Spoiler Alert: This blog post has spoilers on both, Dragon Age and Dragon Age II. If you have not finished both games and you are planning to play them or either, then do not read it!

Witch Hunt was such an awful letdown. I still can't believe they did that to Morrigan and her memory in the minds of so many of us gamers who loved the character for one reason or another, and were immersed into her story within our story. What's even more frustrating and disappointing is that we do not play Dragon Age II as who we were in DA, the Grey Warden, the Hero of Ferelden; thus, we don't know what has become of Morrigan.

And they had the audacity to make us meet Alistair in DA2...drunk, wretched, and the shell of the man he used to be. The worst thing about that meeting was that I, as the player, was not meeting him as his best friend, the Grey Warden, and hero of Ferelden. I can't imagine a more cruel way of "rewarding" us for doing the right thing, making the right decision in Dragon Age. Alistair's hunger for revenge has blinded him, and kept him from honoring the values of the Grey Wardens, the values that Duncan himself would've wanted to uphold, and not just that, but also seeing the more sensible choice of allowing Loghain to go through the Joining ritual, thus leaving his fate to the Maker, and upholding the value of accepting anyone who has the skill in the Grey Wardens ranks. When I made the right decision, as a player, and accepted Loghain's surrender, and allowed him to go through the Joining ritual, I lost Alistair, as a best friend and brother of a Grey Warden, after we spent so much time together building that army and reaching that very point when he chose to depart. And after all this, I get rewarded for making the right decision by seeing him that way in a rundown tavern, drunk, and not even as the Hero of Ferelden, but as another character...so I couldn't even talk to him properly. I think that was cruel of the decision makers, and it all adds up with the disregard shown to Morrigan as a character.

I don't know what they're planning for Dragon Age III, but really...if this kind of treatment of our emotional attachments in the story and lore of the game continues, then I really won't appreciate it. Games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect today are so superbly written, so excellently directed, and so well acted by the voiceover actors and actresses, that players can very much relate to events just like some people relate to events in a drama movie and even have their eyes watering sometimes. Lots of people are willing to accept someone crying from a movie scene, but they aren't as willing to accept an emotional attachment from a player to a character in his party or so...when logic itself dictates that it is much easier and more predictable that a person would get emotionally attached to a story that she herself or he himself is part of, or even a main character in...and in a game, players can spend dozens of hours playing it, being direclty engaged in the events, not just 2 hours watching a movie and being completely separate & detached from its events. Accordingly, I think that game producers and directors today should be a lot more careful on what they do with the characters that they get players attached to.

I really think that Dragon Age's decision makers' treatment of Alistair and Morrigan as such influential characters of DA was just cruel...cruel to the players who have spent hours playing their game. And the only way they can atone for such cruel treatment is to give us some answers and allow us to "help" in DA3. Otherwise, I really won't be feeling that good about the DA series. Yes, of course I'll be a fan and all, but I just won't feel as good about the series as I would if the decision makers would respect the memory of those characters and give us, as players, some closure, appropriate closure too.

Perhaps to be continued...