Dragon Age II
“If the Metacritic isn’t where we want it to be, and honestly our goal as a studio is to try and aim more for 90, then our next step will be to, very easily, go through those reviews, go through fan feedback, especially over some time – as opposed to the day-one initial response – and look at that in a measured way and say, what didn’t work, what did work, where did we go too far, where did we not go far enough, where was there just an inherent dissonance, and try to refine the experience and try to move forward for any future products.”–Mike Laidlaw, lead designer of Dragon Age II
Videogames, and indeed all works of narrative fiction, are built upon a lie—the lie of believability. When you’re asked to put yourself in the shoes of someone who can murder thousands of people with fireballs launched from their hands, it’s important that it all hangs together with some sort of internal logic. Dragon Age II completely throws that out the window, so much so that at first I thought it must have been deliberate. It’s not. It’s just careless laziness built upon a desire to fashion a game to receive a particular review score. There is nothing in this game that feels organic. Its disparate elements all feel as though the designers collated the incoherent mewlings of focus groups, pasted any elements that received praise into the design document for Mass Effect 2, took out guns and added swords, and hoped for the best.
The easiest place to see this is in the combat system. In Dragon Age: Origins, we were treated to a modern version of the classic isometric tactical pause-and-play battle system popularized by Bioware in titles like Baldur’s Gate. This was by design–Laidlaw has stated that a–perhaps the–design goal of the Dragon Age series was to pay homage to the classic Infinity Engine RPGs that Bioware made its name on. Dragon Age II scraps that entirely. The camera cannot be pulled far enough back to give any sort of clear view of the field of battle, and at any rate, it doesn’t matter—instead of a fixed number of enemies, they now come in waves. So many enemies, in fact, that battles become a tiresome slog against hordes of nameless, faceless trash mobs. The game tells you to tactically place your warriors in choke points so as to protect your rogues and mages—which, of course, is impossible, as the game will just have a new wave of combatants appear directly behind your carefully-placed battle lines. This also insults my intelligence—human templars will drop from rooftops, bandits will run up stairs from what I can only assume is hundreds of yards away (using their cell phones to coordinate attacks, perhaps?), and angry Qunari will, perhaps worst of all, literally appear out of thin air. This would not be a problem, of course, if the combat were fun—but it’s not. It’s tiring and joyless, with the only small thrills to be found in massive clouds of blood spouting from your enemies and hacked-off limbs flying through the air. But it’s an adolescent thrill–and frankly, it’s embarrassing that this is all the combat has to offer.
Aside from the failings of the combat system, Dragon Age II shows a curious lack of polish in the internal consistency of the world. To wit: The first 15 to 20 hours of the game are spent preparing for an expedition to the Deep Roads—an underground world built by the dwarves that for thousands of years has been overrun with monsters called “darkspawn”. At the end of this section, my character’s sister Bethany had been infected with “the taint”–the blood of those monsters, which is, of course, fatal. (Typing this all out, incidentally, makes me realize that this is some of the most ridiculously embarrassing writing to be found in videogames.) The game presents a few options: let her die, bring her to the surface and try to save her life, or, if a certain character is in the party, have her taken to the Gray Wardens, a group that ingests darkspawn blood in order to fight them. I chose the last option, and Bethany was whisked away for the rest of the game. It’s made clear that she’s angry about it. Bitter about it. The game’s codex even states that Bethany is furious with my character and refuses to correspond with her. Fine, except that later there’s a friendly letter from Bethany waiting in the mailbox, one which makes it seem that she’d been cheerily writing all along.
Even worse: you and your traveling companions are beset upon by literally hundreds of bandits over the course of the game. These bandits appear out of nowhere in multiple waves, sometimes four separate waves in a single battle. It seems that one half of the city’s population must be engaged in banditry. The city has a police force—one of your companions is the captain of the city guard–and yet, apparently their only function is to appear in cutscenes, quietly emoting. One would think that insomniacs being murdered left and right while out for an innocent midnight stroll would be cause for alarm, but the game never makes any issue of it whatsoever. The bandits seem there simply to give the player something more to kill.
Even worse: In the world of Dragon Age, mages are deemed to be dangerous individuals that at the drop of a hat can turn into horrible abominations that indiscriminately slaughter people, so they are sequestered away in “the Circle” and policed by a group of warriors called templars. Two (perhaps three if your character is not a mage) of your companions are so-called “apostate” mages—that is, mages that have escaped the Circle and are ostensibly hunted by templars. One of those mages is the worst of the worst—a “blood mage”, or a mage that has made a deal with a demon. We are led to believe that the taboo against blood magic in this world is emotionally similar to pedophilia in ours—and yet, when your response to being attacked in the city streets in broad daylight is to let loose with fireballs, call lightning from the sky, and perform acts of blood magic, no one so much as bats an eye. You can talk to a templar with people standing next to you that may as well be screaming “I’M AN APOSTATE MAGE” and the templar won’t even notice.
Even worse: In the game, your character rises from a penniless refugee to become the “Champion of Kirkwall”, the person who hacks and slashes and burns her way through hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bandits, demons, soldiers, dogs, who challenges the leader of a group of powerful warriors to single-handed combat and wins, and yet after all of this, is still challenged by people who stand around and say things like “Ah, the Champion of Kirkwall, I cannot let you live” and then within seconds are dead by your hand. These people would not act like this–these people would run.
But enough of this. Let’s turn our attention to the characters. Bioware is rightly known for the quality of the writing in its games—its writers create fleshed out worlds deep in lore, memorable characters, and believable dialogue and situations that ground those characters in that world. Bioware’s last major game, Mass Effect 2, is one of the few transcendent works of art to ever appear in this medium to date. The game’s companions are beautifully written and eerily human, and I grew to like, then respect, then care for, then fear for them all.
None of that is found in Dragon Age II. Almost to a person, everyone seems brain-dead. Save for perhaps Varric, the rogue dwarf and narrator of the game, your companions are conceptually faceless, uninteresting embodiments of almost unrelenting tedium. I found myself being mean (or, more accurately, choosing the “mean” dialogue option) to almost all of them, just because I was so bored by the whole affair. A few of the companions from Dragon Age: Origins appear briefly in this game, and I was surprised at how their appearances arose in me a feeling of almost unbridled joy–and not a little embarrassment. These are people I as a player spent over 80 hours with, people I had befriended—and here they were, a few years later, seeing me hanging around with the creepy guy from down the street. And the hell of it is, I didn’t even like Dragon Age: Origins all that much—the fact that I felt this way about the companions from that game appearing in the sequel speaks much more to the quality of the writing in Dragon Age II than to how much I enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins.
The companion quests in this game are some of the most pointless exercises in busywork I’ve ever encountered in a videogame. Perhaps the best example is the one where Anders, the mage Gray Warden who is bonded to a spirit of Justice, asks you to literally crawl through the sewers collecting human excrement. A better or more apt analogy for these quests could not be made up—and at the end of the quest, nothing happens, because nothing can happen, because whether you do the quest or not, Anders later does something because the plot demands it of him. The quest is designed in such a way as to suggest player agency—you can help Anders, or you can choose not to. But whether you do so or not, Anders will always have the means to perform his final dramatic action—a fact which makes a mockery of the structure of the entire game.
The characters are where it’s easiest to see the Mass Effect 2 influence. That was a game where the main quest was subordinate to the character-driven sidequests—the game was about exploring the emotions of command and of having to send people you care about into dangerous situations. Dragon Age II borrows that structure, but the companions are so underwritten that the game has no emotions to hang it on. Their personalities feel like checkmarks on a list. There is nothing there because Laidlaw had no reason to design them that way—he was simply following a formula. But game design is an artistic endeavor, not a math problem. Look at the way in which you tell whether or not your companions like you: In Mass Effect 2, that knowledge comes from talking to them, from observing how they talk to you, and from what they talk to you about. It’s completely organic and helps them to feel like real people. In Dragon Age II, you know if your companions like you or not based on their friendship score. It’s a world populated by automatons.
The existence of Metacritic has caused a system to come into being where a game’s success is measured by a meaningless number. It’s not a bad idea to design sequels to address the criticisms of previous games. However, this has gone too far. Instead of fixing problems or striving to make a game better, we have developers who design games in order to try and get a certain Metacritic score. This brings us to a troubling point: Dragon Age II is what Laidlaw sees as a near-perfect game. He looked at the criticisms of Dragon Age: Origins and decided that instead of trying to fix them, he would simply copy what he thought people liked about Mass Effect 2. Because it got a higher score than Dragon Age: Origins, it must be a better game. This is exactly backwards.
I will be very clear here: this is Mike Laidlaw’s fault. Remember his quote that opened this review? This is the game that results from chasing a score. I don’t for one second believe that Laidlaw has any real conception of what he wants the Dragon Age series to be—the first game was described as a “spiritual successor” to Baldur’s Gate, and Dragon Age II is obviously supposed to be a fantasy Mass Effect 2. But everything, everything about this game screams “focus group”. People like blood and frantic combat—okay, let’s give them that. People like tactical combat and party mechanics—okay, let’s give them that. People didn’t like the fact that your character was mute—okay, let’s give him or her a voice. People liked Mass Effect 2—okay, let’s make this game the fantasy Mass Effect 2. Except that Laidlaw can play the notes, but not the music.
This is the game that results from treating this medium like a product. And don’t misunderstand me—I don’t play a game for 38 hours if I’m not intrigued in some way. But it was a grueling slog to get through Dragon Age II—the only thing that really carried me through the game was a sense that I wanted to see what horrible thing would be inflicted upon me next. Or the one or two actual human moments in the game—but those are few and far between. There’s a wonderfully touching and funny sequence at about the mid-point of Dragon Age II which involves Varric recounting the story of how he and your character found Varric’s turncoat brother. To say more would ruin the surprise. This sequence alone shows that this medium can do so much more than this game. Perhaps for Dragon Age III, Laidlaw can produce a game that does so. I tend to doubt it, though—he wants that 90 on Metacritic.
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