1581

Can’t agree with this at all. Having just finished the dwarf section of the game, I was impressed with how unique DA’s vision of the dwarves are. They weren’t just short people with Scottish accents and a love of ale and gold, they had a highly structured culture with a way of life that was very little like that of the humans above. The caste system, the ancestors and paragons, their earthsense, the unknown burden, the shapers, the cutthroat politics. DA’s dwarves are like nothing we’ve ever seen in other fantasy games, other than their height and that they live underground.

Complaining about a lack of multiplayer in Planescape: Torment is like complaining about the lack of a penis on your new car. Does it really belong there? Do you really want it there? What would you do with it if it was there? And do I really want to know?

1582

What about a lack of balls on your new truck, though?

1583

Not really; I love Planescape: Torment (and even replayed it recently, enjoying every moment).

Me, I thought that Bioware did a good job of making me not miss an open world, except for that first town with the little grass arena to the north. That place felt contrived and full of arbitrary boundaries, but the rest of the game felt perfectly normal, less closed-in than Mass Effect or KOTOR.

As someone already mentioned: Denerim? You have this supposedly massive, bustling city, and all you really get to see of it is a (practically) deserted marketplace, a deserted (supposedly tightly packed) alienage, and three back alleys? Contrast and compare with Sigil in PS:T, which does a far better job of making the Hive feel like a busy, breathing city.

The only comparatively well-realized area in Dragon Age (in my opinion, of course), is Ostagar; the limits to the area make sense within the setting, and it manages to feel alive for the short period one spends in it. It’s probably no coincidence that it is the first area of the game after the origins.

Paranoid, antisocial hunters (and yet culturally superior) pretty much describes Elves in 99,99% of all fantasy settings, IMO. The alienage elves are interesting; but could just as easily have been humans with pointy ears.

They weren’t just short people with Scottish accents and a love of ale and gold, they had a highly structured culture with a way of life that was very little like that of the humans above. The caste system, the ancestors and paragons, their earthsense, the unknown burden, the shapers, the cutthroat politics.

Instead they are short people with gruff voices who love ale and lyrium? Given that the main NPC dwarf in the game is an ale-swilling beserker, I am less than impressed with how unique their dwarves are.

Which really hits to the point of what I miss: the lore in the game is insanely detailed, but it has precisely zero impact on anything that actually happens in the game. Sure - you may get a few snarky remarks from characters if you start out as a casteless dwarf in the game, but ultimately it changes nothing about the game setting that the lore would have you believe. The same way being an elf in the game has zero impact other than a few embarrasing moments for the humans you encounter. Anyone who has experience being discriminated against would laugh at the portrayal of the plight of the elves/casteless dwarves in Dragon Age.

It’s the good old Show vs Tell: Dragon Age tells of this wonderfully detailed game world (99% through codexes, which ought to have been a red flag for them); what it shows through its story is a game world that could easily be replaced by pretty much any generic fantasy setting without anyone noticing the difference.

If I’m to point to one aspect of the setting that I think is well realized, it’s the Magical bits. The Templar-controlled Mage setup is relatively unused, and consequences of the lore is actually woven into the story - both through some major questlines but also in a large number of minor encounters/discussions. An (hopefully not too spoilery) example of the latter is the discussion about mages that you can have with Sten… if you are not a mage (at least I was unable to get it when playing a mage). Others include the constant tensions and interactions between your various mage/non-mage companions based on this aspect of their background.

As I said, though - despite my criticism, I still enjoyed the game a lot. Perhaps the reason why I am not impressed by the game setting, is that I compare it against fantasy literature in general, and not just the rather limited depiction of fantasy settings in games.

1584

First town after Ostagar is Lothering. Most people don’t even really see Denerim until much later in the game.

1585

This mode of communication does seem to be common among nerdcore fans in any genre or medium.

One advantage is that it does make discerning the overall thrust of the article a character-building exercise.

1586

Lothering was brought up as a place that felt contrived and full of arbitary boundaries. I mentioned Denerim as an example of another setting in the game filled with contrived and arbitrary boundaries.

1587

Which dwarves love ale more than average? Oghren and then the noble guy who hangs out in Tapsters? So, what, we’ve got two that fit the stereotype. (And it’s worth noting that Oghren could give a shit about Lyrium. At no point does the noble guy even mention lyrium.) So we’ve got two dwarves who love ale. On the other hand, the shaperite is filled with dwarves who love history and writing and folk stories. So based on my observations, clearly the dwarves as a people are obsessed with history!

Even better, if we can judge all of them based on two of them, we can judge half of them based one, right? So there’s a dwarf who wants to become a mage even though dwarves can’t. So half of the dwarven race want to become mages! Amazing! That’s a pretty keen departure from the classical dwarves of fantasy fiction!

If anything, pointing out that some dwarves love ale and some dwarves love lyrium just shows that the dwarves as a people are as varied as humans, each one showing off his own interests and traits without becoming the caricature of one or two aspects of the human condition like they tend to be in other fantasy stories. Yet they still manage to come from a culture where place and birth matter more than aspiration. Do I wish that they’d done more with it? Sure, going through there I found myself thinking of a half-dozen stories they could’ve done with it. But I feel that, at least with the dwarves, they showed plenty. They told a lot, yeah, but through your interactions with the people of Dust Town, the dwarves in the commons and the nobles, you could learn a lot about their beliefs, their histories and their culture.

1588

I’ve been over this before but it’s clear to me that Dragon Age deliberately used well known tropes, like Elves and Dwarves and the Big Bad Taking Over The World, but put a unique spin on all of it. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the Big Bad either. We don’t even really understand what makes it all tick. If you think of Origins as just that then you’re on the right track. Ferelden is just one notch above backwater, Anglo-Saxon England in the days of Byzantium and the dawning Holy Roman Empire, in the scheme of things. There’s a whole big world out there full of both more advanced and more unique and tribal cultures that’s been referenced.

Does the setting have a direct impact, in a solid gameplay sense, on the story? It’s true that’s not very strong. There are class-race restrictions, dialogue considerations and occasionally some scenario that plays out a bit differently. Then what’s the point? The point is that it works wonders for an imaginative player. If you enjoy the setting there’s nothing in the gameplay that conflicts with it. There are minor elements that reinforce it as well. Would the fundamental gameplay be different with other graphics or a different approach to sound design? No. But those elements still play key roles in the gestalt.

Given the amount of work put in to more personalized elements like NPC personae and potential interactions, I think they focused on the most important things while still presenting a whole world of possibility. That’s one of the two keys for me when it comes to world creation. Possibility, “What could happen here?”, gets the mind wandering and makes more of of what’s there than might actually be there. This isn’t silly. This is stagecraft. The other is verisimilitude. Does the game avoid contradictory elements or forcing you to move in immersion breaking directions? Does it create a consistent backdrop for the story and characters? Here again, Dragon Age does this splendidly well.

I can say Torment does a great job with these elements as well. However it’s hobbled with gameplay that’s like pulling teeth. And while the characters could sometimes be entertaining, and were always interesting, they never felt particularly real. I felt more like someone had crammed a very clever graphic novel into a prehistoric D&D engine. Maybe that’s what Planescape is but I’d left D&D behind long before that was published.

Dragon Age is viscerally fun to play, once you get past some of the painfully uneven difficulty issues, and the characters have some depth and nuance to them. The dialogue is almost always amusing, personalities and histories are revealed over time, and there’s lots of this stuff. An amazing degree of work is done here on all the characters, interactions and permutations based on context and player driven plot variations.

Given this, how much of that rich world could they fold in to actual gameplay? There’s enough content here for a thousand potential questlines. Which makes me curious about the tabletop RPG version.

1589

My main complaint is not that the world is bland/uninspired, but that the main quests are so bland/boring.
Since this is the nonspoiler thread, I hope these descriptions are sufficiently vague to be spoiler-free.

Here are the four main questlines:

  1. The mage tower has been overrun by troublemakers. Are you a bad enough dude to kill all the troublemakers until you make the final moral choice at the end?
  2. The Elves are having trouble. Are you a bad enough dude to kill all the troublemakers and wander through a generic elven ruin until you make the final moral choice at the end?
  3. The village is under attack. Are you a bad enough dude to repel the attackers and then find the macguffin to make things right by playing Indiana Jones III until you make the final moral choice at the end?
  4. The dwarves are having trouble. Are you a bad enough dude to do a couple of fed-ex quests and then wander around aimlessly to find the dwarven macguffin until you make the final moral choice at the end?

In Baldur’s Gate 2 the world had a lot more interesting locations: The Planar Sphere, the Illusionist tent, the Mage Asylum and the Test of Sanity, the Underdark with the soulcage and drow politics, the bustling city of Baldur’s Gate itself, the detective quest to find the murderer in the bridge district etc.

What I’m trying to say is that the quests/dungeons feel uninspired and you never get a sense of wonder about the place you are travelling in. Contrast this with Baldur’s Gate 2 where I can still remember a lot of the quests/locations years after playing it, whereas I can barely remember anything unique about the Dragon Age dungeons 2 weeks after playing it.

1590

If that is the case, it is probably because most of those stories only have one or two dwarves in them; usually ale-swilling warriors (which just goes to make Oghren even more amusing).

The stories I’ve read that actually depict Dwarven society tend to create credible, multi-dimensional societies. Most stories, of course, don’t bother to describe Dwarven society as they are based directly off (and assume familiarity with) the Tolkien model Dwarves: a declining socety with low birthrate, strongly focused around clans, a veneration of ancestors and tradition, with mining for the unique dwarven resource lyriu… sorry, mithril and the art of the smith held in high regard.

But I feel that, at least with the dwarves, they showed plenty. They told a lot, yeah, but through your interactions with the people of Dust Town, the dwarves in the commons and the nobles, you could learn a lot about their beliefs, their histories and their culture.

Also a matter of opinion; I think. My impression is distinctly that 90% of the dwarven setting is communicated through codexes or expository dialogue. They even have a couple of character directly telling you that until you’ve gotten the basic information dump from the Shaperate, don’t bother talking to us. I’ll give you that it is a little bit better if you start out as a casteless dwarf, though.

We’ll see where Bioware takes the game world, though. There are certainly many interesting possibilities left open in the game as well as a bunch of tantalizing teasers left unexplored wrt to many central aspects of the mythos. It will also be very interesting to see how they choose to develop the Qunari. Future games should also be able to work with the backstory with less exposition, as they can assume that the player has at least a little familiarity with the game world.

1591

I’m probably over 3/4ths of the way through the game now and I’m a bit annoyed about their decision to make the amount of tactic slots a level up mechanic, and an optional one at that. I realize there’s a mod for this, but still I question the logic of it.

For instance with Morrigan, I finally have her to a position where I can mostly let her run on her own, but she’s not really any more effective in combat because of this. All this really does is reduce the amount of time I have to spend pausing and micromanaging the character, it doesn’t make the character more powerful.

So would this be the first instance of a level up mechanic that makes the game less cumbersome for the actual player but has no real effect on the in game character?

1592

I actually ended up never using the tactics, other than to have them down a potion or use their baseline tactics (shield bash, etc). Spells and any other finite resource, I micro-managed.

Never spent skill points on Tactics slots as the others always seem rather more useful.

1593

Given that the main NPC dwarf in the game is an ale-swilling beserker

“So I ponched him, and while he was picking his teeth up off of the floor…”

Bioware zeitgeist

1594

What fantasy are you reading? Because outside of the Witcher books (as I mentioned previously), I can’t think of a single other place where elves are handled the way Dragon Age handles them. In general, my experience has been that elves come in one of a handful of styles: Tolkien, where they’re incredibly long-lived, noble savants with a wondrous and superior culture that’s nonetheless in decline; elves as faerie, where they’re weird, alien, and cruel and also immortal, elusive, and prone to meddling in mortal affairs; and elves as humans with pointy ears and a bent for music, magic, and shooting things with arrows. Not insular, nomadic hunters attempting to preserve a lost glory age, nor oppressed underclass.

And yes, they could just as easily have been humans with pointy ears. But that’s true of a lot of fantasy races in a lot of fantasy. Very rarely do they have traits that make them operate in a manner that humans simply could not, outside of maaaybe living a lot longer and breeding slower. Usually the major differences are a matter of culture.

Edit: I should add that I’m not asserting that Dragon Age’s story is, like, crazy unique and wondrous and all that, just that it’s not bog-standard genericism either. They’ve put -some- time and thought into it.

1595

You seem to be limiting your definition of Elves to the High Elf variety. Insular, nomadic hunters attempting to preserve a lost glory age = Wood Elves in basically every classic fantasy setting (including Tolkien). Cf. Warhammer for the most popular model of today.

1596

Katharine Kerr’s Deverry Cycle. There are a few other references in Dragon Age to her series as well, one of the runestones is called dweomer (which is the system of magic in her universe,) and there’s a reference to “The Long Road.”

1597

Yes, I’m sure that the DA guys took that one from Katharine Kerr.

1598

Well, not in the Lord of the Rings unless I’m seriously missing something, and Wood Elves are something I’ve encountered extremely rarely in other fantasy fiction, if at all. I’m aware that there’s such a faction in Warhammer Fantasy, but I’ve never encountered them in any of the novels I’ve read or computer games of the setting I’ve played, and the only other instance of such a race I can immediately recall is in the Elder Scrolls series…where they have so far played exactly zero significant role - I guess there are probably some NPCs that are Wood Elves, but the only times I can recall the race of an Elder Scrolls NPC mattering are with Argonians, Khajiit, and Orcs…and of course Dark Elves in Morrowind.

1599

Compared to the fantasy worlds depicted in most computer games, I found Dragon Age to be edgy and different. Mainly in the culture and politics. The castleless dwarves, the elven alienage, the templar controlled mages. Thats why I enjoyed the game so much.

But as others have pointed out, computer rpgs are generally set in painfully generic fantasy settings (eg Forgotten Realms). So saying Dragon Age is edgy compared to those isn’t really saying much.

I think the generic presentation of computer fantasy worlds is an outdated historical thing going back to the pen-and-paper roots of the genre. Genre cliche serves an important role in pen-and-paper roleplaying. When you have 4-5 amateur storytellers making up a story on the fly, the experience cannot be carefully crafted. So genre cliches fill in alot of the blanks. Everyone knows what the dwarven smith looks like even if the game master doesn’t describe him.

But headline computer RPGs are now multi-million dollar projects crafted over years by professionals. They can afford to present original ideas in a crafted, interesting way. So many people are asking why they continue to rehash the same old genre cliches.

Tony

1600

Huh. Somewhere along the way, Dragon Age got easy.

Playing on normal, I’d not had to try any fight more than a couple of times, but things could still go south easily enough if I wasn’t careful. And yet, I’ve hit my second area (the Brecilian forest) and I’m kicking ass and taking names now - it’s not the “levelled to when you entered” effect, because I’m not coming back to something I’d quit halfway through. This is fresh. But even the monsters that had previously given me my only several attempt battle are now folding quietly under my onslaught. I wonder what’s changed.