Dragon Age 4 Shouldn't "Both Sides" The Mages And Templars
We all forget just how different the mage versus Templar conflict is in Dragon Age: Origins. Years of replaying Inquisition has got it in our heads that it’s always been this binary choice: mage or Templar? Like a Telltale game, this decision is often tinged with some good and some bad. Are you a good person, but naive? Or are you evil, but with a bit of remorse? We love some video game morality, we do.
But it didn’t start like this at all. In Origins, you don’t really take sides with either faction - even if that is what the Dragon Age Keep says we did. You are never given a choice of helping the mages or helping the Templars - which side you end up aligning with depends on how much effort you invest in their questline. This is the best way the conflict has been represented, and the series needs to return to these roots in Dragon Age 4.
Related: Dragon Age 4 Needs To Respect Our Awful Choices
To best explain this, we need to remind ourselves of another thing we forget about Origins: the Chantry fucking sucks. They have some dodgy members in the latter two games, sure. But institutionally, Origins makes it clear that the Chantry is wrong to its core. They create Templars by filling unwanted kids full of Lyrium. Continuous use isn’t even necessary for their powers to fight mages, but do you know what it does do? Makes them horrifically dependent on the Chantry for their next fix, since withdrawal can be deadly.
Sure, it’s obvious that the church is ruining the lives of mages everywhere, but the game goes out of its way to show us that the life of a Templar sucks too. This is best highlighted by your eventual advisor in Inquisition, Cullen, who appears here with his original noodle-hairdo. At the start of the game, he’s a
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