The opening paragraph of Bobby Travis’s Greywardens.com post on werewolves in Dragon Age: Origins reads like it was written by a guy who bought a cape at Hot Topic and wears it without irony.
I was decidedly annoyed. Annoyed that the creators of something I had been waiting for, and for so many years, had apparently sullied their potentially great work with something so common to run-of-the-mill fantasy and pop-culture.
“This is the sort of pseudo-intellectual wankery that Roukas lives to destroy,” I thought, but I read on, and I was rewarded. I’ve never actually played Dragon Age, but I’ve heard good things from people whose opinions I trust. Once he gets going, Travis waxes philosophical & sociological on the game’s werewolves in a way that got interested enough to look up the game’s required system specs (yes, I can run it). He analyzes the role of werewolves within the game’s world, and comes to the conclusion that they contribute something important to the development of Ferelden’s culture. How cool to see werewolves in games being utilized as something more than hairy “pass the McGuffin” NPCs!
I’m not gonna lie, though. The embedded gameplay video helped.