The good people at EA (never thought I'd call them that) were kind enough to let me have a copy of Dragon Age: Inquisition and 50+ hours into the game I'm still having difficulty putting down the controller to get some actual work done. The game has its flaws and I'd rather micro-manage my characters and their attributes (it's all distributed automatically now) instead of managing every tiny aspect of Skyhold. I don't really want to choose from 250 different thrones, banners, drapes and other crap to kit out a virtual base of operations. I wish I could just hire an interior decorator for this stuff.
Nitpicking aside, I'm rather impressed with the game, the dramatic storytelling and the fantastic writing. Bioware made some bold choices here and I was particularly surprised by a quest involving Dorian, a mage who can be hired as a companion for the Inquisitor. Frankly, I was fully expecting to hate Dorian when I looked at character trailers and previews. I mean, just look at that silly, drawn-on facial hair!
I don't mind the fact that he's homosexual. All of my friends are, too. He's just a bit... flamboyant? There is one particular quest where the entire world is in flames and there is this constant sense of impending doom and he complains about the interiour decoration of some old fortress. See? SEE? THIS is why I feel the urge to keep decorating Skyhold even though I don't care for this kind of feature in RPGs! Stuff has to look nice or people get bitchy.
Dorian is a smartass, his facial hair is stupid and I just didn't like him very much when the game first introduced him to me. But the guy grew on me over time, he gets some of the most brilliant lines in the game and he's a decent enough character once you see past the somewhat annoying surface. And since it's perfectly normal for companions in Bioware games to betray you and stab you in the back if they hate you enough, I made sure to be friends with everyone, including Dorian.
As part of his storyline, I ended up accompanying Dorian on a meeting with his estranged father. They're not exactly best friends, Dorian has absolutely nothing nice to say about his old man and when you encourage him to talk to his father, it turns out that the main reason for all the bad blood between them is the fact that Dorian prefers the company of men.
You can break up the whole thing, tell Dorian that his old man isn't worth it or tell the guy to go to hell, but if you encourage them to talk to each other it turns out that Dorian's father deeply regrets how he treated his son and that he seeks forgiveness.
Look, I get it. It's soap opera material. But I've never seen anything like it in a video game and their decision to put this quest in there was brave and nothing short of impressive.
Homosexuality is treated as perfectly natural and nothing weird in Bioware's Mass Effect universe. One of Shepard's crewmen openly talks about his husband, whom he has lost in the war. Nobody picks on him for that or jokes about it, nobody calls the guy names, because it's the distant future and people are past that kind of crap. Things aren't quite as happy in Dragon Age. Dorian and his dad are at each other's throats, because the young mage is openly gay.
The Inquisition is also home to the first transgender character I have ever seen in a video game. Cremisius "Krem" Acclasi looks and fights like any male soldier, he has short hair, no boobs and when you first encounter him, he sounds like a woman. Frankly, I thought it was just a bug and the game was accidentally displaying a male character model for a female character. That kind of stuff happened a lot in games like Guild Wars, where random NPCs would look male and speak with a female voice or vice versa until they got fixed in a patch. No big deal here.
That's until Krem casually mentions binding breasts at a later point in the game. Turns out Krem was indeed born female and it never felt right. He talks about how he never wanted to wear dresses as a kid and how he posed as a man to become a high-ranking soldier. When you ask the leader of his unit if there are any issues with him being a woman, he tells you off. "He's not a woman. [...] Krem's a good man. I don't give a nug's ass that it's a little harder for him to piss standing up."
I have met people on the internet who felt they were the wrong gender. I had a friend, some guy in Manchester in his late 50s, who would occasionally wear his wife's clothes. One day she caught him and he told her that he wanted to be a woman. The two of them had been married for more years than I had been alive, but she left him when he went through with it. The hormone treatment, the operation, the whole thing. He... she wanted to be whom she felt she really was enough to give up on their marriage.
I won't lie. I think it's weird. I have no right to judge. It's none of my business whether people feel happy with their gender or not. But I don't think I'll ever be able to understand it. I will never know how it feels to be in that kind of situation and I'm pretty grateful for that. But I like how Dragon Age: Inquisition brings it up, makes you think about it. And teaches tolerance. A good game shouldn't just teach you that if you hit a boar hard enough, gold will come out. That being a hero, a "good guy" doesn't just mean you punch dragons in the face or decapitate bad guys in epic cutscenes. A good game makes you think. And maybe a good game can teach you just a little bit about values. I like that idea. I think they're doing a good thing here.
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| And with a face like this, my Inquisitor isn't really in any position to judge. |
We'll be streaming Dragon Age multiplayer tonight. It's gonna be messy. I don't honestly believe anyone would even want to watch us, but I'll give my friend the benefit of the doubt. He's very enthusiastic about these things. Nothing to lose, right?
It's my birthday this week. First time I won't be receiving any emails or phone calls from my dad. He was never very good with this stuff. I remember one year where he called a day late, because he forgot. I wish things could have been different. I wish we could talk.
-Cat
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