inherited and formed, but it's all centered around the individual and the shaping of one's identity. The companions do address their differences, but it's done in a weightless, humorous way that lays no ground for meaningful exchange of ideas.
The gameplay also paled in comparison to the previous games. I might be just a bad player, but most of the time during combat I had to resort to dodging upon dodging and mindless button-smashing instead of winning by carefully strategizing, which had made the first three games very enjoyable. Even more so, I was disappointed by how all but a few choices made in the previous games didn't carry over to this game. I get it that writing the game while being mindful of dozens of different paths the player may have taken in previous games is more laborious a task with every new game, and that assuming that the player has played the previous games might alienate new players, yet it still feels dismissive of the journey a lot of the players have had with this series to ignore the past altogether. The game is already a direct sequel, so why pretend that the past doesn't matter?
All these grievances I had can be summed up in one question: who is this game for? If it's aimed at players who played and enjoyed the previous games, why change almost everything in this one? If it's for new players, why bother tethering it to a plot carried over from a previous game? Why make this a Dragon Age game at all? Why the juvenile humor, visual style, and writing when the game is rated PEGI 18? Was this game made by people who just really hated the Dragon Age games? Who asked for this?
I keep thinking whether I would have enjoyed the game if it had been its own thing unrelated to Dragon Age, or at the very least a spin-off set in a distant past, the distant future, or a distant continent that would justify it being so wildly different. Maybe I would have? Apart from the grave inconsistencies in tone, it's not horrible out of context. Scrap away the threads that tie it to the previous Dragon Age games and you've got yourself a fun, unserious fantasy-scifi adventure game with puzzles. But I just can't help being frustrated with the wasted opportunity here. Even if the series was continued and the next game was a return to form, it would still upset me that this game is now a part of the canon. It upsets me that that the Solas story was not concluded in a better game. It upsets me that all this time, money, and effort was poured into such a misguided endeavor instead of a project that understood the essence of the previous games.
All this did leave me pondering the rules of serialized storytelling, about how much you can change and add to a story until its essence has been altered beyond recognition. At which point does your brain snap out of its willing suspension of disbelief and refuse to accept a continuation of a piece of fiction as a part of the story, as if one part of it was more "real" than the other? I can think of TV series and movie serials that transform wildly without losing their core identities. It's not impossible for a series to reinvent itself without losing itself. Sadly, that's not what happened here, which makes this such an underwhelming ending to the whole series.
















