In terms of quests, Bioware has a knack for taking the trite and giving it a twist. Take, for example, returning to your Dwarven home that you were kicked out of. The King is now dead, left with his son battling a trusted advisor to take the throne. No decision can be made until the Assembly calls in a vote to who is King, but no one can decide on who they want to crown. A King is required if the Grey Wardens are going to gain the assistance of the Dwarven armies.

Now here I come, a Dwarf without a Caste (social ranking). It turns out that noble my sister was wooing at the start of the game was nothing less than the King’s own son. Already my choice is biased, but I try to go out and do as I might in real life anyway. If I am to enlist the help of the Dwarven kingdom I must choose whom I support. That means research.

This is where the quest irritates me. There is very little knowledge on either candidate. I don’t want to just play like your typical gamer and make a random choice. I want to see if I should betray my sister’s hubby, and likely trust, or not. Yet when I go out and search all I can uncover is that the King’s son allegedly had poisoned his own sibling. The Advisor also claims that the last words of the King were that his son should not take the throne. Are these things true? No one knows. The only fact I know is the King’s son wishes to abandon the Caste system, meaning it does not matter who you are born to. Anyone can become a Smith, Merchant or Warrior if they so desire. I like this idea for various reasons.

So I get all of that information from a single Merchant, and figure more people will have other information available. Only they don’t. I know nothing about the Advisor. I have no concept of his moral character. The King’s son acts a bit like an asshole, but hey, he married my sister who had no Caste. That’s gotta mean something, right? Finding his dead brother’s journal revealed that the prince seems to be a nice guy and not some stuck up snob. In comparison, at least.

Even so, the game gives you no option to speak to either side until you agree to do an errand for them, automatically placing you in bad favor with the opponent. You can’t have a discourse to discover their political values. You can basically offer to help them, or demand help for your cause which only leads to running errands for them first.

So at minimum two hours are spent running these errands, as every quest in Dragon Age seems to be wrapped around another. Kind of like a twinkie. Or pigs in a blanket. Once I’ve finally completed and chosen to support the King’s son, his first act is to sentence the advisor to death.

This is NOT the sort of politician I wanted to support.

I don’t know if the blatant cloud of ignorance is intentional or not. Real politics are full of people out for their own gain, you are limited to a two party system, and in terms of the Presidency the vote of the citizen doesn’t matter. It’s all about the Electoral College, which is similar to the assembly here. No one cares about values and the citizens themselves are stooped in ignorance. It’s all about “who benefits me the most?”. In which case, BioWare represented politics perfectly.

So if the mission’s goal was accuracy, mission accomplished! It’s not about finding a proper King at all! However, it still would have been nice to have had more option as to which candidate I should favor. Sure, I heard a lot of bad things about the King’s son, but I had heard nothing of his Advisor. I didn’t know any causes he had supported or even any slander against him. All I knew was that he was the previous King’s friend. Even in real life citizens that actually care can go and do research.

In the end this was the least favorable mission thus far. Every mission previous allowed me to learn about the background and gain as much information before making a moral decision. This one, on the other hand, was merely an extremely long fetch-quest colored to seem as something much more grand. Hopefully all the missions after have much greater care taken into them.

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