TWO-WAY SPOILER ALERT: I will be talking about Dragon Age: Origins without regard for spoilers. (Except that I won’t discuss the origin story, for your replayability’s sake.) That said, I haven’t finished it, so if you could avoid discussing the ending or major plot points, I’d appreciate it.
I might as well just hand over my ATM card to Bioware, because eventually they get all my money anyway. I just have a thing for their brand of RPG, heavy on the story and relationships but not light on action. I especially like the ones, like Jade Empire, where your actions push you in the direction of an alignment, one good, and one bad-but-we-won’t-explicitly-call-it-that.
My preference is always for the latter type of character, so I was a little disappointed that Dragon Age: Origins doesn’t really have such a system. You spend more time working on your relationships with key characters, or ones you just want your character to get it on with, and their approval of you may increase or decrease depending on your words and actions, and whether you bring them something pretty from time to time. It’s like The Sims: Darkspawn.
"So, um...you a big Buffy fan?"
So your character’s personal morality can get a little confused given that there aren’t always clear benefits to taking the high, pure ground versus being a lying, thieving snitch. One of your party, Alistair, is a templar — in this case a warrior devoted to hunting down apostate mages for the Chantry (the religious authority). You’d think he might object to your accepting a quest to ditch the bodies of some deals that went south, and you’d really think he’d kick up a fuss when it turns out the well in the Chantry courtyard is the designated dump site. But he takes it entirely in stride, with no relationship penalty.
Since there was no good/bad alignment to work towards, I decided to see if I could play my character as an atheist. This isn’t particularly easy. Early on, I pissed off a priest with some backtalk and that ended any further lines of communication. However, you don’t always have that option. There’s a fairly hilarious scene with an obstreperous older Chanter (like a nun who’s only allowed to talk in Scripture) who appears at first to be mangling the Chant by inserting references to bacon and other things, but it turns out she’s doing it on purpose. With this character, you can have a conversation where you challenge the Chantry. However, when you’re in a conversation with a murderous goon from a different culture, your choices are all in the direction of convincing him that the Chant is a good thing.
"Yeah dude, religion's awesome. Now you want out of there or what?"
You’re given a pretty wide range of ways to interact with people, from obsequiously polite to downright bitchy. But if you decide to have your character behave immorally, such as killing allies and going back on promises, or even just get a little snippy with someone, as a player you end up missing out on content, such as with the priest who didn’t like my challenge to her beliefs. This has been mentioned many times about Bioware games, and especially when the game isn’t set up to accommodate a “bad” or “evil” option, you’re more or less forced to be nice to people you’d rather mock or yell at.
But then there are other curious moments where you lose your ability to make those choices at all. There was one quest that for a while I refused to take, where the Chantry asks you to go help out some soldiers in the employ of the game’s villain, who has personally betrayed you and all you stand for. Eventually I got curious enough to take the quest, at which point my character decided on her own to find out where those soldiers were and kill them. Now, that was my plan all along, but I assumed it was going to be done through dialogue trees and persuasion, like many other similar situations. It further muddies the waters on where my character stands, morally.
Now honestly, these are just my musings as I play an entirely entertaining and addictive game. I really don’t have a problem adapting my expectations of evil glory into a more conventional, but bland, white-knight role. Villains always get the best lines, the best accents, and the best musical numbers, but never mind. The annoying thing about this is I find myself crushing on Alistair. Not just any goody-goody templar (okay, I won’t spoil the rest of that), and in any case he hunts down apostates! It’s completely embarrassing. Oh sure, I’ll be cozying up to the assassin to get him to teach me a few things about sticking knives in people, but what my character really wants is to rip off the warrior’s chainmail and make the good boy do very naughty things. And then I need to go play Fable II and assassinate a few townspeople until I feel okay again. Damn you, Bioware, for allying me with the forces of good!
He totally wants me.
