Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dragon Age 2 Wrapup!

Dragon Age 2 isn’t a very good game. It took me a while to figure that out, but after playing it, after going from start to finish, I’m pretty sure about it. See, the problem is that I wanted to like Dragon Age 2 quite a bit. The first Dragon Age was an incredible game, and the follow-up expansion was very impressive. It was a cheap, effective way to build on a game I already loved, and it made me think that perhaps Mass Effect 2 was the fluke, that Bioware still had a good sense of how to grow their properties and expand them, not just launch them.

With The Old Republic looming on the horizon, with Mass Effect 3 offering to wrap up the saga of Shepherd, which has honestly gotten a little tiresome, there have been a number of reasons to be genuinely excited and hopeful about Bioware and the things they’re doing. But there seems to be a disconnect between what Bioware does on its first passes and what they do when they’re trying to bring a sequel to market.

It’s difficult to know what pressures surround them as a studio. Their star has risen nicely over the last few years. They haven’t made a game that didn’t sell in almost a decade now, and what they lack in ingenuity they make up for in subtle bits of subversion inserted into their projects. But every time Bioware makes a sequel I find myself more than just disappointed: I find myself feeling betrayed. Mass Effect 2 was certainly the greatest offender. No question, that game made me hate both Mass Effect and myself. It took all the boring, repetitive elements of Mass Effect and brought them to the forefront of game play. It removed the nitpicky micromanagement that made up the actual game of Mass Effect and stripped it down so thoroughly that the game itself was reduced to a handful of action options and a character progression system on par with the upgrade paths in Monday Night Combat. The well rendered, interesting story of Mass Effect, which had some stymied choices but really let you get to know your characters and made them distinct allies who were all useful in combat, had been replaced by a rushed procedural mess filled with completely interchangeable allies.

I replayed Mass Effect 2, I wanted to like it so bad, and all indicators show I’ll likely do the same for Dragon Age 2. But it’s less the desperate cry of the critic and more the action of a fan, searching for something to love. I want to see if playing through Dragon Age 2 with a different perspective, a different character class, is going to make me hate the game less. So far I’ve barely scratched the surface of life as a lesbian warrior, but it doesn’t seem to be that significantly different. I move more slowly, I’ve decided to be angry and nice more often, instead of just joking all the time. But the core combat of the game, which takes all of the micromanagement of the first game before fights and drops all of the micromanagement during fights, the part I actually prefer and find enriching as a game, is still ever present. Occasionally fights will have the feeling that the developers seemed to be aiming at, such as a prolonged bout of combat with a real live dragon, which was actually a real challenge. But mostly they’re all just chaotic messes against the same set of enemies, rendered on the same blah tilesets that the game has been repeating for the last twenty hours. Sometimes it makes sense, like when the Fade takes the shape of the Circle Tower in the dreams of an escaped mage. But mostly it just feels lazy, like the all important map-designing group that every studio has in some deep dark dungeon, the part that has actually solicited some of the more interesting cultural writing on games by the way, has been completely excised from Bioware’s team.

This sort of content recycling permeates the game itself. I’m not sure why I’d ever have certain character combinations in the game. Would Varric and the other archer have anything to do if they were in a party with one another? Is it possible to have a party without a healer? Why aren’t there more people with healing abilities, by the way? I get that blood mages are bad and everything, but they used to have all the powers that mages had and then some. Why does signing up for additional powers involve losing some of the most useful powers available to mages? It’s interesting how naked each of the base-line character is in their application, but it’s also kind of frustrating. There’s only so much customization that can be done, and I often found myself picking party members based solely on the interactions I wanted to see rather than any element of their combat abilities.

Maybe that was part of Dragon Age 2 design overall, a conscious choice to focus on story over gameplay. The story does have legs. In fact it’s one of the few video games that bothers with a framing technique, that tries to do anything interesting at all. But I don’t think they absolutely had to curtail character customization to achieve that goal, and the sloppiness radiated by the gameplay engine feels less like a conscious decision on how to apply resources and more like a terrible mistake that someone made at some point.

It is worth saying that the story of Dragon Age 2 kept me interested until the very end, when it totally lost its shit. A game focused on the minutiae of actual existence in a fantasy world is a cool idea, something that games like Majesty hint at with a great deal more humor and less thought. Playing a game about making a buck instead of saving the world is neat, and the swelling tides of revolution that Dragon Age 2 eventually brings to bear could’ve been great in a game that put more thought into the big, world changing events that it wanted to play with. I still think the actions of every mage at the end of the game were bullshit, and made no sense in the context of previous actions and words. If the fight that had come of them was even remotely cool it might’ve been forgivable, but the Orsinos boss fight is nothing short of a mess. And Meredith’s eventual madness emerging, along with its explanation, were more random than anything else. Her sudden hatred of mages emerging instead of the avarice and hunger that colored other the actions of other users of the artifact was deus ex machina of the laziest order. A piece of loot, a McGuffin, became the plot device explaining every irrational action that a character carries out without ever touching on why this artifact had such potency.

It was nice to fight with an entire party during the end of the game, and it was nice to see that emerge as part of a continuing dialogue with other characters rather than a set of decisions made at the last minute. I felt like the effort I’d put into building my relationships in Dragon Age 2 paid off more than it has in any other game I’ve ever played, including the amazing Baldur’s Gate games. And the dialogue about sex that emerged surrounding Dragon Age 2 was interesting. In many ways it was more interesting than the game itself.

But I’ve never had to force myself to keep playing a Bioware game before. Especially during the central portion of the game itself. Mass Effect 2 kind of lost me whenever it made me go through a period of tedious scanning, but as hum-drum as the gameplay became I never rolled my eyes at it the way I did with Dragon Age 2. Endless waves of enemies making my combat into a chaotic mess does not a dynamic combat system make. I would often shut down Dragon Age 2 and go off to clean my apartment to make the game seem less tedious and more enjoyable. And while I’m glad I saw it through to its conculsion, if only to understand how the entire thing fit together, it is strange to think that the game portion of Dragon Age 2, the portion that traditionally would’ve been the easiest thing to do right, was the thing that seemed to elude Bioware this time around. It’s great to see original, well written content in games that plays with the idea of what we should make games about, don’t get me wrong. I just wish there’d been a better game at its core, so that revealing bits of story was a joy and not a chore.