Dragon Age: Origins – A Question of Size

One big problem with most role playing videogames has been the sense of scale. Think of Dragon Age: Origins where you are supposed to be a Grey Warden, which is fighting to stop a Blight that could actually engulf the entire world. You need to recruit allies and assault an Archdemon. Yet, as you walk the halls of Orzzamar, trying to get the dwarves on your side, you can pretty much progress without meeting more than 50 characters which have something to say and do.

The rest are enemies which you kill and little non player characters which show up for a frame or two and then disappear. You get to save the world in the end, but it feels like the entire population of Ferelden is no more than 100,000 people. Even the supposed climactic final and first battles seem to be fought with a very limited number of combatants, at least on the side of good.

I don't mind a depopulated world. After all life really seems to be harsh even for the most well-to-do families. But BioWare never makes an attempt to establish the size of the world. They do not estimate the number of big families in the kingdom, they don't show you all the dwarves (which are implied to have a falling birth rate) huddled up in a room, they never show you the entire Dalish clan together and ready for war. You only get some shows of human armies, mostly cloned soldiers shot from weird angles in order to conceal numbers, as they cheer you or march to war.

The game engine probably allows the developers to put in one scene or two with huge amounts of people, in order to establish a sense of scale, and the Codex offers even more opportunities to actually talk numbers and size of the world. Sadly, they are not taken and the player is left fighting for a number of unseen, unheard people. I would mind fighting for a smaller world, some aspects of the experience might even benefit. But I feel less inclined to commit sacrifice for those who are not even there.