Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening Storyline Continuation Examined

The editors at Hellforge have kicked out a spoiler-heavy editorial that examines BioWare’s controversial decision to ignore a potential ending in Dragon Age: Origins when players continue their journey in the Awakening expansion pack. Hopefully anyone reading this has finished the game, because we’re talking about the ending involving the player’s personal sacrifice:

At the end of Dragon Age: Origins, your character had the option of making this ultimate sacrifice, giving their life to end the Fifth Blight. There were other ways out of course; creating some sort of demon-godchild with the apostate Morrigan, or having Alistair or Loghain make the killing blow. However, with the recent update of Dragon Age: Awakening’s FAQ comes a revelation; if your character sacrificed themselves to destroy the Archdemon, you must either pretend it never happened and continue the character, or you must play Awakening in an alternative universe where your character never existed and never made the major changes to Ferelden of Dragon Age: Origins.

A few examples of these changes; choosing the ruler(s) of Ferelden, choosing the ruler of Orzammar, locating the Ashes of the Holy Prophet Andraste and allowing anyone to come and see them, killing all of the Mages in Ferelden’s Circle Tower, killing or leaving to die many of your companions, killing Flemeth (who would probably possess Morrigan otherwise), and so on. Having these decisions persist for Awakening, however, seems to be mutually exclusive with having your Grey Warden canonically die in defense of the country.

They go on to point out how similar endings were handled in Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2:

In Fallout 3 you had the choice of sacrificing yourself to purify the water of the D.C. Wasteland from its post-apocalyptic radiation. This death choice was done horribly and caused just as much anger at the time, but for different reasons. In this case, not only were there several companions who could have performed this task at no danger to themselves (they refused, without any good reason), but even the main character was equipped with a radiation suit and Rad-reducing chems, more or less allowing them safe access to Project Purity (quite aside from the fact that with Liberty Prime and the Brotherhood of Steel holding off the Enclave, you had more than enough time to secure the area and vent the radiation safely before entering).

…

Mass Effect has its own differences. For one, you are always playing Shepard in ME1/2 (though this will change in ME3 as you can die in ME2… unless Bioware wants to ‘hand-wave’ that too). If Shepard had ‘died’ in ME1 (which wasn’t an option), you couldn’t play Shepard in ME2 (well… Project Lazarus, but that’s in hindsight). For two, ME2 is a standalone sequel; to get the benefit of choosing your background for it, you have the option of buying and playing ME1. Awakening is an expansion that requires Origins, but you get none of the benefits of having to have Origins if you chose to sacrifice your character and want to keep that decision intact; there’s not even an economic benefit to this decision.

What do you think? Is BioWare making a big mistake to ignore such a weighty game-ending decision?