Was Dragon Age: Origins as good as I remember? - An analysis of one of BioWare's best games

when you ask someone what games they think of when they hear the word bioware the answers that you might typically expect are mass effect star wars knights of the old republic and dragon age the amount of times i've talked about bioware on this channel is starting to really pile up but for me the release of dragon age origins was probably right around the moment that the developer really peaked really those four years between 2007 and 2011 was when bioware really started to take root in my mind as one of the greatest devs of all time well until a series of unfortunate events began to occur still origins was probably one of my favorite games for a while before being overshadowed by mass effect i played dragon age origins right when it came out and then played it another time right before the sequel released but honestly i haven't touched it since i think something about it felt really old to me mechanically even when i first played it and it kind of kept me from revisiting it until now so in this video i'll be running through the entire vanilla game and giving my feedback on what i think still holds up to this day and what needed tweaking to keep it entertaining 12 years later obviously there will be spoilers and i may not hit every little quest because this game is long before i begin i'd like to direct you to my twitch.technical view channel it's where games that specifically aren't among us happen streams happen most mondays tuesdays and fridays how exciting i know secondly i have a new storefront with clothing from represent the shirts are higher quality than before and i've got some new and returning designs on there if you like clothes do not look at the site if you don't like clothes unless you're just trying to be mad and finally this video is sponsored by keeps which i'll talk about more in a bit alright let's get to it so right away we get our standard bioware options though dragon ages menus are extensively better than mass effects but the menu does have some odd quirks like the game wants you to log into bioware servers so that you can send feedback automatically so they can improve their game yeah i wonder when they lasted that yeah so jim from texas is saying one of the dwarfs beard meshes is clipping through his chain mail beyond that you've got a login for premium content and the like which i'm not doing i'm pretty sure this is the ultimate edition so i should be fine there and finally the weirdest one is that the game takes automatic screenshots of key moments in the game so that you can look back on them and go yes what an odd feature so yeah dragon age starts hard i absolutely love this intro it's been a while since i've seen it but i've probably looked it up about 10 or so times back in the day i mean dated as it is the movement in action is really well done the cinematography is really good at pulling you into this magical medieval kind of setting but let's recap it real quick so we can move on to character creation so in the beginning there were these mages right they were super arrogant and basically thought they could harness the heavens themselves with the magic that they learned to use well this led to them being cast out and corrupted by the same magic that they mastered causing them to transform into the game's antagonist the dark spawn as time went on they started conquering and destroying all life on the planet beginning with the dwarves and working their way through the other races eventually a faction of heroes arose to meet their challenge known as the grey wardens these wardens were able to drive the darkspawn back to where they came from and then everyone celebrated and [ __ ] then 400 years passed a lot of people kind of forgot about the darkspawn well not the dwarves but you know other people they stopped worrying about them they didn't think of them they kind of just went about their lives the numbers of the grey wardens dwindled to a very low amount and eventually they stopped getting taken seriously well now the wardens have started to notice the amount of darkspawn activity is really beginning to amp up again so they've been trying to warn the leaders of various civilizations but again they're not getting taken seriously it's a very bioware storyline but i can't help but really love this setup so now we got character creation we can choose between a dwarf human or elf with each one getting bonuses to certain attributes humans are well rounded like they always are getting a plus one in most of the basic attributes elves are more suited to magic with a plus two to willpower and intelligence and dwarves are incapable of becoming mages as they have a natural resistance to magic along with a hearty plus two constitution and a plus one in strength and dex overall i'm not sure that the racial choice really makes a difference in the long run but i do know that i chose a human the first and second time around along with the bonuses each race has a brief and interesting description humans are the most numerous but also the most divided elves used to be slaves to the humans and have lost most of their cultures saved for a few nomadic tribes which have retained their roots in nature and dwarves have been battling back the darkspawn since they first made their appearance but ultimately have been losing slowly to the fiends i actually like the background of the elves and the dwarves the most particularly how the elves are portrayed as poor beggars for the most part rather than how a lot of other popular media tends to paint them but i've always been a melee boy and i just enjoy being a dual wielding berserker type and the dwarves fit that role perfectly in this game so we're going to be running with one of our stocky friends this time around after choosing your base class of warrior major thief comes the background info there are actually 6 different backgrounds to choose from with each one kicking off your game in a different way before converging into the main story with humans you get the choice of being a noble who has lived the life of luxury and proper training or a mage who's undergoing their trial to prove their worth with magic with elves you get to either be one of those nomadic tribesmen from before or you can be a mage with the same background as the human counterpart or you can be a poor peasant who has lived his life under the rule of humans that last one is really cool sounding specifically because it mentions that your bride was taken by a human novel to bang her before you can leading to a path of vengeance and finally with the dwarves you can choose to be born a commoner who serves a crime lord or you can choose to be the son of nobility who finds out that there's treachery afoot in the royal family even if this is a short and sweet endeavor i miss this type of introduction lots of games tend to leave the background up to the player with some vague details which explain what happened in the past but aren't really expanded too much besides the occasional dialogue line but with dragon age origins you get to play out at least a chunk of your character which really helps you to start understanding the life that they've lived and how they've gotten to where they are it'd be like if you could play out a brief amount of shepard's life in mass effect 1 which was contingent on the background that you chose anyways in this case i'm going to be playing the dwarven noble since that sounds the most fun from the choices that i've locked myself into from here you've got your appearance options there's not a lot that's super special about it it's just a very solid character creator i do like that i can customize the portrait though oh that boy is sassy next we have attribute allocation so strength is definitely going to be my main point dump here as it affects my damage output and accuracy dex is also pretty important seeing as i need quite a lot of it to make dual wielding work properly plus it helps my dodge chance so i'm not getting slammed by everything my last important skill would be willpower which on the surface looks like it affects a mage's mana pool primarily but it also gives my guy more stamina a generation so it's pretty important beyond these three key skills i intend to eventually pick up some cunning which is primarily a rogue skill but it also gives me access to the master rank of coercion if i choose to invest in it and finally there's magic which is mostly a mage skill beyond increasing stuff like potion effectiveness and constitution now constitution seems like it would be a good skill to have on a warrior but it's actually kind of a waste when compared to how good dex is dex gives you a flat chance to dodge every single time you sink a point into it in addition to helping you hit more frequently additionally it gives dual wielders more damage per point so what does con do differently it gives you 5 health per point so it's really not worth squandering everything that strength and dex do for you for that trade-off making it near worthless by comparison next up we have skills which i can choose one of beyond my presets we've got coercion stealing trap potion and poison making survival combat training and combat tactics the creation stuff and stealing are pretty easy to understand just from their names coercion is my persuade slash intimidate skill which use cunning and strength accordingly survival helps to detect nearby creatures and gives a bit of nature resistance combat training is something i've got two points in already which helps warriors and rogues gain more talent in addition to stamina and damage bonus as they progress down the line mages can also take more damage without getting interrupted mid-spell which is cool and finally the tactics slot is interesting so basically this is an older bioware game meaning that the combat is kind of point and clicky and you watch the characters on screen perform whatever you tell them to do well the combat tactics allow for you to auto-program actions to be performed when a certain requirement is met this means that you could have one of your tactics be to automatically drink a potion when you fall below a certain hp threshold or to taunt an enemy away from a spellcaster or whatever it reminds me of final fantasy 12's gambit system in that you can more or less program your party to behave a certain way giving the game a much more tactical feel rather than a reactive one so for my guy i don't care as much about tactics since i'm going to be controlling him most of the time but tactics are extremely important for npc companions but for now i'm just going to drop a point to coercion and make it my main focus alongside combat training and finally we have talents which i can choose too of i'm not going to run through all of these because there's like 56 of them but the main thing is that there are plenty of abilities for every warrior playstyle whether it be dual wielding archery sword and board or two-handed there's also a couple of rows dedicated to the warrior class specifically and the options here to create a unique build is a blessing when compared to fable 2 which i just came off of the skills i'm interested in are obviously all the dual wielding stuff and the first row of the warrior block which gives me access to stuff like bonus health less fatigue and more damage and stamina recovery for now though i'm just going to go straight into the highest rank of dual wielding that i can manage and so we finally get to play the game now that i'm done talking about character [ __ ] non-stop here we're introduced to the dwarven city of orzammar of which you're the son of the king of the noble family i duken the city itself has been cut off by darkspawn but it's also considered impenetrable so during this lull of inaction bickering and squabbles have broken out between the various members of the noble family appearances are everything to the dwarves of orzammar and keeping them up is paramount to political survival one can't take all this marching about in speech making too seriously i'm never quite ready for steve bloom to appear but he does seem to be everywhere and nowhere when it comes to various media so anyways there's supposed to be this big ass banquet feast thing in celebration of my character's first military commission this is important because apparently this commission translates to more honor for myself instead of my character's brothers and cousins in an effort to eventually gain the crown but until then the day is ours which leads us into a tutorial where we can go check out some merchant stalls or the proving grounds for some 1v1 combat i opt for both which leads us into the camera and movement tutorial so yeah dragon age is a little weird when it comes to camera stuff as many games in this genre from this era tend to be you can play from an overhead tactical angle or dead on the back of the character the camera rotates with a and d and your character strafes with q and e which can thankfully be flip-flopped of course you can also use your right mouse button to drag your camera around so it isn't all that bad it's just a little weird so the first little mini quest that we stumble upon is an argument between a noble from a different house and a scholar who wrote about the noble's founder the scholar states that the noble's founder only got to the place that he was through records of bribery blackmail and intimidation he claims to have documentation of these events i'm to choose between covering up history to protect this guy's house or telling him to go suck it i go with the ladder and the nobleman is obviously pissed my right hand man here then asks me if i want him killed which is [ __ ] awesome and immediately puts into perspective just how much power i have as the king's son i choose to have him killed quietly an assassination that i'm assured will take place within the hour i love it next i meet with my older brother who's the next in line for king and my younger brother the younger one seems to follow the older one around like a dog while the older one talks down to me and orders me to go meet with the king i tell him to [ __ ] off before continuing my exploration of ironforge or orzammar next we meet up with some women who have the express goal of getting a baby blasted into them by a noble so that they can spend the next chunk of their lives living in the royal chambers and looking after it this behavior is looked favorably upon by the royal cast as it creates more royal knights to fight for the city i decide to tell the one who's not barbara streisand to meet me in my chambers after the ceremony before heading over to the proving grounds my favorite part about this game's dialogue is how differently i can respond to a given situation i can play the idiot who knows nothing about the world or i can play the down to earth noble who has no issue talking to the commoners or i can play the exact opposite and ask my right hand man why these peasants are talking to me i mean they all serve the same kind of narrative but it really helps me to play my guy the way i want him to be perceived it's actually something that bioware never really quite got right in my eyes until now whereas kotor had you playing a jedi who was almost explicitly good or evil with no middle ground and mass effect had you playing [ __ ] shep or understanding and thoughtful shep dragon age has you responding in much more human ways whether those human ways be arrogant and conceit or sensible and rational anyways next i wind up fighting in the proving grounds despite it being an event held in my honor this is pretty straightforward as i have no active skills that would be usable while dual wielding and the whole thing amounts more or less to a series of cutscenes in which i take down 4 warriors in combat i then win the ceremonial helmet which was commissioned as the prize only to realize that i'm just short of strength to wear it for now so i pocketed and head back to the royal chambers where another nobleman beseeches me to vote a certain way during the banquet you see the dwarves are a very proud race but they're also very flawed they view women as inferior and anybody who leaves to the surface as unworthy of being a dwarf the man that i talked to about this latter issue explains that dwarves rely on trade from the surface to continue on as they do before eventually breaking down and stating that he doesn't actually give a [ __ ] about surface dwarves and that he's only doing this for his wife whose cousin went to the surface on a business venture before losing all of his money apparently when he left for the surface he was stripped of all nobility and high standing because that's what the law decrees so i can choose to vote for or against this guy's petition to allow surface dwarves to retain their houses and have a standing to return to i have a feeling i might wind up on the surface myself so it may be best to go with this idea rather than against it will we really turn our back on our brothers in a potential fortune in cheap labor because of a political technicality denial of the traditions of our people does not qualify as a political technicality so before i continue on i want to touch on a brief issue that i'm facing and it's not a bad issue to have but it does affect this video as you might have noticed i'm talking about literally everything i'm running into and maybe that's redundant but i really can't help it every little thing i've ran into has been something that's only further expanded on and caused intrigue to such a degree that i want to tell you guys about it i feel like it helps to tease the feeling out of the game and set the tone for everything that's about to happen but this game is also very long so bear with me in the fact that i am trying to be concise here like i said it's not a bad issue to have it actually speaks volumes about the storytelling here and how everything is set up even more so when you realize that this is only one of six potential setups but this game does a really good job at making you feel like this powerful royal heir who's respected and admired by those who come from lesser routes while also making you wonder what things would have been like if you had chosen one of the other background stories or hell if you had chosen a female dwarf when there's all this talk about women not being capable warriors and the like anyway so i go up to meet my father before proclaiming that the surface dwarves should have their rights returned which gets a gasp from the crowd of eight dwarves and nothing more kind of thought the king would have something to say about that but whatever then he introduces me as the next commander who will lead in the battle tomorrow against the darkspawn osama's next commander [Applause] accompanying me on this endeavor is the leader of the grey wardens in a human kingdom called ferelden after the meeting the king wants me to grab my older brother trien and send him his way of course my younger brother is with tree and as always and he seems to be getting sick of getting bossed around when trion leaves the younger brother tells me that trian is now trying to kill me because he's afraid that the assembly will vote to have me as king instead both the younger brother and steve bloom tell me that everyone knows that i would be the better ruler as i'm more personable and honorable than he is the thing is this younger brother of mine has been following around our older brother this entire time and i just don't see a reason to take his word with no evidence in fact i'd wager that he wants me to kill trian so that he can blame it on me and take the crown himself i mean look at this shifty [ __ ] but we'll see for now i choose not to kill tran though this choice is a pretty tough one so the next day we all meet up the battle plan is laid out and the younger brother tries to manipulate the king into having the dwarves fight on the front lines for honor instead of the humans again pointing at him maybe being the treacherous one here i'm then tasked with splitting off from the main force to go reclaim the shield of our ancestor which would bring great glory to house idukkin so now we get to the actual exploration and combat gameplay of the game it again plays a lot like a crpg mixed with bioware's brand of auto attacking a bit like an mmo at times you gather up some scouts to form a makeshift party and then get into the groove of knowing how to manage your man i have to say that the tactic system is fantastic here for having certain party members isolate a mage or a rogue and harass them while you clean up the main warrior force well eventually we make it to a group of mercenaries which have arrived before us persuading them nets us the information that they got the signet ring which is required to open the door to this area from a servant of trion again all evidence is pointing to the guy trying to kill me as the mercenaries soon attack us after this conversation but i'm just not convinced it's way too obvious and in your face to be the only thing happening here and i still suspect my younger brother of being the traitor well we recovered the shield and sure enough we stumble upon trian's body i'd imagine that i would have been blindsided by this if i was younger or just not accustomed to bioware writing but upstrolls my younger brother along with my father who claims that i murdered tran what makes this better is that the scout and the seemingly honorable man who i dueled in the fighting pit backs up my younger brother stating that i murdered tran in cold blood before taking his signet ring the king doesn't know what to believe and instead has me taken prisoner to be judged by the assembly i'm not sure if it'll be addressed but it does seem strange that if i wanted my brother dead that i'd do it before recovering the shield and that i'd take his ring but we'll see so now i'm in a new game of elder scrolls and i get to create my prisoner before exploring tamriel my right hand man stops by one last time to tell me that my younger brother got the assembly to vote against me defending myself instead exiling me to my death via fighting darkspawn until i dropped dead alright so the logistics don't matter my younger brother just overrode everything that had to do with justice though i still have to wonder why the king doesn't get a say in the matter i mean when i do get ready to step into these tunnels the lord who is sending me off tells me that he believes that my brother set me up and that he would tell the king this information which i i mean yeah [ __ ] apparently the king just has no say when put against the assembly [ __ ] congress ruining my medieval fantasy games too this introduction to the game is frustrating you start at the top the very highest that you can be more or less and you get cast down into nothing thanks to politics your name stripped from history i kind of feel like a [ __ ] for looting everything now but i guess it is what it is jesus man what a start and this was just one path like holy [ __ ] what a fantastic way to kick off your game while also burning a bit of vengeance into the player god i hope i can come back and kick my brother's teeth in so it is worth mentioning before we continue that i did start another character to play through the human noble storyline it's actually a lot shorter though i was also running through it quickly to compare the two storylines as a summary though you start as the son of a noble and ferelden these nobles are called terns and they're basically akin to dukes and duchesses they serve the king but also rule over their own lands beneath them are the aurels who the terence assigned to further manage their lands so king then taren then arl anyways your brother is about to head out to face the rising dark spawn thread at the behest of the grey wardens alongside your father and your father's friend arl howe when duncan shows up to recruit a capable man into the wardens hau seems surprised and a little on edge at his arrival meaning that he's our betrayer this time it's interesting because you really only catch on to these little expressions and inflections of voice when you're looking for them if you're just mindlessly playing the game a lot of the stuff might go over your head at any rate you run to give a message to your brother before having to retrieve your dog from the larder while killing giant rats giant rats it's like the start of every bad adventure tale my grandfather used to tell then you go to deliver the message to your brother which is that he's to leave early without your father because apparently howe's men are running late you go to bed and wake up to the castle being under siege by howe's men who arrived late in the night then you fight your way through the castle to an escape route only to find your father bleeding out you're badass of a mother who's fought with you up until this point decides to stay behind to protect her husband and buy you and duncan time to escape with your dog in tow it's again a pretty brief intro but i would say that i actually prefer the dwarven noble start just due to how much more intrigued i was in all of the political stuff and then the whole betrayal of everyone besides your right hand man is a lot more infuriating than being betrayed by a man who has less than three minutes of screen time i'm obviously not going to run through every intro i guess i was just more curious than anything else speaking of the dwarf noble intro still isn't over i now have to bumble through this series of tunnels to find duncan and pick up some new gear when i eventually stumble upon him and his crew one of them asks me why i was exiled and duncan goes whoa whoa whoa let's not offend him i want him i tell him what happened anyways and then we get four options to say yes to leaving before we travel over to the grey warden camp in ferelden which is exactly what happened with my human noble so now we find ourselves in the ancient fortress of ostagar which is said to be the last stand against the darkspawn for the human kingdom apparently if the wardens lose here the darkspawn will surely push north and swallow the kingdom when we arrive we meet up with the king of ferelden kailyn kailyn is actually kind of interesting in that i found him to be cheerful and fun to talk to as a human but almost dismissive and condescending as a dwarf you see as a human he obviously knows more about the various areas of the land so when you tell him that your father is dead due to how's interference he gets concerned and upset claiming that howe will pay for his transgressions after the darkspawn are taken care of whereas when you're a dwarf you can tell him yeah dwarves don't usually come up here by choice and he's like wow what a story man sounds like a good one you'll have to tell it to me sometime anyways i got a lot to do and then when he asks about the king you can go well i'm his son but he was doing fine and he's like oh man you're just full of stories huh like just think about the implications from what my character just told him especially when you consider the fact that the son of a dwarven king may very well become a king and forging a relationship with that individual might foster great relations between your races and yet there's no concern or worry about pressing for details just a dismissive kind of nod at your character anyways the king dismisses himself while very confidently proclaiming that the darkspawn have turned out to be much less dangerous than he thought he laments the fact that he isn't going to be part of some fairy tale struggle in which he fought with the wardens against some horrible threat which says a lot about his character in its own way you're then told by duncan that you can scope out the camp and meet up with one of the other game's main characters alistair yes i was harassing you by delivering a message your glibness does you no credit here i thought we were getting along so well i was even going to name one of my children after you the grumpy one yeah alistair is a bit of a smart ass he was formerly a templar for a holy order known as the chantry which partially uses their resources to hunt down rogue and blood magi well after alistar got recruited by the grey wardens he had to basically start working with the magi in order to defeat the darkspawn he doesn't seem to care about the mages personally but he does have to work around the open hostility between the chantry and the mages at the king's behest so our guy joins the party as a medium armor-wearing sword and board protective type from here we can explore the camp which i did a bit of on my own before meeting with alistair there's a quest to help out a dog by retrieving some medicinal herbs out in the woods a bit of background about the darkspawn and how the mages around here work and a bit of info about the relationship between the king and his father-in-law who happens to be a taren i'll touch on the last one a bit for now but this video is going to drag on if i dive into every little detail basically the king is foolhardy about the whole darkspawn ordeal and his father-in-law has been fighting him about it at every single turn claiming that he's just young and unwise to the ways of the world for now though let's focus on the ritual which every grey warden must undergo before becoming part of the ranks the joining while not explicitly explained yet the joining requires us to procure three vials of darkspawn blood and bring them back to duncan he also mentions that we should try to keep an eye out for an old warden holdout inside this holdout is supposed to be some treaties from an era with promises that were made to the grey wardens to aid them in the battle against the darkspawn by various nations and so we head out to the wild with alistar and the two cannon fodder allies the gates open for you just be careful out there even a grey warden won't be safe in the forest tonight yeah all right sure what's gonna be out here that puts us in danger after exterminating the entire forest wolf population we continue to fist darkspawn until we find the ones that have blood in them it's a very video game thing you would think that every darkspawn would contain blood unless they carry around vials of their own blood which might be the case because it seems to be pretty toxic to other life then again they also have a lot of currency on them too so who knows at any rate we nab up a few additional quests grab whatever little fetch things i may need and so on eventually we stumble upon our next primary party member you fear barbarians will swoop down upon you yes swooping is bad this is morrigan a badass shape-shifting witch who's eloquent with words and snappy with replies though we don't get to the shape-shifting stuff yet so sorry for spoiling you i will try not to spoil the rest of the game over the next two and a half hours so alistair immediately shows disdain for morrigan as he suspects her of trying to turn us into frogs or some such nonsense morrigan laughs it off before claiming that her mother was the one who took the treaties from the chest in this rune we go and meet her mother who gives us the treaties before warning us that darkspawn are mean and bad then morrigan escorts us back to the camp so now we reach the joining ritual in which we're to drink the blood of the darkspawn in order to become immune to its blight and gain new power of course the joining comes with the caveat that you might die upon drinking the blood so cannon fodder one steps up and chugs the delicious spawn goo he does not make it then number two gets a little bit scared i mean this guy just guzzled the forbidden beverage and straight up died but come on what a coward am i right so duncan [ __ ] kills the guy alright i gotta pause here because i initially had issues coming to terms with this display so the wardens are a secretive order of beings who specialize in killing darkspawn back in the day there were no shortage of them this is likely due to desperate times leading to a group realizing that drinking magically prepared darkspawn blood had a chance of creating legendary fighters and because of that desperation i doubt that they kept the whole process under wraps i mean they needed to push back as fast as possible and the only way to do that was to get as many as possible to drink i would imagine obviously this is all speculation but either way we're now in the same boat 400 years later but in this case the whole process is kept a secret to someone unfamiliar with this whole ordeal it might be fair to say that duncan overreacted here that the fact that the wardens have to chug blood like a fresh gatorade should be public knowledge so that more wardens can be created to fight the darkspawn threat but one if there were suddenly tens of thousands of superpowered beings roaming the world i imagine humanity as we know it would just simply cease to exist and god knows what other threats might arise due to this behavior two people often times hear one part of the story without listening to the rest in this case the blood isn't drank directly it's prepared magically if someone were to drink the blood without this preparation and survive they would likely be turned into a blight carrying diseased shell of a human and three the chantry absolutely despises magic especially blood magic now they do overlook the warden's usage of it just because it's a necessary evil but if word were to get out that the chantry showed inaction towards the wardens instead of condemning them it would tear the chantry apart and if they did condemn the wardens it would make it very very hard for them to recruit any more wardens so yes duncan was within his right to kill jory here despite it looking to be very cruel but i will say this alistar was with us the entire time he saw how cowardly jory was he saw that he wasn't cut out to be a warden he could have simply reported this to duncan and then they could have just cut him out from the process and sent him home but i guess it is what it is and although the whole thing is a little short-sighted jory was warned that there was no turning back and that the joining was exceedingly dangerous either way i drink my cup and see the dragon age origin before being proclaimed a grey warden funnily enough i do get the option to ask duncan why he murderlized jory and he goes well i mean he pulled out his weapon bro can't ignore that one bro which honestly had he taken the time to explain everything or part of what i just said i feel like it would be a lot easier to digest but jory didn't pull out his weapon and lunge he backed away and was panicking if duncan had backed off and showed that he wasn't going to do anything hostile i doubt he would have attacked i guess you never know though i just wish dunk would have explained it better so after this we meet up with king kailyn who is still rambling about how great this battle is going to be his father-in-law continues to berate his foolishness but ultimately submits to his king the battle plan is for the king to take his soldiers to the front lines while alistar and i go to light a signal for his father-in-law logan and his men to join the fray alistar voices his dismay at not being able to fight on the front lines but eventually gives in we then get treated to a spectacular cutscene of the start of the battle [Music] [Music] so archers [Music] for ferelden i just can't help but fellate this game the music is amazing the choreography is perfect and the overall scene is something out of a movie i don't know maybe watching this group of chaos warriors charge these empire soldiers is just my jam but i'm fully invested at this stage so back to myself and alistair turns out that there was a back door into the tower where we needed to light the beacon and the dark spawn have started to pour into the building meaning that they're either a lot smarter than we've been giving them credit for or someone's helping them out i'm banking on this scary looking [ __ ] either way we now have to work our way up the tower fighting looting exploring i do have to say that while i jumped into this game thinking that the gameplay would be ridiculously clunky since that's something that i do actually remember about it it isn't all that bad at least not on pc i feel like it was probably more of a controller console thing but on pc it's pretty intuitive and does things right for a lot of the time that said there is a formula to all of these areas so far that formula being walk into the area get swarmed by enemies kill the enemies loot the enemies loot whatever else and then repeat and that does get old very quickly it's not like i'm hating my life right now but the combat alone could definitely use a bit of a revamp as there isn't a ton to it right now i'm sure this will get better down the line but for now it generally tends to be pretty boring and less about positioning and strategy well right as i started bitching bioware decided to throw this big meaty chut at us this is an ogre on the surface it looks like the kind of fight that you could heal through while sustaining damage in reality this fight is [ __ ] ridiculous at this stage i know how stupid i sound after just complaining about how simplistic the battles were with no real strategy but this is the exact opposite issue i tried micromanaging and healing people who were getting targeted i tried pulling aggro with alistar while everyone else jumps on the thing and eventually the only strategy that i could actually manage to pull off was exploiting the ogre's ai and kiting it around the room while everyone takes pot shots at the thing with bows this isn't grand strategy that feels rewarding this is a poorly designed fight at this level with the skills that i have access to and again i know that i was practically begging for this but it really doesn't feel fun to have one of my guys get picked up and punched repeatedly to death with no means of escaping and it feels really bad when the ogre teleports both itself and its melee attacks to hit you no matter how far away you get from it the fight would feel completely different if you could get away from its shock wave attack by stepping out of the range or sidestepping its bull rush at least then you could poke and run as a melee fighter but either i got some bad luck with the hitbox or this thing just slaps someone no matter what when it doesn't attack because there were moments where i clearly got out of the range and it still smoked me like i said later in the game this fight would have been pretty damn cool because i'd likely have a party that's been filled out and customized and had tactics built into it to adjust to this threat but as things stand this is too early for a fight where i have two no-name party members alongside my two melee-oriented main guys either way it's time to light the beacon at last well as foreshadowed logan sees the beacon lit and orders his men to retreat i'm of two minds about this cutscene first off bioware isn't particularly adept at keeping betrayals a secret i mean a lot of the people that are going to pull off some kind of huge betrayal tend to look like this but even then their behaviors tend to really lend to that foreshadowing now that said the other way that i think about this whole ordeal is emotionally and emotionally i definitely felt anger and dismay towards logan's betrayal here so even if bioware isn't super great at hiding these things they're good at making the player feel these emotions during these inevitable betrayals predictability doesn't necessarily make something bad just as blindsiding the player doesn't make something great there are so many instances of movies and games where the writers decided to just shoehorn some kind of blind side into their script because that makes the media much better in their eyes but it isn't a catch-all that automatically just one-ups the media that it appears in it has to be told correctly and sometimes there has to be traces of foreshadowing to make it work out either way reinforcements don't arrive and this big load from the darkspawn army does it grabs king kalin and squashes him like a [ __ ] grape before duncan ascends to super saiyan and climbs the thing like a rope ladder with his blades it falls but not before the king has been ran through the soda can recycling machine then a group of darkspawn fire a slew of arrows at myself and alistar before we pass out and wake up in morrigan's hut apparently her mother turned into a big old lord of the rings eagle and grabbed us up before bringing us to safety and healing us so here's where we stand the darkspawn won the battle alistar and i may be some of the last grey wardens god knows what happens to duncan and logan is probably off looking like snape somewhere morrigan's mother then insists that she knows nothing about the darkspawn after giving us specific information about how arc demons supposedly came to be arc demons are the biggest and baddest darkspawn the most intelligent of them who lead their minions against the forces of humanity if we take out an arc demon the darkspawn will likely crumble until they get a replacement but either way we gotta start building an army alistar claims that aryl eamonn of redcliffe will definitely help if we seek his aid along with the other civilizations if we put those old treaties to use then morrigan's mother flemeth insists that we take her daughter along with us morrigan protests but only because her mother is telling her she really does want to leave the wild she just hates being told what to do i resonate with that on so many levels so it's off to a small town outside of the wilds for any word of news with morrigan leading the way now morrigan is truly a character that we can build in a variety of ways she's kind of the inverse to alistair in that regard as big l is almost destined to be a juggernaut tank morrigan on the other end can be a dps powerhouse a status caster who weakens enemies a full-blown support mage with healing a shape-shifting tank and so on for this playthrough i'm going to focus on her being more about control and support which is the opposite of the high dps role that i had her in my previous runs can you cook i can cook yes and so we head out to the town of loathering where we're going to attempt to garner some information on the happenings to the kingdom before proceeding with the gathering of an army meanwhile we cut to logain who's doing his best impression of a sphincter while prompting people to join him or die but what of the army lost at oslo your withdrawal was most fortunate yo what the [ __ ] oh you hear what he said i saw a mud crab a couple of days ago with ugly little animals antiguan my father is doing what is best did he also do what was best for your husband your majesty [ __ ] anyways on our way to loathering we wind up running into a small platoon of darkspawn along with the dog that i saved from the blight earlier by bringing back some special flowers the dog is built like a brick [ __ ] house and fills out our fourth party slot nicely unfortunately for us logan has pinned the blame of the king's death on the grey wardens which is idiotic because why the [ __ ] would they we're told this information by some highwaymen who attempt to rob us after intimidating and persuading them to both forego their robbery and pay us instead and then stealing from them and chasing them out afterwards we make our way into loathering from here we lay out the plan of action with our options being to seek out arleem and for help or to go to the nomadic elves the circle of magi or the dwarves for help morrigan continues to berate alistair for his existence while suggesting that we simply kill logan instead if i were to tentatively lay out a plan based off of my memories of who you can recruit and what you get i think i'd like to go to the circle first followed by eamonn followed by orzammar then the elves and finally going after logan this amount of player choice is a breath of fresh air when compared to other games in the genre and it reminds me obviously of kotor and how we can approach things but i'll kick around load the ring first before solidifying my plan the main thing that i learned in low the ring is that these refugees got a lot of [ __ ] lying around to liberate the second main thing that i learned is that morrigan and alistair are difficult to impress at the same time as with most bioware titles there are romances and friendships and all of that and the frigid and intelligent yet unwise in the ways of the world morrigan and the sarcastic and a bit offish alistar are kind of hard to keep happy at the same time when interacting with others side quest wise there are quite a few things to do around loathering settling a dispute between a merchant and some refugees killing off bandits making poison for a farmer bringing potions to some refugees [ __ ] like that nothing particularly revolutionary but xp nonetheless anyways we soon find out that aryl eamon has fallen dreadfully ill so much so that his knights are now seeking miracle cures that are said to remedy any ailment great a side note here [ __ ] the chantry i went to talk to the revered mother here who is sitting in her chair and she goes hey you look like you got money wanna donate if i say that i just don't have any she's like oh well that's alright and then i ask for her blessing and she's like whoa whoa the [ __ ] you did not pay me any money why would i bless you uh because you want to help people i think [ __ ] eventually we meet our next party member liliana lilz is a bardic rogue archer type which brings to the table a solid mix of dps and support if you take her along i'm gonna have her focus on mostly archer stuff with a touch of bard though i may switch her out here and there for different party members if need be personality wise not a lot has shown about her yet she interferes in a fight between some of logaine's men and yourselves before throwing herself at your party and insisting that god told her to help you she claims that she did quote unquote other things in her life before becoming a part of the chantry but ultimately keeps to herself until further notice this brings us to our next party member jesus they really packed him in here huh this is sten sten was always one of my permanent party members due to his demeanor and how interesting he is as a character that said he was always a two-handed berserker type in my eyes maybe a tank and in this particular run i'm kind of full up on melee tanky boys i might switch between him and alistar depending on which area i'm in but for now let's focus on what's going on with him sten is a qunari a race that doesn't fall into the three main races that we've encountered up until now i'll get more into them later but the thing to know here is that sten has been captured by the chantry for the murder of an entire farmstead family after they took him in one night sten admitted that he killed them and then gave himself up without a fight upon bringing liliana with us she convinces the revered mother to give up the key to his cage so that we can free him he seems indifferent about being freed submitting to the idea that if he joins us against the blight that he'll atone for his sins we'll touch on him more later so i continue mopping up side quests my game crashes the usual stuff it's a lot of busy work with decent experience and monetary gains at this stage for my party the way that side quests are structured is interesting and quite frankly pretty damn stupid i mean like i said they're good for the gains but what they basically have you doing is going to this bounty board running out to the north side of the map taking out bandits and spiders and then running back and turning those in then a couple more quests pop up and suddenly there are wolves and bears and a dead body in the north instead of all the stuff that you just killed so you kill all of those loot the body and then run back to the bounty board at the opposite end of the map like i said it's busy work but it almost seems like all they had to do to make it less back and forthish was expand the area map a little further out and give you all the bounties at once oh well let's get the hell out of here welcome to camp this is our ebenhawk of dragon age and it helps you to get to know your party better while you prepare to move out to your next leg of the story right now i'm gonna put the whole get to know your party thing on hold because i would rather tackle them all at once and then kind of do the whole personal rankings thing though it is worth noting that thankfully these god-awful ugly-ass helmets that my party has equipped disappear during dialogues which is honestly a nice touch additionally a dwarf and his son who we saved from darkspawn roll up on our camp and decide to stick around to sell us goods which is also cool i think he even has stuff that i gathered from my prologue play like the proving helm in addition to some crazy nice albeit expensive gear and his son can enchant my stuff granted i have the runes and correct items awesome the main thing that i wound up picking up was this dwarven merchants belt which according to the wiki doesn't even need to be equipped at all to give a plus five percent gold gain overall the final thing that we learn at camp though is that my father the dwarven king is dead which means that we'll unfortunately be meeting my brother when we return [ __ ] eventually we roll out to the circle tower or at least the outskirts of it we have to take a ferry across but first i look around to find a guy who says that they're not letting anyone across the lake and a sack of side quests like it's just a big bag of side quests i got no other way to explain it anyways i intimidate my way across the lake like moses and wind up at the tower where surprise abominations have taken it over some templar dude claims that he barred the doors and sent word to logan that he wants to destroy the tower and all of the mages in it because he feels like it's a lost cause i tell him to let me in so that i can ride the abominations around like skateboards and he states that he won't let me back in unless the first enchanter is alive which is stupid because even if he isn't and i destroy all the abominations well i mean that's just a blown-up tower for no reason so we head in and find bodies everywhere which is about what i expected we continue further in and find wynn who we actually met in ostagar before the big battle she's understandably wary expecting us to have been sent in to murder all of the mages in here after convincing her that we're not here to kill her she explains that a mage named uldred attempted to take over the tower after returning from battle but ultimately failed his interference though did produce these sludgy abominations which now roamed the tower i will not lose the circle to one man's pride and stupidity [Music] morrigan then pipes up and tells me that the mages here deserve to die because they chose to allow themselves to be subjugated and controlled which is needlessly cruel i actually have to fault the dialogue responses here with this particular trade though so i'm not going to get super into morrigan's character yet but she's very much a practical person she believes in freedom as a human and isn't above the idea of not assisting those who are weaker she believes in doing things which helps specifically us and our cause and not doing things which would help those who would otherwise be unhelpful to us so this entire time i was waiting for that concept to come up to appeal to her selfish side some dialogue option that says hey we could use these people against the darkspawn but that option never comes up instead we get the options of yeah you're right [ __ ] these guys or you're a poisonous harpy [ __ ] and some lukewarm options in between and if i do agree with her then we fight win to the death which is laughable when you consider that alistar here just helps us and doesn't disapprove of the events i just feel like this instance of dialogue options dropped the ball here anyways wynn is a strong and stern older mage who seems to be kind-hearted she cares about the lives of her fellow magi and seems to be very knowledgeable but we'll get more into her character later combat wise she's got a bit of versatility as morrigan does but she's much more suited for healing above all else i might switch off between her and morrigan but it'll really depend on how badly i need heels over control as we head further up we find our first group of defected mages who immediately fight us upon moving up on them when we defeat them one of them survives and starts begging for her life she states that they were only doing this to be free of the circle to lead their own lives and not be bound by the templars she then pleads for us to spare her claiming that she'll go seek penance at the chantry alistair notes that the chantry wouldn't take her and would just kill her off liliana disagrees claiming that the chantry accepts all which i definitely disagree with either way this group attacked us unprovoked and the woman gave me a sob story after about how they didn't mean to i wind up killing her so we keep ascending the tower fighting wave after wave of abominations along the way eventually we make it to a desired demon with tactical jug covers keeping this game safe for now she has enraptured a templar by sucking his life force while he seems content in believing that she's his wife i wind up killing the succubus in templar daddy which you'd think i'd be able to at least spare the guy and then we head across the hall to find this load of flesh who casts a sleep spell on us before i wake up in a dream world here i find duncan who welcomes me to the city of vice helped and tries to convince me that the world has been saved i stick him in the gut with my sword and use his body as a fidget spinner before moving further into the dream or rather the fade the fade is a realm that many living beings have different ideas about but for our purposes it's a mix of the afterlife and a dream world that's connected to the living world when we head to the next part of the fade we're greeted with a menu depicting a map of different zones to choose from the mage who's also trapped in this world fills us in about this chunk of the fade claiming that the sloth demon who put us to sleep has underlings here who he's employed to keep anyone who he sends to the fade within it so i head off and find someone who has turned into a mouse they impart a shape-shifting magic onto me so that i can squeeze through mouseholes it's a pretty cool mechanic in that it uses the pre-existing ability and creates puzzles around it plus transforming into a mouse causes your game to crash as a bonus which is a really unique feature bioware taking a page from daddy bethesda so the fade as a level is actually something that pops into my mind more often than not when i think of dragon age origins from a visual perspective so you take your mouse form here and wind up freeing someone from the fade and then you learn how to shift into spirit form which allows you to access certain doors and treasures that are usually otherwise inaccessible these treasures aren't material but they are permanent stat boosts which is an amazing treasure to find seeing as there are 21 points to scrounge up throughout the areas after freeing someone else you get a fiery form which allows you to bypass walls of flame and eventually you gain a big ass rock form to knock down these heavy doors around the fade once you have all the pieces to the puzzle your goal becomes to destroy these demons that guard your friends while sponging up points along the way it's a really cool and difficult at times challenge which takes a long while to navigate that said it does become rather old after the first half hour or so which to give you a frame of reference i spent a good two hours or so in the fade total so yeah cool idea but it needed a bit more to keep it fresh beyond the transformations because honestly a lot of it looks very samey and once you get the four forms it becomes less puzzling and more straightforward regardless i wind up rescuing my party slowly but surely each one is trapped by demons who have preyed upon the emotion that they're most likely to give into liliana is in prayer with a demon who took on the form of a revered mother alistair is happy with his half-sister and her family win is lost in dismay over the idea of all the mages being dead i try to persuade each one into helping me but win is the only one that i can manage to convince and every time they wake up and i remain stuck here the thing is these visions were all tailor made for the people affected and while i would have loved to see morrigan or sten's visions what irritates me the most here is that the player's vision is of duncan the player character knew duncan for about a week or so i would imagine and you think with all of these custom and unique starts that the game has that they would have seen something from the past like my guy's father or something it just seems like a missed mark there eventually we make it to the end of this hellish ordeal and face down the sloth demon at first i was going to comment on how lots of the boss fights in this game seem to just be a re-skinned ogre from my first fight at the other tower but this guy is [ __ ] tough and he actually does go through five different forms which is insane if he casts walking bomb i'm pretty much [ __ ] but even without it i was popping over to win to chug potions and target heals while also sipping down my very last potion good god talk about a difficulty spike though i might have been better off over in red cliff with the aural first so maybe that was my own fault still the challenge was enough to keep me hooked with the way that i did this so after the demon falls the tour guide who greeted me when i came in tells me that he was being fed on for too long and that he would soon die outside of the fade then he tells me about four or five different times to take the litany off of his body which would help me prevent against blood magic which tells me that if i forego this pickup that i'd probably be facing a much greater challenge he also tells me that uldred was trying to get the circle to rally behind logan's betrayal and that when he was shot down by the first enchanter he used blood magic along with some other rebels to unleash what the tower is currently undergoing so we finally make it up to aldrid who is in the process of turning more mages into abominations he claims that these forms are the most powerful that a mage can be and spouts off some other such nonsense before he transforms into two ogres and a trench coat aesthetically i like this boss fight better but when compared to the sloth demon that we just fought i'd have to say that this fight is a lot easier and more direct so he goes down and we pick up steve bloom who's masquerading as the first enchanter this time and then we head back to the knight commander of the templars who lets us in from here we can choose to persuade the templars to take over the tower kill off the rest of the suspected blood mages and lock the first enchanter into containment or we can choose to side with the mages and tell the knight commander that the tower is safe for now i obviously go for the ladder here and the end result has the mages pledging themselves to my cause while the templars oversee the tower had i went the other way it would have been the templars pledging themselves to me which is a cool touch for replayability one small thing to note here is that when your character is a dwarf the camera tries to stick onto his face as it does when you're one of the other races but with him being a lot shorter than the other races it causes anyone in the background's head to be cut off which is goofy when a serious cutscene is playing out so it's back to camp where i can chat up my party and all that it's worth noting that various gifts can be found and bought throughout your adventures which can then be given to your party members to improve relations it's definitely a great way to still roleplay as the character that you want to be without worrying too much about the disapproval of others in your party also it's worth noting that the romance scenes in this game are not well they're very awkward to look at i mean in the end i don't expect it to be super hentai squirt squirt adventure unless i installed some illicit mods but i guess i don't really feel particularly moved by it not in that way you [ __ ] degenerates but like the scenes feel like they're in there because that's just what bioware does and not because this is a romantically charged display of love or a feral display of lust and that's also probably a point against the gift system seeing as when i entered camp morrigan was a little over the neutral mark but giving her three whole gifts suddenly made her decide to bang until we're numb and this doesn't just apply to love interests i feel like giving anyone just one gift that they particularly enjoy is a really easy way to take someone from the neutral mark to maxed out or nearly maxed out just from the chain of conversations which open up from there if you suddenly have a conversation or two and you nail the approved options then another one might open up which you can do the same thing in and so on it feels like gifts are a way to immediately tip the neutrality over into a solid relationship without having to work for it whereas obsidian's relationships in kotor 2 very much had you spanning the entire game while building them up slowly for the most part alright before we move on to red cliff let's talk about my sponsor for this video keeps so keeps is an online subscription service for men to help them keep their hair good name i've actually been growing out my hair since meeting my wife over four years ago now and since then it's been a weird journey for me seeing as i was always used to having a lot shorter hair learning which shampoos would suit it better learning that conditioner exists and should be used by men too things that i've been laughed at by my wife repeatedly over but something i've noticed is that if i just run my fingers through my hair quite a bit of it'll just come out which doesn't seem like a good sign this is where keeps comes in keeps is actually designed to help you prevent that potential hair loss before it gets out of control and not as a cure for baldness the sooner you start using it the more hair you can save basically the process goes like this you submit your information online through keeps and a licensed doctor looks over it to tailor the right hair loss treatment plan for you you can message your keeps doctor 24 7 with any questions or concerns that you might have while monitoring your progress with the keeps progress tracking tool and when all is said and done your treatment is shipped to your door every three months now it is worth noting that as with all medical products there's always the chance for a rare side effect to pop up so please feel free to educate yourself through the keeps website if you want to learn more if this all sounds good to you and you're ready to take action and prevent air loss go to keeps.com saltfactory or click the link in the description to receive 50 off your first order that's k-e-e-p-s dot com salt factory thanks guys [Music] anyways let's head off to red cliff at last as we travel to it we witness another cutscene in which the traitor from the human noble story arl howe is meeting with logan he presents the news that some of the wardens have survived the betrayal along with news of civil war with those who disagree with logan's takeover his solution to the former is hiring the highly skilled self-proclaimed best assassins to take us out when we arrive in redcliffe alastair decides that now's the best time to drop the fact that he is a bastard child of the king and that kaelin was his half-brother fantastic he says he never cared about technically being royalty but that it may come up when he talks to his adoptive father aryl eamonn well if he talks to him obviously the good oral is still ill and worse yet zombies seem to be pouring from the castle every night to eat the flesh of the living in the village which means we're two for two on the whole this important building is now producing monsters event eamon's brother is leading up the defense against the zombies at least partially morrigan is as always combative about helping others apparently her plan would be to just find towns that aren't under attack and ask for help without doing any favors the second in charge here is the mayor who's having issues getting the blacksmith to arm the villagers apparently the smith is distraught and drinking himself to death due to his daughter being unheard from since the castle's communications fell silence so it's up to me to try to get the old [ __ ] working again first i tried to reason with the door then i tried to intimidate the door then i tried to lock pick the door and then i smashed the door down at least i had options sure enough the drunken bastard is in here yelling about nonsense i calm him down before he explains that his daughter works within the castle serving the arlessa which is aryl eamon's wife she hasn't been heard from and he's mad at the mayor for not sending a bunch of men to their deaths to check on her i promise him that we'll find her in exchange for weapons and armor for the townsfolk morrigan disapproves oh lovely shall we next begin rescuing kittens from trees holy [ __ ] woman how are you this short-sighted anyways we get the militia outfitted and move on to our final person in charge who claims that the arlessa told the knights about a sacred urn of ashes which could cure any disease to help eamonn which is what those guys in loathering were looking for at this stage things aren't looking too good for the arlessa's reputation as the blacksmith already told you that his daughter had been saying that the arlessa has been up to no good for a while now anyways the only thing that this guy wants is a blessing from the revered mother in the chapel so i start exploring around town before stumbling upon a tavern in this tavern sits an elf who is super shifty it's not one of the assassins but it is someone who claims to be waiting for his brother my what oh yes he was supposed to meet me here he's not a very good liar so i intimidate him into telling me the truth which is that he was sent here by arlhau to watch the castle for changes nothing more than that just to see what happens which is obviously telling that logan and howe had something to do with this whole zombie thing or at least with eamonn's sickness beyond that i happen upon a dwarf who can be persuaded to fight with the village along with his men and a boy who locked himself away from his sister who i returned to her safely the revered mother claims that the knight on the hill wants her to physically shield him with some kind of holy magic from god which doesn't exist and i try to convince her to just lie to him but ultimately fail so we're ready for our zombie invasion now i suppose a side thing to note here is that i wanted to figure out how to recover sten's sword but there's this pseudo time system in this game once certain events get triggered so moving out to a different part of the map causes the invasion to trigger without me which is a nice touch i decide to forego the sword hunt for now to reload my save as to avoid the circumstance where i'm not there to help with the actual invasion so the resulting cutscene basically has this [ __ ] cloud pour down from the castle and stop in front of us it's actually one of the more video gameish things in this game because the whole problem with the zombies comes directly from the castle down a path every single night and it retreats during the day wouldn't it have been better to just march with the hired mercenaries and the knights up to the castle during the daytime and tried to infiltrate then i mean yeah the blacksmith has to create new arms and armor for the militia but those are just peasants with rakes and [ __ ] they can just hang out in the village while we take care of the problem during the daytime but whatever so the actual attack isn't us marching up the hill it's simply defending the town from a lot of zombies i made the mistake of running forward at first which got me killed eventually but the second time around i held out with the other knights at the bottom of the hill then the second part of the invasion begins in which the zombies come from the lake somehow which has us fighting another massive wave of enemies when all is said and done the sun rises and ban tegan now feels confident enough that we've thinned the ranks so that we can go march up to the castle which okay i guess that's decent logic but it still seems like we could have just done this yesterday oh well well here comes the arlessa down the hill to tell us that bantegan must return to the castle alone because an evil spirit has taken over the place and allowed her to go specifically to bring back him and him alone which again is super suspicious and her porn acting isn't very convincing either but that's not on the voice actress in fact i think the actress did especially well at conveying someone who's bad at acting which isn't easy to pull off anyways she babbles on about a mage who unleashed the evil the village is dealing with while simultaneously poisoning the aryl for a while now at the behest of logan she's definitely hiding something but you can't pry it from her yet ban tegan is a good man who decides that even if this is a trap he'll go with her while sending us through a secret passage connected to the mill now i do wind up touching on this a bit more during my points about alistar's character but it's probably a good time to mention here so alistair was raised by aryl eamonn when the king didn't want him to get in the way of his true heir kailyn the arl raised him like his own son but eventually fell in love with his wife the arlessa that we just talked to while alistair tells you that the arlessa absolutely hated alistar she made his life hell and constantly tried to make him feel like an outsider in his own home that alone should point out a lot about her character and her potential motivations here but like i said i'll dive more into that later so we head through this passage only for the plot to thicken when we run into an imprisoned mage he immediately goes oh yeah i poisoned the arl but i did not make the zombies huh i actually believe that basically he was hired by logan to poison the arl because he manipulated him into thinking that eamonn wasn't good for the empire but that's not all arlessa esold was the one who hired him in the first place to tutor her and eamon's son connor in the way of magic she didn't want the circle to take conor away to teach him so she was having this guy teach him instead to suppress his magic the tutor thinks that it's possible that conor inadvertently opened a rift into the fade which caused this but he's unsure of that the guy seems very remorseful for everything that happened because of him and states that he wants to make things right if we set him free alistair wants him dead because he's a blood mage whereas morrigan wants him freed oddly enough liliana says that she thinks that he should be freed to make amends but ultimately disapproves of me doing so i think it was because i told him that i didn't care what he did after i freed him after fighting through the castle and freeing the blacksmith's daughter we eventually stumble onto this display [Music] yeah the boy has been possessed by a demon as the mage predicted and is now controlling his uncle the arlessa stands glumly by him trying to convince her son to come back to consciousness the demon pays no heed insisting that he should eat me for dinner after talking with the two it becomes apparent that after the mage poisoned the arl conor tried to break through the fade to save his father's life the demon that he found obliged in exchange for conor's body and soon unleashed the torn of zombies which litter the castle's halls now i'm going to come out and say this here i was deadass convinced that this lady was behind all of this when i first played this game like everything points to her the gossip from the blacksmith's daughter the stuff that aleister tells you about her treatment of him the porn acting when she comes down the hill and you question her motives she really does look like the bad guy here and during my first run i questioned bioware's hinting with this particular chunk of the story like it was so obvious to me that she was the one that did this and i thought that the writing was too on the nose for her particular role in this play but god damn if the misdirection didn't completely throw me for a loop i remembered this particular scene unfolding and being like oh [ __ ] i could have sworn it was her but no the mage who poisoned the arl comes in and she loses her [ __ ] mind on him as well as she should and the lack of combativeness from the mage only proves that she more than likely had zero to do with any of this beyond hiring him to keep her son's magic a secret i'm actually kind of baffled that i'm finally playing a game where i don't go you know this would have been a better plot line at least so far so the mage insists that he wants to help reverse this process after we fight all of the mind control people in the room and the boy runs off his suggestion is that we use blood magic to sacrifice someone in order to send one person into the fade and kill the demon let me list the options that you have here in just this one particular moment just for reference okay so you can kill conor outright with his mom watching you can knock his mom out and kill him after you can have her kill him instead you can have his mother sacrifice herself while you send a member into the fade to kill the demon if you killed the blood mage earlier in his cell you can't do that or you can travel to the circle and implore them to help without blood magic in order to spare both conor and his mother and you can't do that at all if you sided with the templars this is a complete sequence break from this quest if you choose to run to the circle and complete that quest now but as i've already done it i can simply just drop by and say hey guys why haven't we invented text messaging yet also can you kill a demon please thanks but the sheer amount of options for this one quest is staggering they all have different impacts on the party's approval and a few of the characters and it really makes for a more replayable game like the first time i definitely sacrificed the arlessa and the second time i killed the sun the fact that this is my third run and i'm still experiencing new content is a goddamn blessing at any rate on my way to the circle tower to gain their help we run into that assassin who was employed before along with a swarm of his people we dispatch them easily enough and get the option to spare the head honcho and question him he tells us everything that we already knew from watching the cutscene with logan plus the fact that he's not loyal to the antieven crows which he served up until now i then have the option to recruit zevron into the party if i choose xevron's a fun guy the epitome of the roguish type with a silver tongue in brutal honesty i also know a great many jokes 12 massage techniques six different card games i do wonderful at parties no as always i'll touch more on his background later but for now i'll note that i enjoy being able to recruit someone who initially tried to kill me definitely adds a little more variety than the standard method of recruitment in these things so we make it back to the circle and ask the first enchanter for help who immediately dispatches his men to do just that when it's time to confront the demon i can choose to either send in morrigan win the mage who poisoned eamonn or i can try to convince the first enchanter to give it a whirl he does not buy it since my convincing skills could use a little brushing up still but the poisoner does want to try to make amends so i pick him and send him in when he gets to the vision of conor and tries to convince the demon to leave connor suddenly gets a lot hotter the next three or so fights consists of me fighting this desired demon and its minions which isn't too bad this jawand guy is pretty stacked on spells so it's really no issue until we get to the demon's true form in which it becomes pretty clear that standing my ground isn't going to work out here so the battle looks more like this [Music] yeah 1v1s in this game are not particularly enthralling to be honest it's the same kind of issue that we had with the ogre at the start except jiowan can actually heal himself despite having no potions so the demon does go down it just takes a while after it falls the cutscene that plays next is everyone burning the bodies of dead villagers and the like in a viking funeral which is an odd transition so suddenly after this we cut back to the interior of the castle where it seems like eamon might make it he's still out cold but he doesn't seem to be getting any worse teagan wants to know what we should do with jawwin though that he's gone from potential assassin to potential savior i tell them that they can do whatever they want with him and then [ __ ] on off back to camp the issue is that although red cliff is safe for now eamon is still comatose so that whole sacred artifact that can cure anything is something that we actually need to track down when we can to garner some more support here i'm pointed towards denarim for that issue so i'll get to that later down the line for now let's go kick my brother's face in in this episode of long face logan and sidekick how everyone's unhappy i have more news um yes should we not be fighting the darkspawn instead of each other the nobility should be brought into line and then the darkspawn defeated we may not have the manpower to face the darkspawn soon approached your lesions for support did he never marrick and i drove those bastards out did you kill kailyn kaelin's death was his own doing not much more to be said and so we find ourselves in the frostback mountains after mingling with the merchants out here who apparently deal with the dwarves in addition to sitting out here and just being cold we head further into my guy's home well here on the front steps is a messenger from logan who's demanding to get to the assembly in orzammar to beseech them for help the guard out front is not having it and gives him [ __ ] for trying so hard before turning to me and calling me kinslayer i dispute this title but it won't convince the guy obviously turns out that the king did indeed die from sadness or so it was reported and i have to present the warden treaty which is meant for the assembly's eyes only in order to bypass the guard well things are not looking good for ye old dwarf kingdom my younger brother bailin has descended the city into chaos as the old dwarf heromont from the start of the game who sent me out into the deep roads in the first place is now fighting his soon-to-be reign at every turn this has caused squabbling between the two groups to escalate into full-blown killings in the street as each side tries to take power so now the city is open to us which has us picking up some side quests and learning more about how the cast system and assembly works apparently when you're born your cast is determined and you can't move up from it no matter what you do the assembly is a group of 80 dwarves who happen to be lucky enough to be born into their cast one of those assembly dwarves is doing his damndest to rectify this old system and bring equality between the castes which seems like a much better system but ultimately likely won't happen it's interesting because some of the dwarves here definitely are aware of who i am and treat me accordingly usually with disdain others seem to have no idea who i am though that could just be a realistic thing where not every dwarf is aware of their leaders when they're working their asses off all day eventually we make our way to the diamond quarter with all of its nobles going about their lives our first stop is at lord harrelmont estate which has a guy out front going yeah well the world could end tomorrow due to the dark spawn and all but they ain't gonna stop us from trying to deal with your brother bailin today these guys truly have their [ __ ] together so the issue now is choosing between harrelmont and my brother now i personally think that my history pushes my guy to fight for heromont obviously but let's look at this whole thing as objectively as possible so bailin definitely played us right but this whole culture of backstabbing and playing the other nobles is literally in the opening scene for the dwarven noble it's a part of their culture and one could look at baylen's betrayal and usurping of the throne as a well-played move it's not so strange to think that our guy might respect this takeover as a well-executed method of doing what everyone does here additionally balin is a lot more radical and progressive of a candidate here he wants to encourage more trade possibly with the surface and he wants to allow castles dwarves to fight which has been unheard of until now and may actually prove useful against the darkspawn heromont however is a proponent of tradition he wants to encourage and serve the old ways the same ways which got me into this predicament he believes in that same old honor system that every other dwarven noble believes in while keeping the lower castes in their place he'd be perfectly fine with remaining in isolation cut off from the world without helping against the darkspawn but all that said he didn't stab me in the back the way that baylen did it's honestly a contest between my guy's personal interests and the good of the people because as much as i want to stick it to my brother because of what he did i think that his policies are the better way to go for the rest of the civilization as opposed to harrelmont's old ways so [ __ ] i came down here to kick ass and chew bubble gum and i'm all out of ass so i guess let's back out of the harrelmont route and go meet with my brother unfortunately meeting with him is an impossibility until i've proven my loyalty for obvious reasons i think that's the thing that's jabbing at me the most yeah yeah respect for baylen's five-head plays and all that but i really hate that my guy is getting looked at with disgust for something that he didn't do anyways the assembly is in complete chaos and that's not going to change until i step in so my first step to making that change is to expose heromont's bribes to a couple of assembly members as false this means showing two of them that harrelmon promised them the exact same land if they voted his way the problem is that like i said harimot is an honorable man and bringing these papers to the historical records area of the diamond quarter proves that these papers are forgeries but i mean if forgery is the straw that broke the camel's back here i imagine that slaying your brother and framing the other brother would be a lot bigger so whatever let's go fully ingratiate ourselves into the political process the first one goes off without a hitch but the second one's father is currently on an excavation run into the deep roads meaning that we'll have to go track him down with this info so that the vote will go bailon's way instead but before that i head over to dust town which is the poorest part of orzammar and is where the castles dwarf starts if you choose that origin this place is a [ __ ] dump and if there was ever a testament to there needing to be more equality between the different groups of dwarves it's this pit there are a lot of side quests in orzammar and dust town keeps piling them on most of it is busy work but i honestly don't mind them as much because of their premises like there's a dwarf who wants to go study magic at the circle despite not being capable of using magic there's a shady guy who wants you to buy lyrium from him so that you can go sell it to a guy that he knows is interested on the surface there's a group of thugs who moved up from dust town and are now intimidating shop owners in the common area for protection money because of the chaos that's broken out with the current power struggle the list goes on and on and even the quests and events that are less impressive story-wise are at least short and sweet so it's off to the deep roads again it's the same route more or less as before so nothing new there when we give the lord the news he agrees to not vote for harrelmot before bioware thankfully allows us to fast travel back to the diamond quarter with him and so we finally meet with my brother after all this time getting to confront him about his betrayals and yeah he makes some pretty solid points about how dwarven politics work stating that i was already positioning myself to overtake our older brother by winning over the assembly but more importantly bailon understands the threat of the darkspawn and is extremely eager to help out the surface in any way that he can when he claims the throne but first we gotta introduce some law into this hell hull so those thugs from before who were bearing down on the shopkeeper yeah that's kinda gotta stop they're part of a lawless group known as the carta and bailin wants me to go take them down before i do so though i stopped by the historical records area to pick up some more quests and chat up one of the historians now i won't dive into everything here but the history that's laid out by this so-called shaper who shapes the memories of the dwarven race is really fascinating to listen to there is a lot of effort put into fleshing out the dwarves and i can't help but really immerse myself in learning about how orzomar came to be about the paragons about the other dwarven cities which are scattered throughout the underground and about the great stone golems that they used to use to fight for them in battle the history is really fun to hear about and i can't help but continue to jack bioware off for the cool [ __ ] that they've whipped up in this game so the main thing about the karda is that their leader is extremely paranoid we find out from a beggar type that she uses engraved finger bones to allow admission into the karda which we eventually procure after blowing out some thugs who try to jump us the funny thing about all of this is that these hideout entrances are described by three or so separate people as random walls that people suddenly disappear into but the entrance itself is just a big locked door so i don't know what these guys are smoking but it's gotta be some good [ __ ] either way we run through the cartel layer which is a massive sprawling ship fest filled with traps and enemies the level layout is um it's really boring the loot can be decent sometimes but the fights all generally play out the same i will note though that there's an injury system in this game i know we're like an hour and 20 minutes into this thing and i'm pointing out combat basics but yeah if someone has a whoopsie in battle and snaps their big toes off then they might not move as well or if they have a cracked skull or dislocated uterus or whatever then they might not be as accurate this is where injury kits come in as long as you don't suck at the game on normal difficulty you'll forget that these exist and when the going does get tough you'll have a thousand kids at your disposal it's an okay system but honest to god i usually fight with injuries for like 20 minutes or so before i realize the little red square on my hud isn't a buff i guess that's a complaint i have this game was meant for a windows 98 machine attached to a commodore 1084 crt monitor so the hud hasn't been updated to accommodate anything from the past decade which is a bit sad i don't know why i'm complaining about this now either but here we are eventually we make it to the leader of the karda who tells me that she's going to make me pay for killing her men i point out that she has no men left and she goes oh yeah watch this and summons like six men astonishingly not a big threat though i also didn't realize that she was using them as a distraction to harvest morrigan's kidneys so i have to chase her down and fashion her into a leather jacket before realizing that the biggest threat in this entire room is the 23 traps that are laid haphazardly around the joint now the downside to sinking all of my points into strength and decks is that my character doesn't see so good but the upside is that he's built like a cannonball with all of his armor so while the others may fall to traps my guy gets back up after falling the traps either way little italy is no more and we jog back up to the surface after a hearty round of healing snapped femurs with a small box of scooby snacks so you remember the proving grounds yeah you can do that again the whole thing is a breeze though i need to start watching morrigan since she keeps getting her staff shoved up her ass after our arena excursion we run back to bailin who has the next task ready as always remember those gollums well they were an invention by a paragon who was ridiculously skilled when it came to crafting oh yeah a paragon is a dwarf who has done some ridiculously crazy awesome deeds for the dwarven empire the dwarven race the dwarfs they're usually voted on by the assembly so so a paragon is like a hero that uh does great things for orzammar yeah the knowledge of how to invent the golems was lost hundreds of years ago and a new paragon named branca recently took an entire house with her to the deep roads to try and find the anvil of the void which is where the golems were created and now we're to go to try to seek her out in the hopes that her throwing in with bailin will auto win over the assembly on our way to the deep roads we run into our final vanilla game companion introducing steve bloom uh [ __ ] augrin augren a drunken mess of a dwarf who cuts us off to ask if we've seen a grey warden running around i ask him to describe the warden in question to which he describes me perfectly and then states that he hasn't seen anyone matching that description after pointing out that i may indeed match that description he settles for me with a sigh before explaining that he's the only one in the city who's been trying to look for branca at this stage well until now he knows what she looks like and where she was looking because he's her husband and he wants to pool our knowledge to try and find her combat wise ogren is pretty straightforward he's a berserker which is the class that i've been wanting this whole time for my guy and he hits like a mack truck when he gets going i don't necessarily want to replace liliana with him but i feel like i might want to here just for the plot by my ancestors this is a wonderful gift as we start down our path to branca the game actually tries to save agron's life you see as we're fighting the game crashes but i foolishly relaunched it because hey why wouldn't i unfortunately this causes morrigan to actually kill augren right after the fight a handsome man with women fawning over him it must be very difficult for you to handle i do not blame you your envy however especially considering that the chances of any woman who is not struck both blind and dumb of providing you the attention you crave is slapped quiet you you can't get under my skin were i you i would simply give up all hope of knowing another woman at all or have you already a wise move if so i forget i said anything trust me dwarf i already have my god she just [ __ ] murdered him if i had known i i wouldn't have taken him jesus christ so this next leg of the journey is the most harrowing yet it's constant battling of darkspawn little raptor enemies and spiders and it [ __ ] sucks man i mean it's not difficult it's just a slog of dungeon crawling and as much as this game is done right the combat system is starting to get flimsier by the minute and i know that some people are enthralled by this kind of combat hell i wouldn't say that i mind it honestly it's just not quite there for me personally to keep long stretches of it interesting it's kind of a hard thing to balance because my preference of combat would entail a more action-based combo kind of fighting i'd likely use a controller and just enjoy slicing things up but my issue is that when combat systems tend to gravitate towards the more real-time oriented action they completely drop the good stuff that the older more point-and-click combat provides in this instance it's the tactic system what i would ideally want is something closer to a less quick time aventish god of war or maybe something souls-like but with the tactic system retained for my party i know that's just not what this style of game is and i do respect it but this is just my two cents with my own preferences at any rate we start to stumble into the area where branca is supposed to be and wind up taking out more spiders and some spiritual ancestors of various dwarfs eventually we make it to a journal which says something roughly along the lines of hey i know you've been fighting for an hour straight to get to this point but i went to an even more dangerous location that's well known to be teeming with darkspawn hell it might even be the source of them love branca [ __ ] great so we press on only to witness the cutscene from my earlier dream play out in real time the dragon age origin roars and spits hot fire all over leagues of darkspawn warriors as they march onward towards something mr origen then flies off further into the cave while we sit here at the start of it man i can't believe bioware ripped off skyrim like this as we approach the bridge a group of dwarves engage some darkspawn and a pretty big battle plays out afterwards one of the dwarves in charge here states coldly that the paragon is dead and everyone knows it that him and his men hold back the darkspawn from advancing further and that my quest is a fruitless endeavor so we charge across the bridge and take out swarms of darkspawn and he comes up with his men and goes yeah you fight good but you're still an idiot thanks brother so it's more delving which goes on and on i mean the setting is cool at least eventually we stumble upon a survivor from branca's house who has gone completely insane she mutters a vague recalling of events which have happened down here stating that the men went off and died in battle when they became aware that they were corrupted by the blight she then says that the women weren't hurt physically but that they were forced to feed on the blight in some way or another before presumably transforming into something it's hard to make out exactly what she's saying but she does make it clear that she's been fighting off completely losing her mind this whole time she does mention that branca has already submitted to the blight or something of that nature before she runs screaming off further into the tunnels i do have a slight issue with all of this and it kind of makes sense given that this was ever an option but ogren has remained silent for the past handful of conversations with others down here he's not yelling about the whereabouts of his wife or demanding answers or pleading with anyone he's just quiet i kind of wish i'd brought liliana so far just because she could at least have picked these chests open down here as you continue this goose chase more is revealed about what these people had to go through like i said the men died immediately but then the darkspawn forced the women to eat their loved ones one of them in particular wound up tearing off her husband's face and drinking his blood which is certainly an image as this woman continued to eat the flesh of the dead her body grew and changed turning gray with blight until she had fully transformed only to begin producing more darkspawn what you've just heard is the reproduction process of the darkspawn they need living females to force the blight into corrupting them until they become a brood mother which produce more darkspawn you want to see what a broodmother looks the like flooded our tunnels with lava wait no not that jesus christ dude i am never gonna get used to that scene but yeah these things are um man you know what the best part about all this is if they just simply surprised us with this thing as we rounded the corner yeah it would have been off-putting but it would have been more of a what the [ __ ] moment rather than a moment of horror the way the dialogue was paced so perfectly as you crawl your way through these sacks of burbling flesh bags describing the process of someone becoming a brood mother god what a fantastic way to introduce something so grotesque hats off to bioware on this bit they absolutely crushed it the broodmother fight itself is tough but fair morrigan still isn't as much of a healer yet in my party as she is a controller entity and you can't control much here besides the one or two gen lock soldiers which show up here and there so i actually had to pop over to her and give her a few commands while also playing a lot more of an active role when it came to potion popping and the like it was a fun fight and if i had been more passive and less tactful in the way that i approached it i would have easily been wiped after this we thankfully don't have to march another mile to get to branca instead she leaps out completely fine and starts talking down to us how can i phrase this delicately huh oh yeah bronco's a complete [ __ ] she dismissively notes her husband stating that he's a useless drunk and that i must be his newest errand boy sent down here for her she's clearly obsessed with getting to the anvil which is apparently locked tight behind tons of traps that were invented by the former paragon himself this means that she doesn't care about returning to the surface or who sits on the throne all she cares about is getting the anvil operating again and sees all others as expendable i imagine that when she began this journey she probably did care more about others but at some stage the corruption down here must have been too much for her to humanely bear so she simply cut that part out of her in order to accomplish what she set out to do without letting the burden of all of the lives lost weigh on her soul it does make sense but i don't have to like her anymore because of it what has this place done to you i remember marrying a girl you could talk to for one minute and see her brilliance i am your paragon huh weird answer the next stretch of road has broncha locking us down to one path which we're then forced to go down while fighting waves of darkspawn all while she's monologuing at us so i may have given her the benefit of the doubt because it sounds like she may have always been like this it really is hard to tell especially when she goes on about using her own people as live bait to test the traps throughout the anvil's outskirts when they began to give up on her and insist that they return back to orzammar she allowed for them to be killed off and transformed by the darkspawn so that she could then use the darkspawn to test the traps instead as a never-ending supply of test subjects it's wickedly evil in the service of something noble and i hate to admit that i can actually see the raw logic in her thinking and so we press onward fighting off golems and wading through a trap room filled with poison at one point we fight a boss consisting of these stone faces which rotate and spit out spirits when a spirit is slain it activates these four anvils sending the spirits from the anvils back into the stone faces causes damage to the monument it takes a total of eight hits two on each side to silence the thing for good it's an awesome boss fight i enjoyed it quite a lot and finally we reached the end where the former paragon stands reincarnated as a golem he begins speaking to me telling me the story of how he came to be this way you see he did discover how to create these golems but what he didn't tell anyone besides the king at the time was that they were forged using living beings at first they only used dwarves who were willing but then the king wanted more and he forced the paragon to use tons of unwilling sacrifices to create ever more golems when the paragon refused to do it anymore the king had his own apprentices fashion him into a golem instead but what they didn't know was that a control rod was essential to making a golem obey without question so the paragon fully retained his personality as he got full metal alchemisted into the iron golem soon after he shut down the forge anyway but was unable to destroy the anvil since no gollum is allowed to touch the thing he implores me to help him destroy the anvil before branca comes running in screaming to tell me not to this is our major choice of the area on one hand you can help this twisted individual to create more golems on the sacrifice of others using them to create soldiers with the strength of a dozen men these golems will be immensely helpful against the darkspawn at the cost of potentially innocent lives but on the other hand you can help to end this whole thing and prevent any other lives from being forced into gollum servitude and after weighing the options i just can't help but side with the golem carat in here branca has been on a war path and her staying here to create more golems would 100 result in innocence being sacrificed for this golem army maybe a more pragmatic grey warden would see this being the way to go but i just can't do it morrigan of course disapproves but i have to contest this one because she's like oh think of the power of creation that you're forgoing but it's like for someone with freedom as their number one priority would you personally like to be shoved into a golem and be made to obey i actually get to tell her just that and she only disapproves a little bit man what a stubborn character agreen obviously disapproves but his dialogue says otherwise he calls his wife out for being so nutty about this whole ordeal before fighting with me against her the fight itself has us fighting more gollums and branca herself who has some tricks up her sleeve for the event she goes down after a bit of persuading before i return back to keradine to ask what's next with the matter of the anvil finally decided keradine asks if we'd like a boon from him before the anvil is destroyed i ask agren what he would want seeing as it's his wife that we killed to get here oddly enough agron asks if keradine can bring branca back to life as a gollum i thought this was a strange request but i guess definitely a human one carradine of course declined saying that he wouldn't do it even if it were possible so he makes us a crown instead for a king of our choosing before we run up to the anvil and obliterate it once and for all it's kind of weird that a single hammer strike from the anvil's hammer would destroy it i mean it's literally made for getting hit with a hammer but oh well semantics i guess caridin then thanks us one last time before flinging himself into the lava below finally bringing an end to his thousand-year existence when we return with the crown and choose bailin he's crowned in a very flashy fashion before he stands up and orders the execution of heromont ever the efficient individual baylen doesn't want his new kingdom divided by any naysayers again i hate to admit it but the guy's right this might have been a different situation had the darkspawn not been rising up but as things stand this is probably for the best though it's hard to say that he's not taking pleasure in the situation when all is done king balin pledges his men to our cause and sends me away with a mace from house idukken god that was a [ __ ] long ride i am glad that it's over but i have to say that i did have a good time all in all let's head back to camp and at long last finally crack into what each of my companions is all about there is a lot to delve into and even then i may not be covering every little thing about them but i'll try my best with what i've got and head forward from there morrigan stands in camp looking like a diablo 2 class ready to be selected being the loner that she is this setup makes perfect sense a lot of what makes her the way that she is stems directly from her mother flemeth because honestly morgan's childhood seems as though it might border on child abuse at times nearly everything that she tells you and others about the things that her mother said to her seem to be needlessly cruel and unusual which probably explains why morrigan is the way that she is today my mother told me stories too she was the one who kindled my love of the old tales and legends my mother's stories curdled my blood and haunted my dreams no little girl wants to hear about the wilder men her mother took to her bed using them till they were spent then killing them no little girl wants to be told that this is also expected of her once she comes of age i um i see no you don't you really don't the truth is flemeth was good at raising a survivor in a chunk of land that was uncivilized and surrounded by danger templars would hunt them down seeing as they wouldn't submit to the chantry and become part of the circle and flemeth would send her young daughter out as bait to run screaming into the woods which would eventually lead these templars to their deaths it's both the reason that she has such disdain for alistar and the reason that she became so adept at learning how to survive in an otherwise dangerous place while simultaneously being able to blend in with human society and morgan proves that time and time again when she regales you with tales of how she ventured into human civilizations and taught herself how to speak to people properly and the like not that i did not have trouble there are things about human society which have always puzzled me such as the touching why all the touching for a simple greeting she's fun to talk to because she's extremely intelligent to a degree where she questions why people would showcase very human traits while simultaneously being able to manipulate them to a point where they never suspected her of being a witch that said she obviously has a lot of issues when it comes to helping people liliana speaks of the legend of flemeth the witch who was once a beautiful maiden who men across the land sought after in her version of the tale flemeth married a lord and then fell in love with a bard choosing to run away with her new found love into the wilds years passed before the two were lured out by the news of her husband falling ill when they went to pay their respects they killed her lover shackled her in a high tower and then she took revenge by fusing with a demon and slaying everyone in the castle morrigan's story is a bit more interesting she claims that her mother was initially married to the bard who was offered a large sum of money by the lord to sell her to him she actually agreed and the arrangement was made before the lord had the bard killed and took her for free instead she spoke with the spirits and had the lord killed before retreating into the wilds where she lived out her days soon it was stated that she raised an army of wild men to attack the civilized ones and a great hero stopped the army while driving her back into the wilds flemeth claims that this never happened instead stating that the hero killed his own people to gain power and then blamed the civil war on her to make himself look good it's an interesting divide in lore and it's hard to say what exactly is true but these tales only further reflect on why morrigan is the way that she is now this is a bit of a sidestep from describing morrigan's character but it's the reason why i even bothered describing her mother flemeth in more detail after you discover a grimoire which belonged to flemeth morrigan begins pouring over it in her off time and she discovers that the reason why her mother has these myths about raising countless daughters and that she's lived for hundreds of years is because her mother uses those daughters as a vessel to keep herself young when morrigan finds out that she was nothing more than a shell for her mother to live on in she's understandably furious she immediately lays out a plan for you to go slay her mother without her so that she can't instantly possess morrigan's body when she falls when you go to confront flemeth she's already wary of your approach she doesn't deny the charges but she does chastise you for blindly obeying morrigan your options are to fight her or to simply bring her grimoire back to morrigan and lie about you killing flemeth i opt for fighting her which is uh she will earn what she takes i'd have it no other way yeah so at one point i learned that this [ __ ] atari ai dragon is really bad at dealing with someone near it the dark souls method of staying near the legs and rolling when it tries to intercept you holds true and eventually my platoon of archers stand back while i pretend that i did something to it while striking the final blow honestly [ __ ] this fight though jesus [ __ ] took me like 45 minutes morrigan is a cruel woman with a soft side that rarely comes out because above all else freedom as a person and practical decisions reign supreme but that said when you do manage to get closer those soft moments are more noticeable she goes from answering your questions with curiosity to being super awkward about interpreting a new emotion for her she starts by explaining stuff like being a child who was full of wonder when it came to normal people in a civilization at one point she wound up stealing a gem encrusted mirror from a noble because she was fascinated with the object her mother smashed the mirror on the ground and scolded her for potentially exposing their hideout over a trinket it's interesting because morrigan then claims that she's grateful for that lesson even if it did break her heart as a child what's even more interesting is that taking her mother's side nets you less affinity than sympathizing with her younger self even if she agrees with her mother's stance now it just goes to show that even if she does come off as harsh and practical she still wants to feel sympathized for to some degree either way your physical relationship with her begins with her telling you that she's just acting on her desires and that it has nothing to do with love because i don't think that the concept is really registered with her at this stage in her life beyond a very practical and logical view of the emotion but that doesn't last for very long as it becomes blatantly obvious that morrigan cares for you on a deeper level even if she won't admit it she gives your character a ring stating bluntly that she can locate you with it if you get lost she then immediately goes uh nah not that it's out of sentimentality or anything it's just that uh you know you're useful to our cause that's all sure buddy i understand eventually morrigan outright admits that she loves you but proclaims it to be a foolish emotion that's only a hindrance you can agree with her and tank your relationship or you can insist that you love her too which she awkwardly mumbles about you being an idiot over she's basically an anime one whole anime but she's a pretty cute one at times for all of the [ __ ] that she blatantly can't seem to wrap her head around all in all morrigan is probably one of the most complex characters in this game she is agonizing to listen to when dealing with others and she shows her disapproval when it comes to literally any assistance towards otherwise helpless people it's unfortunate because i could see why this would cause someone to not even want to try to get close to her but when you do it actually turns out that the harpy does have a heart making your relationship with her that much more complicated on the surface alistair is just a goofball who knows that his sarcasm grates on people but he also has a kind heart and tends to keep people's best interests in mind that's what i'm here for to deliver unpleasant news and witty one-liners the man doesn't really keep too much to himself if there's something on his mind he'll tell you which makes it pretty easy to gain influence with him albeit in small bursts he's actually pretty damn cute in the way that he lights up when you chat with him about certain topics such as commiserating with him over the loss of duncan he's not very fond of killing others or threatening violence the true picture of a paladin albeit with a bit more sass and a bit less respect for the chantry itself while not the most complex character i found him to be a pretty solid picture of a good friend in a universe that has you diving into some pretty horrible places he does have some deep-rooted issues or i guess he did rather like we found out he's the bastard child of the former king the half-brother of kaelyn though he doesn't stated at the time that i talked to him instead claiming that he was the bastard of a nobleman who wanted nothing to do with him his mother died when he was young and he wound up in the care of aryl eamon as stated previously eventually the aryl fell in love with arlessa isolde who alistair thought hated him simply because she thought that alistar was secretly eamon's son at age 10 the arl felt like he had no choice but to send alistair off to the chantry to be raised as a templar which caused the young alistar to hate his adoptive father for a while he actually got so upset that he smashed the only memento he had of his mother a pendant from her which shattered you can actually find this pendant fully repaired by the aurel in redcliffe castle allister himself is actually pretty mature about this as he claims that he was a very stupid and short-sighted boy eventually the earl stopped visiting alistair as he would constantly give eamon grief for sending him to the chantry every time he visited from there alistair would consistently make trouble for the chantry and he would be punished all the time for it via having to clean and scrub things that needed cleaning he hated the chantry as the poor families thought that he was some smug noble while the rich families made fun of him for being a bastard but he pushed on and took solace in the discipline of training eventually getting rescued from his misery by duncan who took him in as a warden the wardens were like a new family for alistar he claims that with all of them having the same kind of story of being cut off from their real families that they bonded together pretty closely of course this kind of talk also causes alistar to sink back into the depression of losing it all after the good times that he had which is understandable but it does get to be a bit of a drag at times and you can choose to cruelly give alistar [ __ ] for moping around instead of comforting him if you're a heartless bastard also he hasn't had sex i mean there's nothing wrong with that but his squeamishness and awkwardness around the subject is adorable and he immediately takes the whole line of oh well i wouldn't want to rush into it and we might all die anyways and um can we move on but the most jarring news that we get from alistar which they don't tell you until after you've joined the wardens is that the darkspawn blood which you consumed will eventually kill you the average lifespan after the joining for a warden is 30 years which is insane i mean i'm actually not sure how long dwarves and elves in the dragon age universe live for i think elves lived for a really long time though but it's typically longer than humans in other fantasy media dying after 30 years seems cruel for them if the same rule applies when you make it back from redcliffe you can grill alistar for the reason why he kept the part where he's the heir to the throne from you to which he states that everyone always treats him so differently after finding out and that he was afraid to tell you because of it he doesn't want anything to do with the throne or inheriting it he just wants to fade into obscurity which is something that many people don't want at all in this world eventually the last of alistar's worries lies in denarem where he found out that his half-sister is currently living he's actually never met her which is um kind of an interesting oversight by bioware seeing as we saw her in his fade dream when we went to rescue him but he wants to check in on her so i suppose we'll get to that in a bit but beyond this outline alistair is just a big talker he loves his gossip and hates morrigan giving me [ __ ] for growing close to her while also giving input on some of the other members in the camp he's a good guy who's a bit of a doofus but i enjoy his character a lot did you remember me mentioning wow i'm more used to people not really listening when i go on about things i initially found liliana's personality to be boring dresses fine dresses and furs and shoes of course one can't mingle with nobility with bad shoes you see by the shoes living with those ridiculous trends was worth it for the shoes the shoes made in olleh were exquisite there's 30 shoes but sometimes a girl just wants to have pretty feet oh i could talk about shoes all day i don't know if that's controversial or anything but she's a religious girl who used to travel around as a bard and got into trouble before joining the chantry she didn't quite get along with the chantry and found a lot of their ideas to be wrong in her eyes but she was at least at peace there i don't know her whole joining story of oh man one time i had a bad dream and then when i woke up a flower bloomed on a dead bush and now i just want to kill the darkspawn i don't know it just seems like they were trying to give her some reason for coming with you like alistair she never really knew her biological parents instead being raised by a noblewoman in the foreign nation of france now that said this was just my initial impression as time goes on it becomes evident that she's definitely hiding something that she doesn't want to talk about she glosses over her fighting skill expertise chalking it up to simply gaining experience while traveling around before curtly ending the conversation pressing her for further details reveals that there's a difference between a singing minstrel and a bard at least in orlais the country that she's from sure she can spin a tale with the best of them but she talks about how bards are specifically utilized as spies who infiltrate and steal and gain information however they can and it becomes apparent that that's exactly how she came into the skill set that she has i still wasn't super impressed by her character at this stage but she is fun to listen to when it comes to various stories and legends and all that well eventually she spits out even more backstory it turns out that while she was doing her bardic spying she came upon some sealed documents that she was told to return to her mentor after killing a dude for them curiosity got the better of her and she decided to open them well it turns out that her mentor was not only selling information to orlais about other countries but she was also selling info about orlais to other countries liliana wasn't as concerned about her country's secrets being leaked as she was about her mentor being in danger also i believe her mentor and her were lovers so that's probably playing into it so she confronted her mentor with her worries who told her that she would be fine that her double dealing was in the past while one day some guards approached liliana who showed her the documents which had been altered to implicate her as the agent her mentor had sold her out and she was tortured for it and branded a traitor eventually she fled at the first chance that she got which is when she found a new purpose in religion and the chantry that actually does make a lot more of an interesting character in my eyes or at least a lot more interesting of a background story and while she wanted revenge she was afraid of her mentor's skills this whole ordeal is actually depicted more in depth in one of the dlc's in which you get to play as liliana during her betrayal but i'll get to that some other time at one point liliana's mentor sends a group of mercenaries after us which we dispatch the murk in charge spits out that the person who hired him is in denerim which is where logan is holed up so much like alistar's quest we'll go over what happens there later as it's still pretty far down the line at this stage for now i'd say that liliana certainly has a lot of unique stories and an interesting background but it doesn't really make her personality any more interesting in my eyes she's not a bad character by any means but i would just rather listen to what she says about other areas and people rather than hear her talk about herself i guess i guess the biggest thing for me personally is that she just trusts way too easily for someone who was betrayed by somebody who she trusted the most it just feels like oh i don't really have a character and then all of a sudden oh my god i was betrayed and all this stuff and you would think that this would cause her character to be more suspicious of you and she's not she's very open immediately trustful i don't know it doesn't feel like it actually affected her even though she said she was tortured it sounds like a traumatic experience but her character doesn't actually really reflect this stuff that's a good boy right there now i referred to sten before as someone i really liked as a character i said this because he's so much of an anti-social person that i can't help but laugh at his answers sitting as you observed qunari have no kings little patience for endless questions yes getting answers out of him is like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone and his very curt and annoyed demeanor only makes me want to ask him more questions of course if you want him to actually like you you have to take most of his direct answers at face value and move on before he'll actually talk to you sten is a member of the qunari army whose leader demanded that he go out and find out what the blight is after seeing the battle where kaelin fell he got his answer but he couldn't report back to his people for reasons unknown as time goes on sten begins to demand more answers for me such as how i intend to stop the blight when i answer him he claims that the great wardens are less impressive than he once thought the approval route here is telling him that you don't give a [ __ ] which is always fun eventually after gaining more approval he admits that you're not as immature as he initially thought and tells you what happened up until the moment that he was caged so he was sent here with a group of soldiers his brothers as he calls them they were to investigate the blight and were getting nowhere suddenly they were jumped by the darkspawn and everyone was slain except for him when he woke up on the battlefield his sword was missing a qunari soldier's sword is his lifeblood and no soldier would ever return home without it as sten puts it he also claims that his sword is specific to him that it was made for him if he were to return home without it he would be strung up more or less as someone who was useless as a qunari i let him know that we'll go look for it as he marks vaguely where the thing is supposed to be the reason why sten killed the farming family was out of panic an almost ptsd moment the darkspawn battle was traumatizing and the loss of his comrades and sword put him into a mentally weakened state when he asked the family where his sword was they claimed that they never found one on him he did believe them but something inside of him snapped causing him to murder them he knew that it wasn't right and he regretted it immediately it's a tough situation because murdering a family out of grief is objectively not a great move but actually getting to know sten makes the man seem like someone misguided or a victim of circumstance still i would have to say for as much as sten exudes this machismo of soldiers are strong and do their job without hesitation this mental lap seems like something that would go against that at this stage sten is talking a bit more asking him what he likes about ferelden is especially entertaining to me there is interesting food here you have a thing it doesn't have a word in the qunari tongue little baked things like bread but sweet and crumbly yes we have no such things in our lands this should be remedied but a lot of what he has to say about ferelden really shows the way that his people think he claims that the farmers in ferelden all want to be merchants that the merchants want to be nobles and that the nobles want to be warriors even if what they're all best at is farming selling and ruling respectively which is an oddly deep way of thinking about things i mean it's true and that's the way a lot of people work in real life too it's a complex chain of thought for someone who's content with being simple his lot in life is being a soldier which is all that he wants he sees no reason to try and open a shop or become an entertaining bard if he's best at fighting though oddly enough with this thought process he could likely become a philosopher as well eventually we nab sten's sword after running through a couple of npcs who moved it around sten is grateful but doesn't quite know how to express it he then states bluntly as always that he will stay with you to put an end to the blight so that he can report back that it was nothing to worry about he calls you a great soldier stating that he misjudged you at first before ominously hinting at the prospect that the qunari will one day invade ferelden and that he doesn't relish the idea of meeting you on the battlefield when that time comes overall sten is a unique character who seems to be the opposite of liliana in many ways where liliana has non-stop tales to tell with a rather dull personality sten's dull personality is almost a strength of his you can tell that he's been through a lot but he has no interest in spilling it to you beyond recent events underneath it all lies a character who likes what he does and finds purpose in what he is and i appreciate him a win is old i'm not saying that to be mean it's just the first thing she tells you she claims that she's probably close to death but that the events in the world continue to demand her to keep pushing on she sounds like someone who just wants to get to a stage where she can settle down and live the remainder of her life and peace but she's seen a lot during her time as a circle mage with abominations being one of the key things that she focuses on lately she's pondered her own existence as someone who could potentially turn into an abomination if she slips up and it bothers her because someone who normally is the epitome of a great mage could suddenly become that way with almost no warning it's gotten her to thinking about whether or not that process could be reversed or if someone's humanity could be preserved despite their physical form becoming that of an abomination it's certainly food for thought when it comes to the whole blood mage phenomenon i guess i never really got into what turns a mage into an abomination the basic outline is that in order to create one a demon has to possess someone with great magical ability the resulting strength of the abomination is actually based on the strength of the demon who possessed the mage though which explains why we were able to slice through the basic [ __ ] ones in the tower all mages can become susceptible to this transformation if they find themselves in the fade and are weak willed enough to become possessed but blood mages are particularly susceptible to it the big thing about wynn is that she seems to ask more questions of me rather than me of her and this works out sometimes as her questions tend to lead into what she thinks of things as if i had asked her instead other times however this line of questioning has some odd responses for example she notes that i was truly meant to be a grey warden and my answers consist of stuff like i used to be nobility and now i'm nothing or i just want to kill my brother or i actually prefer this life and sleep well because of it i choose the last one and her response is well chin up friend you survived it can't be that bad being a warden right which is very obviously a response to the other options instead of what i said and this extends to quite a bit of her dialogue such as her asking about what being a grey warden means to me and the options are all kind of samey but none of them are what she's looking for so she ramrods her answer your way no matter what and it really takes me out of the game more than other characters do most of the other characters are interesting to a point where i don't question the bioware line of dialogue choice where the game is going to give you the same answer no matter what and that's a good thing but wind really drives home the point that most of the lesser choices that you make really don't affect much because she's asking a voiceless character what they think and then reacting to it the same way but i've lectured enough for today i should stop before i wear out my welcome i don't know i don't like win like i get that she's ancient and she knows a lot about the ways of the world well no actually it's more that she's well she's like opposite day morrigan on many levels where morrigan will go on about being free and independent while also being cruel and callous towards others wynn is compassionate and fights to protect others pushing the idea of responsibility above all else but she's also the picture of a doting grandmother one who sticks her nose in the affairs of others and tells them what she believes is best for them this was already pretty bad with her ideas of what a warden is supposed to be but it becomes particularly bad when you become more involved with morrigan as wynn starts insisting that she doesn't care about you and that she'd easily use you for her own ends she calls you an irresponsible child if you tell her to shove it and then she preaches that someone with as much power and responsibility as i have must end relationships and choose to reject love if they look at all to be detrimental to my mission and even if this is true the worst part about all of this is that wynn later tells you that she was wrong and that she didn't realize just how in love you were and how morrigan loves you back the amount of backpedaling just makes her seem more foolish than wise even if she did backpedal into a more understanding position because realistically she is right about morrigan using me to her own ends she's just annoying to me and her harping drives me up the wall because there's no emotional substance behind her logic no personality or understanding about her incessant nagging of my choices sure she tells you of the time that she was a moody teenager who hated being confined to the circle but then she goes yeah so i ran away and then i came back and talked to a priest and then i understood that with great power comes great responsibility it's just not a good way to get your point across to someone as the average person is going to shut down when their detractor doesn't empathize at all with a choice that they disagree with i will note that at one stage win collapses on the path that we're walking she thought that she died but no dice on that one turns out that when she was a little younger she wound up actually dying when she was attempting to exercise a demon out of her assistant when she biffed it a friendly spirit took hold of her body and brought her back to life she has no idea why the spirit did what it did but she does note that she's always been very much attuned to the fade not fearing it but accepting it and since then this spirit has extended her lifespan for an unknown time every time it starts to weaken every time it starts to weaken she collapses like this it's a decent twist on her character as something that she's experienced and it's definitely welcome but i still just don't enjoy her demeanor i guess so i guess if i were to summarize win i'd say that she's an intelligent being who's bad at getting other people to understand her points she found it easier to go through her life of self-sacrifice and is now trying to push that idea onto you as she's always looked up to the grey wardens as legendary figures she tries to shape you to blend in with those myths but only knows how to do it by saying that you have a lot to live up to it's a world view that works for her but not for everyone else and it makes it frustrating to listen to her drone on and on about these same general topics over and over in an effort to create a responsible little warden so you had better listen to me because i swear if i should fall before the end and you don't seem to be doing things properly i'll get up again to give you a good finger wagging zevron is an interesting piece of work he has all the joking manner of alistar combined with the straightforwardness of morrigan or stan as much as you would expect him to be some edgy boy brooding in a corner he's much more suited to standing out to get people to drop their guards one of the first things that he tells you is that the assassins that he used to serve would have you believe that their trade skills are some ominous shrouded mystery that takes years and years of hard training but the truth in his words is that all you really need to know is how to kill someone and have the desire to do so he claims that the biggest thing that you can do is get the first strike off to make the battle much more in your favor which is ironic considering his method of jumping you was to attack from the front and have some archers off to the side i mean really i can think of a dozen other ways off the top of my head where the jump on us would have been much more effective but semantics aside zev has a pretty wide array of knowledge in the art of killing and he makes sure to pad that knowledge with poisons for that extra edge zevron was bought at the age of seven sold to the crows for three gold pieces i believe he had no idea what he was doing but quickly learned while being pitted against other slaves in contests of skill eventually he became a full-fledged antieven crow and with that came the respect and fear from ordinary people in addition to whatever material things he could desire he describes it as being in a gilded cage that the things were nice but that he was forced into the life that he found himself in so when he got the opportunity to bolt for the first time ever he took it he's still not sure what exactly he wants for his life but he does know that he'd likely always be an assassin and that he's happier where he is now away from the crows but for as much as zevron complains about the crows he absolutely loves his homeland of antiva he misses the warmth the desert meeting the ocean the smell of leather from the part of town where his apartment was he's just a fun character to listen to albeit not a particularly deep one at least not right now his tales from the past are funny and intriguing but it seems that that's all there is to him as a character beyond his roguish flirting with your warden in fact i'd almost suspect that he would sooner kill me off after earning my trust with how direct he is about the lessons that he's picked up over his adventures i was sent to kill a mage who had been meddling in politics after i killed her guard she got down on her hands and knees and begged for her life rather aptly i might add so i joined her in the carriage for the night and left the next morning the woman had actually convinced me to speak to the cross on her behalf what can i say i was young and foolish at the time then as i was kissing her goodbye to return to antiva city she slipped on the threshold and fell backwards out of the carriage broke her neck shame really but at least it happened quickly my master was very impressed that i had done such a fine job of making it look like an accident at first glance this is really all there is to zev which would be totally fine because again not every character needs to be extraordinarily deep now i do know that there is more to him beyond this and a lot of this is just first impression stuff but for now i'm going to have to put that off and circle back to him later adding any additional info and impressions as they come up i'll probably have less to say about agreeing just due to the history that we've already been through but to put it bluntly agron is a big pile of drunken [ __ ] i mean a lovable and funny one but one nonetheless he's pretty much always been a drunkard who's always excessively horny and ready to fight it's actually kind of impressive how big of a mismatch him and branca were though who knows how she was before becoming obsessed with the anvil throughout our journey through orzammar and the deep roads agron would drool aloud over morrigan hint at her and i banging and laugh at alistair for being a virgin i hope you're not referring to alistair him does he even like girls i believe the matter is still up for debate i'm right here you know anyway you and the grey warden do you actually have a question dwarf or is it your intention simply to lear and drool stick with the classics he's not a particularly good person by any means which actually adds a little color to the party in the same vein that morrigan or sten does once you got that i tell you the ladies love it when you're all mysteriously angry for no reason trust me he does have one redeeming factor in my eyes and that he never gave up looking for branca but you could also just assume that he was just desperately horny at that stage it's worth noting that branca had been cheating on him with the dwarven girl who lost her mind in the deep roads but he also had been cheating on her with a waitress in orsamar so whatever i guess apparently he [ __ ] something up and the waitress wound up heading to the surface for reasons unknown now in his latest quest for a place to sheath his sword he wants to try and look her up at the tavern that she's working at stating that she's probably forgiven him by now without elaborating further just be ready to pry her off when she throws herself at me we don't want to make it senior akron is that you yeah in the flesh baby what are you doing here uh just trying to kick back with a pint the whole surface to choose from and you just happened to come to my tavern yeah well agree i'm sure i can speak for everyone when i say that there's nobody in thedas who doesn't think about hitting you in the face with a hammer oh well it's been fun felsi but i better go wait you're leaving you just got here i haven't called you a shaft rat yet well you can't keep the archdemon waiting well you don't need to fight it right now do you i mean you could have a pint first you could call me a surly bronto i could tell you that you smell like nut droppings jesus christ this went from super uncomfortable to awkwardly funny in no time flat that's a uh that's certainly a relationship i suppose seems like they're made for each other dwarves are weird man i still got it from here agreement opens up more which um isn't opening up for agron means something completely different than literally every other character here you can ask him how he felt about bronco dying and he's like she was good at [ __ ] but she was a little soft in the head i mean she leaves me and flits about with that watered dart hespith what's she got that i don't just the thought of the two of them together kissing and licking and intertwined on the floor of the deep roads yeah i'm uh i'm just gonna go back to the tent for a moment excuse me sweet [ __ ] i did not need to hear steve bloom say any of that but this it's just kind of how agron is you know how i kind of implied that liliana or zevron or sten are a bit more shallow in how they think or how direct they are yeah agreen is truly shallow in every sense of the word he loves the surface not because of the newly patched day night cycle or weather or anything like that but because the ale is made from grain and the whole place is somewhere where he can commit acts of debauchery and without people knowing who he is the worst part about trying to get him to say something more about what he's thinking about is the fact that he usually winds up getting so drunk after a single dialogue that he refuses to say anything other than ah yes ass chabs but we really don't need much more out of ogren to understand him he's basically the epitome of every dwarven fantasy stereotype shoved into a character and hilariously nearly every other dragon age dwarf looks at him with disgust because of it and i want to clarify that i'm not looking for him to have some crazy deep introspection some kind of breakthrough where he goes hmm yes maybe it was i who was being most heinous this entire time he's the comic relief and he seems to be well i don't think he'd like being called it but he seems to be fine with his lot in life let's just leave it at that hey warden you gotta hear this one this human walks into a tavern and there's an elf there and she says and she says she says i don't all in all companions in this game are a crazy mixed bag from pure to corrupt and from selfless to selfish for the most part they all have pretty interesting background stories and even the ones which don't have as much for them going in that regard at least have a lot of interesting things to say about the world i find it cool that you can ask most of them to just leave your camp if you want to and that they all have different class specializations to teach to you for your own usage this game literally would not be the same without every single one of them and i can't help but think that bioware hit a home run with the writing here alright let's get to the forest i'll be switching up my party a bit here just because of some of the interactions that i know of which take place with certain members i should theoretically be just fine with my party leveled up the way that it is regardless when we first stumble upon the dalish camp on the forest's outskirts we're met with hostility the dalish are those previously mentioned nomadic elves who have stuck to their ways despite a vast majority of elves being enslaved at one stage the guard tells us to [ __ ] off i tell them i want to speak to their leader upon hearing that i'm a warden the dalish leader dismisses the guard with some kind of elvish language farewell i'm gonna come out and say this now i've never liked fantasy elves they all kind of generally do the same thing they mix their language into common speech they tend to live in forests they're very attuned to nature they tend to be stuck up in regards to other cultures i just i don't know i find it grating i guess because nearly every elven group is interchangeable with other franchises that's why the ones that lost their culture and are looked down upon are much more interesting to me it's a fresh take and i would rather have interacted with a group of those elves than the old forest elves who have nature problems though i'd be remiss if i sat here and pretended that orzammar's dwarves are much different than every other fantasy media i guess i just don't like elves it's not a flaw in the game it's just a personal preference at any rate the issue that the dalish elves are facing is werewolves lots of werewolves apparently the elves here had planned on moving north when the blight showed itself only to be cut off by the lycanthropes these werewolves unfortunately carry the age-old property of transforming those wounded by one into another werewolf eventually so you can see the problem here already in order to stop the curse from spreading we gotta hunt down the first and original werewolf and then pluck its heart out the elven leader then goes oh yeah by the way all the death in the forest has caused the dead spirits to be able to interact with the living world again okay good luck bye great now you'll notice that i brought along big win for this adventure there's a reason for that which i didn't mention in her character run through you see after we found out that jesus christ entered her body without her consent my character can ask wynn about it can we cure her does she have regrets etc well she does have one regret which involves an elf which she tutored the elf was very mistrustful of humans as he had grown up in an orphanage where he was treated like trash by them well when his magical powers awoke he was sent off to the circle where a young win was to guide him she knew of his background but she was arrogant and thought that the elf needed to simply get over his distrust like a proper mage well eventually she berated the poor elf over something that he did wrong and then he ran away the templars got a collective boner over an escaped mage and hunted him down presumably killing him although they never told win here about his fate so that's still up in the air so listening to all of this might make you go see wind did learn from her mistakes she grew as a character and became more considerate of others but this just isn't true in my eyes wynn repeats these exact mistakes even at her old age when it comes to your character and morrigan she berates you calls you a child and tells you that you're making a mistake instead of saying something more understanding and more relatable she more or less chases you off for making what she feels is a mistake only to renege on it later and try to fit back into that matronly role that she's working so hard to give off even when she talks about the elf she can't remember what it was that she scolded him over which to me if i made that big of a mistake one that got someone killed i'd have remembered it for the rest of my life i mean [ __ ] i remember whipping a controller at my friend's head when i was 13 or so because he was beating me at halo 2. i mean he dodged it but i remember that instance of teenage angst like it was yesterday that [ __ ] was a duke controller it would have killed him either way that's our setup to keep in mind with old win here so strutting through the camp has us picking up the usual suspects in the form of side quests one guy's wife got wounded by a werewolf and he was told that she was dead but he wasn't allowed to see her body so i need to try and find her dead or alive werewolf or not out in the woods there's a guy who wants me to gather iron bark for him in the woods to make [ __ ] out of there's a girl who's looking after a pointy white deer who may have been infected with the werewolf curse but you aren't able to tell without a higher survival skill and there's this dude who fills us in on the background lore of how the dalish came to be i won't go over the whole thing but there is a point where the guy says that most of the elves were forced to submit to the overwhelming crusades of the humans and sten pipes up stating bluntly as always that the elves should have fought to their last the dalish dude counters asking what the difference was between the qunari forcing people to submit to them and the humans sten simply states that the qunari improve these civilizations that they force into submission whereas the humans make things worse after the dalish storyteller is done he then describes the forest so the rundown is that all of the deaths in this forest have made it very close to the fade which has in turn given it a reputation for being haunted it's said that the fade possesses the creatures and the forest itself making the whole place particularly dangerous the final side quest around this area for now is this dude who's like yeah so i i've been an apprentice hunter for two years and i need to kill an animal to become a real hunter and this girl i like won't marry me unless i become a real one so and so i go to talk to her and i'm like bro true love and she's like my god i've been a fool this may be the worst quest i've played to be holy honest we are both very grateful for the part you've played in bringing us together how marvelous you are i am so happy and yet i still kind of felt happy about these two getting together why am i like this anyways the storyteller still has a little marker over his head so it means he has more to say and sure enough we can ask about that elven apprentice that wynn took on all those years ago of course he's still alive and well out here in the woods he's referred to as a healer one who likes living in the forest itself and not the outskirts beyond this though the storyteller gives us some information on the werewolves we were told this part earlier but the werewolves managed to snag so many elves earlier on because they set up an ambush one that indicates a vastly bigger intelligence than they were given credit for the leader denies that it was the work of them being intelligent beings instead insisting that any beast can lie in wait which causes the storyteller to wonder if he's intentionally lying or just in denial so after standing around and looking like a christian rock album cover we head into the forest at last of course we immediately get swarmed by wolves and werewolves which is no issue but then we run into a group of roaming werewolves which can actually speak or at least one of them can the wolf basically tells me to [ __ ] off on out of the forest to which i try to persuade him to tell me what's wrong he more or less says that the elves deserved this because of the past years but won't tell me anything more than that before he scampers back further into the woods as you might have picked up there's always at least two sides going on with these events and in this case it's either the elves or the werewolves anyways this forest is goddamn cool you got your werewolves you got your darkspawn and you got your tree ants you meet this dr seuss elder tree who speaks and rhymes to you before tasking you with tracking down a thief who stole an acorn from him one morning and then you stumble upon a campsite which looks super inviting and causes your party to pass out when sticking around it for too long fortunately wynn is able to resist the fade demon who has made this illusory campsite their feeding grounds and a revival spell puts a quick end to our untimely demise thanks for warning me you big [ __ ] tree as we venture further into the woods we stumble upon the wife of the husband who suspected that she might have turned into a werewolf sure enough she is one but she's still able to think and talk she's in agony due to the curse describing it as fire in her blood the voice acting here is top notch and it makes me feel horrible for her [Music] before i put her out of her misery at her behest she tells me that the werewolves are no longer mindless animals that they've overcome the curse and reside in the center of the woods at some ruins we kind of figured out half of that information already but still pretty handy man i gotta say i'm just rolling things at this stage the berserker specialization is no joke and i'm just spanking enemies left and right even the revenant that we wind up disturbing from a tombstone but it does feel earned if that makes any sense there were moments in this game where i was just getting slapped where my potion supply was just getting drained in nearly every medium to large fight but once i met agren and got my spec it's like i turned a corner at last it feels good actually i just realized that i never really covered specializations in detail most characters start with one and then get another at level 14. and then i think again at level 22 i'm not really sure there that came later with awakening some specs are wholly considered better than others while other specs have more specific utility usage for example the champion class is usually always picked up by most of the warriors in the game or at least that's the quote-unquote meta for my guy specifically though i want to be a berserker reaver for maximum damage anyways next we run into wyn's former pupil out here in the forest i wish that i could say that this was either a heartfelt reunion or a big dramatic standoff between a pupil who never forgave his teacher and the teacher who only wants forgiveness but it's not it's just the pupil going oh hey yeah i remember you yeah it's all good now i like being here talk about building up a decent backstory only to shatter it with a single interaction then again it's win so who gives a [ __ ] after this we meet a crazy old [ __ ] hermit who stole the acorn from the rhyming tree after trading him for a book we complete our circle back to the only way out of here besides the way we came in which has this dark souls fog wall that causes us to get lost when we tried to traverse it bringing the acorn back to groot has him giving us a tree branch which will help us navigate the fog so that we can press on if you watched my witcher 1 video one of my big complaints was that the world was very bad at spacing out its quests in a way where you can explore a small chunk of the map at a time before moving forward dragon age origin seems to adopt the opposite philosophy at least in this area i will say that orzammar definitely had more of that issue where you were kind of going back and forth between quarter to quarter and these quarters were pretty massive in and of themselves honestly i would say orzamar in general is cool as a big sprawling underground dwarven city can be cool but a lot of the time i really didn't feel like trying to go back and forth for all the little side quests so the brazilian forest is a much better example of quest design in my eyes and that's not to say that there aren't overarching quests which span different areas throughout the game because there are but i just don't feel overwhelmed because every area seems to have these smaller quests or parts which i can work through and resolve a little at a time even orsamar to a degree overall it's a really well done quest system that always has me working towards other things without me feeling like i'm always backtracking at nearly every moment now i will have a little more to say about this when we get to denarim so just keep that in mind if you've played this game already and you don't necessarily agree with what i just said but anyways so now things start to pick up as the fog gate allows us through to meet up with the same werewolf as before except when i offered to just talk to it and not fight he shouts about protecting the original werewolf with his life and attacks us as we're about to deliver the finishing blow a seemingly regular wolf knocks us back and he escapes further in where we find the ruins where the rest of the werewolves are rumored to be when you get to splunking through the ruins you encounter a couple of werewolves some spiders and a dragon the dragon was sitting on a horde of gold and other rare items which was awesome honestly this whole level is probably some of the best design yet yes there were cool and interesting bits in other areas but a lot of them were spread out between crawling through the underground or going from building to building in a town or running up the circle tower or something like that with the brazilian forest nothing seems to wear out its welcome at least so far and the fighting is usually rewarded with some kind of mystery to solve or interesting tidbit to stumble upon there's an elven ritual which depicts steps for you to follow in your journal which leads you to performing them in the way that they're written in order to unlock a room with a solid set of armor there's a little gem that has the soul of the last of the arcane warriors in it who's been trapped there for seemingly an eternity in its mind when you offer to set it free from its endless cycle of torment it teaches you the arcane warrior specialization before you shatter it to free its soul actually you can also choose to just keep the gem or not shatter it which is hilariously cruel it's just a really cool cycle of progressing gaining a puzzle or reward and then progressing some more eventually after blasting through trapped room after trapped room and fighting just about every single enemy type that you can think of we make it to the werewolves at first they charge at us as per usual though this time there are these shadow werewolves which appear out of nowhere mixed into the fray when we make it to a certain point another talking werewolf goes uh um [ __ ] uh so we thought you would have died by now so i guess um would you like to just maybe talk you [ __ ] [ __ ] all right sure let's chat so they bring us further in and all these meat heads are just growling at us and making fake swipes and [ __ ] like that and then out of nowhere this nippleless lady comes strolling out she actually looks pretty similar to the lady of the lake in the witcher in that she has two eyes a nose hair skin and tasteful censorship plus she's called the lady of the forest so i mean they're identical right anyways now we get some answers so the lady here informs us that the dalish leader was the one who created the curse which turned people into werewolves but it isn't so simple as him being evil or making a mistake while experimenting or anything of the sort a couple hundred years ago when the dalish elder was still young the humans started to force the elves away this meant killing the elves however they could which wound up with the elder son murdered and his daughter raped by a group of humans when his daughter found out that she was pregnant from the humans she killed herself so yeah i would say that the dalish leader conjuring up a curse was well justified at the time basically to do this the elder conjured a powerful spirit at these ruins and then forced it into the original wolf which then began tearing through the humans but obviously this was centuries ago now when the werewolves found the lady she began drawing out their humanity causing them to regain some of their intelligence then they began to send messages to the elder praying for him to end the curse once and for all the elder ignored these messages it's kind of hard to sit here and go well he should understand that these wolves had nothing to do with what happened to him because that kind of pain isn't so easily forgotten he lost both of his children but realistically the right move in my eyes is ending this curse and letting these wolves find some peace so we head back to grab the elder in the hopes that he'll be willing to chat with the beasts and lo and behold the guy's already up at the entrance of the ruins ready to use the heart of the oldest wolf that i never grabbed you know i haven't been looking to complain about stuff but i was kind of ready to go ah man it's too bad that i have to backtrack all the way back to the camp to get to the elder i mean what a power move by bioware to make this that much simpler though i suppose they could have just let me fast travel back as well but anyways yeah this guy is still pissed off he can't let go of the past and he believes that the werewolves won't do so either so he tells me that the lady of the forest is the same spirit that he bound to a wolf and that he can force her back into that form again to gain the wolf's heart if need be i convince him to chat with the spirit and her beast guard and he reluctantly agrees stating that he sees no point in this discussion when he comes down the spirit tries to reason with him asking if he'll continue to be this bitter about something that happened centuries ago he goes hell yeah i will you should have seen the [ __ ] that they did to my family yeah i still can't blame him honestly talk about a tough situation i think i might actually care about this one more than orzammar's story so the options here are to attack the lady and all of the werewolves wiping them out and saving the elder and the dalish or to attack the elder killing both him and the lady alone the numbers side of things favors the latter as does the reasoning in my eyes you see the elder is bound to the curse because he used blood magic to create it in order to end it without using the heart of the original werewolf he would have to die alongside the lady so after taking out the elder he submits and admits that he's too old to see anything besides hatred and a lust for revenge such a lust for revenge so he agrees finally to end the curse and he sacrifices himself along with the lady [Music] it's awesome to see the former werewolves amazed at their own transformation back in the humans after they become human the former werewolves just walk away which is a little lackluster but whatever we head back to camp where a new elder is crowned who then pledges themselves to your cause this whole endeavor took about a third of the time that orzammar did and it was way more interesting in my eyes the exploration was top notch the side objectives were simple but fun and the whole thing was self-contained with orzomar you had to do a lot of running around going from place to place to accomplish your tasks with no form of fast travel beyond the occasional map pop-up in the deep roads quite a few quests related back to other areas which involve you traveling around the map to achieve them the plot was fine but the whole choose your king thing gets lost when you find yourself in the deep roads for hours of course the [ __ ] that bronco pulled definitely does make up for this quite a bit but it's a very long walk to get to that point and it definitely drained me when i played through it now i will say that most if not all people regard orsamar as the final area that you want to hit besides maybe denarim so i kind of amped things up like crazy when i went from redcliffe's small town and castle to orzammar's sprawling city and even bigger deep roads but the relief from that gigantic undertaking is much appreciated in the brazilian forest's shorter and sweeter escapade alright so we're getting closer to the end let's head back to camp before making our way over to denarim for these final quests you're gonna want to strap in for the [ __ ] show that i unleashed onto the camp so morrigan and i have been going balls to the wall all day every day well now liliana is in a place where she wants to progress our relationship to the next level she even sings a song that looks super awkward with the echo and the 3d model [Music] so we wind up getting our kissing scene which then advances to her saying all right buddy i hear you and morrigan banging every night what the [ __ ] dude so i tell her alright alright i'll i'll end it with her i go over to morrigan she knows what's up she's pissed and tries to protect her emotions by ending it with you instead then i give her a mirror that reminds her of the one that she stole as a kid and her mom smashed on the ground and she's like [ __ ] yeah relationship is back on i mean it's a scumbag move and honestly had the relationship truly ended i would have loaded up a save and chosen morrigan i've chosen her once and liliana once in my play through so i got to see how this one winds up because i didn't even know this was an option alright so the gang's back together let's hit the road and get denrum done so we roll into d-town which looks remarkably like vizima in many regards our first order of business is immediately taking a turn to where liliana's former mentor is we kick the door down dispatch some guards and her mentor awaits in the next room with enough gas to light a priest into giving up their god but try as she made to pretend like she never meant liliana any harm she soon sheds the facade when we call her out she then tries to tell us that liliana is a snake who would say anything to use us since that's in her nature obviously the girl is projecting her own personality onto leliana but no matter how aggressively french she is she won't get us to budge on this nonsense i know you my liliana i know what you are capable of for five men you can dispatch easily so eventually liliana tells her mentor that she wants her out of her life and yeah she just walks out man that's the second time where there's been some person from the past and the conflict just mellows out i'm here for the drama let's [ __ ] go man anyways running right back to camp since i was at the start of deneram anyways nets the conversation with liliana depicting her innermost thoughts about this whole ordeal this is actually an important crux in her character there are two companions in this game that can become hardened one of them is funnier because he's a dude the other is leliana who you can actually persuade to embrace her old ways to become the more morally grey character that she's been straddling the line back and forth between my biggest issue with her besides her personality being kind of bland in my eyes was that she could never seem to decide between serving the chantry as this paragon of good or being that sneaky thief who takes pleasure in killing and secret hoarding and you can now encourage her to embrace the chantry and be the good character she's always striving to be or you can harden her and have her embrace the skill set that she's practiced for a large chunk of her life i choose the latter here as i find that vicious killer with a touch of goodness to be more interesting than the 50 50 that she's been rocking this whole time you know how low to the ground this [ __ ] gotta be for me to pull off this maneuver i'm like four foot nothing down here anyways liliana has been hardened which is now thankfully funnier after the previous cutscene she's ready to accept her life as an assassin bard and as a much more badass person she gets a bump up in the power rankings now which is something i think roughly 50 percent of us can get behind anyways denrim is [ __ ] nuts the first thing you see is the chantry [ __ ] itself you've got a templar who's so lyrium's out of his mind that he can't remember anything properly alright i never mentioned that god there's so much to this game so lyrium is the mana potions of this game charges your magic and all that i mean there's much more to it than that but for the layman's explanation uh it's just magic it's magic power mages can chug it down and do cool [ __ ] with it templars can also do that but since they aren't mages it actually [ __ ] with their minds after a while basically the more lyrium an average dude drinks the faster his mind goes and it's addictive as all hell so the chantry pumps out these lyrium adult soldiers and sweeps it under the rug and this dude who can hardly remember the king dying is the result of that additionally we got this woman who keeps trying to mix in food with her chance because she's bored of being sentenced to only speaking enchants then she talks about a guy who used to be a member of the chantry before he got so hooked on lyrium that he stripped off all of his clothes and drowned in a big vet of elderberry wine we were six days drying him out for his cremation he looked like a pickled egg oh my god the chantry is a joke i just love listening to how bored both liliana and alistair were when they were involved with it it used to get so quiet at the monastery that i would start screaming until one of the brothers came running i would tell them that i was just checking oh you never know right i no i never did anything like that i enjoyed the quiet suit yourself the look on their face was always priceless i've rounded one corner in this town and i un-ironically have ten new quests this was the [ __ ] that i was mentioning earlier in the game when i was uh talking about the quest structure if i had to rank each area in terms of quest design i would put the forest at the top and denrim would easily be at the bottom the issue is that a lot of the quests seem to set up denrim like the game's main quest hub almost there are plenty of quests which all link the town to different areas all around the game but the problem is that denrim almost always seems to make the most sense to do last dish in your quest order and when you do wind up getting to it last you'll find that plenty of its quests want you to venture back and forth between areas of the game that you've already been like i said i'm cool with the game having some of its quests interlaced between areas but i'm much fonder of having the quest be self-contained to the areas that you received them in at any rate next up is alistair's sister does she even know i exist my sister that sounds very strange sister sister hmm oh no i'm babbling maybe we should go let's go let's just go so goldanna is a [ __ ] like holy [ __ ] i mean don't get me wrong i kinda get it she's poor she has five kids she's probably uneducated due to how the system has treated her so naturally she blames alistar along with whoever else for her misfortune poor alistar's getting beaten down at this stage but i can get her to soften up a bit a little bit then she basically says she doesn't give a [ __ ] about alistar and the poor guy says he'll do whatever to get her taken care of now this is the second character that can be hardened which again is hilarious and we're all laughing about it please pause to laugh now thank you oh [ __ ] unpause on pause ah [ __ ] not again so you can continue to coddle alistar and honestly a part of me wants to he's a good guy who's just naive about a lot of stuff and it adds to his charm in my eyes the fact that he's so idealistic and holds others to those ideals makes me feel bad for him at times effectively making me appreciate him more but if you want to you can tell him that he needs to be more assertive to stand up for himself and to stop being so naive about the ways of the world and he does just that even thanking you for opening his eyes to this newfound perspective it leads to some pretty powerful [ __ ] later on and i'll show you just that when these occurrences do come up dude this game has like an eighty percent chance of crashing when i try to go back to camp from denaram or even try to load parts of it i don't know what that's about but it makes me unhappy for some reason so i looked it up and this game struggles with more modern rigs particularly around denerem ea is an absolute train wreck as is expected of the company there supports a [ __ ] joke literally every time like i still can't believe some of these solutions that they cook up for example when i initially wanted to try to get all of the dlc done in this video also i realized that the only dlc which i had downloaded was awakening not the 4 to 7 other dlc which should come with the ultimate edition now mind you i was using ea play through xbox game pass and both ea play and game pass stated that i should have all of the dlc the other dlc isn't even listed on the ea play app so i hunted down answers i searched my question about seven different ways i even went to the second page on google that's how desperate i was i looked for this [ __ ] answer for so long that ea unironically gave me a badge for it 100 answers god damn well get back in there sport you got a long way to go well eventually i figured out that ea has a link to all of the dlc files on their website and that you have to actually manually patch them in with dragon age's patcher you know what ea's customer support answer was for this grand question that the app is in beta and the team is working on adding dlc [ __ ] you idiots anyways in the second round of ea play's top 10 answers they deadass linked to a nexus mods forum conversation as their official answer what the [ __ ] anyway some other kind soul figured out that downloading a 4 gigabyte ram patch like you would with a bethesda game does the trick so thank god for that guy reporting in i would like to tell ea to hire him but he'd probably help the community too much to fit within ea's rigid guidelines anyways if you're struggling with the game not doing its thing on a modern machine try downloading that and see if it does the trick so back to denrim where we find my right hand man gorham of all people he left for the surface right after you got exiled but not before receiving the family shield and a note from the late king on his deathbed the note itself is addressed to you calling you the king's only son and stating that the king regretted what he did to you almost immediately this is echoed by gorham who claims that the king saw bailin for what he was in the end when it was already too late the note also says that the king initially didn't want to defer to the assembly but wound up doing so specifically because he wanted to avoid a controversy which looked bad for the idukkan name it's a bittersweet ending for the dwarven noble's backstory and i still think it's probably the best in the game in my eyes gorham himself is doing great better than he ever expected it's a bit odd seeing him out here peddling dwarven crafts in the market district of denerim i mean the guy used to despise surface dwarves and would do anything to preserve the legacy of orzammar but now he's a married merchant with a kid on the way i'm happy for him dude was always a solid person and really fun to listen to and interact with so we continue our adventure around the city there's a lot of people to talk to and interact with quests to do things to see you know standard [ __ ] the first bit of resistance we get stems from a guy who calls me out for the death of the king who i tell the [ __ ] off he does indeed [ __ ] off after admitting that he would die along with any other city guards who got in my way beyond that we got a handful of merchants who all sell various goods be careful with that package you lazy [ __ ] it's worth more than you'll make in 10 years we've also got a poster claiming that all friends of the grey wardens who know the truth about their innocence should meet at a whorehouse called the pearl which is either a sign of progression or a trap but we'll get to that in a bit i don't want to continue to complain about the quest pacing but it's full tilt in denerem like throughout the game there have been these little quest hubs right a bag of quests for some mages a board for the chantry and these are generally the side quests that someone wrote up and then they decided that they didn't want to turn them into full-fledged side quests because they probably weren't involved enough to voice act or whatever and that's fine there's nothing wrong with miscellaneous questing but good god there's a chantry board in denarim a mage's collective bag some rogue quests at a bar another set of quests in the same bar it's insane how many quests i just picked up and when you shotgun blast them at me like this i honestly don't want to spend the hours that they would take to turn them in with the first chantry board it was self-contained and loathe the ring with the initial mages collective bag it was spread out throughout your adventure but this is just like oh yeah we wrote all of these quests too have fun anyways next up we have our urn of sacred ashes trail which leads us to a house in the market district when we go to ask this guy about the person who went after the urn one brother jenna tv he gets a little nervous he claims that he hasn't heard from genitvi in weeks and that he last went to the inn across from the circle tower this guy sent the red cliff knights that way too but they haven't been heard from since then i catch him on a technicality where he first claimed that jenna tv told him where he was headed to but then he says that he read where jenna tv was headed instead when i pick out this technicality the guy's story falls apart before he turns hostile and blasts us with magic after we take him out and look around the place we find the decomposing body of the real guy who lived here along with jenna tv's research notes which points him heading out to the mountains it's worth noting at this stage that i'm kind of trying to brush up on equipment for my party to push through the end game with alistar is pretty much a king among men no pun intended since his gear has been relatively easy to nab while questing morrigan and liliana are a bit tougher since a lot of the game's best gear stems from the dlc man this game has a lot of dlc and i am cool with quite a bit of it being gated behind questing because that makes sense but so much of it is random pre-order bonuses collector's edition stuff things like uploading a character onto bioware's social site or pre-ordering from amazon specifically like jesus christ that had to be annoying when this game came out but fortunately a lot of this stuff is an auto inclusion in the ultimate edition which again ea play does not give you so please take it from me buy the game from gog or something good god we'll get some shoes too shoes we could go shopping together when we head off to the village where this jenna tv fellow hiked to we get a cut scene with more shaky camera than cloverfield immediately after the darkspawn sent some assassins to give us the old slice and dice although i don't get to control every companion this was pretty cool to see all the people fighting at once anyways this place is [ __ ] weird the people are weird the buildings are normal but i wanted to say weird so they're weird too it's mostly the people honestly you got this guard who tells us to leave immediately and that he's never heard of a brother jenna tv but we ignore him and run into a child who's equally as weird the kids out here chanting some nursery rhyme and then insist that we leave because we're outsiders he does tell us that everyone's in the temple though so i guess we'll head there next and what is it about my nose that captivates you so i was just thinking that it looks exactly like your mother's i hate you so much so we head up the mountain and find another villager they tell us to leave then we head into the shop here buy some potions and then try to head into the back room and the guy comes out and goes whoa whoa whoa that's private property buddy you can't just go back there that's ridiculous and i'm like yeah but i want to so um and then i kill him i gotta say this guy was definitely in the right ear but then again there's a body of a templar back here so yeah i guess i'd say it evens out guess i used my warden sense on that one anyways this guy must have tripped the silent alarm because the cultist police are outside now we kill them all on the way up to the temple and pop in during the middle of a sermon again the cell phone technology here is great especially given the average reception in the mountains and this guy goes why would i help you you broke into our homes while we were away and killed the shopkeeper i literally have no response to this like it's just a player action to explore everything and loot chests and kill shopkeepers i don't know what do you want me to say even my guy is like oh sorry i was just exploring lol at any rate we kill them again it's alright because they were bad i was almost questioning my guy's morality since his actions have nothing to do with me the player but they were hiding jenna tv back here so my guy must have known all of that ahead of time with his warden vision fortunately jenna tv is still alive and he knows how to use the amulet that the cultists had on them to get into the temple at the top of the mountain where the urn is yo i got some questions before we go alright what is on your mind nothing important brother when you asked jenna tv what they were doing with him here it becomes apparent that the cultists were trying to replace him and dinner him with an impostor seeing as they were grilling him for personal information about his background so we head up the mountain and the dude lets us in he decides to stay back to study the entry while we kick ass throughout this palace there are a lot of cultists in here and we shred through them with little issue as we work our way up to the next area at first it's business as usual but then the dragonlings start to show up they're not a big deal but they do get a little more dangerous in packs eventually we stumble into the upgraded versions which are these drakes they get stunned pretty easily so no big deal i gotta say this game is getting laggier and laggier as time goes on i didn't know if it was just the area or what but i noticed it even in some of the menus turns out that despite official denial a lot of people suspect that there's a memory leak in this game and i kind of have to agree seeing as restarting it caused the lag to disappear but at any rate this whole place is just fighting fighting and more fighting i really do pine for the brazilian forest method of spacing out the fighting with intriguing tidbits but the cult of todd howard really isn't doing it for me here here we have our suspect 28 year old penelope fairweather security footage shows the suspect attempting to stab a victim to death before escaping down cavern street unfortunately for her the boys in gray are hot on her trail which happens to be down a one-way street officer salt eye duke and attempts to cut her off with a dual sweep maneuver but fair weather is just too quick for him the suspect continues to rip down the street with reckless abandon thankfully there were no innocent bystanders out at this time as the officers continue to try to get her to pull over at this point the police chopper is trying to keep up with the tunnels are unforgiving for the eye in the sky finally miss fairweather hits the dead end and promptly surrenders herself into police custody despite the footage you see here wardens are denying any brutality towards miss fairweather there's a uh there's a trade manifest in this egg and a necklace but i'm more concerned about the manifest why is it in there dragon age truly is a mystery anyways i'm losing my mind in this cave and my voice hurts after that last bit so let's jump ahead when we make it to the end the leader of the cult stands with his minions he claims that god i never explained this either okay so brief religious history the maker is god right that one's easy but androste was a human female who was married into one of the primary human tribes way back in the day for political purposes her father was i'm trying to summarize this but okay so her father was super important and he wound up dying in an enemy raid right in this raid andraste was taken as a slave so all the power went to her husband but people wouldn't follow him until andraste was freed so he negotiated her release and everyone followed him and his wife at this stage androste saw herself as the maker's conduit and began spreading the word of god around she united the elves under her and began marching around and spreading her influence this was pretty much right after the first blight so a lot of natural disasters were occurring and weakening andraste's enemies and this was fortuitous for her because people believed that she was the one causing these miracles to happen well at one point andraste's husband got jealous that people seemed to be just following him because of her so he arranged for her to be kidnapped and burnt at the stake by the enemy this only increased her followings fervor because they now saw her as a martyr of god her husband's treachery was eventually revealed and he was killed at the same time even the enemies of androste were converted to her religion which eventually led to the creation of the chantry the followers then collected her ashes into the urn which we're now obviously after and then built this temple around it eventually the remaining followers here kind of lost their way because nobody was kind of keeping touch with them and they wound up thinking that andraste was reincarnated as a high dragon so what the cultists here want me to do to truly free her is to pour dragon blood onto the ashes so that she can return to full power liliana and alistar absolutely hate this idea morrigan is stoked about it which is a nice change of pace the thing is i have to pour the blood onto the ashes to unlock my second specialization but i have to leave them untainted to unlock the champion spec for aleister stenn and ogren fortunately there is a way around this i don't quite know how this works but i can pour the blood onto the ashes reload my old save and then still have the reaver spec weird huh anyways dragon age lord runs deep and that's the kind of [ __ ] that i've spared you until now or maybe you liked it in which case sorry so we head up to the mountaintop this guy talks to the high dragon we [ __ ] our pants a little and then we head into this place called the gauntlet first we come up on this spirit guardian thing it tells us that it's been here for god knows how long while also explaining how those outside came to believe that the dragon is androsta incarnate he then picks at each of us asking how i feel about bailin killing trian asking alistar if he thinks that he should have died instead of duncan asking liliana if she thought that she was andraste's equal since she claimed that the maker told her to come with us asking more again if begone spirit i will not play your games all right never mind so first up is the riddle room you solve riddles in a room if you'd believe it they're all pretty straightforward though i do botch one of them and the dude turns into an ashrae these spirits are all part of androste's tale and while i would love to explain the whole thing in detail i'm on page 42 here so so next is the tree in room followed by that one room in the water temple where you fight a shadow copy of yourself or i guess the end of zelda 2 but not as many people know that one i guess trian says that he's proud of me and gives me what the game describes as items and the shadow versions of ourselves chose their builds poorly next up is the bridge room i like the bridge room basically three people gotta stand on these switches to build a bridge but you need two of them to create a solid quarter and the third person to find the switch which builds the first piece and the second piece then you take your fourth guy and put him on the second piece the second person then finds the piece which builds part of the second and third pieces while the very first person steps off to find the same combo then you repeat this process for the third and fourth pieces it's a cool puzzle that took some trial and error and i enjoyed it a lot our final room is the bdsm room here we take off all of our clothes and cha-cha slide through some fire thankfully i don't gotta re-equip everything that was my primary concern here and here we are the ashes like i said before i gotta pour dragonblood on these fuckos to get my specialization so we do that first alistar disapproves liliana freaks the [ __ ] out i tell her to watch her mouth and then we walked back outside after dispatching the spirit guardian from earlier then i drink more blood from a cup and pass out which is accurate to what i do in real life i wake up get my speck and reload without tainting the ashes this time reaver is still here all is good except these idiots outside are not gonna be happy about me not pouring the lizard liquid onto the human dust sure enough they attack they die they drop a horn to call the dragon so this dragon fight is identical in every way to the flemeth fight except now i'm strong enough to solo it it just takes nine years to take down so yeah identical i do feel pretty good about my chances out there in the end game now because of it though as long as the enemies have the exact same attack pattern and take the time to slowly flip towards me over and over of course so we head back to the arl sprinkle those hot dead person ashes over him and he pops right back up after the arl gets caught up with everything he notes that two armies fighting each other when the darkspawn are running amuck might not be the most sound of plans and while he could just submit to logain he instead proposes that alistar be put forth as the rightful heir to the throne this of course is not in alistar's best interests but he can't object to the logic especially now that he's hardened so the next order of business is what to do until then eamonn basically wants to call a meeting between the lands a lands meet if you will this would basically put logan in a position where he'd have to accept it if he didn't want to look bad he asks me if i have any objections because he doesn't want to do this without my blessing and it doesn't matter what i say here because the arl will just say nah that's dumb until i do agree so so much for my blessing and finally he asks what we should do with the guy that poisoned him again it does not matter what i say because even when i say to set him free he's like nah that's dumb it's that classic bioware writing though this is one of the only times in this game where i felt truly shoehorned into a certain outcome at the end of this conversation eamon tells me that we're ready to go ahead to dennerim i'm not quite done checking out the town so i tell him that i'm not ready and then i head to danarem by myself dumbass arl always thinks that he can control the outcome watch me go kill low game without him so i grab some armor for me and the boys i'll come out and say this now this game has some exploits one of them is gaining infinite money i did that and the other one i used was getting infinite dragon armor i know i'm a filthy degenerate but i also want cool [ __ ] anyways after this we wind up in the [ __ ] house of the city hey sexy do you want to take a look at me ditties yeah thanks for waiting for me out here guys i appreciate it so that allies of the grey wardens meeting was a trap i mean it makes sense but i didn't think i'd be facing down a scuffed version of my own party oh well easy enough i think i'm done with denrim now i mean there's still like 20 or more side quests to do but like i'm good you know especially with the infinite money and armor there's just a point that you get to in this game where you're like i think my party's probably good enough to move on if you're a completionist you're probably going to be playing for a good four to 8 hours longer than i did here before you're ready but i also think that this might be one of those things that makes the game a little different every time if you choose to do some of these quests on a new character while not doing some of the other ones that you did on your previous character either way let's just burn the city down or whatever it is eamon wants to do here rolling up on rogaine proves to be about as fruitless as you would expect he disperses with any niceties almost immediately calling eamon's ability to rule questionable while constantly insulting the grey wardens you can get a few jabs in there but nothing really gets under his skin enough to make him angrier than he usually is which to be fair is pretty damn angry already at one point you can put forward that alistar should be the new king but i decide to save that one for the actual lands meet oddly enough eamonn then goes alistar will lead us against the darkspawn and logan just [ __ ] ignores it doesn't ask what he means or regards it in any way other than to continue to call us dumbasses who are wasting the time and efforts of him and his daughter the queen then he stomps off with his posse from here we get to explore this big ass estate to see if there's anything further to do before initiating the end game all of my companions are here and they all have various things to say about the estate this is not as defensible as i would like but it will do if one more servant asks if i would like a change of clothes i will set the house on fire i haven't been here in a while they've changed the dining room the meat of this whole ordeal is um you remember that arl hal guy who betrayed the human nobles family well the queen visited him in the hopes of getting him to admit that logan betrayed king kailyn well hal freaked out on her and locked her in a guest room in his estate so now we've gotta rescue her before logan kills his own daughter and blames it on eamonn god these people are [ __ ] so the proposal here is that since howe is always hiring new guards that we disguise herself as guards and bust her out my only issue with this is that i haven't seen a single dwarf in any royal capacity i mean i've seen elven servants so that's plausible but honestly even an elven guard isn't very probable i think the only thing that outright works is a human warden you'd think that they would have forced alistar to lead the charge specifically maybe with a couple of other less suspicious people in tow so when we start making our way towards howe's house house house house house house house when we start heading that way we get cut off by one of zevron's old associates from the antieven crows he asks where zevron is who suddenly shows up to confront the guy they have this back and forth where the guy insists that zevron come back and they'll both kill you now and make something up zevron actually will betray you here if his approval rating isn't high enough which is a cool twist but as it stands he sides with me and we take out his former colleague after this zev states that this is what he wanted all along and that he's considering walking away from this whole blight thing now but you can persuade him with the promise of treasure alright you make a convincing argument you do seem to stumble onto treasure on a regular basis somehow [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] and now that this is finally done we can get the last bit of lore about our stabby friend that we had been missing until now so zevron has always been pretty confident in his abilities i would call him just short of cocky as he is now but back in his antivan heyday he was arrogant as all hell he would boast about his conquests both contractually and when it came to [ __ ] he was that guy that you know who keeps bragging about all of the women he's [ __ ] and how great his life is well eventually his superiors got sick of his [ __ ] so they sent him on a particularly dangerous mission with the guy that we just killed and a female who he was very attracted to named arena well at one point the guy tells zev that rina has betrayed them by accepting a bribe from their target to tip the target off that they were moving in on him at this stage zevron was in love with reina but he was afraid of getting too close to her so when the girl pleaded with zeb for her life claiming that she loved him he laughed in rena's face and told her that he didn't care what happened to her so zevron's comrade sliced his love's throat open and they completed the mission when all was said and done and they were looking around the place xevron discovered that the true source of information wasn't rena and that they had been played for fools his comrade insisted that they cover up the true cause of death when reporting back but zevron superiors knew the truth they told him that they knew what happened and didn't care and that zev would one day die in the same manner this is the reason why zevron wanted to leave the crows he knew that he was nothing but a tool to them that he would die in their service and no one would care after losing the first person that he ever truly loved in the way that he did he decided that he wanted to die as well so he sought you out in the hopes that you would kill him in battle when you decided to talk to him instead his survival instincts kicked in and he bargained with you eventually he realized that his life was suddenly better without the crows and he started to discover his true desires it's actually a very touching story and i can't help but feel that much better about him as a character knowing that all of this was underneath the surface it's actually something that i never pointed out before but when zeb does open up to you more in camp you can choose to poke fun at him for being the way that he is you can insist that the scents of his home sound like they smell awful when he's reminiscing about them or you can give him [ __ ] for being so cocky and he'll just laugh at it like you told him a joke but his approval of you will actually go down because he doesn't show you what he's really thinking you ever talk to one of those really unaware people who give you [ __ ] for something that you're sensitive about they think that they're closer to you than they are and so they poke fun at you because they think that that's just what banter is well this is effectively what you can do to zevron you can be that unaware clown who pokes at someone's insecurities because that's how banter works when the reality is that that person thinks that you're a [ __ ] oaf for trying to get so close to them despite not knowing them well and unfortunately people don't get that meta game knowledge of the approval rating in real life it's actually a really cool occurrence to see unfold in a video game and it makes me really appreciate zevron more than ever which is the reason why he's placed so highly in my rankings alright well now we have zevron and tow for the long haul apparently as we infiltrate howe's estate expertly and by expertly i mean that we go racing down the side of the building haste it out of our minds only for some guard to go who the [ __ ] is that and attack us yeah great start i'm glad they didn't sound the alarm like good guards would when we make it around back we equip our disguises and have the queen serpent distract the two posted outside apparently our outfits won't fool them but we'll fool most of the people inside now mind you i look like a [ __ ] dwarven robot with a rocket fueled jet pack on my back sprinting around at high speeds you think that might tip off the guard but apparently it's a common practice with howe's men it is best to keep your distance from all of them and try to blend in my host was not content with leaving me under heavy guard he sealed the door by magic find the mage who cast the spell he'll most likely be at house so we make it to a prison area where the prisoner reaches through the bars and snaps the guard's neck somehow the first time i played this [ __ ] i thought for sure this would be duncan but nah it's this guy apparently he's a warden from high ever and he knows alistar the guy was sent here by the wardens of high ever to see if logan had truly betrayed the king and how to best fight the blight he can't help right now but he may be able to when he gets back to his people and if we can stop logan so we continued to run through house torture fun dungeon and wind up freeing a noble whose father was aligned with low gain now that he's free it's safe to say that the family won't be supporting logan either further in we actually find the city elf character that you could have been if you had chosen that background he's been imprisoned here since he attacked the noble who was trying to [ __ ] his wife on their wedding night it's a pretty cool thing to see actually and it makes me wonder if we would have run into my doppelganger somewhere in the world if i had chosen a different background i can't remember if that's the case or not but it'd be cool eventually we run into the man himself i always love it when these absolutely average characters get all cocky without any sort of contingency like we just slaughtered so many of your men i'm wearing armor made from a dragon our entire bodies radiate power i don't understand this guy being so cocksure about his victory but yeah he dies i avenge my human noble character who exists on another save file life's pretty good except for the whole blight thing and logan when we check the back rooms it turns out that the noble who [ __ ] over the potential city elf warden is actually locked back here too since that's whose estate that howe took over after persuading him out of his lockbox key i killed a bastard in his cell before freeing yet another dude who was trapped down here apparently the entire place is just packed with potential allies i guess but now to go back to rescue the biggest ally the queen when we make it back up to the palace the whole sneaking thing is out of the question as a veritable horde of men come charging at us after blowing them out we rescue the queen who's dressed up as a guard for reasons unknown i just like that one of my dialogue options is aren't you a little short for a guard while she towers over both me and her servant so we take a stupidly short jog out towards the exit and here comes logan's men i'll just let this one play out don't be ridiculous the queen isn't being held prisoner here or anywhere else her father would never stand for such a thing what so catherine i praise the maker you're here this brigand tried to kidnap me unbelievable bring them down logan wants the warden dead or alive good god this still pisses me off so this fight is probably one of the hardest ones in the game especially since i got [ __ ] over by zevron coming with me over liliana but basically you can lose this fight and your guy winds up being taken hostage in a fort alongside alistair from there you can attempt an escape in your undies or wait for two of your party to come rescue you after the queen goes running to eamon about us being captured actually she only mentions me being captured here and the rl has to remind her that alistar exists i've never been able to beat this woman in the past so this time i run to the end of the palace and take her 1v1 after dispatching her two melee lackeys or like two or three v1 but you know whatever it's 1v1 alright sounds better it's a tough fight and there's lots of potions required but i do manage to defeat her pick up alistair and then take out the rest at the front of the estate when we make it back to eamon and queen and aura she goes what you blew my cover i had to save my ass what the [ __ ] are you talking about okay so the queen was dressed as a guard right and i decided to say that how captured the queen the queen comes forward and instead of confirming it she says we tried to kidnap her the only way that this line of response from her makes sense is if she's intentionally trying to put aleister out of commission until she can sees power because what's the difference here in terms of what happens to her absolutely nothing i actually did do this whole sequence every way possible first by fighting my way out then by surrendering and escaping the dungeon and then by losing the battle and escaping the dungeon there is no difference at all and how things play out beyond your capture which is kinda sad i mean from a gameplay perspective it's neat but nothing has made a difference here and where she winds up she doesn't get transported to logan in literally any of these outcomes so her stating that we blew her wonderful cover of her face showing through a big cut out circle helmet is [ __ ] morrigan kind of hints at it during these scenes too stating that we have more than just one trouble while looking at anora additionally when we do make it back and the queen says that we blew her cover and all that she then insists that she should rule ferelden she says that alistar is not cut out for it and that it would look like we're trying to intentionally put a grey warden on the throne i really don't see anything wrong with that she is extraordinarily conniving and i've had enough noble backstabbing in this game to deal with her [ __ ] except the issue here is that for as much as i've been able to influence and change and choose in this game i'm still forced to dance to her tune now i'm just a little disappointed that the exact same thing plays out past the initial dialogue of each sequence it's probably the biggest moment in this game where i felt like nothing i said truly mattered because telling her you betrayed me or i promise you nothing i'll have her saying literally the exact same thing as me saying anything else to her but anyways what information we do glean is that how and logan really pissed off the elven alienage here in the city anora doesn't know why or how but it's worth looking into the place to see what they have to say before we get to that though anora wants us to meet her in private this should be good so listen to this [ __ ] anora goes hey warden sorry about the whole thing where i tried to get you thrown into prison i realized that that couldn't have looked good um so anyways eamonn listens to you and i want to be the ruler of ferelden so um can i have your support oh my someone thought we wouldn't be getting out of that situation huh but yeah you can run through all of these options and the three outcomes here is telling anora that you support her telling her that you don't support her or suggesting that she marry alistair i'll actually jump more into what can come of all this when we get to that stage but for now anora basically says that alistair would be a [ __ ] king and that she's what ferelden needs now alistar won't agree to marry her unless he's hardened which is probably the biggest difference between his hardened self and his usual self so that is a possibility here but again we'll get to all of that later let's go check out some elves so this place uh it's like they built a zoo for elves in the middle of the city there's a big ass tree in the center of it that they can climb or whatever and the whole place is just filthy we wind up catching up to the elf we freed from how's prisoner garden and he tells us that there's a plague going on that specifically kills off elves and foreigners which seems um intentional apparently there are some mages from a different country here to help stem the plague which is also strange seeing as the chantry is so ass-mad about anyone besides their people using magic morrigan actually points out this country is across the sea with many borders between them so them being here to prevent any potential plague seems unreasonably humane for them when we talk to the sister of the elf who we rescued she claims that these mages set up a quarantine to prevent people from getting sick i swear to god every single game that i play nowadays has a goddamn plague in it i've said that so many times in my videos now but yeah she says that they can only prevent people from getting sick and not actually cure the illness but then she seems weirded out that they're taking people that aren't sick which seems to be a point of contention for her i must be misunderstanding something i guess the main thing that she's concerned about though is that some of the healthy people that they take do not return to the alien edge including their leader that one definitely seems weirder so let's get to the bottom of it so the thing we can do is sneak in the back way of this quarantine area but i opt for running through these apartments instead after making our way through them and having liliana break some locks we stumble upon some soldiers who attack when we make it through the onslaught we encounter the real operation here these guys have been enslaving the elves and selling them off with logan's blessing the slaver in charge decides to bargain with me asking for a hundred gold for a letter implicating logan i counter offer telling him to leave the slaves and the letter he says nah that's dumb which is weird to me since i have max speech maybe i'm just not built enough to scare him so i instead offered to not kill him after we fight him and he generally agrees to that one we wind up rescuing the would have been slaves and this mime who knew duncan since he would try to visit and recruit people all in all it's not a bad little side plot though the ending is underwhelming like you free these people and there's no resolution of oh my god you saved us or we're gonna join you against logan or anything like that the elves and soldiers outside the quarantine building are just suddenly gone and the building's locked up and you get a small thank you from a few people and that's that i will say that there's this blind templar out here who feels like something is wrong in the area and when you do a little investigation signs point to something going awry at the orphanage when you head in there are ghosts and blood and bodies everywhere pressing further in reveals a demon who has predator vision which then attacks before retreating further into these set of buildings now mind you this place is about on the same level of creepiness as the deep roads area with the brood mother the soundtrack is children screaming i'm not kidding that's what you hear constantly and as you get further and further you have a ghost child who screams at you to get away from him a deranged ghost woman who attacks you and then claims that she can't be killed after you defeat her shaking furniture and objects and a ghost girl who keeps repeating various nursery rhymes it's not bad though it does feel a little bit forced at times like the devs tried to fit in all the horror tropes revolving around ghosts that they could in this area when you do make it to the end the demon attacks again and the templar who's with you starts tap dancing about the demon being purged before he gets a pitchfork to the chest again super horror movie inspired as the demon then raises him into the air for some reason before dropping him we eliminate the demon and then continue the tap dance that the templar started in his honor before looting the room and leaving job well done as always okay so the landsmeet is the stupidest [ __ ] thing in this game like i can't help it it's ridiculous and it makes no sense so you show up to this thing right and all the arls and arlessas and bands from across ferelden are in the presence of you and logan having a political debate from what i can tell it does not matter what you say here i can't get a victory for the life of me so i bring up stuff like logan selling slaves like him letting howe torture people like logan abandoning the king on the battlefield then enora shows up and says that logan should win because i did not take her side i lose 3-2 in votes low gain demands us to be executed and the whole thing turns into a brawl okay fine i reload my save and adjust my tactics the persuasion options don't seem to do [ __ ] here so i avoid them this time i win 3-2 and logan demands us to be executed and the whole thing turns into a brawl what the [ __ ] no matter what i do i win 3-2 and the whole thing turns into nonsense so i look at my quests only to realize that i had not turned them all in so i head back this time and i have an extra vote so i win 4-2 and logan demands us to be executed and the whole thing turns into a brawl i don't know what to do the only thing that i've gleaned from all of this is that even though one of the houses responds to me bringing up the slave ordeal then no points are given to me because of it because no one votes any differently when i bring it up and when anora shows up she must have some auto win for logan because that's the only thing that makes sense so i reload and tell dumbass that we'll help her out during this thing because [ __ ] it and she comes in and speaks against her father and suddenly we win the lands meet what a [ __ ] show and maybe you're thinking well why is he making such a big deal about this and it's honestly because i did all of these extra side quests and made sure to turn them all in to try and appease every single person there is no rhyme or reason to all of these speech options at the lands meet it's pretty much decided before you ever enter and my least favorite thing here is how shitty it feels to be in a debate against someone as well spoken as logan when your character has no voice if you were able to control alistar for this it would make for a much better scene solely because logan wouldn't be able to walk all over him in the same way that he does with my guy going oh yeah well uh what about the slaves i don't know it just seems like such a big event in this game where your hard work pays off where your master level coercion pays off where you carefully making allies and choosing the right options pays off but as it stands it likely just comes down to something stupid like me killing that [ __ ] rapist in how's moving dungeon and then not telling anora that i would give her a mustache ride in front of everyone at the lands meet so what this now comes down to is a 1v1 between myself or whoever in my group i choose against logan in a duel of honor i choose alistair to be my champion which takes forever solely because he does no damage my boy's a tank not deeps but eventually we win forget marrick this for duncan god damn oh that's a good scene so this is where some weird [ __ ] plays out again basically i told enora that i'd let her ride me around like a scooter so that she can become the ruler but when alistair wins eamon's like oh [ __ ] yeah that's our boy that's our king wait what didn't i come in here to support her i mean i yeah i was gonna betray her but like i don't even get the option to betray her i want it to betrayer i don't know it's just a weird sequence but let's talk about the possibilities here alright so say i take on logan instead what happens after i defeat him is uncharacteristic of him in that he actually compliments me stating that he hasn't seen strength like that in a man since kailyn's father he claims that he's happy to leave ferelden in your hands which again makes me feel that the guy was much more misguided and twisted than evil but here's the even more interesting twist you can recruit logan into the wardens making him a secret party member if you so choose though that said alistar absolutely despises this and will leave if you do this you can also kill logan yourself which results in you cutting his balls off instead at your height when this happens the proper scene plays out in which even declares alistar the king but alistar is like whoa whoa wait the [ __ ] no no and anora goes well look he doesn't want it give it to me in this case you can choose who ascends to the throne manually and then of course there's the whole marriage route now mind you the possibilities here actually encompass a mixture of these events resulting in 10 different outcomes depending on your origin gender and how the event went the landsmeet itself actually has minimal impact on these outcomes and is more for flavor i think the most spicy of these outcomes is either letting logan join you or allowing anora to call for alistar's execution when she does become queen and i thought we were friends i guess i was wrong here's my decision then i'm no longer a grey warden i'm leaving i'm afraid it's not so simple as that alistair you already got what you wanted your murdering father gets a place amongst the grey wardens what else could you want from me your life unfortunately i could spend another 15 minutes running through every possibility and its impact so i'm just going to say that for as shitty as the landsmeet event is structured i do appreciate this many possibilities to make a ton of playthroughs unique i suppose there are worse things that could happen to me other than becoming king and being hitched up to a beautiful woman and nora probably thinks she'll just be able to push me off to the side but i'm not that person anymore she won't be able to walk all over me so i stick with alistair becoming the king after he murders logan he then decides to lock up a nora and then give a speech which is uh pretty well worded for him actually and then everyone cheers and we get ready to march on the darkspawn at last we're told that the bulk of the darkspawn are headed towards redcliffe so we head on over there to rally as we arrive on the scene the darkspawn have made it in first we say [ __ ] the town and just head into the castle where more spawn await us when we finally make it inside the warden who we rescued from before tells us that the majority of the forces are actually marching towards denrim with the archdemon dragon at a town apparently they'll be there in around 2 days which is way too fast so we convene with the warden in private to discuss things while the red cliff forces prepare to march well what our warden friend tells us isn't uh great news so when the archdemon is slain its soul travels to the closest point of the taint which all darkspawn possess so if an average person kills it it possesses the closest darkspawn and reincarnates the reason that the wardens are so pivotal to ending a blight is because that the essence will travel into them instead when that happens the two souls intertwine and then explode more or less killing both the archdemon and the warden who delivered the final blow our warden friend riordan volunteers for this sacrifice seeing as he's the oldest if he fails it'll be up to myself or alistair but seeing as alistair is the king well it probably won't be him so i head back to my room and find morrigan this is the apex of her character the final thing that really expands on who she is so this whole time she's been this cold and calculating person one who is very pragmatic and straightforward about everything when you get close to her you kind of warm her up in more ways than one she becomes more open she tells you things that she's never had an interest in telling anyone she becomes well more of an average human with real feelings which may interfere with her own interests but here at the end of the game this is when she comes full circle and decides to follow the path that her mother laid out for her becoming more like the person that she seems to hate more than anyone else it's here that she tells you that her mother flemeth saved us and sent her with us for the express purpose of becoming pregnant with my child the child would be infected by the darkspawn taint and the archdemon soul would seek out the child like a beacon when slain now all of that sounds well and good right the wardens would all live and the child would bear the brunt of the archdemon soul but morrigan's end goal isn't to prevent your potential death it's to give birth to that child and raise it as someone with the soul of an old god in them like i said she's come full circle back to becoming her mother she tells you that she'll take the child and never see you again she doesn't want you to see the child she doesn't want anything to do with you after she'll raise it in the swamp and that'll be that so despite the romance between you two morrigan has determined this to be her purpose in life her decision she doesn't want to be weighed down by a relationship despite being so close to you and if you choose to deny her she'll leave before the final battle and you'll still never see her again so as far as choosing her for your partner you were [ __ ] from the beginning in terms of happily ever after this is the main reason why i have her at my number one slot over alistair now to clarify this ranking chart is more about the complexity of the characters mixed with how interesting and well written they are to me if we were going solely off of how much i like them i'd probably have placed morrigan somewhere around the 4th or so slot but either way this is the decision that we're faced with and it feels like the right move here is taking her up on her offer so we get the final romance scene where we're reminded just how small a dwarf is when morrigan looks like a [ __ ] amazonian by comparison even my dude backs up on the bed like this was more than he bargained for and the next scene we watch as people we've recruited start marching towards denerem i kind of wonder if the dwarves who are on the surface now lose their cast either way it's a very badass scene alistar takes to a podium outside of the city and jerks me off in front of the whole crowd before jumping down and making me feel bad about picking out the armor for him and then we charge and my god what a scene i'd love to show you all of it but i'm not gonna you go play the game what am i a tour guide after we make it inside it's just me and not a party of four i mean everyone is here but i can't control them after we clear out the opening area though we do get to choose our typical party riordan tells us to take alistar and two others to head further in he claims that he can't come with us because the archdemon will sense us before we get set up apparently two wardens next to each other can't be sensed but three buckle up the plan now is to get to the fort where we were held prisoner in an alternate timeline and head to the top of it to draw the dragon there there are also two generals in the city which should be taken out before we make it to the fort otherwise the dragon will call his generals to him and make the fight that much tougher so everyone says their final thoughts to your warden before we head further into the belly of the beast it's a pretty touching scene honestly and i get called my love by both liliana and morrigan so i guess we at least had a backup plan for when morrigan leaves then we march down the center and are cheered on by the human forces that are remaining here to secure and defend the front gates with the rest of my crew let's [ __ ] rock so the market district is now torn asunder by the darkspawn and everything's gone to [ __ ] it doesn't take too long to march through it and kill the general here though honestly i'm unsure if i just didn't notice it at first but the game does tell you that you can send in troops from a certain army to help from here onward i drop some redcliffe troops in the market and then head on over to the elven alienage where i deploy elves obviously this fight is a lot tougher than the market and it takes a while to chew through the forces here after this fight we cut over to sten in the squad where i pilot that chunk of my party while defending against darkspawn reinforcements this shit's cool in concept as it actually rewards you or [ __ ] you over depending on if you bothered to arm your backup crew but the actual fight is very um i guess clustered at the door which makes sense but it's not a very eventful fight beyond using sten to knock down some dwarves which i had reinforce us so back to the main battle where we watch riordan decide to jump off a tower onto the dragon and give it a few stabs before just dying [Music] glad we got that backup thing going with morrigan so we keep fighting our way to and through the fort just to spare you the details at this stage though my game does crash mid-battle at the fort which is lovely as always we actually wind up finding the merchant from the camp son up here who only knows how to say the word enchantment enchantment you're surrounded by corpses enchantment and then we finally make it up here to the big bad itself i've said this in other videos but i've been over dragons in my video games for a very long time i know this game is older but yeah i mean this is the third dragon in this game and although it does actually have a different move set i'm not sitting here in awe by it the fight itself goes well enough i like that arle eamonn and first enchanter irving are up here with us fighting the first phase is a pretty average dragon fight though this one does flip around the map a lot then it flies across the way and reinforcements pour in we take those out and it takes an embarrassing amount of time for me to remember that there's a ballista in the corner for me to use against the damn thing then it comes over for one last ass kicking before my guy finishes it off a cutscene ensues in which i cool guy run at him with my helmet off then cool guy pick up a sword in case i was a mage or some [ __ ] and then i cool guy cut the big snake neck very cool and just like that it's over i will say that i wish the enemy was a bit more i guess talkative i know it's a big dumb monster but i think it would have at least been cool to feel that connection of holy [ __ ] [ __ ] this guy if it had spoken i mean we really only see it like three times total before it makes it to dinner and siege but whatever it is what it is the epilogue then plays out and we watch as a proper coronation ceremony for alistar is held he then lays some commendations on me and asks me if there's anything that he can do for me now that he's king i gotta say this is probably one of the more awkward moments in the game where they insist on calling you warden or the like because they want to let you choose your name but i almost feel like they needed to just give you a list of like 6 to 12 different names for you to be called so they could be voiced oh well my reward options are either to continue serving alistar or for the title of taren and lots of money or for orzammar to be aided against the darkspawn or for the wardens to never be forgotten again or nothing which i kind of feel like all of these should be done honestly but whatever bioware i go with serving the crown which nets me the chancellor role then alistar asks me what i intend to do which i think affects the awakening dlc but i'm unsure as i've never played it one of these choices is attempting to track down more again i decided against it and choose to have my guy stick next to alistar to help him roll of course all of this changes if you chose to have yourself die after not taking up morrigan on her offer which makes for a much more somber ending that specifically relates to the origin that you chose but as things stand i can now talk to some of the key figures throughout the game and some final conversations alistar can't believe that we both made it out alive and wonders if riordan was wrong about the whole warden needing to die business eamon is heading back to redcliffe while considering giving up the city to ban tegan gorham is here and he claims that both him and i got our titles restored to us as full-blown eye dukens with the assembly being in talks of making me a paragon kind of funny that he's so stoked to go back there after apparently finding happiness up here with a wife and kid on the way liliana gives up her traveling plans to stick around with you seeing as that love triangle side fell off when morrigan stole my precious seed and then ran off with it xevron on the other hand decides that it'll be safer if he dips out from ferelden in case the crows start to poke around for him i just like that he's so worried about this gathering because it's a great place for assassinations to occur wynn actually keels over and dies right there on the royal carpet if you'll believe it nah she's gonna haunt me until one of us dies since she's taken up the position as court mage to advise alistair looks like i'll have to have liliana snatch her life alert necklace while zevron shoves her down the stairs in order to get away from her nagging the stenster is sitting here in the corner trying to comprehend what's happening i mean it's way too happy around here for him so i ask if the qunari ever celebrate anything and apparently they do [Music] chanting meditations abandoned it is madness i actually offered to accompany him on his trip back to his homeland i'm not sure if that'll actually happen but i imagine that you'd deserve a month off after all this [ __ ] i am smiling and finally there's augren who that pot-bellied son of a whortegan said i'd pass out before drinking an entire barrel of pickle juice i aim to prove him wrong yeah that seems about right i will say that i believe this dog that's right next to sten is the same type of dog which morrigan can shapeshift into it wouldn't talk to me probably because it's a dog but i like to imagine it's her but yeah man that's it there is a lot of post-game text to read which details all of the bigger and a lot of the smaller things that you did throughout the game and the results of each of them i'm not even gonna bother trying to read off or summarize all of them it goes on for a long ass time i mean it's definitely cool though even things like me sending the dwarven girl up to study at the circle make the cut some of the highlights involve things like morrigan being spotted in the frostback mountains while pregnant and liliana sticking by your side for a little bit yeah they didn't really want to commit to anything with the important characters much like how your character is said to have stuck around to help alistair for a little bit you also become a paragon while your brother radically changes the regime to try and make orzammar a little more modern eventually so many assassination attempts are made on his life that he just dismantles the assembly there's a lot more obviously but that's probably a good enough summary and i couldn't help but feel a little sad when it finished i'm gonna just start with this dragon age origins was much better than i remember it may just be one of my favorite games of all time and i can't believe i was questioning it it does have issues of course it does i still think the whole mmo combat system gets slow and repetitive after so many hours of it and even at the beginning the simplicity of what you can do doesn't do it any favors either the ai isn't always the best and that it tends to cluster or you might wig out a bit when trying to click on something specific enemies weren't always the brightest and that made combat get a bit stale at times but once you start getting your builds rolling on your respective companions the tactic system and all of the possibilities for a different party at any given moment is amazing i had a load of fun when i opened up new abilities and combos the level design and exploration ranged from mediocre to brilliant with most of it landing right around the good mark it definitely did drag on at times especially in the deep roads and the fade i feel like if they had approached every map the way they did with the brasilian forest there would have absolutely been no complaints on my end there the overall story is one of the best experiences i've had in a game yes there were a few frustrating moments especially when it came to resolving quite a few of the quests you'd free some slaves or transform some werewolves back to humans or find your companion's long lost pupil and the game would just mark the quest off in your journal with minimal resolution and then of course there's the whole queen and aura landsmeet thing that happened and i'm just still not a fan of that but beyond that detail there have been a shockingly few amount of games where i was almost constantly impressed or content with the writing the way that i was with dragon age i had a lot of fun picking apart the motivations and backgrounds of various characters to help understand them better which just doesn't happen to this degree in a lot of modern games there were very few points in the plot where i would have written something different and that made the game an absolute treat for me to run through the characters and companions in particular were so fun to learn about to grow closer to and to converse with and the fact that someone else could have played through the whole game with an entirely different attitude and had completely different experiences and outcomes with these characters still blows my mind dragon age origins is a [ __ ] gem i thought i was blown away by new vegas and i was but man i hate to resort to this old saying but they really don't make them this way anymore i don't know how else to say it i mean sure there are still good modern games out there and obviously i haven't played them all but i just can't think of the last time that i was this satisfied with a video game overall i think i'm gonna have to get that dlc video rolling here at some point because christ almighty it's weird because i've only heard through the grapevine that the series has gone downhill since origins i haven't played inquisition but i've heard mixed things about it but of course i've still got to get to dragon age 2 again first so it'll be a while before that happens thanks for watching god this thing was long i mean it was worth it but it really makes me scared of the witcher 3. godspeed joseph anderson anyways i've got my new storefront going for those who want to check out some torso cosmetics feel free to check it out if it peaks your curiosity and thanks again to keeps for sponsoring this video i know some people out there aren't super excited about sponsorships but they really do help to make these really long videos possible so please feel free to check keeps out with my link in the description i've also got a twitch where i play video games poorly but in real time hd 720p it's as exciting as it sounds i've got a twitter where i say very important stuff i don't actually but hey yeah i got nothing follow it if you feel the desire i've got a discord where people talk a lot about stuff i really should be a salesman and i've got a patreon and that's it have a good one

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 3,396,719

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Id: s3SLdJkDr-k

Length: 227min 7sec (13627 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2021

Reddit Comments

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