The Dragon Age: Origins Companions, Ranked From Worst To Best

Sten, the lone Qunari character in Dragon Age: Origins, has to carry the unfortunate burden of being a walking codex entry for people who are far away from everything going on. That’s not to say Sten doesn’t have his own charms separate from telling you about the Qun. He’s a bluntly funny tortured soul who bears the weight of his culture silently until you get him to open up. Sten helps pave the way for more interesting Qunari characters like the Arishok and Iron Bull, but there are more interesting characters in Origins’ party.

Dragon Age: Origins’ healer mage starts off deceptively simple. Wynne is shown to be a compassionate, protective woman who cares about those around her. She scolds you for shirking your Wardenly duties to shack up with your love interest. She is the party’s grandma, and she fits that role with all the care and thorniness you’d expect. But as her story progresses, it becomes clear that her attempts to impart wisdom upon the younger generation come from her reckoning with her own mortality. Wynne is a senior to everyone else in the party, but she’s also confronted her own death once before being saved by a spirit. She wants to do the best she can with her second chance, whether that’s in making right by old mistakes or saving the world.

Oghren is the type of character who could easily fall into being a comic relief party member. The dwarven warrior is a boisterous drunk, but it’s all to bury his angst at the apparent loss of his wife who disappeared into the underground Deep Roads. Oghren quickly becomes one of the Warden’s most loyal companions, even following them into the Grey Wardens’ ranks in the Awakening expansion. He starts out prickly but endears himself to the group almost immediately. He’s one of the best sources of banter and raunchy wit, but he’s never without heart to balance it out with substance.

As we said in our Inquisition ranking, Leliana is a complicated character to examine because she embodies some of Dragon Age’s biggest problems with continuity and consequence. But back in the Origins days, she had none of that baggage and was simply a repentant sister of the Chantry with a dark past and a devout demeanor. She is one of the few bright lights in Origins, even as the reality of who she once was becomes clear. Leliana shifts and changes to match the needs of Dragon Age more than once, but there is something refreshing about looking back at where she began.

You couldn’t get off on a worse foot than Zevran does with the Warden. The elven assassin greets you with a dagger and killing intent and manages to talk you out of killing him on sight. Do you know how charming you have to be to go from getting ready to take someone out for good to being a (mostly) trusted member of the crew? They let him sleep in a tent with them and everything. Zevran sometimes feels like the “forgotten” member of Origins’ team as he didn’t go on to become a series mainstay like the rest of the game’s potential romantic interests. But despite falling into some tropes as a seductive assassin, he still always manages to win me over each time I’m passing through Ferelden.

As Origins’ DLC character, not enough people have gotten to experience Shale in all her glory. The golem is quietly one of BioWare’s best-written and funniest companions, while also bringing some monumental context to parts of the Dragon Age universe that go otherwise obscured. Shale’s initial nihilism is somehow never exhausting because of the pitch-perfect writing of each line she utters, and watching her reluctantly grow into someone who cares about the party when she has spent hours roasting them is a delight. I’m watching videos of her banter and it is such a shame that not everyone who played Origins got to meet Shale. She’s truly an underrated companion in the BioWare canon.

Alistair has become such a focal point in the Dragon Age universe (some might argue too much so) that, on any given day, he could rank at the top of an Origins companion ranking. He starts out as a goofball who is just trying to cope with his tragic life, but depending on player choice, he can end up thrust into the limelight when he’d rather have a simple life fighting for a cause he cares about. Alistair’s complexities and different possible fates put him into so many quantum states in the Dragon Age universe that it doesn’t surprise me BioWare decided to say “fuck it” and write more stories about him in books and comics that firmly set him in one place in the universe, though they’ve done a better job keeping player choice consistent across each game than Leliana. He’s beloved for a reason, both by fans and clearly by BioWare.

It took every ounce of my self-control to not put the Mabari hound you recruit early on in Dragon Age: Origins at the very top of this list. Sure, the other two we’ve ranked above him are more complex and are woven deeply into the drama of Origins’ narrative, but are they the goodest of good boys? Are they a canine king worthy of ascending to the Ferelden throne at a moment’s notice? I think not.

Dragon Age: Origins’ secret companion Loghain Mac Tir is, by all accounts, a reprehensible individual whose actions cost the lives of countless people on the way to recruiting him. The cost for adding him to your party is so high that most people never actually get to hear Origins’ villain out. Do I think his claims that he sabotaged the people of Ferelden to save his country are enough to exonerate him of his crimes? No. But I do find him compelling as a villain who, in a delusional patriotic mania, sought to scorch the earth and rebuild it in his image.

From the outset, Morrigan, the Witch of the Wilds, is an enigma. She’s kicked out of her secluded life in the Korcari Wilds by her equally enigmatic mother and forced to learn about the rest of the world. Typically, she does so from a high horse, judging people affected by systems that were in place long before she was even born. It’s interesting to hear an outsider weigh in on things that have always been commonplace to most people in the Dragon Age universe, but it also exposes her ignorance about how shackles like the mage prison of the Circle of Magi come to be. Still, in a way, her words often seem prophetic of how the world would change in future games.

Morrigan always knew she was destined for something bigger than her isolation, but watching her uncover what that is throughout Origins as she stumbles confidently through a world she knows very little about is one of Dragon Age’s strongest throughlines. She ends Origins on her own terms, one way or another, and by the time we see her again in Inquisition, she has become the influential force she was always meant to be, but she has also learned to be caring and curious, and is still susceptible to that same unfortunate hubris. Morrigan is one of the most recognizable characters in Dragon Age, not because BioWare touts her out at every given opportunity, but because when she is on screen, her presence always matters.

Dragon Age: Origins set the stage for what would go on to be one of BioWare’s longest-running series, but it remains to be seen how much it will influence The Veilguard. The two seem pretty diametrically opposed, as The Veilguard has shed the tactical RPG dressings of its predecessor in favor of a more action-oriented approach. Will any of its characters make an appearance? We’ll find out when The Veilguard launches this fall.