(Warning for spoilers as well as liberal application of TVTropes links. It also sort of assumes you’ve played the game, since major plot events are referenced but not explained in detail.)
On Friday, I was up until 3am finishing Dragon Age 2. I didn’t quite get 100% game completion — there were side-quests in the second and third acts that bugged out on me — but fairly close, and even though I got the ending I wanted…
Well. More on that in a moment.
So I finished the game; about 41 hours playtime, according to Steam. If that sounds short — I have a Rift guildmate that spent 45 in Act I alone — it’s probably because I cheat egregiously; fights don’t tend to last very long when every party member is level 20, knows every ability and has 100 in each stat. My husband, who plays “properly”, felt that the fights were substantially easier than in Dragon Age: Origins; even cheating, the game felt more like a console action title than an RPG. I know why BioWare did this — Rule of Cool and Rule of Fun, basically — and it actually even makes an alarming amount of sense, given DA2′s framing story,[i] but… yeah. Sure it’s cool to watch Varric kick mooks in the face or Mage!Hawke stab them with the pointy end of his staff when they get too close, but it’s arguably not RPG-cool; it’s especially not PC-RPG-cool.
Does it work? I dunno. Maybe.
The other thing I was unsure about was the dialogue wheel. It’s not like it’s a secret — to anyone who’s been playing BioWare games since their DnD days — that you pick 1 for Lawful Good and 5 for Chaotic Evil. Still, having all the choices marked with actual icons felt… limiting in a way that the numbers 1-5 don’t. I ended up almost exclusively picking the Helpful/Diplomatic option for the majority of the game, sometimes sneaking down into the purple snarky choice if I was feeling particularly aggrieved. I think I picked the red option once, to tell a demon to shut up (and Hawke ended up being alarmingly nice about it, see below).
It wasn’t until I read one of the appendixes in my guidebook much later that I even realised what the green/purple/red colour-coding was for; basically the game keeps track of Hawke’s personality in the same way it keeps track of his[ii] stats, and the response tally-stack affects his voice acting. The reason the responses are paraphrased — something that I think has caused everyone grief at least once — is because the lines Hawke actually says occasionally change based on whatever your dominant personality-type for the Act in question is.
In retrospect, I wish I’d picked more purple and red options, particularly in Acts II and III; I think I’m still stuck in the DnD alignments mindset where Aggressive = Evil. But we’re in Thedas[iii] now, and sometimes life in Kirkwall just needs the red option.[iv]
Still. Even now, knowing how the personality system works, I’m not sure that I like it. I like the idea behind it, but functionally — particularly due to Hawke occasionally just seeming to say whatever he feels like saying, and damn what the player meant him to say — it tended to make Hawke feel less like “my” PC and more like an NPC I just happened to be controlling. This isn’t necessarily bad, and it’s even de rigueur for other genres where you’re controlling a not-you character (and where part of the fun in the game becomes exploring your protagonist’s personality/history). But DA is a Western PC RPG; I’m not controlling someone else’s character, I’m controlling my character… except when I’m not.
Hawke is “identifiable” as an individual in a way that, say, the Grey Warden from DA:O isn’t. I can point to a picture of Hawke and say “That’s Hawke!”, despite the fact that the picture looks nothing like the Hawke I actually played in-game (to the point where I wish I hadn’t changed his appearance, even). And yes, this might be better for marketing and box art and the like… but it also means I occasionally felt like I wasn’t playing my character any more; I was playing BioWare’s Hawke, which meant I started second-guessing how I thought BioWare!Hawke would act.
I should point out that I don’t mind playing pre-made characters — Geralt from The Witcher comes to mind — and I don’t mind 100% custom characters; it’s DA2′s weird middle-ground I’m not so convinced about.[v]
DA2′s plot also took some getting used to. When considered against (oh say) DA:O, DA2 is a railroad. In DA:O, the end of the story was sort of a foregone conclusion — you were going to kill the Archdemon and stop the Blight — but how you got there was what mattered, hence the whole after-game slideshow detailing the long-term results of all your various game choices (as well as how much players angst, even now, about the choices they did make). DA2 is almost the opposite; there are no choices. Not real ones, anyway, and it feels frustrating — especially if, like me, your standard play style is as Captain Compromise McThirdway — until you get to the BioShock-esque finale and realise that was the entire point.
Thedas is doomed no matter what you do, and it’s foreshadowed numerous times by multiple characters. In that regard, DA2 almost feels like the part of the game you usually don’t get to play; the bit of history that screwed up the world before your Hero Protagonist comes along to fix it. And, again, I get what BioWare was doing, narratively, but… I’m not sure I’d be racing out to emulate it. 40+ hours is a long time to set up a sequel, and if I don’t get to march Hawke — or the Warden, or even someone totally new, I’m not picky — across Thedas fixing everything I’m going to be majorly bummed out.
DA2′s plot is good, and it’s engaging, but I couldn’t actually say I enjoyed it with a straight face; I summed it up the other day as, “You don’t beat Dragon Age 2; Dragon Age 2 beats you.” And then it kicks you when you’re down and spits on you for good measure. It’s emotional, but it’s brutal, and if you don’t like (and weren’t expecting) that sort of diabolus ex machina storyline it’s one hell of a downer considering the time and care you’ve invested to get there. I get that BioWare is making a point — almost entirely at the expense of their former selves, no less — but…
But. It also comes at the expense of the player; particularly those of us who tried to be the hero. Sure, we might have retrospectively made Cassandra a bit misty-eyed, but in the end I almost wish I’d been more of a jerkass to everyone. Except I don’t like playing like that.
Sigh.
Incidentally, I suppose this all sounds like a bunch of kvetching over how much I didn’t like the game; this is actually not true, and I’ll get to why in a minute, but first…
People frequently tend to confuse BioWare’s main strength when it comes to writing games. They think it’s plot; it isn’t. BioWare’s actual strength is giving you people as opposed to characters; ones you honest-to-gods end up liking. Yeah, they’re only pixels, but they’re pixels you care about and it’s actually kind of a bummer you can’t ring up Alistair and invite him round for some XBox IRL.
I’m a very character-focused reader and writer — I can ignore, even enjoy, the most spurious plots if the characterisations are good — hence my massive love of BioWare games. After spending about a hundred hours[vi] with the Warden and his[vii] companions, I ended up pretty attached to everyone. So I spent most of Act I of DA:O wishing stupid Carver was Alistair,[viii] or that Varric was Zevran, or that Merrill was Wynne. Why do I have to have new Thedas friends! I liked my old Thedas friends! We did stuff together! Fun stuff!
So it’s probably not surprising that I latched onto Anders and Isabela a bit when they showed up.[ix] I mean, I knew those guys! Even if they didn’t know me anymore! When Anders told me about Ser Pounce-a-Lot I felt personally aggrieved; I gave him that cat! Me! How dare someone take away my present!
Cue appropriately evil cackling from BioWare. I mean, of all the characters who could possibly betray you in the plot, you think it’s a coincidence that it turns out to be the ones you’ve befriended before? Hah!
It took until about mid-way through Act II for me to really start to appreciate the DA2 companions in their own right, as opposed to constantly wishing they were someone else.[x] I was slightly disappointed in that you seemed to get less one-one-one dialogues than in DA:O, which I blame on Hawke’s voice acting requirements; I seem to recall talking to, for example, Wynne for much longer than I ever did with Aveline, and not always just in response to companion-specific plot developments. I don’t know whether I just missed a whole bunch of conversations or not, but this was one thing that legitimately disappointed me.
Anyway, so there I am in Act II trying to pick mage!Hawke’s love interest. Did I want to go with the obviously sympathetic choice of Anders? Or battle through the Foe Yay with Fenris?[xi]
And then it sort of occurred to me: Oh. This is the plot. It’s the plot writ small, but it’s still the plot. Do I side with the mages, or against them? I’d been keeping plot spoilers to a minimum — unusual, for me — but by now it was becoming apparent that Anders was going to do something really stupid by the time the game was over. I knew that, when push came to shove, I was going to side with the mages over the Templars; somewhat against my own better judgement. Notice how there are literally no “innocent” mages in the entire game, with the possible exception of you (depending on how you play) and maybe Bethany? Even your magic-using BFFs are an abomination and a blood mage, both of whom manage to be case studies in exactly why magic is terrifying and dangerous (and you even get to help them execute their horrible schemes! hooray!).
Fenris might be an emo jerkass, but he does kinda have a point (and no matter what you think of the Templars, the Tevinters are arguably much worse). If, like me, you have both Fenris and Anders in your party (mostly I liked to hear Fenris constantly chew Anders out) and Fenris likes you enough (I was very careful about which quests I took him on) he even has an enlightening semi-meta conversation with Anders re. who is capable of not abusing magic. Essentially it boils down to: The PC. Maybe. I forget the exact lines of dialogue, but Fenris makes it pretty clear he’s of the opinion that it takes a phenomenally strong will for mages not to fall to abusing their powers. Judging from, oh, every mage you meet in the game who isn’t you, he’s not exactly wrong. Not to mention you’ve got the unique benefits of, a) the Power of Metagaming, and b) being a life-long apostate whose existence is knowingly tolerated by the state.[xii]
In short, you’re privileged. And BioWare, a) knows it, and b) has set it up that way deliberately. BioWare’s recent IRL actions make it pretty damn obvious they know what privilege is and how it works re. oppressed classes; keeping that in mind, the plot of DA2 starts to make a hell of a lot more sense. It’s Fantastic Racism[xiii] with mages; are all the mages you meet “evil” because magic is inherently bad… or is it because they’re been told their entire life they have no hope and no options and no humanity and, well, if everyone thinks that then what’ve they got to lose? The point of the game isn’t siding with the Obvious Goodies over the Obvious Baddies; the point is getting the player to stand up against oppression even when every member of said oppressed class isn’t a shining paragon of virtue. So, you know; how it actually works in real life.
As a deconstruction of your standard Oppressive Fantasy State, I think it’s amazingly nuanced; moreso because of the fact that I don’t think many people have really realised it yet (having been distracted by the shiny gore and sex and different UI). It also sheds a bit of light on why BioWare staff members are suddenly sprouting off Social Justice 101 in public; because they’ve apparently researched it for their game.
I mean… wow.
So anyway, back to Act II and my Dreadfully Important Life Decision of whom to bone in a videogame. As mentioned, it was pretty clear — even if, like me, you’d forgotten Varric’s statements to Cassandra in the Prologue — that nothing was going to turn out particularly well. This whole Templar/mage situation was going to boil over, and it was all going to end in a screaming heap of fail. Without a great narrative victory to work towards — at best I figured I could try and make a least-worst outcome (incorrectly, as it turned out) — I chose the next best thing; how could I get to the end of the game with, a) every companion still alive, and b) none of them actually abandoning my party.
Since I figured I’d be siding with the mages, I assumed that meant I had Anders covered off. But Fenris? It was pretty obvious that the only way he was going to not totally hate me when the credits rolled was if we were practically married, and maybe not even then. I figured the rest of the companions would just side with me by default if we were all total BFFs, since they seemed mostly either sympathetic, undecided or netural on the whole Mages: Evil or Oppressed? issue.[xiv]
As it turned out — after some judicious application of The Guidebook — my assumptions re. Fenris were exactly correct. So there I was racing through Act III to finish off his final companion quest. I found his sword, turned it in… and found myself 5 friendship points short of 100 and no way to get any more before The Last Straw.
Fuck. I knew I should’ve let him kill his sister!
Except, not really (I’m sure he’d feel bad about it later or something). So my options — being that they took the Dog Bone mechanic from DA:O out — were either to go back and re-do that quest… or to cheat.
Fuck.
And, like, that’s weird, isn’t it? Because I’d been cheating the whole game. Hell, I even had to tone the cheating down at one point once I realised being level 66 was breaking the Tactics menu (I believe the game’s Technical Level Cap is about 50, but the content will only get you to around 20). But cheating in combat is, like, fake cheating; I don’t really care about beating the fights, I care about playing the game. And cheating in relationships means I Played It Wrong; that’s admitting real defeat.
But I did it anyway and, a few hours later, was rewarded with my own personally-assessed “good ending”; the one were all my BFFs are still, in fact, my BFFs (Anders having been promoted to “OMG you’re lucky you’re an abomination with no sense of long-term planning but if you do that again I’ll have Fenris punch your heart out he’ll really enjoy it I swear”-frenemy status).[xv] At least it’s now arguably A World Half Full rather than a straight-out Crapsack World, and I’m ready to go kick some ass (or at least help someone) in the sequel.
It took about 24 hours for the conclusion of Dragon Age 2 to really set in. It happened Saturday night, when I went looking for the end credits version of Florence and the Machine’s “I’m Not Calling You a Liar”[xvi] and listening to it almost made me cry. It still does (I mean, it’s also just a good song, but still). And every time I think back on the game, something else pings at me.
And this is why I think DA2 is an amazing game, despite some of the, um, questionable choices in the UI and general gameplay mechanics and my initial “OMG THIS IS DIFFERENT I DON’T LIKE IT!” reaction. Honestly, I think it transcends all that, and I think it’s still too new for people to really appreciate just how much. I think it also needs more than one play-through, and I’ve been trying really hard not to do that right now because, uh, I’m supposed to be running a Rift guild here and I’ve already been absent for a whole week. Oops.
So no, I’m not complaining about the plot, despite how it may have hurt me so. Because, oh dear gods, what hurt it was!
And see, here’s the thing. In Australia we have this ongoing argument about having an adults-only rating for games; in a nutshell, we don’t have one, meaning that games featuring heavy violence and sex are (technically) not releasable here. The argument that gets made by those of us in the pro-new-rating camp is that videogames are now a mature medium and games get released by adults, for adults, featuring adult-focused content, and should be classified accordingly. Fake-downrating adult games to MA15+ is just as pointless as banning them outright; the classification system should reflect both the content and the intended audience, and the current one doesn’t work. Games like Fallout 3 and the GTA series simply aren’t made for kids; no-one is arguing they should have access to them, only that adults shouldn’t not have access based on an assumption that’s been out-of-date for decades (if it was ever really real to start off with).
Sounds reasonable? The problem that argument tends to run into is when anti-new-rating type turn around and ask tricky things like, “Okay then, give me an example of this ‘mature content’.” And we end up shuffling and looking at our shoes because, really, all we’ve got to give them are games on intellectual par with BMX XXX. Which, yanno, is certainly “adult”… but could hardly be called “mature”.
I think you can guess where this is going. Dragon Age 2 is an example of a mature game; not because of the lulzworthy violence and presence of (clutches pearls) TEH GHEYS, but because it’s mature thematically. It deals with thematic elements most adults have difficulty with, let alone children, and deals with them in a way that’s more emotionally brutal than all the violence in something like Bulletstorm. More than that, it manages to singlehandedly highlight the strength of videogames as a mature storytelling medium as opposed to something like a film or a novel; that is, the interaction. You can go through the whole of DA2 siding against the oppressed mages at every turn and — particularly if you happen to be one yourself — not once thinking to check your own privilege. DA2 is mature not because its message about oppression and privilege is Anvilicious but precisely because it isn’t; we’re so used to being hit with the Anvil of Morality in all media that when it doesn’t drop (or when we find it already lying on the ground, as it were) we assume it doesn’t exist.
This is what it means for a videogame to be “adult” (not that I think DA2 deserves an R18+ rating, having said that; though if the series gets any darker it might!); not gratuitous sex and exploding bodies… though those can be fun, too.
One last thing. Remember how I said things kept pinging at me over the weekend? Here’s another one: It is impossible to get the aforementioned “Dee’s Best” ending in DA2 playing Hawke as a straight man (or, well, a lesbian); you either have to be romantically involved with Fenris or your victory is always going to be partially (even more?) pyrrhic. Admittedly this depends heavily on how much you relate to each of the companions but if, like me, you ended up liking everyone — despite or even because of their faults — it’s a pretty heavy blow.
And if you’re exactly like me? It’s almost as if this game is tailor-made for you, personally.
I’ve… never actually had that before.
Amazing.
- Why do you cause waves and wave of mooks to fall apart like ragdolls or explode into tiny pieces? Why, because either Varric is exaggerating the violence or Cassandra is imagining it that way. Actually, a lot of things make sense given the framing story, such as why no-one appears to have aged in ten years, with the possible exception of the DA:O cameos in Act III (I dunno whether it was deliberate or just the models, but Alistair and especially Zevran did, indeed, look older than in DA:O). ↩
- Or her. My Hawke was a dude though — and remember that, because it becomes important later — so you’ll have to make do with my male pronouns on this one. ↩
- Or, more correctly, TheDAS. “The Dragon Age Setting”. Get it? ↩
- Anders I am looking at you, bro. Just because I let you come fight the bad guys with me doesn’t mean I’m not unimaginably pissed off right now… ↩
- Planescape: Torment has, I think, the best example of a pre-made character who is still “ownable” by the player; in fact, this is arguably sort of the entire point of the game. ↩
- Two play-throughs, plus Origins, plus the DLCs. ↩
- Or hers but, again, mine was male. Both times. ↩
- Incidentally, King Alistair kinda blowing the Warden off in DA:O-A was really hurtful, BioWare! He was like my bestie! ↩
- I never played a Dalish elf in DA:O, incidentally, hence not getting the same vibe from Merrill. ↩
- Except Carver; I never ended up liking that guy. Have fun with your violent new Grey Warden life and eventual horrific death, sucker! ↩
- I was kinda interested to see whether I could make Fenris not actually hate mages. The answer, if you’re wondering, is no; but you can make him not-hate Hawke to the point that it overrides his common sense, in more than one situation, For Love. Strictly-speaking, this makes him by far the most loyal, honest and least dangerous of all of Hawke’s possible love interests; sure he’s a bit of a jerkass, but he never actually lies to you or betrays you (the worst he does is leave the party 4EVA) or, yanno, causes and/or makes you complicit in the genocide of dozens/hundreds/thousands of people (Merrill, Isabela and Anders, respectively, give or take some orders of magnitude). The only companions who are equivalent in the Hawke-loyalty, prevention-of-the-death-of-innocents and outright not-being-evil stakes are Varric, Aveline and Carver/Bethany, none of whom are potential love interests. Go figure. ↩
- Fridge Brilliance moment: Early on the in game, if you’re a mage, you get the sense the Templars in Kirkwall have a particularly vicious form of genre blindness re. someone walking around in robe carrying a staff setting fire to people. By the end of the game, it’s fairly evident that they’re perfectly aware you’re a mage, and have deliberately left you alone; at first due to bribes, and later due to your social status. The presence of characters like Fenris’ ex-master — as well as Varric’s judicious application of bribes on behalf of Anders — indicate this isn’t an unusual situation; money and influence can buy a sort of “freedom” for mages. ↩
- Though it’s arguably less an analogy for racism and more like, say, the relationship between the West and the rest of the world. Though that’s probably a whole different essay… ↩
- Also one of the reasons I don’t plan on buying that new companion DLC; I can’t handle the abandonment! ↩
- Also: Anders/Hawke/Fenris OT3 4EVA! ↩
- For those of you who skipped the credits: go look up the lyrics and tell me you can avoid, in the words of one YouTube commenter, “taking that personally”. ↩