#the sharpshooter gathering intel for her powerful org. the scattered engineer. and taash is there I don’t have a specific idea for them

[athenasdragon]

In thinking about how the Dragon Age games have changed since Origins, I’ve been thinking about genre conventions and the inspirations for the series.

Dragon Age: Origins is very very heavily lifted from Dungeons & Dragons, and my impression is that this is because Baldur’s Gate was a big inspiration. I think it’s especially obvious when you open up your character profile. Like that is straight up a d&d character sheet. You can map the d&d classes onto the DA:O subclasses too (e.g. some of the warrior subclasses are champion [classic fighter], templar [paladin], and berserker [barbarian]). The heavy focus on tactics and the top-down combat option also evoke TTRPGs to me.

And of course, because we’re existing in the genre tradition here, we have a lot drawn from the Lord of the Rings as well. Darkspawn/Orcs are an unambiguously evil species that exists just to cause destruction! Humans are the predominant species, but we have nature-connected elves and subterranean dwarves! Our story takes place in among the ruins of a past civilization that existed in a distant age! We’ve got themes of history and faith and a little fellowship going on a journey to defeat an evil dragon.

So with that in mind, we have a pretty straight up and down medieval-inspired dark fantasy. It follows so closely in this tradition that we even see the writers struggling to break out of molds that they explicitly set out to avoid—for example, certain gender politics.

I really think the character who starts to break that is Varric. Not only is he a well-known author (requires not just widespread printing but widespread literacy and reading for fun—now we’re talking much more recent history in our world) but he’s writing (Kirkwall-flavored) hard-boiled detective fiction, which is explicitly an American* post-WWI tradition. This is a genre that explores the gritty reality of life in cities, interpersonal and systemic violence, and often positions a lone morally grey hero in small-scale opposition to those larger forces. Kirkwall (and DA2) isn’t a bad place to add that flavor.

Inquisition starts to feel more 20th century to me as well. We’ve got international espionage and geopolitics. We’ve got anxieties of a dramatic apocalypse brought about by man’s hubris. We’ve got, effectively, some variety of civil rights movement for both elves and mages.

What really got me thinking about this is that Neve and Lucanis feel like they’re some the same genre to me: the jaded, brilliant, but somewhat poorly-upkept big city detective and the heir-apparent of a powerful mafia family caught up by a betrayal both feel very interwar noir imo. Emmrich’s look is also SO 1930s. I can only speak for myself but I think that’s where a lot of the change in “vibe” can be traced.

It feels to me like Varric’s narration of the series has tugged the story itself into the genre he exists in.

Anyway, whether you wish the series stayed more straight up and down sword and sorcery or like the direction it chose to establish itself, I think it’s interesting to think about!

* I might ramble about how deeply North American the geography of Thedas is another time lol