Dragon Age and its World
Living in the world BioWare built.
A couple of things first, before we get going: Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate! I wish you all the best. If you’re not celebrating Thanksgiving this week I recommend having some dessert this weekend, just because. Secondly, this post is about Dragon Age: The Veilguard and although I’m pretty vague there are technically spoilers within. I’ve played about 20 hours of it. You’ve been warned, so let’s go.
It is a little concerning that I’ve been playing Dragon Age games for 15 years, I’ll be honest. But here we are. I played Dragon Age: Origins quite a bit in 2009. Quite a good bit: I have distinct memories of sitting in a hotel room in DC having doubts about whether I had checked out of the archive for the day because I was worn out or because I really, really wanted to get my gang out of the swamp and on to the next thing. This would turn out to be a feature of my research trips. It wasn’t Dragon Age specific.
But I did play a ton of that game. Pausing never felt so good. After that I was a shameless Dragon Age hipster, nothing could reach that initial high. Dragon Age II, which had plenty of its own problems, was fun but felt like a break before we all returned to normal. Little did I know. In the end I was the only person on the Internet who just did not like Dragon Age: Inquisition. People love that game!
I have tried and I have tried. Most recently this past summer in anticipation of Veilguard. I could not get there. Every game since the original has felt like a step backwards to me despite each time being a deliberate step forwards: towards some kind of action-RPG button mashy… thing. I have resented this like you would not believe, I have rejected every sequel, I have stewed. If I randomly posted about it on social media twice a day, well, I would have completed my metamorphosis into something very unpleasant. Luckily for me I just have a weird Dragon Age thing when people bring it up. And after all that, Veilguard is the final form, pouring points into upgrade trees to make Y do a different thing if you have recently pressed X twice. And I couldn’t be happier.
Okay. That is an exaggeration. I still love Origins the most. And I haven’t yet come all the way home. But my goodness this is the most fun I’ve had with Dragon Age in a long time. Maybe 15 years. The funny thing is I played - many of us played - a vastly superior RPG only a few months ago. Baldur’s Gate 3, this is not. It’s not even Origins. It is astonishingly, sometimes brain-breakingly linear. But they’ve captured something and I’m happy.
What does Dragon Age do so well? Lots of games have good storytelling, and I’m not really sure Veilguard is doing much special in that regard either. Ultimately the series’s great strength is in its “lore”, to use an often over-used word. Lots of games have lore of course; I’ve always been interested in games like this, that build their own worlds. That historicize, or self-historicize, if you will. One area where Dragon Age does particularly well in this regard is in its representation of institutions. Well, maybe their use more than their representation. The Chantry, a symbol of institutional religious control and perversion since Origins, is the prime example. Having the player character navigate a world where the main religious/governmental/cultural institution was not just anti-magic but actively hunted practitioners down set things up well for a fantasy tale that might seek to do things differently.
I’ve been thinking about that too; it’s hard to be different in the world Tolkien made. As Dragon Age went on the promising first steps in Origins - such as elves being a downtrodden underclass as opposed to a wistful overclass or shadowy cabal (or both) - continued to progress. Veilguard just assumes you know all this from the off, which is disconcerting but also… reassuring? I’m not sure why I’m pretending, in an empty room by myself after my wife has gone to bed, that I remember who the Venatori are. But it seemed important (this has proved to be the case). I should know about the Tevinter Imperium, really, beyond the odd reference in the first two games; maybe that is something I missed in Inquisition.
Anyway, institutions. Thedas is a fleshed out world, and its institutions with all their built-in problems of structural racism and practiced deceit give every new character you meet a leg up on making an impression on you. How do they feel about the Chantry, or the Tevinter Imperium; have they ever hung out with Dalish Elves? Dragon Age games like their characters to provide information like this very quickly, bordering on being obvious. Well, it is obvious. Bordering on being silly, perhaps. But it does work.
The whole game feels like that, almost twenty hours in. Extremely direct and obvious, but it works. The game did not waste time reminding me who the Antaam were, but provided a little through context and there’s a whole lore library in the pause menu. The beauty of the story is that the basics are easy to follow: the Venatori and the Antaam are bad and they want things. The structure of the tale is clear. The story reduces itself, efficiently but not cheaply, to that of a scrappy underdog team against the ultimate Dragon Age bad guy team up. And that’s really all you need to know.
Except there is more. The Venatori are egregious not because they are aimlessly bad but because they are very much not aimless at all, and their goals are ambitious bordering on fantastical (and certainly are fanatical) and thus all the more threatening. The Antaam pervert the otherwise more complex realities of their race, playing up to prejudices and then some. Now, when a character shares a childhood trauma or clarifies just why this thing or that thing is bad or good they are placing themselves on a moral spectrum for cogent storytelling. An old BioWare strength. A lot of the game does not really feel like that. But enough of it does.
The institutions with which I’m most familiar are mentioned mostly in their absence. We are in the north of Thedas for this game, far from my beloved Ferelden where I traipsed and tramped with earnest knights and horny swamp witches. The Tevinter Imperium is a magocracy, so magic is largely tolerated, normalized. This actually allows for nuanced takes on Thedas’s problems. It also helps me feel connected to the game that brought me here, in a funny way. I recognize and remember the world I first knew playing Origins when it is referenced or alluded to (or elided) in absence. The plot of the game is about fundamentals: the nature of existence, how to understand the afterlife, or damnation, or whatever the Veil and the Fade it enwraps actually is. The game also works hard to focus on individual relationships. Another traditional BioWare strength.
As I said above, more or less, I think that the Dragon Age games are some of the best “lore” games we have. The Elder Scrolls games do it, The Witcher does it, but although both of those series namecheck plenty and let you get involved in matters large and small, after all this time Thedas still feels more… lived in, to me.
It raises the question of what I’m talking about when I talk about games self-historicizing. It started in my head years ago as a hybrid of post-grad-school ruminating and a desire to think up less than obvious ideas for History Respawned and my then-new undergrad class on History and Video games. The short version is that we’re looking at a history created in-game by characters (on- and off-screen, or out of- and in-game) for the purpose of their own existence and culture. What you and I and a few billion other people are doing, right now, basically. They do it for their own reasons, as dictated to them by invisible voices inside their fictional brains (writers). So it is in theory an entirely diagetic system.
Obviously this exists for entirely practical storytelling reasons - the “lore” we’re talking about. We end up with a theoretical system that only really exists for critiquing this specific game and games in general. You know… history and academic study in general.
So why is Dragon Age so good at it? That, I’m not sure I have a great answer to, particularly as it’s entirely possible that I happen to connect to Dragon Age in a way I don’t connect to Elder Scrolls, even if I love both. Maybe that’s something worth returning to… I didn’t expect to write this much about Veilguard. Part of the reason I’m so motivated is that this is coalescing into a potential book chapter. I’ll share more in the future, but “Book Three” as it exists on my laptop is a games studies book and I’m trying to corral a lot of historiographical ideas together. I’m excited about it, even if I’m not sure what… “it” is, really.
So, once again I wish you a peaceful weekend whether you’re eating turkey and pumpkin pie or not. When I first moved to the US I was somewhat mystified by this huge family holiday that had existed completely outside my universe up to that point. Now I’m grateful for all the good vibes and peacefulness we can muster.