Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Unbearable Immensity of Dragon Age!

Dragon Age: Origins has been out for a while now. Almost a month, in fact. As Bioware’s latest opus we all knew it would be pretty big. But I don’t think I personally realized just how staggeringly large the game could really be until I started playing. Sixty hours in I feel like I’ve barely gotten to know the world Bioware has created for me. This is hardly new to veteran Bioware fans. Their games are usually overwhelming in their immersiveness and their scope, offering up hilarious vignettes and enlightening asides to any who are willing to look.

But Bioware has outdone themselves here. Even as I eke my way through the central plot, battling the usual Bioware pitfalls of buggy design and side-quest creep, I feel like I’m missing so much by merit of the choices I’ve made in both creating my character and playing through the game. After three weeks or solid play I’m nowhere near finishing the game, but after discussing it with two friends who are also playing it I’ve already realized just how much I’ve missed.

By playing a human rogue, for example, I’ve unlocked some really cool quest lines. Now I get to know all about Arl Howe and his shady politicking, but I know nothing of the events surrounding the death of the dwarven king. I know nothing of growing up as a city elf in an alienage or living in the wilds with the Dalish. My perspective has shaped how the plot events in each of the locations I just mentioned have played out as much as my perceptions as a player have. Bioware has done something games (aside from arguably The Path) have never really been able to accomplish before: they’ve created an unreliable narrator.

The narrative figures within games who shape our story are an aggregate of the characters we control and the NPCs they interact with throughout the world. To a lesser extent objects, places and set pieces do the same thing, but for now let’s keep it simple. In most games you, the player, shape most of what the player character can see or do. There might be some areas barred to you in the context of the game but for the most part the world is open and awaiting exploration. It’s simply a matter of you taking charge and seeing what you can of it.

Games like Call of Duty and Fallout 3 rely on this sort of narrative freedom, scattering goodies throughout their worlds which we are then incentivised to grab. Even Bioware, which planted false memories in your character’s psyche, allowed us to learn more about the world around us largely through exploration and consideration. In these games we never have to worry about our choices impacting what our characters can see. Even in purposefully duplicitous games like Dead Space and, in a better executed example, the Thief series, there is a “correct” version of events which we can uncover with enough effort and exploration.

Not so in Dragon Age. In Dragon Age events are shaped not only by your perceptions as a player but also by the choices you make within the game. Not in the normal “make bad decisions, get the bad ending, make good decisions, get the good ending” fashion, but instead in a way that casts every fact the character learns into doubt. If you become a member of the Circle you’ll be perceived differently than any other character. This, in turn, will lead to you perceiving the game world differently. Like Raymond Carver’s Cathedral before it, Dragon Age forces you to relate to a character you’d normally attempt to dissociate yourself from.

It’s not brutal with its attempts to get you to associate with your protagonist. In fact you could easily miss it if you distance yourself from the game’s mechanics or only allow your self one play through of Bioware’s epic, a totally reasonable decision given the mammoth scope of Ferelden. But each play through of Dragon Age is unique based on your approach both within and without the game. Each choice you make reflects on the world around you in a real and noticeable way. Even minute details such as the way that NPCs speak to you and the way you interact with minor characters are effected greatly by the path and origin you choose.

It’s a difficult leap to make from telling a meticulously crafted story to granting players immense amounts of interpretive freedom, however, and it shows. Many of the larger events in the game which I’ve encountered are walled off in such a way that events must unfold. Personal history simply colors these events rather than allowing them to emerge as some of the smaller, more interesting occurrences do. For example, I’ve just reached the Landsmeet. As a human noble I’m not giving much away when I say that I want to kill Howe as quickly and violently as possible.

But I’m almost positive that I’d be handed a set of arbitrary reasons for wanting to kill him just as much were I a city elf or a dwarf noble. In fact I’ve now been given a political mission to break into his palace and rescue the sitting queen. Sure, I’ve still got that “he killed my family” undertone going my way, which shapes my perceptions as a player greatly along with my character’s perception and his dialogue options, but the actual events are all scripted. I have to fight Howe for the game to progress. As such a blanket reason is offered to me and all the rest is just flavor text.

I understand the limitations that force them to do this sort of thing, and to their credit Bioware does their all to mask the seams but they still show through, sometimes to a jarring extent. For example the various reasons we are each told that we cannot possibly comprehend the plight of the Dalish depending on our background. The flipside is that I want to play through to see how I’ll be told I cannot understand the battle against the werewolves as a Dalish citizen, simply to see what hoops I’ll have to jump through to convince Tuvok to stop being a douche bag.

But I’ll always have to find a way to make him less of a douche, and that’s the problem with Dragon Age, and with games in general. So much effort goes into crafting each part of the game that we’re encouraged to experience it. Some older games, such as Star Control 2, Fallout and Baldur’s Gate 2, didn’t really buy into this completionist philosophy. They’d let you complete the game without encountering certain places. In fact Star Control 2 made some serious efforts to prevent you from doing everything in the game. And completing every action in Fallout would actually cut down on the time you have to explore the wonderfully textured world Bioware made so long ago. Dragon Age has many of these traits as well, but the seams still show.

Even if I can never utilize an NPC’s quest line they’ll still be there with a snippit of dialogue hinting at how the right person could activate these quests. Even if I don’t support evil-dwarf-Prince his quest remains in my quest log and the nobles he wants me to talk will always have single option dialogue trees. They don’t even know what I’ve done to the Anvil of the Void. Don’t these people read the Orzamar times?! Get with it, dwarves!

Then there are the other, more egregious examples such as the infamous in-game salesman. I’ve also somehow made a perfect storm of bugs which has completely obliterated all of the expansion content I purchased, which perfectly illustrates the line between original and “expanded” content. But the commoditization of content isn’t really my issue with this game. I’m used to being fucked over by various game companies for my money (for example, I bought Overlord II for full price four months ago – it now costs five dollars). What I take issue with is the ways that we still can’t permit ourselves to omit experiences and allow players to miss things in games. It seems as if the industry is entirely dedicating to making sure everything hangs together, that the game is played in the “correct” way.

And changing this could be very difficult. Some games, such as The Path, have actively tried to and were met with rage and bewilderment for their efforts. After all, why put content in a game if other content precludes or prevents its accessibility? Why force players to endure multiple play throughs in order to have a full experience? Perhaps if the cost of games were lower or the authorship of the medium more focused these questions wouldn’t be significant, but presently the issues these questions raise about the rights of consumers are valid, and they outweigh any concerns that pundits attempting to qualify games as art might raise. And while it is totally understandable, it’s still a bit of a shame that we don’t get to see an interested party like Bioware completely run with their unreliable narrator. That really could’ve been something great.