How Bioware turned Dragon Age from a 'Dark European Fantasy'

How Bioware turned Dragon Age from a 'Dark European Fantasy' into a High Fantasy Wonderland

I love Dragon Age: Inquisition. The world is gorgeous, the characters are fun, and there's so much content to complete that I almost feel bad about complaining. The actual main story/plot itself, which is usually a stinker in Bioware games, is pretty decent in this game as well.

But while exploring Bioware's new opus, I found that time and time again, I had experiences which jarred with my previous understanding of the franchise, and with Bioware's own lore. Few things have been explicitly retconned in Dragon Age (Anders' death in Awakening and Leliana's death in Origins being exceptions), but the atmosphere of the world has changed. And it's not just about the bright colours either- Bioware's vision of a dark, brutal, fantasy medieval Europe has turned into a generic struggle between light and darkness, and 'freedom' vs. 'order', a kind of Assassin's Creed-cum-Lord of the Rings mishmash that disappoints when viewed against the previous games more grey world.

From the very outset of Dragon Age's publicity relaunch in late 2007 (the game had first been announced in 2004 as a multiplayer PC game in the vein of Neverwinter Nights that also happened to have a singleplayer campaign, but had shifted rapidly with the seventh generation of home consoles), the game's writer made clear that the world in which Dragon Age was set was a kind of 'Southern Hemisphere' transposition of mediaeval Europe.

The location of the first game, Ferelden, was England or Britain, with its English accents and kings and lord and banners and tapestries and environments all reflecting that influence. Other countries, too, were frequently mentioned, and the player saw characters from across Thedas. The Orlesians, like Leliana, with their words (comte, chevalier, etc...), elaborate outfits, devotion to the Church and its leader, and a vast clergy and noble system, were the French. The Antivans, such as rogue Zevran, were the Italians. Rivain was 14th century Spain, its Moorish influence replaced by the Qunari invaders, another blatant cultural allegory. The Free Marches were the central European city states, rich merchant centres. The warmongering, wealthy, dragon hunters of Nevarra were the Germans. The frozen, distant, and barely inhabited Anderfels, the home of the Grey Wardens, represented Scandinavia and Northern Europe generally. The vast Tevinter Imperium is the remnant of the Roman Empire in the East, which eventually became the new Byzantine or Ottoman Empire. The other ethnic groups in Europe at the time were represented too. The dwarves, as they were in Tolkien's work, are the Jews, wealthy merchants and traders in more insular communities, mistrusted as blasphemers against the Chantry but accepted as an economic necessity. The Dalish elves, cast away, hated by most people, wander the lands as the Irish travellers, or gypsies did (and even speak in Irish or Welsh accents for the most part). And the Qunari, as mentioned before, with their dark skin and strange religion, represent the Islamic Moors.

This fiction was all widely established and supported, heading in to Dragon Age: Origins. In the same way that there were not (with the exception, of course, of the legendary Sir Roderick Ponce von Fontlebottom the Magnificent Bastard) any Caucasians in Bioware's Jade Empire, set in a fantasy China, there would be no humans in Dragon Age of ethnicities which were not present in Europe in larger numbers in the late mediaeval age. As a "POC" myself, I found that to be perfectly reasonable- a game set in 4th century Africa probably shouldn't have white people in it either!

In Dragon Age: Inquisition, this entire idea has been completely and absolutely removed. There are now people of all ethnicities in Thedas. As I said, I am not white myself, but this feels out of place. What's more, Bioware, unable to retcon everything about its lore, painstakingly built over the past decade, has decreed that everyone with a skin colour darker than tan (that is to say, Arab/Persian looking, Native American looking, East Asian looking, South Asian looking, Indian looking, and African looking) all have heritage from the one tiny nation in Thedas that is not light-white (Rivain), thus shoehorning all the 'POC' into one little country. It's not just pandering to Bioware's social justice followers on Tumblr and at conventions, it's downright fucking offensive to me, that Bioware thinks black people will call them racist, or not play the game, if they make a world without us in it. Were whites complaining when they couldn't play a Caucasian in Jade Empire, or when they had to play as CJ in GTA: San Andreas? Certainly. And we called them out for being racists when they did.

But blatantly trying to pander to people like me by retconning Thedas' ethnic makeup is far from the only change that happened in the five years since Origin's release in October 2009. Dragon Age: Origins portrayed a world that was in many ways deeply misogynistic. The female City-Elf storyline opens with the player being kidnapped by a nobleman in order to be gang-raped on her wedding day. There are several references to male-on-female sexual assault in the storyline. Hardly a surprise, given that Game of Thrones (or A Song of Ice and Fire) were big inspirations. While some female aristocrats have a degree of power in Dragon Age (as in, you guessed it, real mediaeval Europe), the vast majority of rulers are males, and society remains generally patriarchal, though not to the extent where a female Warden's progress is significantly impeded upon, presumably because Bioware couldn't be bothered to tell two separate storylines.

In Inquisition once again, this aspect of the world is completely removed. Mass rape, a daily reality of civil war in the mediaeval world, hell, something DIRECTLY MENTIONED in the Dragon Age novels themselves, is never even referenced once. The idea that it might happen, has, in the 40+ hours that I have played the game, never even been suggested. Dragon Age, despite pretensions of becoming a political thriller in a dark and dangerous world, has been pacified at the hands of those who would call anything that shows one racial group racist, who would scream misogyny (as people do at Game of Thrones) when creators try and set their game in a brutal and violent world in which terrible things occur.

[As a male POC playing a white female, I never find that I can't relate because I'm not the same race or gender as my character- she is different to me, and we can empathise with all kinds of people]

Running around the beautiful green and pleasant fields of Crestwood, I couldn't help but feel that any sense of actual danger or impending doom that might actually exist in a collapsing world (it is vaguely implied, for example, that Ellie might be raped if captured in TLOU, which adds to the tension when you play as her protector/de-facto father in Joel) is completely and utterly destroyed by the fact that nothing truly bad, except for some comically overdone scenes of destruction, actually seem to happen. Even Mass Effect 3, which contained no threats of sexual assault at all (just to make it clear that I'm not "demanding rape be put into the game", had a sense of dread that Inquisition lacks. It's the end of the world, but I'll stop and pick the flowers on this perfect hillside, before retiring the tavern for a few hours, and then merrily stroll around for a month, collecting shards so I can open the ancient temple in the desert. The end of the world comes along awfully slowly in this game- and impending doom seems far off.

The one word that keeps flashing through my mind, dozens of hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition is "MMO". Not just in the grindy requisitions quests, or the hotbar combat, or the fact that you can now jump, or in the zone level brackets, or in the armour types, but in the *world* itself. Fantasy MMOs don't succeed when they're too dark. Their worlds are bright, and playful, and happy, because players *live there*. You don't go on holiday to an MMO, you build a life there (if it's successful), and no one wants to live in a horrible world full racism and misogyny and moral greys and things like that. So most MMOs, even if they have bad guys, are deeply, deeply pacified. Even the tough bad guys are locked away in the raids and the dungeons while the open areas remain relatively safe or easy. Dragon Age feels like that kind of world. A world made by developers who didn't have a backbone to stand up for what they had created, and capitulated to bizarre internet pressure to build a happy-dappy paradise where good people are good, bad people are bad, and any 'grey' moral conflict can be sorted with a quick check to which faction you signed up to.