Games of Throne: George R.R. Martin-style themes of tragedy and ambition strengthen Dragon Age: Origins

There were plenty of clues that 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins took inspiration from A Song of Ice and Fire. Some were small—knights called “ser” instead of the customary “sir.” Some were larger, like an ancient Night’s Watch-like order called the Grey Wardens, dedicated to fighting off surges of supernatural evil called “Blights.” But there was a single moment, early in the game, that made me take notice and say “These developers have been reading their George R.R. Martin.”

Much like Game of Thrones, it seems a conventional fantasy story. There are evil creatures invading, heroic kings, steadfast allies, and your character, the unconventional hero. The good guys line up on one side, the bad guys line up on the other, and then….and then much like Ned Stark’s execution, something totally unexpected happens, and it becomes clear that the rules that are supposed to govern heroic fantasy aren’t applicable here. Dragon Age is not a simple story of supernatural conflict, but one of human ambition and treachery. Much like Game of Thrones, the people in power are unable to put their personal motives behind them in order to serve a greater purpose.

These themes pervade Dragon Age: Origins, making it feel, in many ways, like an epic Game of Thrones role-playing game. Also, Dragon Age has a much more important kitten named Ser Pounce than Game of Thrones….

Another crucial way that Dragon Age and Game of Thrones intersect is that both avoid simplistic morality. A trend in video game RPGs across the previous decade, since Fallout, had been to have a straightforward good-evil dichotomy based on player actions. Helping people good! Murder bad! But Dragon Age: Origins became one of the first major games to really complicate matters, by centering morality not on conventional ideas of good and evil, but on personal relationships between characters in the game. Go out of your way to help people, and the kind archer Leliana will be happier with you, but the ruthlessly pragmatic witch Morrigan will disdain you. Each has their own philosophy.

Likewise, the choices themselves tend to be more complicated than “Save the kitten!” versus “Burn the village!” Coming across a possessed boy gives you the option to save him at all costs, but that cost may end up being the life of his mother. The characters in Game of Thrones are likewise rarely presented with simple good and evil—and when they do, “good” usually backfires spectacularly. Just ask Daenerys about her attempt to save the Lamb People.

Dragon Age: Origins is a fairly traditional-style role-playing game made by BioWare, developers of the much-loved Baldur’s Gate and Knights of the Old Republic games. It uses combination of real-time and turn-based combat. Its interface can be a little bit clunky at times, but it’s worth powerful through that for the expansive world and great companions. It was released on PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3, and should be cheap and easy to find on any of those systems.

There’s one respect where Dragon Age: Origins can’t quite match up with Game of Thrones: the use of multiple perspectives. In Dragon Age, you play as a single hero, and travel to all the important parts of the world yourself, resolving each major issue. This doesn’t reconcile very well with Game of Thrones’ multiple perspectives, where stories are resolved based on the local characters–which lends itself better to negative results like a Red Wedding, which wouldn’t happen if there were a single hero who had to be able to fix everything.

The second Dragon Age game, released in 2011, resolved some of the issues of tragedy by offering more difficult choices and, quite cleverly, offering situations where the player completing a quest doesn’t always resolve happily. But Dragon Age 2 was also set in a single city, and had a story based on the very specific workings of magic in the game world–in other words, it had the human drama of A Song of Ice and Fire but lacked the specificity that connected the original game to Martin’s works.

A third game, Dragon Age: Inquisition is scheduled for release next week, making it the first game in the series since the Game of Thrones show started. If it connects to Game of Thrones like the first game in the series did, we’ll be giving it more coverage here.

• Published on 11/09/2014 at 10:05 PM CDT
• Last updated on 11/09/2014 at 10:05 PM CDT