Dragon Age: Origins was the start of a long-running and beloved series at BioWare, but it wasn’t always meant to be. Former executive producer Mark Darrah, who worked for BioWare from 1998 through 2022, said that the game was conceived as a standalone story, and that you can still see that intent in some unresolved story threads.
“Dragon Age: Origins originally was intended as a standalone game,” Darrah told MrMattyPlays (via PC Gamer). “You can see this, if you play Dragon Age: Origins, knowing that it was intended to stand alone. There’s a lot of threads that are cast out that kind of had to be abandoned because there could be werewolves all over the world, there might be a civil war happening underground in Orzammar.” He said those elements were good for world-building but were difficult to deal with as an ongoing series.
Dragon Age became known as BioWare’s fantasy series alongside the sci-fi Mass Effect. Both had ongoing stories that respected your earlier choices, including the ability to import your saves from Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 into the third game, Dragon Age: Inquisition. Or, you could customize a set of pre-set choices to build the world of Thedas to your liking. But accounting for all those choices in the third game meant that they could only be so impactful while still telling new original stories, because the studio hadn’t counted on needing to pay off every decision from Origins into later games. Then Origins was a success, and the company was inclined to iterate with sequels.
“It’s pretty much financial reasons more than anything,” says Darrah. “And I think that the franchise has been much more forward-looking ever since then.”
The latest game in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, had limited connections to previous games in the series, and didn’t import saves from previous games or otherwise take your choices into account. It was mostly a standalone story, rather than one that accounted for all your previous adventures in Thedas. Darrah said that EA has pushed for Dragon Age to become more of a mainstream series.
“The problem that Dragon Age has had, charitably I guess, is that EA wants mainstream success,” Darrah said, “and it’s hard, or at least it has historically been hard, for corporate people, people who come from the sports side of the organization to look at a game like Dragon Age: Origins, which is super nerdy, not very attractive looking, and say ‘Oh, this is a mainstream game.’ They don’t see it.”
Dragon Age: The Veilguard was generally well-received, with an aggregate score of 82 on Metacritic and our own GameSpot review calling it a return to form. But the discourse online has been divisive, with some fans expressing disappointment with the lack of narrative choices and narrowly designed world.
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