BioWare’s early history is filled with beloved games based on Dungeons and Dragons. Between Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Baldur’s Gate 2, the legendary developer created worlds that fantasy fans adore to this day. However, the developers wanted to create their own engrossing fantasy universe, especially after seeing how successful their Mass Effect series was in the sci-fi genre. Enter Dragon Age. The fantasy RPG launched in 2009 and quickly became a fan-favorite. We’ve since gotten three more mainline games and two spin-offs (plus a few web browser games), but which of those stands on top?
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Here is every Dragon Age game (outside of the browser games) ranked from worst to best.
6) Heroes of Dragon Age
Heroes of Dragon Age is one of EA’s many attempts to turn their fan-favorite franchises into freemium mobile games during the 2010s. The publisher tried this with just about everything, and unfortunately, even Dragon Age wasn’t immune.
As a strategy game, Heroes of Dragon Age is fine, if a little simplistic. There’s enough depth here to keep you engaged for a few hours, which EA hoped was long enough to get you hooked on leveling up and collecting characters, but there’s no real reason to play this when much better games exist in the series.
5) Dragon Age Legends
On a similar note, Dragon Age Legends is a Facebook game that launched as a companion piece to Dragon Age 2. Players create a character and engage in relatively simple turn-based combat scenarios. You can then level up and recruit new characters to make future combat easier.
Because it was on Facebook, some of the avatar characters are your friends on the platform, giving your party a personal touch. It was one of the best games on Facebook at the time, but that wasn’t saying much, given some of the other games on the service at the time. Sadly for fans, its servers turned off after about a year, but a free download was made available for offline play.
4) Dragon Age: The Veilguard
The most recent game on this list, The Veilguard, tried to bring Dragon Age to modern audiences while continuing the intriguing plot set up in Dragon Age: Inquisition. And while I do have it as the worst mainline game in the series, Dragon Age still did a lot of things right.
Combat isn’t nearly as tactical as long-time fans would like, but it is fun. You have plenty of abilities at your disposal, and taking down hordes of enemies is a blast. The Veilguard also looks great. Some fans might be put off by the more cartoony character models, but the world design is exceptional. Plus, that twist and finale are worth seeing.
The problem is that a lot of what makes Dragon Age Dragon Age isn’t here. The Veilguard has the weakest companions in the series. That seems impossible when you remember one guy turns into a skeleton mage, and another is a coffee-loving assassin, but it’s true. The dialogue is also a weak point, and role-playing has taken a backseat. It’s not a bad game, but it’s missing a lot of the series’s trademarks.
3) Dragon Age: Inquisition
Depending on the day, Inquisition could rise as high as the second spot and drop below The Veilguard. This was BioWare’s big push to turn Dragon Age into an open-world game. Sometimes, that’s great, but often, it feels more tedious than anything.
Look, don’t get me wrong, exploring the nooks and crannies of Inquisition can be a blast. There’s a lot to uncover, but some of it starts to feel like filler. On top of that, I think this is the weakest combat in Dragon Age. BioWare kind of tried to bridge the gap between Origins’ tactics and DA2‘s action, but I never meshed with it. Combat isn’t bad, just not as strong as the other three mainline games.
That all said, Inquisition has a strong cast of companions and NPCs, gorgeous vistas to look at while you’re exploring those massive open worlds, good payoff for choices from the first two games, and excellent world-building. If you can ignore the open-world bloat, Inquisition is great. If you want to do everything, you might stop playing because it’s so boring. Either way, we’ll always have Iron Bull.
2) Dragon Age 2
Dragon Age 2 was made on a time crunch, which greatly hindered what the developers could do. EA was forcing the team to release a game under a tight window, so they needed to focus on a smaller story with fewer environments. That let BioWare tackle a few interesting ideas that they might’ve tossed aside.
Because most of the game is set inside the city of Kirkwall, you get to see it change over the years. It’s a focused story that lets you get to know the city and your character Hawke intimately. Speaking of characters, DA2 has some of the best companions in the series’ history. Anders and Varric are back and are joined by new fan-favorites like Isabela, the swashbuckling pirate captain.
Unfortunately, the smaller scope means that there aren’t as many opportunities for players to influence Hawke’s path. DA2 strays much closer to an action-adventure, which means a lack of real roleplaying. Plus, the limits of Kirkwall mean some of the levels are repetitive, and the lack of time led to an underbaked finale. If you can look past the issues, though, Dragon Age 2 is a fun sequel that gives fans several of the series’s most memorable characters.
1) Dragon Age: Origins
They say your first is always your favorite, and that holds for many veteran Dragon Age fans like myself. The original game is the perfect mix of BioWare’s D&D roots and the future, action-heavy combat we’ve become used to. Each encounter is an excuse for players to dive into tactical combat that rewards sharp decision-making and careful planning.
On top of that, the first batch of companions are some of the more enduring companions in Dragon Age’s history. Allistair and Morrigan were both standouts and continue to play important roles in the series moving forward. Leliana joins Inquisition as a spymaster, and you can run into Loghain and Zevran on future journeys. Hopefully, Dog is next on the list of comebacks.
Granted, the first Dragon Age isn’t the prettiest game at the ball, but that’s true of many games from its era nowadays. It was also a bit buggy at launch, and the DLC offerings weren’t nearly as strong as, say, the Trepasser DLC for Inquisition. Still, Dragon Age: Origins is the game that started it all, and the move to streamline combat in subsequent entries has only made the series worse.
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Image courtesy of Focus Features.
