Dragon Age Origins Wasn't Just Horny--It Was About Sex

Dragon Age Origins is celebrating its 15-year anniversary today, November 3, 2024. Below, we examine its role as a daring, if awkward, attempt to use sex as a central theme and mechanic.

Sex and video games have always had an uneasy relationship. Playing smut on the Atari 2600 feels like looking at middle-school scrawlings. Much of the pornography peddled on Steam is embarrassing and unattractive. Even more mainstream games in the modern era have had a fraught relationship with sex. The tame scenes in Mass Effect infamously got a paranoid Fox News report. Recent years have seen recording romantic scenes in Baldur's Gate 3 net players temporary Xbox bans. In such an environment, it is hard to imagine a mainstream game having a bold depiction of sex. But 20 years ago, Dragon Age: Origins took a daring, if flawed, swing at it.

Dragon Age: Origins is still a weird mix. The basic plot is downright Tolkien-esque: a fellowship of warriors from across the land are driven together to stop "the blight," a horde of demon creatures dedicated to destroying all free life. In practice, however, the game takes most of its dramatic cues from A Song of Ice and Fire (the books, not Game of Thrones). Nobleman Loghan leaves boy king Cailan to die, triggering a violent succession crisis. Magic, while more commonplace than in Westeros, is marginalized, feared, and policed. Even the blight itself resembles the white walkers, i.e. a fundamental existential threat from the natural world.

In other words, Dragon Age: Origins, even as it holds on to high-fantasy ideas like ancient elves and underground dwarven metropolises, has a strong dark-fantasy bent. This extends somewhat to its treatment of sex and romance. Like its influences, DA:O's approach is largely heterosexual, interested in bloodlines, parentage, and, well, impregnation. This manifests in fairly tame ways, like companion Templar Alistair's claim to the throne, and in absurd ones, like the witch Morrigan begging the player to impregnate her with the spirit of the archdemon, leader of the blight. If you play as a man, she propositions you directly, but if you are a woman you must, even more comically, find someone else for her to sleep with.

In this moment, sex is transactional. It serves a purpose but is not necessarily about romance or love. Morrigan propositions a male player character even if she's left the party. She'll sleep with characters she finds despicable and unattractive. It's a means to an end. In some sense, this is not exactly remarkable. Most sexual encounters in video games are treated as rewards for kindness and play out in endgame cutscenes. The romance is a reward for playing correctly.

Dragon Age: Origins is no exception to this. In fact, it's perhaps an egregious example of how shallow this kind of narrative design can be. No matter how much you antagonize or bully party members, you can win their affection with a set of gifts. There's even paid DLC which fills your inventory with trinkets that max out your party's affections. You can quite literally buy your way into their hearts.

However, Dragon Age: Origins is good at grounding its characters in politics and a culture that exists outside them. Morrigan's utilization of sex to get power comes from her background as a mage forced to hide from the oppressive church. Mages are discouraged from having children; the prevailing belief is that the more mages there are, the more force must be expended to police them. Morrigan's ritual to trap the archdemon is a massive defiance of that restriction. In other words, the choice to go through with Morrigan's ritual is one that has implications beyond just sex. But the heart of it is the push and pull of consent and vulnerability.

Morrigan is the most successful example of this kind of characterization, but not the exception. Both of the possible queer romances--the bard Leliana and the assassin Zevron can be romanced by a warden of either gender--are foreigners, hailing from places where the sexual culture is freer and easier. Though religious, Leliana rejects the celibacy of the church. Zevron was raised by sex workers. Alistair's status as a virgin is openly commented on and mocked. All this is to say, Dragon Age: Origin's companions each have a sexual history (or conspicuous lack thereof). This history informs how they treat you and their overall attitude toward sex. Zevran is easygoing and flirtatious, for example, while Alistair is insecure, deflecting, and sarcastic. None of these characters are defined by their sexual orientation or experience, but both inform their characterization throughout the game's entire runtime.

This is not to say that Dragon Age: Origins handles all this well. To put it lightly, DA:O is immature. In its lighter moments, it has a frankly juvenile sense of humor. It uses sex and violence as a cheap and mostly ineffective means of shock value. Characters stroll out of regular combat encounters soaked in blood, which is so comical that any actual gore has no impact. In the City Elf origin, DA:O handles sexual assault and racist violence callously, as trauma backdrop for the player character's blank slate. Jokes about sex are plentiful, but mostly amount to high-school health-class fodder.

The encounter with the pirate Isabella is most emblematic of both the game's successes and shortcomings. If you pass a persuasion check, you can sleep with Isabella to earn a subclass (yes, it's all transactional). Other party members can join you. It's not as if there aren't a few big games that feature group sex--you can have a foursome with drow twins in Baldur's Gate 3 after all--but there are fewer where the exact configuration of the encounter depends not just on whether the player character and their partner are game, but on a chain reaction of character psychology and choices. For example, If Alistair and Leliana have been "hardened" by the outcomes of their personal quests, they'll join in. If not, they won't. Isabella will always ask Zevran to participate, regardless of his romantic status with the player. He'll happily oblige... unless Alistair is there, like a bitter bisexual rejecting the advances of a couple at a bar. This moment is better conceptually than in practice, funnier and stranger to read about than to experience. But it also reflects a deeper thinking about each character's sexual ethics and how it relates to every other character.

There is a further problem, however: Dragon Age: Origins is visually ugly. It is just as dirt brown as a Gears of War game, but without the brutal, comic-book starkness that franchise has. It's going for a kind of grounded grimness but ends up just feeling dirty. Sex scenes are stitled and awkward beyond even the regular woes of the uncanny valley. Characters posing in underwear doesn't feel romantic or erotic as much as it resembles the intimates section of a Sears catalog–albeit with a rustic, medieval theme. Mods can help with this, though they can also yassify the characters beyond all recognition or render DA:O aesthetic far afield from its creators' original intentions.

Still, despite these shortcomings, DA:O engages with sex in a way that is rare for games of its size and budget. Outside of a couple moments, Baldur Gate's 3 is interested in sex and romance as a vector for character arcs (good!) and as plain wish fulfillment (bad! Josh Sawyer shares my assessment). Despite some standout moments in Cyberpunk 2077 (Judy Alveraz's set of side quests are perhaps the best romance of their kind in video games, period), it is also largely juvenile. The streets of Night City are plastered with annoying and tasteless ads, not provocative as much as silly.

To be sure, there are bright spots. Games like Disco Elysium and Pentiment don't feature the traditional mode of video game romance, but are plugged into their respective worlds' sexual mores and practices. Nevertheless, even in its crassness, its ugliness, Dragon Age: Origins took steps towards a more adult landscape. I can't help but feel that AAA games have regressed since.