Bizarre Weekend
Bizarre Weekend is our common Saturday column the place we have fun PC gaming oddities: peculiar video games, unusual bits of trivia, forgotten historical past. Pop again each weekend to search out out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have grow to be obsessive about this time, whether or not it is the canon top of Thief’s Garrett or that point somebody within the Vatican pirated Soccer Supervisor.
What number of Dragon Age video games would you say there are? Solely 4, proper? Origins, its sequel, Inquisition and final yr’s Veilguard. Not many, for a beloved franchise spanning a decade and a half at a serious writer. However then the BioWare staff behind the sequence was typically characterised as a pirate ship by colleagues: crusing haphazardly between initiatives and sometimes drifting off beam because it discovered its strategy to its subsequent hit.
Definitely, there was by no means a simple follow-up that constructed straight on the success of Origins. BioWare’s pirates have been routinely tossed about on the tough seas of EA’s whims, following mandates for tight budgets or new engines or dwell service options. These inner skirmishes added years to the event of mainline Dragon Age video games, and we obtained fewer of them as a consequence. It is laborious to not speak concerning the sequence previously tense, given EA’s obvious disdain for a nerdy universe wherein no person carries both a ball or a gun.
The place can one discover extra Dragon Age, then? Within the novels, that are in my expertise fairly good, written by lead writers of the sequence like Trick Weekes and David Gaider. In expansions like 2010’s Origins: Awakening, well-received but often forgotten. And, buried amid the Flash-based Fb distractions and long-dead cellular spinoffs, there is a sole survivor on Newgrounds: Dragon Age Journeys. It is a briefly charming turn-based affair set beneath the earth, amid the dwarves and the darkspawn. However even that was cancelled after its first episode.
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In that latter graveyard of browser video games lies the saddest loss to the sequence—Dragon Age: The Final Court docket. Constructed by Failbetter, the developer of Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, it was a sport of lordship, wherein you managed the affairs of an eccentric fiefdom on the fringe of Orlais (France for dweebs). You’d select a bodyguard, a counsellor, a lover. You’d steer your realm by a vital interval of potential relegation, the place the rating of fiefdoms is worried—tackling bandits and revolutionaries and creepy issues within the forest, whereas uncovering secrets and techniques throughout a number of playthroughs.
“What lies within the Sealed Chantry?”, wrote Failbetter narrative director Chris Gardiner. “Who’s the Horned Knight? Who’s behind Serault’s latest troubles?”
Properly, I do not suppose I will ever know. As a result of The Final Court docket existed for a six-year span throughout a interval once I was a lapsed Dragon Age fan. After which, it popped its clogs within the pandemic. Servers by no means keep on endlessly, and EA is especially brutal on this regard: BioWare’s second-most-recent sport, Anthem, is shutting down early subsequent yr.
I’ve a robust sense of what The Final Court docket will need to have been prefer to play, nevertheless, having lately grow to be obsessive about Failbetter’s Fallen London. Like that masterpiece of interactive Victoriana, The Final Court docket was virtually totally text-led, spinning its world from the form of formidable prose that is sometimes consigned to codexes in 3D RPGs. You’d draw playing cards, every representing a go to from a topic or a brand new occasion inside your borders, and browse all about it—selecting learn how to reply within the course of. Some decisions would contain a danger, a cube roll that drew in your ability stage in one thing like scholarship or derring-do, and the end result would affect the general well being of the realm.
Court docket administration, after all, is an exercise with its roots within the days of traditional BioWare. In Baldur’s Gate 2 you could possibly tackle the ruling of a stronghold, tax the peasants, and take care of the complaints of bandit-dogged retailers, who claimed you were not policing your lands successfully sufficient. As a religious successor, Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity revived the stronghold. And Dragon Age: Inquisition’s battle desk riffed on an analogous thought—that there have been necessary issues happening on this planet, past the corners of your dialogue field.
Characters in The Final Court docket got here with indirect, Failbettery names just like the Acerbic Dowager, the Purveyor of Teas and the Properly-Learn Pig-Farmer. However I discover that one, named the Scornful Sorceress, had a well-recognized face. “This isn’t a childhood I recognise,” she would say, watching the courtiers’ children at play. “The video games my mom inspired have been much less harmless.” It is solely a correct Dragon Age sport if it has Morrigan in it.
I can nonetheless quote The Final Court docket as a result of followers have peppered components of it liberally all through the Dragon Age wiki. As soon as EA introduced the sport’s shutdown, a diligent effort was made to save lots of every part that could possibly be screenshotted. Gamers coordinated through BioWare’s boards and Reddit, exploring as many avenues of The Final Court docket as attainable over the course of the seven real-world days it took to complete any given playthrough.
Their efforts are to be applauded, however in some methods solely enhance the retroactive FOMO. A wiki just isn’t a sport, until you are taking part in Neurocracy. Cataloguing The Final Court docket’s additions to the lore just isn’t the identical as experiencing it as a choose-your-own-adventure thriller or strategic administration sim. And a once-public Google Drive, filled with photos from the vanished sport, has lengthy since expired.
We dwell in an period the place MMOs might be introduced again from the lifeless by sheer fan ingenuity, and even granted official recognition by their authentic publishers—saving them from the worry of sudden takedown notices. However, whereas I might like to be confirmed incorrect, one thing tells me that this is not EA’s type. And in 2025, BioWare is preventing for its life and its soul—in no match state to advocate for a undertaking solely a hardcore subset of its fanbase remembers.
As a substitute, I am discovering solace in one thing that Failbetter has typically mined in its tales: the romance of the buried place which you could by no means fairly attain. It’s the very unattainability which makes you all of the extra keen to go to that forgotten metropolis, to catch a glimpse of its crumbling pillars or misplaced literature. It is the identical distance that enables it to dwell as a gleaming surprise in your thoughts—freed of the imperfections and mundanities that come from contact with actuality. I will say this for my expertise of The Final Court docket: there isn’t a strategy to be upset by the sport you possibly can by no means play.
