Dragon Age: Origins – Morrigan Restoration Patch

The Morrigan Restoration Patch for Dragon Age: Origins is one of the most significant content restoration and bugfixing patches released for the game. In addition to a huge number of bugfixes, the mod also restores a vast quantity of cut/unfinished content to the game, primarilly centering around Morrigan. The mod has seen over 380,000 downloads to date and I like to think the restored content brought out even more of depth of this character.

As a solo modder in the endeavour, taking what is essentially unfinished/cut content, shaping and polishing it into something that doesn’t look out of place in a AAA game was a challenge, even moreso when striving to accurately interpret what the original developers were aiming for with each scene, but thankfully the Dragon Age Toolset was fairly intuitive to work with and putting some of the cutscenes together was quite enjoyable.

Being a localised game, special care had to be taken to ensure that the content I restored was also compatible with the non-english versions of the game, which is an additional challenge as the public modding tools for the game make it tricky to support multiple languages when modding the original campaign. Releasing this mod required skills in many fields – testing, scripting, cutscene design & animation as well as the assistance of other helpful members of the community when the time came to test the newly restored content. Overall the community has been very receptive toward the mod, bringing back a lot of voiced dialogue to the main campaign and (hopefully) enhancing the experience for many players.

Restoration Patch Highlights

Restoration Process Overview

The first step in restoring partially finished and/or bugged content was to identify where dialogue existed that never triggered in the game.

Here, the highlighted conversation was inaccessible in-game, due to both being unfinished and missing the scripting required to fire the event.

After addressing script based issues, I move onto creating a scene to match the dialogue.

Since I am restoring cut/incomplete content I typically choose to create a cutscene that I feel matches the feel/mood of the dialogue. BioWare often include scripting and localisation notes in their official campaign when viewed via the toolset, which allow me to get a feel as to the intended mood of a scene before I attempt to create a scene to match the pre-recorded voiced dialogue. Here the player has just slain Morrigan’s mother at her behest and has acquired a powerful magical grimoire. Before the quest we see a side to Morrigan that is conflicted as to whether this is the right thing to do or not. In the beginning of this scene I wanted to emphasise this aspect of her character and create the all-important finale to the questline that was missing in the retail game.

I begin the scene with a fade in to a relatively calm scene as Morrigan waits in camp. This scene follows directly on from one of the most difficult battles in the game so it’s important to reward the player with an evocative scene.

Dragon Age features a powerful cutscene editor that utilises tracks. Typically the animations that ship with the game are sufficient to craft a scene via blending multiple animations however in some circumstances I used third party tools in conjunction with 3DS Max to tweak existing character animations to give me the exact animation I required. The scene depicted above was one of many created entirely by me in order to bring cut content into the game in a seamless manner, I strove to keep my style of scene as close to the developers as possible.

As the player has just made a major plot choice, I want to underline the emotion of the involved characters as much as possible. Specifically I felt it was important to show Morrigan worried, perhaps about herself or about the player character themselves. I used FaceFX to achieve this.

After applying some subtle facial tweaks via FaceFX, the in-game representation of Morrigan looks suitably worried, conveying a sense of apprehension upon the player as they view the scene. I think this level of detail is important in modern games that strive to draw the player into a story.

After this the scene shifts to the player character approaching and we can see her emotion shift somewhat from trepidation to anticipation of the outcome of the player’s encounter with her mother. There were many other tweaks that I made that go beyond the scope of this document but the end result is a fitting resolution to the quest.

Last but not least, oftentimes restoring bugged and/or cut content requires delving into the game scripts in order to fix, modify or extend the code there and tie everything together. Dragon Age’s scripting system system is pretty powerful and robust, the toolset houses its own IDE for editing the scripts and it’s fairly painless to work with

Example of the finished product