Gun Metal Gaming Chapter 1: Like a Fereldan

In “Gun Metal Gaming: A 2009 Retrospective,” Wolfman Jew covers one game from 2009 a month for all of 2024. Each is one he’s either never played or played for only a few forgotten minutes well over a decade ago; he’s coming into these about as fresh as a player can. Hopefully, his experiences will give us a good view of one of gaming’s lesser years.

Thanks to Cart Boy for edits.

“I didn’t just hear you say that, did I? You’re going to let him live? After everything he’s done? Kill him, already!”—Alistair, Dragon Age: Origins

Few developers seemed to acclimate to the 2000s like BioWare. The Canadian studio had an upward streak of licensed role-playing games—first Dungeons & Dragons, then Star Wars—that got more acclaim and sales with every entry. Baldur’s Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, and their original property Jade Empire were largely a consistent upward slope of success. But Mass Effect, a 2007 Xbox 360 classic, was the point of no return. It’s when BioWare became a fully and undeniably A-list studio. It was produced by Microsoft (which still has a stake in the game despite the series being owned by Electronic Arts, whose purchase of BioWare was also in 2007) and was one of their biggest titles for one of gaming’s biggest years. The space opera brought RPG mechanics and hardcore sci-fi trappings into more of the mainstream through the avenue of a third person shooter, and it was mightily rewarded for it.

Image: Source Gaming. Basic gameplay of Dragon Age: Origins. I’m playing on my Xbox Series X, which is where I’m getting my screenshots; most of the images for “Gun Metal Gaming” will be taken this way. Benefit of backwards compatibility.

The game and its developer were emblematic of what the industry was striving for during the Seventh Generation of Consoles. It had cinematic drama with celebrity voice actors, stories that ended by choices you made, stunning graphics, and a sense of grit and realism. It’s fitting that the Mass Effect trilogy wrapped up its final expansion in 2013, the year where the Xbox One succeeded the Xbox 360. The trilogy was around for most of the latter’s life. It helped define it. Culturally speaking, Mass Effect helped send BioWare from the top of the B-list to be one of the world’s highest profile developers, a process that wasn’t easy. The company’s developmental practices were, and remain, incoherent and unhealthy. They call it “BioWare magic.” It’s crunch and chaos extreme even by the standards of the industry that lends itself to confused productions, higher level meddling, internal reboots that throw out years of work, and classics and boondoggles alike made by an ill-treated workforce. Every game they’ve made was built under terrible conditions and on a bed of weak legs, always at risk of utter collapse.

Two years after the first Mass Effect, BioWare released the daring Dragon Age: Origins (with Edge of Reality responsible for the Xbox 360 port I played). It was an original property like their last blockbuster, but it wasn’t exactly taking the SSV Normandy to Middle Earth. Instead, it was a deliberate throwback to those Baldur’s Gate titles, a hyper-customizable RPG drowning in Dungeons & Dragons and A Song of Ice and Fire flair. There’s the land of Ferelden, the plague of the Darkspawn it suffers, and one hero—a human, elf, or dwarf who beats it back as the newest recruit to the storied, Night’s Watch-esque Grey Wardens. Where the game that made BioWare big was filled with stylish action and cool aliens, this story is proudly old school. It’s set in a fantasy riff on England, the mechanics ape tabletop conventions, and its graphics are a noticeable step back. Though that last one was an aftereffect of a troubled seven year production that started on the original Xbox. Between a sudden engine switch and a title change that forced them to add dragons in at the last minute, this suffered plenty of BioWare magic.

Image: Source Gaming. The single most fun action in Dragon Age: Origin is Fireball, a powerful area of effect spell that knocks everyone away—including you and your allies. There are many, many reasons to turn off Friendly Fire, but knocking you and your friends off your feet with only mild, temporary side effects is the best.

Playing Dragon Age: Origins today is interesting, if challenging for a player like me. Unlike Mass Effect (and the average 2009 player was comparing them), which is fairly accessible, this one, well, isn’t. Fighting follows convoluted rules. You have so small an initial inventory that you’ll hit the limit midway through the opening. And the story lacks much “va va voom;” you’re frogmarched into a dull order of knights, watch your new brethren get slaughtered and betrayed, and go on a quest in their stead. So it’s very abrasive, at a time where abrasiveness was being stamped out in every corner the industry’s bean counters could find. At the same time, we now live in a world where it’s easy to play not only those original CRPGs and several spiritual successors, but Larian Studio’s 2023 instant classic Baldur’s Gate 3 (which I’ll be playing this year and has more to help people like me, i.e. those with no time for tabletop theatrics). I actually did play Origins back in 2013 or so, but only for a few minutes before giving up. With my “Mass Effect in Medieval Times” assumption fully destroyed, I put Ferelden out of my mind immediately. If I’m being honest, the first nine hours of this second attempt were no better. I spent them frustrated and miserable, though I now had context.

Still, context only helps so much. Unlike Commander Shepard (a streamlined avatar written in such a way that they could commit any combination of available good deeds or atrocities), the Warden is a hardcore RPG hero. They don’t get voice acting beyond stock lines, their backstory is so open that your character—in my case, a marginalized elf mage enrolled in a school meant to imprison and constrain the magically inclined—gets one of six sizable prologues, and those are not equally satisfying. In my aim of going outside my roughneck play style and using magic, I chose the absolute worst backstory. The Circle Tower is a joyless, miserable prison filled with stodgy racists, soldiers who hate and fear you, and former classmates who’ve been forcibly lobotomized. Everything that turns me off about this genre in general and Origins specifically is on full display here. However, it is cool that the game is so open that there really are six distinct prologues, something that extends to the number of solutions for each quest. This and Fallout: New Vegas from 2010 feel like the last gasp of an era where you could expect any normal Western RPG to give you so much agency. You can’t regularly make A-list games like those anymore, and you kind of couldn’t back then. It’s just not feasible for a healthy production. Again, bed of weak legs.

Image: Source Gaming. Why is this inconspicuous salesman played by voice acting legend Steve Blum? Well, if you go through the Dwarf Noble origin, he’s a supporting character. Each prologue’s characters show up in the rest of the game.

At every minute, Dragon Age: Origins seems like a repudiation of the values of gaming in 2009. It’s extremely inaccessible for someone expecting an action RPG (or someone unversed in tabletop gaming). There’s only mild cinematic bombast and, due to that rough production, none of the high end graphics players expected. If you want to learn more about your companions like Morrigan the forest witch and Shale the amoral golem, you need to actively work to connect with them. You get constant dialogue checks, many of which can worsen how your sidekicks feel about you or deep-six a side quest on a dime. Game feel is nonexistent in a time where gratification was supposed to be immediate and tactile. Regular brawling felt terrible whenever my protagonist fainted and I took over a warrior or rogue companion, though spellcasting was a delight once I started unlocking the high end ones; I’d call down whole thunderstorms or knock a dozen enemies off their feet with a fireball. It felt great. But this is not the future of video games Microsoft and Sony were promising us, which gives it a sort of fun exoticism.

The greatest difference to everything else on the market back then is probably that amount of effort it requires. You’re expected to regularly replace your gear, manipulate your partners’ combat styles during the hardest fights, and inspect everything. The first village of Lothering has two important and popular party members, but the game does little to tell you that, and if you miss recruiting them they are killed offscreen with the rest of the town once you start on the main quest. I killed another prospective party member by accidentally triggering her aggression. Just audacious, and laudable for how much it flew in the face of a business that was beginning to treat side content like the plague. This put player agency first in a year where Assassin’s Creed II used the shallow affectations of agency to codify the bloated “map game” and infect the industry like a cancer. At the same time, I’d be lying if I said I quickly acclimated to this. I found the mechanics confusing, the world a bit hard to get into, and stretches of the plot dull and derivative. Your party members liven things up a lot, as do the details of the world, but seeing them grow or seeking them out takes a lot of engagement. Again, this game is heavy on friction at a time when friction was seen as the biggest threat to a game’s success. Demon’s Souls had only just come out, and Dark Souls was two years away.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the first big moments the fan favorite Morrigan gets, right when you find your first optional quests. It sets up how party members will react to you—in her case, she’ll respect you a bit less if you’re too invested in taking the quests. It’s a good character beat and introduction, though it sets up an odd friction: quests, typically the basis of easy experience farming, can actively do you harm.

That being said, things did really click for me as it went on, once I got through a trek back to the Circle Tower and its awful, comically oversized dreamlike Fade dungeon. Dragon Age: Origins starts with its worst foot forward, but it did get better and I did end up enjoying myself. The Ruined Temple is also stupidly long, but also fun: an ice cavern filled with snaking paths and goofy puzzles. Morrigan, Shale, and the rest revealed much more depth than their initial “edgy fantasy antihero” façades suggested—and sure, the horny elf assassin Zevran didn’t, but he was so strikingly absurd that I couldn’t not enjoy him. It also became a joy to pick demented choices at which modern RPGs would balk. The plot demanded I save or kill a prince possessed by a very Aughts-appropriate stock sexy demon, and upon delving into his mind and given the opportunity to slay her or be seduced, I simply let her leave for the price of psychically making my companion Sten like me more (it’s a great deal; seems like nothing you can say makes him happy). Commander Shepard could never be so exploitative, but it’s all copacetic to the Warden.

The best area, the sulphuric dwarven metropolis of Orzammar, is BioWare operating at the top of its form. Instead of relying on the popular, rough and tumble image of dwarves, the city’s a hotbed of brutal caste discrimination, deceitful politicking, gangland fighting, and evil constantly rapping at the door. It’s Origins’ ASOIAF aspirations at their greatest and best realized. You do also contend with a terribly long set of dungeons in the Deep Roads and a loutish, caricatured sidekick, but the setting is extremely compelling. Redcliffe Village is dull, the Circle Tower actively unpleasant, and the Brecilian Forest and Denerim are perfectly fine fantasy settings and fun to explore. But Orzammar reveals a greatness Dragon Age sometimes fails to advertise, as well as some of its sharpest writing.

Image: Source Gaming. Orzammar also houses Origins’ two funniest characters: the rival town criers whose propaganda changes depending on your actions and which dwarven lord you side with.

Despite all of these things, the game isn’t entirely out of step with the times. In fact, many of its tropes are emblematic of where the games industry was or would be. Its Diablo-esque focus on constantly finding and selling treasure would become only more popular in the years to come with loot shooters and the like. The politics-heavy plot about a deceitful general, a malicious Darkspawn, and a coalition you forge against both are very appropriate for both the late and post-Bush Eras (it’s kind of the plot of all three Mass Effects at once). More broadly, the aggressively edgy tone of the Aughts is in full force with sexually ribald party members and cursing aplenty, though it’s a bit of an exception for being mostly pleasant outside of a few misconceived choices. And again, it is a rare game of this generation that actually was as open as it claimed. The middle four of its seven acts can be done in any order, and each hides tons of optional, hard to find quests that can interweave and expand the story. Seemingly all of them have multiple solutions and routes, allowing me to betray or shake down the very people I offered to help. As games became more mainstream and expensive, publishers touted uncharted agency while making a stranglehold on what you could actually do. This is the opposite of that. Realizing how much freedom I had was the turning point for me, and I exploited it with utter glee in as many ways as I could find. Despite that, though, most of my choices weren’t actually insane or demented, which I credit to the game’s writing; I worked to find narratively satisfying endings to most of the stories.

This freedom is especially interesting when considering how Origins’ suite of choices operates within the culture of “moral choice systems,” particularly with regard to its older sibling. The Seventh Generation loved these. Giving players a “good” or “bad” option in a story could make them feel empowered, justify multiple playthroughs to see each choice, and sell the product as serious and highbrow. This was the era of “the Citizen Kane of video games,” of gamers and companies desperate to prove their maturity. And some worked. I think most of Mass Effect’s storytelling does right by it. But Mass Effect also had its “Paragon / Renegade” meter, which punished you for roleplaying as someone who wasn’t pure good or pure dirtbag. Other games like InFamous and BioShock had the same problem, and it was indicative of how little rein players usually got. And more often than not, they simply led to poor, faux-mature stories. This game is much more in line with the marketing around the trope than how it usually worked. The plot will generally defer to you, it’ll sometimes hit you with interesting consequences—the most damning of which involve party members permanently leaving if a choice offends them too much—and you never feel constrained by either the game or yourself. It’s really cool. Maybe my Warden ended up a bit incoherent, maybe his long run of kindnesses and few but deeply horrific brutalities don’t make a ton of sense in a macro level, but almost everything I did still felt right and breaking free of constraining RPG moral alignments is for the best.

Image: Source Gaming. Every major quests has a plethora of avenues and endings you can take, and you can often (if not always) jump from one avenue to another with ease. These werewolves can be on your side for the final battle, exterminated, or cured; I picked the third option.

After uniting Ferelden’s factions, confronting Leliana the thief’s mentor, introducing Shale to her past life as a dwarf, killing Morrigan’s adopted mother Flemeth, and consummating my romance with the witch through a deeply embarrassing sex scene (which got a laterally embarrassing reprise at the end), I entered the end game. And like Orzammar, it smartly puts politics in front. The Darkspawn needs everyone to join forces against it, so the climax is a mix of quests before a conference where you put allies and evidence to bear against the treacherous Loghain. I did reload my save a few times to win; turns out evidence of him torturing nobles is more valuable than evidence of him protecting slavers. But I got the votes and brought the convicted general aboard as my final party member, less over Loghain’s genuinely compelling material or narrative value and more to spite Alistair, the default sidekick with whom I didn’t even bother engaging due to the stink of “first BioWare party member” on him. Great stuff, so much more than the protracted approach to the Archdemon afterwards. The final three hour siege of Denerim was a painful chore of constant restarts and awful fights, but Origins’ best moments shine in spite of it. It also ended nicely, when upon request by the queen I decided to give the Circle independence over cash or a cushy job.

Image: Source Gaming. The Landsmeet is wonderful. It’s a great culmination filled with drama, humor, and chickens coming home to roost. It also does a lot to bring out Denerim, the kingdom’s largest city and this wild maze of side streets.

For all its commercial and critical success, Dragon Age: Origins feels like something of a dead end, a triumphant but temporary return of a style of game design that had little place in the market. Part of this was practical, since the high definition generation was hell for the mechanics a game like this needs, but it was going up against a gaming culture less attuned to serious role playing. The generation’s standard bearer for Western RPGs, the dominating Skyrim, culled much of what makes the genre special to be a captivating but painfully shallow open world adventure. The Nineties style BioWare was calling back to would return, but slowly thanks to Divinity: Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, and Baldur’s Gate 3, each of which would evolve the formula in different ways. In their absence, it would take alternative RPGs over the next few years like Dark Souls and Xenoblade Chronicles to chart unique territory and help found the new canon of role playing games. Fortunately, Dragon Age itself would join them with notably divergent sequels, even as its sibling Mass Effect shed some of its genre trappings for its second and third entries. It has held down its genre bona fides even as it strayed from successors, from competitors, and from itself. Here’s hoping the long awaited Dragon Age: Dreadwolf will keep that going.

That’s about where I ended with this RPG: an appreciation for how much it went against the grain. While I found some of it instructable, at times even actively hostile to a Dungeons & Dragons neophyte, I did enjoy Dragon Age: Origins and its vast ambitions. It’s a game I’m happy to have added to the “top ten games of 2009” list I’m tallying behind the scenes. But I especially respect it as a work of art so outwardly opposed to the trends of late Aughts gaming. This is a hyper-dense, overcomplicated, and difficult fantasy epic complete with an absurd amount of interesting, actively hidden content. It isn’t representative of its era or year or generation (which makes it weird as the first subject of this series, I’ll cop to, but it’s best for my personal schedule), but it also kind of has to be. This was EA’s largest, most exciting project of 2009, and it paid dividends. That generation and its publishers hated the things games like this represent, yet the most obnoxious and brutish publisher around produced it. There’s some kind of magic in that.

Not “BioWare magic,” though. That’s just bunk meant to justify poor work conditions.

Next game: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Read all of “Gun Metal Gaming” here.