#like everything we see in veilguard re: grey wardens has long-since been established. bioware clearly wanted things that way

[nelkenbabe]

what i don't quite understand about the criticism of "bioware doesn't know or like the grey wardens, did they even play origin lmao" is that. origins is not even remotely a full representation of grey wardens as an order

the player character is, along with the 6-months post recruiting Alistair, one of the few grey wardens we meet, and the two of them know very little, next to nothing. the whole point is that they are cut off from all other wardens, that they don't have access to information or any leads on how to go about defeating the blight.

duncan is secretive as fuck, and genuinely scary during the joining, and then he's dead. riordan doesn't join until way later, and even though we get some crucial information regarding the matters at hand it still gives us little about the grey wardens as a hundreds-of-years-old organization, their policies and how they actually handle things. the only thing the player character has about what grey wardens even are, is the ideal of what a grey wardens should be

so going off of origins, we as players as just as naive about the grey wardens as our character. i suspect that it's that naiveté that leads people to be severely pissed when it's brought up again and again that the grey wardens, as an order, are a group of people who make fucked up, morally corrupt choices for The Greater Good. that's all the entire order has ever been, starting in origins when duncan can literally blackmail you into joining the grey wardens (cousland origin), and then the whole secrecy around the ritual, where a recruit dies from participating in the joining, and then duncan kills the other recruit who changed his mind.

it's also brought up in the DA:2's legacy dlc again, and of course becomes even more glaring in Inquisition, and genuinely i think all of it is a part of the dragon age series' running theme of "any organization that reaches a certain size will fall prey to morally bankrupt people making bad decisions, regardless of the purity of intent."

now whether that is a good thing or not may be worth a discussion. but my point here is that the grey wardens being a fucked up organization that commits gross, morally questionable acts and is subject to internal politics, is not a new concept. it's a well-established part of the dragon age universe. i understand that a lot of people may not like it. but it does not come out of nowhere