Emergency Pre-Holiday Message Concerning Dragon Age: Origins

DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS Platform: Xbox 360, PC Publisher: Electronic Arts Let’s start at the beginning. Two days after preordering the PC version of Dragon Age on Steam, I got a package in the mail from BioWare, wrapped in brown paper and sealed with red wax. It contained an Xbox 360 copy of the game in question and a vial of red energy drink labelled "darkspawn blood" (darkspawn are like Dragon Age’s orcs; there’s a ceremony the main character has to go through where he or she drinks some of it; it’s a whole thing), all padded with straw and sawdust. This is actually pretty cool in theory, although in practice getting straw and sawdust out of carpet is a bit of a pain. So, to sum up, I have two versions of this game for two platforms.Dragon Age: Origins is a fantasy game created by BioWare to hearken back to the days of another fantasy series, Baldur’s Gate. That game and its sequel are oft-regarded as some of the best gaming of that era. As it happens, Baldur’s Gate was based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition rules, and set in the Forgotten Realms, the most popular D&D campaign world. Dragon Age: Origins, though evocative of Baldur’s Gate, is very much not based on D&D or set in a D&D world. It’s got its own mechanical system and its own world, which… hmm. (I am actually going to come back to the D&D thing later. Bear with me.) I have to give Dragon Age this: the setting may be generic fantasy, but it’s well done generic fantasy. I like the political setup, and the explanations for why dwarves behave like stereotypical dwarves. And I love that the game’s attitude towards elves is “Man, fuck elves.” It’s also really beautiful, graphically. Not “near-photorealistic” beautiful or “innovative use of cel shading” beautiful the way the current height of game design tends to go now. The levels are really lush, and I love the character and wardrobe art. (Except the hat-type items for mages.) No, the problem I have with Dragon Age: Origins isn’t the amount of content or the character designs or the characterization or the plotting, or the level design or the aesthetics or any of the other things BioWare did great. They did most of the game great. It is by almost any objective standards an excellent, nay, a superlative game. The problem is with the one bit of system the player actually interfaces with constantly: Character advancement. Character advancement and anything handled through it is inexcusably flawed. Dragon Age characters have a race (human, elf, or dwarf) and a class (fighter, rogue, or mage). Dwarves can be fighters or rogues; humans and elves can be all three. Characters also have levels. As you advance through the game, you gain levels; when you gain a level, you gain points to put into your attributes, skills, and talents. Certain skills and talents—like shapeshifting for mages, or two-handed weapon combat for fighters—are of questionable utility. They are not very good. Fighters can get four combat styles right off the bat: Weapon-and-shield, dual-weapons, two-handed-weapon, and archery. Each has 12 different talents you can buy. In a well-designed game, they would all be equally effective, but play differently; in Dragon Age, weapon-and-shield is by far the most effective. However, you will not know this until you’ve played for hours as a two-handed weapon fighter, and realized that all these fights you’re getting into are kind of unreasonably hard. At that point, since the game provides no way to redesign your character, you’ll have to chose between a) continuing to play with the mess of poor choices you made because the game didn’t educate you about its systems properly, or b) restarting the game and playing through much of the same content all over again. (Or conceivably you could knock the difficulty down to easy, although that’s not satisfying if you’d like some challenge, just not unreasonable challenge.) This is not good game design. It’s especially not good game design in the case of shapeshifting, which is a mage specialization you have to unlock, and which you would assume is really cool because turning into a giant spider looked awesome in that one trailer, but actually completely sucks compared to just putting your skills into normal mage talents. And it’s especially-especially not good game design because there’s a section of the game that gives you shapeshifting powers that are fun to use, but which you can only use in that section, then later on you can unlock shapeshifting for use anywhere, but the latter sort of shapeshifting doesn’t play anything like the former sort of shapeshifting. So it’s all a big bait-and-switch, I find this sort of flawed design infuriating. Every moment I spend playing I think about it—why wasn’t someone in the design team on the ball for this? It’s not hard to see why this sort of design makes the game actively less fun, so why was it included? Why aren’t the different combat styles balanced against each other? Why the hell isn’t there an option to respec your character as if from level 1 if you’ve discovered you’re unhappy with the choices you’ve made? You could argue that in providing the player with an array of choices of varying worth, without educating the player as to the worth of those choices, and then forcing the player to stick with the choices he or she made afterwards, the game is either emulating real life or communicating an important ideological or thematic point. To which I would respond “Fuck you, you sanctimonious prick.” (The game actually does the same thing with the story a few times, where you’re given the option of choosing Path A or Path B, and one of the paths leads to badness but there’s no way to know which until after you’ve made the choice. I’m not complaining about that.) Remember I mentioned Dungeons & Dragons earlier? Baldur’s Gate was based on Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition, which had deeply problematic mechanics. Dragon Age isn’t based on D&D, which means BioWare was free to avoid emulating problematic tabletop systems. But Dungeons & Dragons FOURTH Edition—say what you want about other elements of it—actually solved the problems I’m seeing in Dragon Age. In 4e, classes are balanced against each other. Different play styles within each class are balanced against each other. Hell, 4e even supports respeccing your character: At every level, you can swap out one previous power choice for a different power. Obviously the D&D licence isn’t available to BioWare, but they could have at least looked at the fixes Hasbro applied to the tabletop game and used them as examples of how one might go about solving similar problems in a similar game type. Another major problem I ran into was the way the game handles party A.I. Usually you’re leading four characters around; you normally only control one of them at a time, although switching between them is quick. Any party member you’re not controlling is handled by the A.I. which is customizable according to a scheme resembling the Gambit system from Final Fantasy XII. You create a list of behaviors, with a condition and an action, like “If Self: Health less than 50% then Use healing item” or “If Enemy: Nearest then Attack,” which the character then follows by order of priority. Characters in Dragon Age get tons of special abilities, so something like this to manage them is a great idea. And I love systems like this. In practice, it has a major problem: Characters start with three tactics slots, which is really not enough to make a complex or interesting A.I., and although they gain a few more as you level up, to really get more you need to put points into the Tactics talent. Those are the same points you can put into shit that actually makes the character more useful. This disgusts me. Maybe it’s unreasonable, but I feel I am owed competent artificial intelligence—a game with weak characters can be fun if the enemies are balanced right, but a game with stupid characters is annoying. The problem at the root of both of these systems is opportunity cost: The cost of any choice you make is whatever you gave up to make it. Putting a point into Skill A means you can’t put it into Skill B, so Skill A and Skill B should be equivalent somehow, so there’s no clearly superior option. And if one of the things you can put your points into is “Make awesome deadly poisons” and the other thing you can put your points into is “Fix the stupid broken artificial intelligence,” then no matter which choice you make, you feel like you’ve made a bad choice, because being an awesomer poison-making alchemist would be awesome and actually fun, but on the other hand, if you choose that option you’ll get extra-mad every time the stupid broken A.I. fucks with you afterward and you think “I could have put a point into fixing this… but then I wouldn’t be able to make these awesome poisons ARG!” I’ve talked to a lot of people about Dragon Age and by far the most common response I get when expressing these concerns is “That’s all true, but I don’t really care because I’m having a blast with the game anyway.” I really envy those people. As I said earlier, it is by almost any objective standard an excellent game. But I can barely stand it . As I said, I have the game for both PC and Xbox 360. They’re not quite the same. The PC version, in particular, supports player-created mods to the game, like new items or monsters or scenarios or, yes, a nude patch. And the problems I’ve outlined above? There are mods to fix them. I have a mod installed that ads respeccing, so I can go back and fix flawed character builds once I’ve learned enough about the mechanics to understand how they’re flawed and could be made to work better. I have another mod installed that unlocks the maximum number of tactics slots for each character, without having to put anyone’s points into the Tactics skill. Those two mods together fix basically all the problems I have with the game. But the console version can’t be modded. Now, again, don’t take my word for all this. Tons of people seem to really appreciate Dragon Age. It really is the spiritual successor to one of the best fantasy video game series’ ever made. But God, does thinking about it make me angry.