Waking Dead

I completed Dragon Age a few days ago. I really enjoyed it overall, and despite the amount of hours I’d invested in it, I immediately went and made another character and started a second playthrough. I wanted to do the things I’d missed the first time around, like play through the whole of Orzammar with Shale, or have the Werewolves on my side for the final battle. Dragon Age, as with pretty much all of Bioware’s games, presents you with choices. But there’s something fundamentally wrong with all of this, even given the game’s addictive qualities. You see, for all they spout about difficult decisions and long-term change, they continually hamstring themselves by chaining their games to plots that offer neither.

I am at least thankful that they have chosen to remove the good/evil swingometer from Dragon Age; this was a throwback to the light side/dark side gauge of Knights of the Old Republic, and an unnecessary contrivance. But they still want you to think that the choices you make allow you to be one or the other. In fact, it’s nothing of the sort. All of Bioware’s games – and Dragon Age is no exception – fall short of delivering on their promises. Their much-vaunted choices really only boil down to playing the part of the hero, or being a total prick.

Let’s go back to the plot of Dragon Age for a moment. At the end of the day, all I’m really in it for is to kill the Archdemon and prevent the Blight. That’s it. It’s one choice, and it seems to fall squarely under the ‘being a hero’ category. If I was able to be truly evil, I might have the option of joining with the ranks of Ogres and Hurlocks, perhaps even overthrowing the Archdemon and leading the Blight to the surface myself. That is real choice. Deciding between going ahead with the mission or totally subverting it is what I expect when Bioware make their bold claims. Deciding to insult someone’s sexuality instead of thanking them isn’t quite the pinnacle of player-driven storytelling. Perhaps laughing maniacally and twirling my mustache whilst saying it might improve things.

There are no shades of grey in Bioware’s world. Oh sure, the elves are oppressed and the dwarfs are embroiled in bitter in-fighting – there’s even a rape sub-plot. But honestly, it’s a pretty clear-cut traditional fantasy world straight out of Tolkien’s playbook. A superior and generally well-realised fantasy world, but generic nonetheless. Compare this to the world of Andrej Sapkowski’s The Witcher, a universe also cut from the same cloth, but a universe twisted and reshaped to mimic the author’s Eastern European homeland. The game, also created by a Polish team, is as ambiguous as its protagonist. There is no greater good, and there isn’t really any great evil. There is simply life and the choices of how you live it.

That’s not to say that CDProjekt got it totally right – there are still times when you get rail-roaded as with every other RPG on the market. But – and it’s a crucial but – at least they make their choices meaningful. I literally sat for 20 minutes staring at my dialogue options during one protracted encounter. I could not easily discern where each option would take me, and it totally blindsided me. Bioware take note: when my dialogue options are ‘tell him he’s awesome’ or ‘kick him in the nuts’, and both of them progress the plot in exactly the same way, I’m not really being presented with much of a choice.

It’s not just dialogue either; I simply chose this as the most obvious way of presenting my argument. For me, if we want to give the player real and meaningful choices, the absolute biggest change to RPGs (and gaming in general) must come from a flexibility in how the story plays out. You can keep the plot simple – kill the Archdemon, prevent the Blight – but if you really want to make players think, give them the option of doing the opposite. Could you imagine playing through a game and reaching the conclusion, only to start again and play through it all from the opposite side? How much richer would the experience be?

So, back to Dragon Age. Despite my criticisms I’m looking forward to playing through the game as a total prick. I know that I won’t be able to alter the story in any substantial way, and I already know how it ends, but there are subtle changes that I can experience along the way. I just wish somebody somewhere would give me more of a choice.