Dragon Age Woes

Please God make it 'time to die' for woke attempts at popular culture

Whilst momentous events have of course been occurring in a US election that finally offers hope that the United States of America can survive its corrupt political and media class, its brain-dead soy addled beta males, and its screeching Death Cult Baby Murder feminists, other developments suggest a dawning new Age of Sanity may, at long last, begin to unfold.

It may seem a lot more trivial (and in many ways it is) but I want to talk about another topic dear to my geekish heart, which is specifically the fate of the new game in the Dragon Age computer RPG franchise. The latest game in the (previously) popular BioWare produced series is Dragon Age: The Veilguard. And its been more than a bit of a disaster.

One could say that its launch and subsequent sales have shared many features with the failed Kamala Presidential campaign. Huge amounts of money and corporate power (in the gaming world) were placed behind this game being a winner. It had all the corporate backing you could possibly want. And gaming magazines and mainstream gaming critics and journalists gushed effusively over its content and allegedly ground-breaking brilliance, in an obvious, purchased and concerted effort to make it a success.

Sound familiar?

Like the modern Democrat Party, BioWare went full steam ahead into the Culture Wars. They made their product astonishingly woke and became obsessed with inserting woke narratives, their personal social and political opinions regarding the present day, and a radically progressive attitude towards gender, identity and sexual politics into a game still claiming to be about, well, dragons and adventurers in a mock-medieval fantasy setting.

Everything in the product was subordinated to delivering these messages and imposing woke lectures on the choices and narratives gamers would encounter. BioWare hired a long list of progressive activists (particular trans advocates) as writers and developers of the game, and spent 10 years crafting it (a period which saw established writers from earlier in the franchise fired to make way for more strident and politicized appointments).

Again, does this sound a little familiar? What BioWare did with the DragonAge franchise was essentially what Anheuser-Busch and its subsidiary executives did with Bud Light in 2023 when they partnered with trans activist Dylan Mulvaney, only moreso.

Imagine if as well as a single ill-advised marketing campaign Bud Light had hired 100 or 200 MORE Dylan Mulvaney’s to radically alter the flavor of their drinks and direct every aspect of the company’s top selling products, perhaps proudly announced that the new flavors would be called Semen, Spunk and Jizz, and done that especially with a new flagship product they spent 10 years on, and you get a better idea of the scale of the idiocy of BioWare executives.

Imagine them doing that and then releasing the product to the fantasy gaming market and fan base where the expectations are of escapism from the real world, fictional settings with their own lore and issues, and heroic quests and high fantasy adventures based primarily on saving that fictional world from obvious and supernatural evils. Imagine a fan base that wants to fight dragons, collect loot, discover exotic ruins, even save damsels in distress, be a HERO, a fanbase still dominated by straight boys and straight men with a fairly traditional idea of what escapist adventure means….and then delivering them a gaming experience where they sit through (as helpless witnesses) passive-aggressive woke lectures on the proper use of imaginary pronouns.

Yes, there are female gamers. Yes, there are gay gamers and yes there are trans gamers. There are also gamers that are woke. But the important point is that these are not the majority. Fantasy literature, fantasy art, and fantasy computer gaming has had some incredible creatives who are not straight males. But the fan base has been far more male dominated than general society, with a very traditional approach to what makes an entertainment engagingly heroic and appealing. The whole point of fantasy games has been to do the things a knight would do, or a Boy Marked by Destiny would do. This is a genre shaped by the influence of Robert E.Howard (the alpha male barbarian warrior Conan expressing every nerdy boy’s fantasy of what it would be like to be strong, fearless, handsome and tough) and by J.R.R. Tolkien (a traditionalist scholar of Old English massively influenced by the Beowulf poem, by Norse sagas, and by the fellowship and decency of the English yeoman).

Think of a standard fantasy plot in a novel or a game and its the classic Hero’s Journey that goes back to ancient myth and that was then and now primarily driven by what are considered masculine virtues (as well as masculine flaws). Myth is quite often the cultural explanation of biology, and fantasy is rooted in myth. Which means Man as striver, explorer, fighter, defender and conqueror. Man taking risks. This stuff is predisposed towards the portrayal of male figures of admiration and interest, just as the topics covered are predisposed to appeal to a male audience.

Which is not to say that fantasy is just for straight boys. Such a statement would be absurd given so many female fans and contributors in the modern world. But if you can’t recognize that there are MORE boys and men engaged in this stuff than women, you’re not recognizing the reality of the market you are discussing. More boys than girls, more straight people than gay people, more non-woke than woke, and definitely, definitely much more ‘everyone else’ than trans and trans activists.

There are subtle ways to broaden that appeal if you want to. There have been very good female fantasy writers (CJ Cherryh, Ursula Le Guin, Robin Hobb, even Doris Lessing could be described as such if you want some highbrow respectability) and less good but hugely successful ones too (Leigh Bardugo, and of course JK Rowling). The influence of these female writers (and many others) together with changing social attitudes more broadly mean that today ‘strong female characters’ are a given, but even there people notice the difference between when its done well and in a rounded fashion (a Sarah Connor, to borrow from the sci-fi genre, or Tolkien’s depiction of Galadriel or Arwen or Eowyn) and when its a ‘Mary Sue’ figure simply granted pre-eminence in everything by dint of being female.

Character based good writing will appeal whether or not the main character is male or female. Lara Croft and Zelda are big franchise computer figures. Wonder Woman can be a popular series and some blockbuster movies. Ripley is an admired science fiction legend and core to the Alien franchise. But successful female characters work in fantasy when, ironically enough given the inherent departure from reality the genre is based on, they are realistic. By this I mean the thing has internal logic and setting lore that explains anomalies that depart from usual experience. Buffy the Vampire Slayer can throw burly men around because she’s a Slayer, not because she’s a woman or every woman can do this. Buffy’s mum isn’t kicking vampire ass as well. Your explanation can be magical, but it has to be exclusive in some way, and believable within the logic of the setting itself. And if you write Buffy as an insufferable bitch spending all her time browbeating men with feminist lectures rather than doing heroic things like saving her family, town and friends, Buffy would have been a flop like more recent Mary Sue characters have been.

Even there, good examples of the strong female character grow and develop, just like male heroes. They suffer reverses. They make mistakes. They feel guilt. They get lectured by others sometimes, based on plot developments and their errors, rather than just being vehicles for a writer to deliver a lecture to his or her audience. Quite often they have to learn and hone even supernatural or magical skills, again reflective of male characters developing extraordinary powers.

These issues (respect for setting lore, good writing and believable characters, characters being actually likeable, the poor writing choice of blocks of lecture-text) all apply even more to putting forward a trans character. A sympathetic trans character is going to be one that has more to say than “I’m trans” and might best be served as a character who is interested in something/anything else other than giving lectures on pronouns.

In Dragon Age: The Veilguard players are presented with a trans character, who belongs to an established warrior-mystic race of giant, somewhat ogre like creatures called Qunari. Previous lore established that the Qunari have very strict ideas of gender being related to occupation. In other words, the Qunari are more traditional on gender than anyone else in a mock-medieval setting. Thus the character immediately contradicts established setting lore and the expectations players have who know the lore best (the most engaged fans of the setting). This character is one-dimensional, rude, obnoxious, obsessed with delivering its gender messages. It’s a Mary Sue They/Them. Everyone responds as if this character is great. NPCs (enemy and aligned) in the setting marvel at this characters wit when its dialogue isn’t funny and admire this character’s toughness when its being an arsehole of indeterminate gender.

It’s a truly horrific example of writing and of political point scoring mattering more to the ‘creatives’ involved than basic writing competence.

One scene has this character rudely lecture its mother on gender identity. The player has to sit through that. The character is introduced before that by sitting down at the player characters table and saying “ I’m non-binary.” Those are the words of introduction (which have prompted lots of entertaining memes along the theme of ‘who the hell introduces themselves that way’?). Another scene has an enemy figure say you are not a warrior, and the trans activist Qunari reply “you don’t get to tell me what I am”. When an ‘enemy’ disagrees with They/Them/He/She/Whatever, the trans activist immediately sets them on fire, proving that the trans brand of heroic adventure is burning alive anyone who verbally disagrees with you.

An approach which of course teaches us, according to the writers of this garbage, that trans people in real life aren’t any kind of threat to anyone.

That’s not though the full extent of the horror on show in this dumpster fire of a gaming product/failed trans propaganda project developed, written, and praised exclusively by indoctrinated morons.

Along with intruding the purely contemporary real world language of trans and LGBTQ+ activism in a game that used to be about KILLING DRAGONS, the Qunari He/She is also made to speak exactly like a contemporary 16 year old Antifa recruit. She/He deploys a mode of expression that breaks the fourth wall more vigorously than a to the camera quip from Deadpool does. This is now the fantasy world ancient mystic warrior race of ogres who are most likely to use the words “bruh” and “dude”. Here’s an example of just how bad the dialogue is:

“Rook: I’d appreciate it if you avoided fencing any of the elven artifacts unless Bellara tells you its okay.

Taash: Don’t worry about that. The Lord of Fortune aren’t thieves.

Rook: I mean, aren’t you though?

Taash: Nah. Anything we hunt is salvage. Old forgotten ruins and crap. And we make sure we’re not screwing over a culture that lost it.”

So there you have it. “Old forgotten ruins and crap”. Nothing invokes that sense of mystery and wonder fantasy fans are after quite like that description. “Nah”, “crap”, “screwing over” really says I’m in a non-contemporary fictional setting….written by very contemporary (and sadly real) retards.

And for good measure they seem here to have the trans activist Qunari having a very contemporary real-world woke pop at the British Museum.

It quite beautifully expresses, I suppose, the foundational crudity, idiocy and ignorance of woke positions, both on real world history and even on fantasy and imaginary lore and worlds they take charge of. The Lords of Fortune, by the way, are a thieves guild by the established conventions of the genre and the previous lore of the game franchise. Having them say they don’t steal things (with that typically leftist sophistry based ‘when we do it its okay’ woke logic such as ‘our stealing is salvage/your salvage is stealing’) is as idiotic as having your College of Mages insist they don’t cast spells or your shire of hobbits insist that they are all six foot tall.

Gentlemen, please, no fighting! This is the War Room!

What was even in hippy era 1964 brilliant satire in Dr Strangelove is now the ‘serious’, intended operating logic of woke ideology, that people today are putting into computer games…ON PURPOSE.

For fans of fantasy, including fantasy computer game franchises, what you have is a kind of narrative where traditional positive male qualities are necessary and valued, where lots of the fan-base are straight and male, and where these boys, men and even most other gamers are looking for escape from the real world and the kind of vicarious relaxation and affirmation that comes from guiding an imaginary little character through a series of tests and trials that they overcome.

In other words creating a product that is steeped really obviously in very current issues, that aims itself specifically at validating a tiny fraction of your audience, and that is prepared to turn heroic adventure gaming into a series of unavoidable real-world lectures that shatter all sense of willing suspension of disbelief, all hope of escape from current reality, and all the kind of affirmation the gamer is actually after (whether that’s of gaming skill or identification with an imaginary hero) is pretty obviously going to fail.

BioWare said you want entertainment and we are delivering a lecture. It said you want escape and we are just going to use this fictional setting to make political points you might be escaping from. Gamers said they wanted a mock-medieval world. BioWare delivered a world so contemporary that it has pronoun battles. Gamers (and fan bases generally) always say respect the lore of the product (they love this franchise, and want more of the same). BioWare said the lore and the fanbase don’t matter because what’s really important is this activist message we want you to sit through. And most unforgivable of all for a heroic adventure game, players were told that rather than being an active participant and the hero of the story, their character would spend chunks of it (without choice to avoid) as the captured audience for a subsidiary non player character working through a trans affirmation storyline. With whole segments where the main character and the player controlling it are forced to be passive and denied even a dialogue option of disagreement.

To really ram home the point, there’s not really an option of avoiding the entire trans Qunari storyline. It has to be completed to unlock certain areas of the map, and it has to be completed to max out the achievements available. Then it makes you a witness for excruciating dialogues you can no longer escape except by quitting the game or perhaps, if you are particularly fortunate, dying. Even dying in real life might be preferable to some of this.

BioWare spent more years on developing Dragon Age: The Veilguard in this woke direction than the Democrats and mainstream media have spent on trying to demonize and destroy Donald Trump. They had ten years to figure out that what they were doing was heading for disaster. All that time they were picking up fat pay checks and delighting in those important and powerful business titles these people give each other.

They saw various other contemporary agenda highjackings of a brand or a franchise crash and burn in that time. They saw the disaster of Bud Light. They saw the disaster of Kathleen Kennedy and her ilk and of Star Wars spin-offs like The Acolyte. They saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. They even saw woke computer game titles crash and burn. And they didn’t deviate at all. They kept heading for the cliff.

What’s even more astonishing is that earlier iterations of the franchise managed to broaden the appeal to other demographics without entering Unavoidable Lecture Mode. In prior games in the series players could select gay relationship options. Or straight relationship options. A straight player could totally avoid the gay elements without losing any game areas or any achievements, and a gay player could if they wished just as easily avoid the straight relationship options. These games were a big hit and there were minimal complaints about the sexual diversity. Because none of it was forced on you and all of it could easily be ignored.

It’s a difference reflective of a move from old liberalism to modern wokeness, and the difference is defined by a player and purchasers CHOICE in it all.

BioWare decided to spend a fortune ‘transitioning’ from this successful approach to direct lectures and lack of choice.

Some of the figures I’ve seen banded around for the development costs of Dragon Age: The Veilguard are astronomical. Employing a large team of developers for 10 years working on a single product is very, very expensive. Steam community commentary (based on the likely number of developers and the average salary of them in the industry) puts the development costs at around $250 million US dollars BEFORE the marketing costs are added in. To make back such an investment, the company would need to sell 5-6 million copies. That wasn’t necessarily an unlikely thing as earlier iterations of the franchise have sold well above that level.

BUT it becomes a lot less likely when you target the product (very obviously) at only those gamers who match your political obsessions. Instead of a game that has to appeal to EVERY type of gamer to break even (which is the reality), you produce a game that only appeals to your trans gamers, and their very woke allies (perhaps a third or a quarter of the people, at best, who were already following the franchise).

Current estimates are that the game has hit 500,000 sales (between 5 and 5.5 million below what they need to break even and start making a profit). As it stands, it has lost BioWare 10 years of effort and most of the cost of creating it.

There are of course both economic lessons and broader social lessons here. The economic lesson is that big bets on woke content are bad business strategy. This is the ‘go woke go broke’ lesson which we have seen innumerable times in film, entertainment and media, and have now even seen in election results. But more than that it speaks to how paltry and stupid all this nonsense is, how anti-creative it is.

It’s impossible to produce actual entertainment out of this dross, and it doesn’t want escapism at all. It wants you captured wherever you are, forced to sit through lectures you don’t want delivered by people who can’t write and only appealing to people who can’t think.

Its as poor a social model as it is a failing business model.

BioWare deserve to go bust for this. Any company that delivers this stuff with such contempt for their audience, and spending $250 million dollars on it, deserves to fail. Hopefully, economic reality will be the brick wall that companies acting like this run into until they stop doing it or disappear.

The same choice Democrats and people doing it in elections have too, now, it seems.