Dragon Age Origins: Oh Alistair!

For the past ten days or so, I have been obsessively playing Bioware’s latest role-playing game Dragon Age: Origins. Although my obsession with any good game is nothing new, there’s something about DA:O that drove me to blog about it today. But let me start from the beginning.

DA:O is set in a fantasy world where evil beings known as darkspawn are always trying to find ways in which to cross over from their world into ours. For the most part, they are confined to the underground tunnels and cities dug up by the dwarven folk and only dare venture out to the surface when they are being led by an archdemon. In the game, you get to play a character who is eventually recruited into a select army known as the Grey Wardens, said to be the only ones who can defeat an archdemon. As RPGs go, the game is rather linear in the sense that it doesn’t give you the freedom to go wherever you want whenever you please, as the Elder Scrolls games do. But because of this, it tells its story more compellingly as it keeps you focused on one main goal and thus one clear path – to unite the armies of Ferelden. Additionally, all the dialogue is voiced-over and characters start random conversations with each other or with you based on choices you have made in the past, giving you a total feeling of immersion in the game. What’s more, the game allows you to cultivate relationships with other characters, presenting dialogue choices that encourage romance with one of them, depending on your preferences.

(SPOILER ALERT: Continue reading only if you aren’t playing the game, have completed it, or love spoilers.)

So it’s no surprise that the most popular threads in Bioware’s Dragon Age forum have to do with the story’s alternative endings, with scores of people saying that they are depressed or somehow affected by it. I am close to beating the game myself but having made all the important decisions (and having read the spoilers), I can pretty much imagine what the ending is going to be like for my character and I’m not so sure I want to continue playing. Here’s why.

Because I always end up playing mages named Elanor in every other fantasy RPG both single and multi-player, I am playing a female human mage named Elanor. Now, there are two characters in the game who figure quite prominently in the story and both become your adventuring companions early on – Alistair and Morrigan. If you’re a girl, chances are that your romantic interest will be Alistair, and if you’re a guy, you’ll probably fall for the witch hottie Morrigan. Alistair is the bastard son of the late king of Ferelden and as such, has a tenuous claim to the throne and he is also a Grey Warden. But because Elanor is not a noble (only because I chose to make her a mage – apparently nobles can only be warriors or rogues), she cannot be queen if he becomes king.

As the local Grey Wardens are all wiped out in the beginning of the story, Elanor and Alistair, who are both new recruits, go through the motions of preparing for an encounter with the archdemon without really knowing how to defeat it. It is only towards the end, when they meet Riordan, a warden from another kingdom, that they find out that one of them will have to die in order to make it happen. Riordan gallantly offers to be the sacrifice but he dies before the archdemon is killed. But wait there’s hope. The night before the big battle, Morrigan tries to convince Elanor to convince Alistair (who ostensibly hates her) to “lie with” her in a ritual act that will conceive a baby. According to her, when the demon is slain, its spirit will seek out the baby instead of one of the wardens and the baby will not die. It will instead become some sort of god, though she claims it will be a “clean” one. Once the ritual is over, Morrigan will disappear from the scene and won’t bother them ever again. So as you can see, here are Elanor’s choices:

1) Make Alistair the king, in which case he will dump her because she’s not a noble,

2) Support the reigning queen (Alistair’s sister-in-law) even though all indications are that she will not be a good ruler,

3) Convince Alistair to have ritual sex with Morrigan (that is just SO wrong!) thus unleashing an unknown power into the world, or

4) Alistair dies in the end, since according to all spoilers, he just won’t allow the love of his life to die instead. But even if this weren’t the case, she would have to die herself!

In other words, for her to have a happy ending, Elanor will have to make all the amoral/immoral choices. Of course I can always say, it’s just a game who cares but that’s precisely why I don’t even want to see it through to the end. With Dragon Age: Origins, it’s the story that keeps me playing so now that I don’t like where the story is taking me, the motivation is also gone.

What if she had been a noble? For a happy ending, she would still have to agree to the Morrigan abomination. If I had chosen to play a male character and fallen in love with Morrigan? She would have had the ritual with me and disappeared forever. Or I could deny her the ritual, in which case she would leave me anyway. In either case, that sets up the male character for a perfect archdemon-bait suicide in the end. Sheesh!

I swear, in my next life, I want to be a video game content writer who writes only stories with happy endings!