Would you believe it? After hours and hours of staring at the character creation screen, I actually started playing Dragon Age: Origins. Okay, Khana helped by creating a grumpy old dwarf and playing a bit of the dwarven commoner (well, more like dwarven beggar, really) Origin Story, which finally motivated me to start my own game with a character. Wohoo?
General impressions:
- You might be able to make your characters look old, but the Origin Stories will still pretty much assume that you’re a teenager/young adult. Khana’s “grumpy old dwarf” was called “boy” by everyone around him and was still living with his mother… who looked at least twenty years younger than him. The Mage Origin isn’t much better and tells you outright that you’re the same age as that guy over there who’s in his early twenties. (Well, at least the Mage Origin allows you to have a character of colour and not have him stand out completely, mostly because his family is not around. The dwarf commoner’s family is, and they’re all white, regardless of his own skin colour. M-maybe he was adopted?)
- The battle system reminds me a lot of Guild Wars (and basically every other MMORPG that I’ve tried for half an hour. Never been a fan of those.) but there haven’t been terribly many battles yet. Amusing detail: I tried the Dhalish Elves Origin Story for a bit with a rogue and within one battle with a random wolf he had blood all over him. (I guess the game’s rating has to come from somewhere…) My mage? Squeaky clean, even when the Really Dangerous Spiders and various other enemies came close enough to whack them over the head with my staff.
- The voice acting I’ve heard so far is really nice! (Which is good, because there is of course a lot of spoken dialogue. Actually, every line, even one coming from a random NPC, is voiced.) I’m a bit disappointed with the lack of detail when it comes to the characters’ body language in conversation (and the few cutscenes I’ve seen), but I guess that can’t be helped. If I want detail, I can just stare at peoples’ clothes. *g*
And now let me introduce you to my character, the basic premise of his Origin Story and my thoughts on him. I will then proceed to illustrate my point with pictures. XD
Fiddling around with the character creator is seriously addictive, but eventually I came up with Yuran. Yuran is both an elf and a mage, which means that he’s… pretty much completely screwed. See, elves are discriminated against in the land of Ferelden, where our story takes places, because… because. I have yet to find out what is going on with that. And mages… well, mages once upon a time tried to become too close to god “the Maker” and ended up being turned into some kind of evil creatures. And ever since then, people don’t really trust mages.
Not that other people in Ferelden have it much better. As Khana’s grumpy dwarf showed us, caste-less dwarves also got the short end of the stick. In other words, you better hope that you’re born as a noble, and even then, The Plot will probably screw you over, but I wouldn’t know about that, and I’m here to speak about Yuran today.
When we first meet Yuran, he is about to undergo the Harrowing, the trial that all mage apprentices have to undergo before they can join the Circle of the Magi. And it’s not like they have much of a choice: The mages of the circle try to find every child that has magic and bring it to the Tower, where they will grow up and learn to control their powers. They are not allowed to even leave the building (dramaaaaa!) and if they fail the Harrowing (which is, of course, very dangerous), they’re killed by the templars immediately.
Oh, and should a mage, whether they are an apprentice or a member of the Circle, ever manage to run away from the tower or stray from the path the council has chosen from them, they will be tracked down via their blood (a sample of their blood is kept in the vaults of the tower from the moment they arrive there) and killed. Have I mentioned that they grow up confined to a single building and in constant fear of a trial in their early adulthood that they are not likely to survive?
They have one choice though: They can go through the Rite of Tranquillity that strips them of their magic – and their emotions. They will then spend the rest of their lives as servants in the tower.
Yeah, it sucks to be a mage.
In any case, we begin with Yuran’s Harrowing (which, despite being feared and incredibly dangerous, is of course extremely easy to play through, given that it’s the first thing we ever do in the game) and it’s definitely my favourite part of the Mage Origin. It’s clever, has multiple possible solution (I’d guess; it looked that way at least) and I really love Mouse, the bear. Don’t ask. While I played through this, I started wondering what kind of guy this Yuran fellow was and how I’d go about playing him. After all, I have to know this in oder to give in-character answers when people talk to him!
The first thing I learned is that for all that he doesn’t wan to judge people because he’s on the receiving end of prejudices far too often not to know how much it sucks, there is one point where he will absolutely not accept a differing opinion on: The only people he despises more than the ones that force someone to undergo the Rite of Tranquillity are the people that chose Tranquillity out of their own free will. He’s all for choices, but he can’t accept that one, even from the people who became Tranquil only because they feared their Harrowing. He feared his too. It’s no reason to throw away his emotions, he says, or is humanity. Or whatever the equivalent for elves is. You know what I mean. Even fear’s a whole lot better than not feeling at all.
…now why do I have this sneaking suspicion that he’ll get himself into trouble wanting to feel something, anything, when venturing into the wider world? *sighs*
Yuran is generally pretty easy to be around, even if he has his reservations about templars and mages of the Circle. (I was not really surprised when I had him leap at the chance to become a Grey Warden and join the main plot without a second thought.) His Harrowing has shown that he prefers riddles to combat, but he won’t hesitate to use the powers he has either.
Warning: Spoilers for the second half of the Mage Origin ahead!
After the Harrowing is over, there is more plot in the Mage Origin to play through: Yuran’s fellow apprentice, Jowan, fears that the Circle plans to make him Tranquil because they think he is a Blood Mage and eventually asks his friend for help: He wants to run away from the Tower with his girlfriend Lily, a cleric-in-training. Yuran wouldn’t be Yuran if he would want Tranquillity to happen to anyone, so he agrees to help them brake into the vault where a sample of Jowan’s blood (but not Yuran’s; now that he is a full-fledged mage, his blood sample was brought… elsewhere) is stored for tracking purposes.
You need a staff to get in there, but to get one, you need one of the older mages to sign some kind of paper for you. The game heavily pushes you in the “go ask your mentor!” direction and I did that at first. However, it then pretty much forces you to betray Jowan and Lily because oh no, Blood Magic! and only pretend to help them so that your mentor and Lily’s seniors from the church can catch them red-handed. I played on, pretty grumpy at that point because betraying them was so completely out of character for Yuran, and hoping that there was a way to warn the two others, but there wasn’t, they were caught, Jowan turned out to really be a Blood Mage, fled (while injuring a couple of templars) and there was some kind of “Okay Yuran, you did exactly what I told you and for some reason we hate you for it now!” thing going on so that Duncan could jump in and recruit him for the Grey Wardens. It really didn’t make all that much sense, not for my specific character and not for the plot as a whole.
So I restarted from an earlier save after the Harrowing, even though I’m determined not to do something like that in this game, and this time I took a detour: There’s a seemingly random NPC in the library who will, after you bother her about it long enough, admit that she messed up and let Big Dangerous Spiders into one of the store rooms, so you can agree to go on a sidequest and kill the spiders for her. She says she owes you something and will later agree to sign for you the paper you need for the staff that lets you into the vault. So you never have to go to your mentor and betray your friends, and the ending of the Origin Story also makes more sense: You are, after all, caught helping someone break the Circle’s rules, so it makes sense for them to hate you. Duncan to the rescue!
I found out more about Yuran through all this: For one, he thinks that Lily is fickle bastard (she drops him like a hot potato the moment he’s revealed to really be a Blood Mage), and that the Circle mages are hypocrites anyway, using blood to track their *cough* “lost sheep” *cough* while at the same time condemning Blood Mages. Yes, he’s read the books. He know what this kind of magic is capable of. But if we’re going to kill people for having “evil” powers, we can just as well throw the populace of the Tower to the dragons. It’s not the power that’s bad. Actually, it might be kind of… fascinating.
Have I mentioned that I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of trouble this guy gets himself into now that he’s about to join the Grey Wardens and see more of the world?
