Dragon Age: Thedas at War is the Crusader Kings 3 expansion of my dreams. If you’re a fellow Dragon Age fan, you need to play this, even if you’ve never even touched the game it's built on top of before.
Lovingly created by a team of volunteers, Thedas at War turns Crusader Kings 3 into a Dragon Age grand strategy game, letting you play across Ferelden and Orlais, and choose from a variety of different backgrounds and religions. There is a world of preset characters you can choose to play as representing all of the different factions across southern Thedas, or you can make your own and try to build up an original in-universe dynasty.
As any Dragon Age fan will tell you, the series lore is incredibly expansive. There are even two books that just focus on that, giving us details on the countless characters that roamed Thedas long before the games take place. Much of this lore was never supposed to be adapted into a game, but the team behind Thedas at War have done just that. The overhaul kicks off in the Glory Age, hundreds of years before the titular Dragon Age, dealing with characters that many fans probably didn’t know existed.
Now, fresh off the mod’s wildly successful launch, I spoke with some of the Thedas at War devs to dive into how this CK3 overhaul was made - and what we can expect from future updates.
Dragon Age: Thedas At War was brought to life by hobbyists with different passions. I spoke with Rislav, the art lead who got his start modding Crusader Kings 2 as a portrait artist; Rex, the community lead who started out in Skyrim modding; and Korin, the lead writer and passionate roleplayer who started out working on the mod between running D&D campaigns.
Development kicked off in 2023, with the three leads joining throughout the year. They began work on the first “bookmark” - a starting point in any Crusader Kings 3 run. While the game launched with the Glory Age bookmark, we were originally going to get something much closer to the official games.
“The original plan was actually to do a Ferelden Rebellion start,” Rislav tells me. That would have put Thedas at War towards the end of the Blessed Age, which is just a couple of decades away from Dragon Age: Origins.
As any CK3 player will tell you, decades can pass in the blink of an eye, and it was this proximity to the main games that didn’t work for the team. “We thought it would be too hard to do a Ferelden Rebellion bookmark because that's too close to the Fifth Blight, and then we'd have to do all the [Dragon Age] Origins stuff and all the canonical game stuff,” Rislav explains. “We didn't want to mess with that.”
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/crusader-kings-3-dragon-age-thedas-at-war-interview/
