Somehow memories from this extremely stupid blip in 
history popped into my mind and it’s remarkable how closely it mirrored the various Sweet Baby Inc/Blackrock/DEI panics of recent years. What’s interesting is that all of this happened all the way back in 2011, so it predates even Gamergate
For context, Dragon Age II was rushed out the door by EA to capitalise on Dragon Age Origins’ success. As a result, the game had a bunch of issues and cut corners, the most egregious of which was the fact that the game had like three interiors that it shamelessly kept recycling for quest dungeons for the duration of the entire game.
Dragon Age II was also more streamlined compared to the first Dragon Age. Dragon Age Origins was a game Bioware had been cooking for a long time, even before their acquisition by EA and was very much in the vein of classic CRPGs, which was not something you really saw from big console-focused AAA publishers or developers. As a result, it got latched onto by hardcore elitist gamer types as an example of a Real Game, so when the sequel went in a more flashy ARPG direction the accusations of a complex RPG series being dumbed down for stupid console babbies were loud and swift. There was a video from E3 where a cringy Bioware rep tried to big up their new combat system by explaining how “every time you press a button, something awesome has to happen. Button->awesome” which didn’t really help
So you had a rushed development and simplified gameplay, both of which are enough to generate gamer rage. However, what truly made from froth at the mouth were the writing and characters.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Dragon Age II was the first Bioware game that forwent any kind of gender restrictions on romance options, meaning male and female PCs could romance any of the romanceable male or female characters. This led to the unconscionable occurrence where a male player playing a male character would get lead-in dialogue scenes to romance plotlines with male characters or even be FLIRTED with by them. This was unthinkable to the 2011 gamer and I remember people complaining that they were shocked and offended by being sexually propositioned by MEN while trying to relax with their video games.
It also didn’t help that one of the male romance options was Anders, a character previously introduced in an expansion for the first game. In the DLC he was a laid-back, quippy and (seemingly) straight dude but in DAII, in addition to being romanceable by both men and women, he was also rewritten to be more tortured and angsty. This lead to many an angry GameFAQs post complaining about how Bioware had ruined their cool bro by turning him into a whiny gay sissy that wanted to fuck them 
Some people also took issue with how the elves were portrayed. While the Dragon Age elves were never quite Peter Jackson-esque tall Aryan supermen, in DAII they were made explicitly more fae or pixie-like, with large heads, big eyes and smaller bodies. There were complaints about how emasculated the elves looked
I also remember people hating one of the first party members you get in DAII, Aveline, a female warrior and member of the city guard, for perfectly valid reasons I’m sure you can guess:
What’s funny is that DAII also had a party member that was a horny lady pirate with big tits who didn’t wear pants, and I seem to remember gamers hating her because she was too forward with her sexuality
Anyway, what truly reminds me of Gamergate and modern anti-woke campaigns is that the gamers started digging around for culprits for why the game had turned out the way it did and settled on one of the game’s writers who had appeared in a few promotional dev log videos. This writer was, of course, a woman and I believe she had mentioned that she wasn’t much of a gamer and liked playing games on easy difficulty. Gamers started googling her name and found a self-published sci-fi adventure story with gay romance. They now had their smoking gun and would soon craft elaborate conspiracy theories about this one writer.
According to gamers, this insidious and incompetent woman had Trojan Horsed her way into Bioware through diversity hiring to force her sick gay fetishes into Bioware’s games to push them on the general public after no one bought her gay novels. (The woman also happened to be overweight which naturally was referenced in all the memes and posts about her.)
Loads and loads of angry gamers flooded Bioware’s forums to vent their rage and to tilt at windmills which lead to mass deletions, which in turn led to accusations of censorship, cover-up and conspiracy. One of the Bioware forum moderators had an Asian name and I remember a Youtube video making fun of him for deleting posts critical of Bioware with a racist Chinese accent
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Literally the only thing I remember about DA2 is that it was always the same fucking cave.
The game was legitimately sort of a mess because it was so rushed
“Every time you press a button, something awesome’s gotta happen! So, button->awesome, connect it now… in Dragon Age II” is an alltime banger though.
Classic clueless marketing speak
Wait, is that why the ”hold this to sprint/do wrestling moves on enemies” button is called the Awesome Button in Saints Row: The Third?
You just reminded me of all the cringe Fenris fanfic.
Also I liked the elf redesign. Merrill is the cutest little blood mage I’ve ever seen
I have never played the Dragon Age games and yet this burns bright in my mind. I see it referenced on the RPG Codex, old Razorfist videos refer to it, I go back and look at threads sometimes. The " “controversy” " over this writer (or another staff member with a similar story) I think extends all the way back to Mass Effect 1, I recall seeing prerelase stuff about her not having enough time to play stuff on account of being a mother. (Surely no gamer would ever be mad about that again…)
I remember seeing the fucking memes about her being fat. I remember being bewildered at the pure fury grassless gamers were expressing. Staging ground for gamergate, like the rage over Gone Home was.
Razorfist
Republican Spoony
Can’t believe I remember that guyIt’s interesting to think back on the Dragon Age II backlash and how much of it was just centered on hating specific Bioware staff members. I don’t recall there being any broader conspiracy theorising about how Anders being gay was the opening salvo in a communist takeover of America
He’s a real guy which is sad honestly.
Yeah that was kinda before the gamergate thing united gamers and the right wing permanently, so the grassless ones were just kinda mad at this random woman whom they’d perceived as invading their boys’ club, rather than (((them))) or whatever the hell.
There were complaints about how emasculated the elves looked
That is extremely funny
All my Dragon Age friends were generally some flavor of Gay, so I never heard these complaints.
generally speaking it is one of the gayest fandoms in existence. But it shed a lot of
after DA2 and DAI. I think as much as anything they started to realize that it wasn’t a game only made for them, and that set them off.KOTOR, Jade Empire, ME1, DAO and ME2 were all pretty straight dude oriented. Wait, was the Cam Clarke-voiced companion in Jade Empire also romanceable as a male character or am I misremembering things
I remember I liked the snappier animations, never finished it though, the whole setting is strange and confusing to me. Played the hell out of Origins though. I remember that the gay elf in Origins also made some insecure g*mers mad. Then there was the incredibly sexual Iron Bull in Inquisition, but maybe the rage addicts had given up on Bioware by then.
There was a gay elf in Origins? I don’t remember that game too well, all I remember was that you had Morrigan for the dudes, Alistair for the ladies and Leliana for both, as was the standard Bioware arrangement for a while. Then again, the only DLC I ever played was the big expansion that Anders was in since I was led to believe it was important for the sequel (it wasn’t)
I never played Inquisition but even I remember there being plenty of grumbling about Iron Bull, as well as the gay mage character in that game
Zevran, IIRC he was missable.
Oh yeah, he had a Spanish accent and everything
Inquisition was one of the first times I ever saw GET WOKE GO BROKE actually!
DA2 wasn’t supposed to be a full sequel but EA was EA so that’s why the maps were like that.
Aveline was the Carth of that game.
I resent them for making me defend a crappy rpg. fucking capitalism won’t even give me good treats
I liked that you were just some guy or girl trying to make their way in a new city while also looking after their friends and family instead of the bog standard chosen one plot (hello DA:O) but the overall game left much to be desired
that was part of why the backlash was so strong though. You weren’t epic badass chosen one hero. I agree with you, I liked the change a lot. I think it also helped the relationships with the companions. The fact that your party stayed together because they were all either pals or your pals made the relationships feel more grounded and real.
Not Afraid by Eminem was written about a brave G*mer standing up to women and minorities ruining his games.
Yeah, I remember that, whiny g*mer complaints never change. Another embarassing ”backlash” from around that time was ”Mighty No. 9 has a feminist community manager”.
Huh, I could have sworn DA2 had gendered love interests, but they aren’t (except some DLC I never played). I don’t remember having gay interactions with the male characters despite doing the typical bioware thing of being generic nice guy to all companions, which makes me think you would’ve had to have chosen the heart dialogue options, which I never did.
Re: the elf redesign, and the more stylized aesthetic in general. I got to speak to one of the lead artists at a con for a moment a while after launch, and asked why they’d gone for such a change in style (personally I thought it was worse, but didn’t say as much). He said it was because DAO was just generic fantasy and didn’t stand out enough. DA2 was the worse game (and DAI was worse still), so a lot of people associate the change in style with the games being worse.
Anyway I’m one of the weirdos who preferred the faster and more stylish combat and didn’t even mind the “enemies respawn from nowhere” rooms, but disliked the game overall because the story (and in particular the ending) sucked ass.
It would be incredibly funny and incredibly on brand if they went out of their way to flirt with the dudes just so they could get mad about it online later. I wasn’t too into the fairy-looking elves but I remember liking the Qunari redesign, but of course you then never had a Qunari character in your party in II.
I liked the general idea of II’s story, that it was a smaller-scale, more personal story about some schmuck and their pals
I actually really disliked the Qunari because in my mind this was the payoff from Sten in DAO and it just didn’t match up at all, but to each their own. And yeah agreed that the general idea is fine but “oh no evil rock” and “the wizards who have a pretty raw deal and the people who want to kill all wizards are both right” just did not work lol.
I liked their visual aesthetics in that they looked like a more unique fantasy race, but I think story-wise they were pretty one-dimensional designated villains for one chapter which I liked a lot less
The only thing surrounding DA2 I remember was this gif
It was really funny how they tried to push Dragon Age as an edgy “not your daddy’s fantasy” series when it was very much your daddy’s fantasy
They put a fucking Marilyn Manson song in one of the ads for Origins
they had a whole trailer that was just a compilation of violence from the game set to Marilyn Manson. Possibly the hardest anyone has ever tried to be edgy.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I currently playing DA2, I’m replaying the franchise before the release of DAV.
DA2 sucks a lot in different ways: the dialogue is too linear and you can’t talk to your companions, most of the time the dialogue is Companion talking > Player talking > C talking and the dialogue ends, the combat is boring, all encounters are the same, you have waves upon waves of enemies spawning out of nowhere, the nightmare difficulty was so rushed and so poorly balanced that it’s just annoying to play and finally the game has the problem of the 3 map recycling, and so on.
How the fuck Gamers focus on the gay characters when everything around them is shit?
Fuck Origins has Zevran and Leliana and Zevran flirts with your male warden all the fucking time, Isabella is also present in Origins, in a brothel and she invites you to fuck. Your warden can be just like Aveline and be a badass female knight invited to join the Grey Wardens. In fact the two most difficult bosses in the game, aside from the Archdemon, are a female dwarf, a living legend in the eyes of the dwarves, and a female knight, the second in command of Loghain.
Gamers are too incongruous to be taken seriously.
