I have been reading articles and listening to podtoids, and they have been saying how Dragon Age is one of the best games of the year. Another article talks about how JRPGs have suffered from a lack of evolution. I decided to hold back my comments on DAO until I had time to write a blog to articulate my feelings better. Dragon Age is not my Game of the Year. Bioware is not my publisher of the year. Here is why. (Disclaimer: I have not yet beaten DAO. I plan to try to go through the rest of it, and because of this, some of my points may be invalid. )
The Formula
Knights of the Old Republic. Mass Effect. Dragon Age Origin. These are all the same game! First, here is your into story. You can pick a branch of your character that will affect the first x amount of time (Granted in DAO, x was over an hour). Then you have some mission that is your tutorial, only to be forced to go rogue. From here you branch off to having to go to one of three places. Here’s the kicker: you get to pick the order! Cool, right? Yeah? It doesn’t matter when you go to place A or place B, because they aren’t interlinked at all. This lack of continuity is one of the things that bothers me about the formula. I feel like one of the reasons to play an RPG is for the story, and that the story should be fluid. What going to planet/galaxy/town A B or C does is say “You know the main story? Its still here. But here is a completely irrelevant subplot that isn’t linked because of continuity purposes, but will relate to your goal at the end”. The first time I had the pick your own path thing, it was kind of cool. The second time, it lost some appeal, but was still an alright method. In DAO, I was disappointed by it. Maybe I just expected more. Now as I have said, I have not beaten DAO yet, so I have not gone through all of the uniting paths, but if I had to guess, once I am done with the uniting the different peoples, there will be some sort of twist, rendering most of my work useless. I just wish that Bioware would take their next RPG to a different method. High hopes, I know.
Its WoW…but offline
I would like to preface this by saying some things about my girlfriend. She is pretty new to the videogames scene, but she has her inputs on games I play. First, if I ever became addicted to WoW, she will break up with me. There are some NSFW reasons behind this. She said this game seemed like WoW, and I agree. The play style of “press A once, wait and hope you don’t die” is not my favorite. I enjoy a little bit more reaction, and my girlfriend was disappointed with this scheme. However, this is a minor gripe. In fact, my next point is the major difference between WoW and this game, which frustrates me to no end.
My RPG Experience
Not from DAO...this guy is from FFTactics
My brother and I used to play RPGs all the time. He was a grinder at heart, and did not mind putting in the sound track to Blues Brothers, and rock out for a couple of hours while grinding in Chrono Trigger. Being level 50 against a level 35 enemy is a great feeling. An RPG to me is only as hard as the time you don’t put into it, and that is one of my favorite parts. An RPGs difficulty should be inconsequential, because if an enemy is too hard, just go back an area, and grind until that enemy is easy. Dragon Age has enemies that will kick your ass at level 1 the same at level 20. It is the Evolved Mutant Dire Rat from Hell!!! Am I to believe that the bandits have been doing the same stuff I have been doing, killing hordes of darkspawn so that they can be at my pace, so that instead of being at human strength, they are equivalent to the first time I fought an Ogre. What the hell! There was an alternate system mentioned on a podtoid I believe that suggested to let you grind for a bit, to be maybe a level or two above. Let me explain one of my favorite video game memories. Final Fantasy Tactics had enemies that leveled with you as well, but only the enemies in the outworld, all of the plot enemies were constant. About one fifth of the way through the game, I had a wizard who was capable of summoning the most powerful summon, and easily wiped out the entire enemy team. My patience was rewarded, and the fact that enemies leveled with me only helped this.
These are my reasons why, if I had a chance to vote for GotY or best publisher ever, I would not vote for DAO. Let me know what you think.
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* no ability to pause or skip cutscenes... it seems that this should be standard for "next gen" games, yet they didn't bother adding this.
* Graphics... they weren't "bad", but they also weren't great. I was especially disappointed that most of the game environments all looked the same. Whether you were in a castle, underground or in a forest, the gameworld had a "sameness" about it with re-used objects/textures.
* no ability to walk (or ride) from location A to location B. Most games have evolved to a larger sense of world... yet Bioware were using their very old method of "tracks on a map" to get you from one location to another and this just now feels very restrictive.
* load times... my lord!... the load times were horrendous compared to most other games nowadays.
* lack of controller options. My husband moves with his right stick rather than the left... the inability to change the controller options is again very restrictive in this age of "next gen".
Bioware's strength is in the story telling and creating a very unique experience for everyone who plays the game. You'll rarely see two people who have the same story - the romance options, political options, and game ending options (who lives/dies/kills the dragon) all make for so many different stories that it really is quite amazing. This is why the game is still an incredible game... and if they had moved a bit more forward with the gameworld and graphics it might indeed have been my GOTY (but I can't forgive the inability to pause/skip cut scenes and lack of controller options).
To be fair Mass Effect, unlike KOTOR and DA:O, is a trilogy. I'm interested to see how that turns out because it's true the three do share similarities but ME is special in that of the three it's the first to get a direct sequel from the same team. I get this argument and why people use it but you have to remember ME1 is a trilogy which is evidenced by some of the glaring holes in the plot.
DA:O is not a GOTY at all. In fact the more I play it the more I dislike it. I liked it at first but now I'm getting serious KOTOR flashbacks and all the issues with that game, both gameplay and plot wise, seem unchecked. In fact that was gonna be my next blog whenever the hell my laptop gets here so I'm glad you got the ball rollin'.
All in all I like Biowares stuff. They got me into gaming with KOTOR and got me back into gaming after a long hiatus with Mass Effect. I've played through both many times and still can't justifiably say they're the same game because they really aren't. They're similar but the same is a little far just because ME has the continuity to deal with. The plot has yet to be wrapped up and the story is still alive. Mass Effect has always been a trilogy and respectfully I can't judge it until the fat lady sings.
Overall DA:O is a reskinned, rewritten, KOTOR and even as someone who heralds KOTOR as my "gateway game" I feel like there's an evolution that could have transpired that didn't.
@Elsa
Seriously Elsa you need to pick up a 360 on the cheap and check out Mass Effect. The team that did ME was far superior to the DA:O team and really did address some of those issues. The walking from point A to point B thing (or lack thereof) makes more sense in space, the graphics were amazing albeit with a few kinks, and the load times really were vastly better than DA:O.
I will say I don't know about the PS3 but on the 360 any cutscene in any game can be paused by pressing the guide button.
Thanks Xzyliac!! (one thing I love about this site is that I learn interesting stuff!)
Funny you should mention this, as I stopped playing Dragon Age after about 20 hours and went back to KOTOR. The difference: KOTOR is more enjoyable and has better friendly A.I. I will say that Dragon Age's story and voice acting make up for its technical shortcomings (the "friendly" AI is horrible in DAO).
Also, Alistair is Carth Onasi and Atton Rand's lovechild.
I've read at least a couple of forum comments of people weeping how they got to level 25 (the cap, by the by) before the game had really begun, all ready to go out there and rape everything they came across, only to find everything else was more or less on par.
Anyway, grinding only goes so far. I guess Bioware games use 'player skill' as a more powerful tool to defeat enemies (that is to say, effective use of talents/skills/spells through party management during combat etc) than going off to kill wolves and bears for a couple of hours when the going gets a bit tough.
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