You begin as a chosen one, someone of strength, skill, and significance who-after a brief trial-is tapped by Grey Warden Duncan to aid in one of the greatest battles in Ferelden’s history.

Origins tells a different story for your character. 'Is empathy with someone fleeing desperately for their lives with their family really such a terrible thing to cultivate in a medium where standing in someone else’s shoes is the whole point?' In short, the Hawkes are NPCs in Dragon Age: Origins. With no money and no kit beyond what they could strip from corpses, much less any purpose. But it was a significant tonal shift, a tone instantly set by the Hawke family positioned as fleeing refugees, fighting for their lives against the darkspawn flooding from their burning hometown. What it all adds up to may provide some insight into why the game bombed with so many Dragon Age fans.ĭragon Age II came on the heels of a hugely successful epic fantasy RPG, Dragon Age: Origins, which was easily one of the greatest of its generation, and a shining capstone of Bioware’s signature style of ‘on-rails’ roleplaying games.

This is not a trivial plot point it drives the action and several introductory quests, defining the Hawke family’s first year in Kirkwall the surviving Hawke sibling refers to the refugee status as a detriment more than once overcoming it is the main quest for the first act posters in Kirkwall scream promises to “reclaim the Free Marches for the marchers,” to underscore how unwelcome Fereldan refugees are. It dawned on me that you’re playing the story of a refugee family fleeing a grueling, unsurvivable war, who ends up on hostile shores. I’d not played the second entry in the series since 2012, however, and I was unprepared for how differently its prologue would strike me in the wake of current events.

Upon finishing Inquisition, I decided to go back to the beginning and play to cast the light of hindsight onto all those foreshadows. Like most well-made RPGs, it’s rather fun to curl up with for hours on end.

A belatedly frigid winter and a partner who insisted I take care of myself after half a year spent in a window seat crisscrossing the country ensured that I revisited the Dragon Age trilogy in full.

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