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