So much of BioWare and Electronic Arts' upcoming Dragon Age 4 remains a mystery, with players still waiting for a confirmed title or a glimpse of gameplay. Solas returns as the big bad, but apart from that, story details are scarce. Dragon Age 4's development has also been a marathon of mishaps and about turns, with a shift to include live-service multiplayer elements only for the studio to change its mind again after the failure of games like Anthem.
While a single-player narrative focus and a Tevinter setting has been confirmed for Dragon Age 4, not much else has. This has left plenty of room for fans of the series to speculate on what they think Dragon Age 4 will include, from returning characters to gameplay mechanics. One element that many gamers would love to see make a comeback is the character backstories featured in Dragon Age: Origins. While Dragon Age: Inquisition allowed players to pick their race and their starting class, only Dragon Age: Origins added individualized stories and starting points to these choices, and this level of customization and attention to detail would be a welcome feature in the upcoming installment.
Dragon Age: Origins' Character Stories
In true fantasy RPG fashion, Dragon Age: Origins lets players choose a race and a class to play during the character creation. Gamers could choose an elf, dwarf, or human, in addition to choosing whether they wanted to play as a warrior, mage, or rogue. There were some limitations based on established game lore, like how dwarves could not be mages due to that race's lack of magical abilities and resistance to lyrium, but apart from that, players were given a variety of choices for how they wanted to play the game.
Dragon Age: Origins really embraced this area of role-playing by including different backstories and starting points for each character, depending on their race and class. The mages start in Ferelden's Circle of Magi, Dwarves get to explore various levels of Orzammar society depending on their noble or commoner status, humans could have a tragic noble background, and elves could either showcase the nomadic Dalish lifestyle or the oppressed city one. These varied and individualized backgrounds helped to explore elements of Dragon Age: Origins' lore in a much more in-depth way, and even though areas could be revisited later if players didn't experience them through their origin story, it still encouraged multiple playthroughs.
Dragon Ae 2: The Move Away From Backstories
Although this was a popular feature of the first game, Dragon Age 2 chose to go in a different direction. Instead of choosing a playable race, gamers were limited to a human character called Hawke who already had their own family and established backstory. A possible reason for this more stripped back approach could be the tight deadline the developer was given to launch the second installment, leading it to reuse assets and limit the locations of the game. While some players really took to Hawke and still felt they could craft the character the way they wanted with dialogue options, a class build, and potential romances, others lamented the loss of the freedom from the first game.
Dragon Age: Inquistion brought customization back to some extent, adding more options like a playable Qunari character and reinstating the choice of the protagonist's race. However, besides some brief allusions to the Inquisitor's life before they received the mark, they don't have an individualized backstory that players can witness for themselves. This more simplistic approach does still allow for some role-playing elements and players are free to make their own headcanon for their character. However, including separate stories based not only on their race but also their class helps to tie-in the lore of the land and the history of the various groups in Thedas to an extent that can't otherwise be achieved within the wider narrative.
Why Dragon Age 4 Should Bring Them Back
For games that pride themselves on their worldbuilding and narrative depth, individualized backstories just make sense for Dragon Age installments. There is so much history to explore and interracial tensions to exploit, and for players who may only just be coming to the franchise with Dragon Age 4, separate origin stories for each type of protagonist would be a great way to introduce them to the world of Thedas and its colorful inhabitants. Making each class and race combination distinct gives weight to their stories and adds to the replayability factor, which can be important to the success of a single-player game.
While previous Dragon Age titles have featured in-game consequences for class and race choices, like the prejudice that Elves encounter or the near-universal fear of mages, giving appropriate origin stories to these aspects helps players to understand the gravity of their choices. This could be further complicated and improved in Dragon Age 4, as the stage is set for a massive Elven rebellion led by the Dread Wolf, and playing an elf during this turbulent time could be really explored through an origin story. Likewise, the Qunari-Tevinter war will probably be a focus for the upcoming game, and the significance of playing as a Qunari traveling through the antagonistic country would best be explained through a well-constructed and playable backstory.
Giving gamers a chance to play through a character-specific origin story not only helps convey a better understanding of the world they find themselves in, but it can also add emotional stakes to the proceedings. In Dragon Age: Origins, player who chose the human noble background as either a warrior or a rogue would have witnessed firsthand Arl Howe's betrayal of their family. As he becomes a major antagonist throughout the game, it gives them a more personal motivation to take him down, which is not present in any of the other character storylines.
Little touches like this help to elevate an RPG and its storytelling, giving players the chance to craft more individualized narratives and experience the game in a different way each time. Dragon Age 4 would do well to emulate this feature from Dragon Age: Origins, and create a more nuanced and intriguing world that presents its stratified and historically complex societies in a more engaging way.
Dragon Age 4 is in development.