If it was any other game, I would have given
up. But I have faith in BioWare. EA, not so much, but the fact that DA:I has even a tangential relationship
to the Mass Effect games -- i.e. it
may not have the same team, but it comes from the same figurative country --
means that I can’t write it off just because of seven or eight bad
experiences. I won’t.
So I went back in.
And sure enough, The Sidequest Trap tried to ensnare me yet again; how a
set of sandy canyons manages to pack in more random NPCs needing a gofer is
beyond me. And contextually, they’re not
on stable ground; imagine if you were there with the intent of scouting the
area and ousting the demons, only to have someone try and strong-arm you into
finding their ring. I may be playing as
the more-or-less savior of the world, but I’m not a miracle worker. Also, I don’t care. And when a game -- no matter the genre, but
especially for something like DA:I --
makes you stop caring about the world, it’s a surefire sign that something has
gone wrong.
But as it turns out, I did find something to care
about. That same something has gotten me
thinking about more than just DA:I;
it’s made me wonder if too many games in general are on the wrong track.
Ha.
Like I said last time, in order to earn the right
to continue through the story (and do other missions via the War Table), you
have to earn Power from sidequests. So
circumstantially, playing the way I did -- building a surplus of Power so the
player can proceed uninterrupted -- is possible, but not recommended based on
my time with it. Weirdly, even if it’s
possible to have a continuous stream of sidequests going, thus far the game’s
actual plot has a stop-and-go quality to it.
You go to a place, maybe talk to some people, or fight off some baddies,
and then it’s over.
Well, that’s a reductive way of putting it -- it’s
about the quality and content of those missions, and to be fair there is
something to them -- but there have been a few instances where I found myself
asking, “Wait, that’s it?” My
expectation was that (even if I’m at the start of the game), I’d be put into
some weighty episodes -- chapters with a definitive start, middle and end. I’ll admit that I don’t exactly expect a
drag-out fight toward a boss in every instance, but so far it just feels like
I’ve traveled the land for conversations I’m practically sleeping through.
And I know, it’s early in the game, so I shouldn’t
expect every scene or every event to go from zero to sixty in seconds
flat. But even then, I’m struggling to
keep “it’s only the start of the game” as the primary excuse. The game’s opening -- from the sight of your
avatar wandering a green wasteland to the official formation of a world-saving
Inquisition -- is solid enough to make me want to keep venturing out. I went in expecting to get more of that.
Sure, I probably will at some point, but the
“story” stuff so far has felt so insubstantial.
Have I made a difference? Have I
done any good? Because the most I’ve done
so far is find out that everyone who belongs to a named group is arguing and
doesn’t want to work together. And in
the interim -- before and after -- the game is still bombarding me with
sidequests. A conversation with a damn
religious leader fed into her roping me into a fetch quest.
But you know what?
I get it. I figured out why I
have problems with this game, and what it can do to fix them -- if it hasn’t
already. It’s very simple, really.
It all starts with the characters.
I barely even finished a conversation with Sera
before I internally screamed “Get in my party right now.” Is she the best character ever? No.
But her presence at that point was extremely
welcome. Her general glee and
Deadpool-style rambling set her apart from pretty much everyone I met prior to
that point. It wasn’t necessarily about
her injecting some levity into the game (though that helped), but because if
nothing else, she was different. As a character, and no matter her…well, character, she added something new and
appreciable to the proceedings.
That’s more than I can say about the starting
party. Chalk this up to me not having
the downtime to have conversations with my party members (on this, my third
file; I did talk to them on previous files, and wasn’t exactly endeared by
anyone), but so far they’ve all been uniformly boring. I don’t feel the impetus to go back to the
base and talk with Cassandra, or Solus, or Varric, because I feel like I’ve
gotten enough of them just by having their non-presences in the party. Cassandra is tough and serious. Solus is calm and rational. Varric handles the snark. A part of me wants to keep playing the game
just to get these people out of my sight.
And this is coming from someone who gleefully
did all of the loyalty missions in Mass
Effect 2. Zaeed wasn’t my favorite
character, but I leapt at the chance to run through his little arc. As soon as I got Sera, I dumped Varric. I haven’t looked back yet.
I said last time that DA:I felt cold and passionless.
I stand by that -- but I don’t feel like I went into detail as to why I
felt the way I did. (Probably because
that would’ve tacked on another 2000 words.)
So once again, I have to assert that Xenoblade
did it better. Gameplay and story
alike came together in battles; when Shulk and Reyn fought together, they would
talk to each other -- giving each other boosts in confidence and congratulating
one another when they landed critical hits.
Shulk set up enemies for a fall, and Reyn knocked them over so they
could go to town. They worked together
via chain attacks -- once they had a third party member -- and by the player’s
hand they could resurrect one another, pick them up after a nasty fall, or just
cheer them up if their performance in battle suffered. THAT’S TEAM SYNERGY, AND IT’S AWESOME.
In DA:I? Even with that borderline-useless Tactical
Mode, it feels like my party of four is closed up in different rooms -- on
different floors of a skyscraper. Oh,
sure, they’ll chime in and say “Cassandra’s in trouble!” or “Solus is hurt!”
when the time comes, but we’re effectively fighting in silence. I don’t know what my guys are doing when a
fight starts, and I can’t bring myself to care as long as they’re doing their
class-specific roles and not dying. I
can’t perceive the importance of my party not just because they feel so far
away from me; it’s because it doesn’t feel like we’re struggling together, be
it with the story or in battle.
Though on that note, I have to ask: why is it that
I’m doing an early-game quest at Level 4 and run into demons for that quest
that are Level 8? And when I’m doing an
unrelated quest at level 6 -- a quest that splintered off from the one at the
top of my journal, and presumably one of the easiest -- I run into spawning
demons that are Level 12? Why would the
game even allow me to go to a canyon area that spawns Level 12 demons regularly
when I’m Level 6 and haven’t even accomplished anything in the story? Why would the game spawn a dragon that one-shots
you and almost your entire party when you’re just trying to go off on your
way? Why does it feel like I’m punished
for playing the game when all I want to do is play the game?
…I feel like I’m going off-topic here. And I know I am, but CHRIST. I wouldn’t have to go off-topic if there was
something to keep me pacified -- if the game would give me the illusion of
camaraderie, or adventure, or even progress in the hours I’ve spent with
it. Is it so wrong of me to ask for
cohesion and merit? Is it really? Can I not have one eighth-gen game that
doesn’t piss me the hell off? Can I
seriously not?
…Now I’m definitely going off-topic.
You know, I can’t help but think of the Tales games -- specifically, Xillia 2. I was probably nicer to it than I should have
been, given that it’s ALSO a game that hides the main story behind
sidequest-bred paywalls. To its credit,
its gameplay is significantly more fun, but in the interim there’s more stuff
for a player to sink his or her teeth into.
A huge part of its battle system banks on linking with party members for
both passive bonuses and unique combo attacks; even if it didn’t, the team of
four still talks to each other on a regular basis mid-fight, maybe more so than
any Tales game before it.
But even out of battle, there’s so much more to
help build bonds between characters. In
typical Tales fashion, there are
optional skits that have the party members chat it up. Even if you ignore those, they’ll still speak
while you’re out in the field. And in Xillia 2, their personal sidequests are
so pronounced that they have icons signaling them in towns -- not to mention
that said sidequests have multiple stages, with cutscenes (in-engine), that
offer insights into who they are, and tack on bonus scenes to the main story
once you reach the designated point. All
of that helps to establish that the party isn’t just a bunch of jagoffs
fighting demons and bandits; they’re a team.
A family.
I’m not just bringing up Xenoblade and Tales so I
can go “herp derp, JRPGS are better!”
I’m trying to do a compare-and-contrast.
You can probably guess which approach I prefer, regardless of a game’s
area of origin, but I can still accept the styles of others. Again, I like how Mass Effect handled things. It
had a major, overarching plot -- and while it didn’t necessarily go to as great
lengths as the average Tales game to
establish the whole “we’re a family angle” (not saying that it didn’t, of course), it did strive to
have the player form a close personal bond with bunches of walking, talking
pixels. And it succeeded.
It had that “save the universe” plot. It had sidequests. But its characters had enough charm and
charisma to make you want to take time out to talk to them -- figure out what they
were all about. I wanted to learn more
about Miranda besides the amount of stress she puts on the backside of her
pants. I wanted to hang out with Jacob
and do cool black guy stuff. Hell, I’m
still reeling from the death of Kaidan, and he’s gotta be the most boring of
the bunch. The combat in those games was
good enough (invisible sniping and freezing rounds, yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah), but the characters? That’s what’ll bring me back for Mass Effect 4.
With DA:I,
it feels like -- even at this early stage -- I’ve jumped right over some of the
rungs on the ladder, and I’m dropping back to the ground because of it. I don’t feel like I’m anchored in the world;
sure, I’m trying to protect it, but I don’t have a firm grasp of what it is.
Chalk that up to me not spending a lot of time with the earlier DA games, but even if most of the bond
was established back then, I should still be able to feel something for this
brave new world. I should care about the
struggle between the mages, the Templars, the Chantry, and the rebels. But I don’t.
Not yet -- and I’m worried that it won’t happen at all.
It seems like the game is aiming for concepts and
conditions, but those are the higher-level elements. Those are what you go for after you lay down the ground floor --
and there’s no element more basic and more
vital than the characters. Sera is
the only character introduced so far (and even then, I would have missed the
chance to recruit her if I didn’t wander around some city) who isn’t just a
mouthpiece for grim determination, exposition, snark, cross-organizational
disputes, or just details about missions.
She actually tries to be a fun character, and as such ends up being more
of a character than everyone else. As
soon as I met her, I thought to myself, “Hey, things are finally looking up.”
So I guess the question I have to ask is this: can
you care about anything before you care about something first?
That sounds like a weird question, I know. But let me put it this way: it’s been nearly
a year since Infamous: Second Son came
out, and at this stage I’m inclined to think that I was too hard on it. It’s still flawed as all get out, of course;
I’m not backing down on that. But the
personal stakes and bonds that main character Delsin Rowe has -- and more
importantly, establishes at the
outset -- go a long way towards giving the motivation to start caring about
everything else that happens. Whether
it’s his brother Reggie or his ailing tribe, there’s someone out there that
matters to him, and helps sway his actions.
In a lot of ways, the player feels the same way.
I’ll admit that I would have defaulted to the Good
Karma path no matter what, but Reggie’s presence -- a big brother and man of
the law who’d want to do the right thing even without his badge -- made the
choice a lot easier. Even so, I wanted
to bond with him, and I felt the world a little bit more because I had a guy
like him alongside me. So on a personal
level, I enjoyed SS; what I DIDN’T
enjoy was how it almost immediately fell apart in terms of its poorly-explored
themes of personal freedom vs. security.
Yo, Sucker Punch? Maybe a
superhero game isn’t the best place to try and make a political statement,
especially when your game features destruction porn that proves the mean ol’ government
right.
As you can guess, the problem I have with DA:I isn’t unique to DA:I.
It’s just baffling that games keep trying to aim for these high-minded
concepts, but don’t have the execution needed to do anything more than say
“this is a thing that exists” or “look at how deep and meaningful this game
is”. It’s the perennial case of trying
to run before they can crawl; Watch Dogs tried
to be “about something”, but couldn’t even give us one decent character. DmC tried
to be the next stage of video game narratives, but had a plot that could’ve
been out-written by an office chair.
Year after year, Call of Duty fails
on every front, as if its developers refuse to learn from past mistakes. And how many games trying to be “epic”
haven’t been able to deliver? How many
of them will continue to be unable to
deliver?
What I’ve said here isn’t some revelation. It’s common sense. People get attached to characters, first and
foremost. The setting plays into
preferences, too, and a strong plot can only be beneficial. Characters create opportunities on a small
scale and a large one; putting a hero or heroine through their paces and having
them interact with other elements -- other characters, story-specific
conflicts, whatever -- is what allows for interesting stuff to happen. I’m not saying that I need every character to be a laugh riot, or for every game to take
time out for friendship, romance, or good cheer. All I ask is this: whatever a game decides to
do, it has to do it well.
And I’m inclined to say that DA:I doesn’t.
Once more, is it fair to judge the whole game
based on a tiny snippet? No, and I’m
ready to be proven wrong -- if not expecting it. But here’s the thing: regardless of the
medium, everything needs a hook. DA:I’s gameplay isn’t enough to provide
that hook at its outset, which isn’t as
unreasonable a demand as you’d expect.
Fortunately, as an RPG it can offer up that hook via its story; unfortunately, that doesn’t really come
through. Not entirely. The beginning is solid, but it’s still just
that -- a beginning. The sheer steepness
of the drop-off from that beginning damn near negates everything that came
before it.
The thing about DA:I is that it’s built to make the player selfish. It starts with you being labeled as the
chosen one, but it doesn’t stop there.
Everything that happens is more or less in relation to you, and how it
affects you. I can’t imagine Varric and
Solus having a conversation with each other, which throws out a bunch of good
opportunities; instead, they can only develop if you’re around, as if they
suddenly take the stage.
You’re pretty much the only one that can solve the
world’s problems (as its gofer), but you’re essentially its last sane man/woman
who has to tend to the squabbles of enemy factions -- whose conflict, unless
you’re entrenched in the lore, doesn’t affect you in the slightest. Why should you care about the mages or the
templars when you’re just some doof that A) is technically a blank slate, B)
was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and C) can only have a history with
those factions if you choose it via your backstory -- which you can’t really
choose in the first place?
The implication is that the world is under fire,
and you and your organization are going to keep the peace -- but that’s in
contradiction to what you see around you.
The tutorial area’s got some dead bodies, but once you clear that, it’s
off to a place called Haven -- and true to its namesake, it’s pretty peaceful. As is the area around it. Same goes for The Hinterlands; it’s a forest
with outlaws roaming around and pockets of enemies, but huge swaths of it have
nothing going on. You visit a town where
you might hear people talking about the “troubled times”, but there’s no visual
evidence of it besides arguments between two factions firing jibba-jabba at one
another. And then you can go to the
canyons and find -- beyond the very occasional
demon-spewing rift -- even more nothing.
What you’re told doesn’t really match what you
see. If there is a threat, it could
simply be a thousand years away -- meaning that you’re invited to stroll at
your leisure, doing whatever you want, with barely even the concept of immediacy. You’re free to do what you want -- and by
default, what do you want in an RPG? To
get stronger, and learn new skills, and get cool stuff (i.e. loot). That’s it.
And sure, the prospect of a new level is thrilling -- my brother used to
look to me to grind through RPGs on his behalf -- but it’s shallow. It can’t compare to the prospects of bold new
worlds and lovable new characters.
Because it can’t compare, the thrills are short-lived; it isn’t long
before even the thrilling becomes the routine.
If that. When you don’t have that
anchor, you just end up floating adrift -- lost in a sea of cold, passionless,
non-demanding misadventures.
Now, I’ll be fair.
I feel silly for even thinking it, but just to be safe I’ll go ahead and
say it: what I’ve said here is pretty much my opinion, albeit one I’ve tried to
back up with reason. So I can’t say that
(right now) I like DA:I, but that
doesn’t mean it’s objectively awful. It
just doesn’t line up with my tastes.
Granted, that’s a strange thing to say, because Mass Effect is arguably JUST as selfish (maybe more), but one
franchise did it better, and that’s the one I’m putting my faith in. As for the other? As for this game?
…Yeah, I might play it some more.
Or I might not.
I want to give it the chance and the time it deserves, but I don’t want
to play apologist and keep at it just so I can delude myself into liking
it. Besides, what I’ve said here can’t
be easily taken back, even if I put thirty hours into the game. Much as I hate to admit it, my instincts (or
opinions, rather) make me think that DA:I
is a flawed game by design. It tries
to be big, but can’t support its own weight.
It tries to be meaningful, but doesn’t have the patience to hold back
its biggest and most unwieldy tools. And
as it stands, I don’t care if Morrigan is in the game. I need a strong cast of characters, not just
one person I remember from an earlier game.
Besides, there’s only one
Morrigan that really matters -- but you didn’t hear that from me.
So. I guess
the quest for the game that justifies the PS4 continues. This would normally be the part where I segue
into the next game I’ll look at next, but…well, I think I’ll hold off for
now. Unless it’s on the Wii U, I have my
doubts that there’s anything out now or later that could possibly --
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHnow
DA:I’s gonna feel even more boring…
Whelp, then. I guess Dragon Age will never be my cup of tea if this isn't doing a good enough service to its world or characters. Origins bored and frustrated me because of its mmo gameplay and it's impenetrable world. In spite of that, I dove into three unique 10 hour save files and tried to invest in something to boost my interest and motivation to keep going. It was all for nothing and I gave up. I don't think Inquisition is gonna change my indifferent feelings. All I'll say is that it's funny how some things tickle your fancy while others don't, especially if it contradicts your usual expectations. (i.e. I generally find some fantasy slightly more interesting than sci-fi, but Mass Effect captured me instantly from the first two seconds while Dragon Age Origins was a chore to get past the first introduction.)
ReplyDeleteI think part of the reason I couldn't stick to Dragon Age is because the lore felt very generic, Tolkien-esque fantasy with blood, dragon guts, and nihilism. Maybe the plot concepts raise the stakes are so abstract and nondescript, I have no clue where to go, what to do, or who to listen to. Morrigan was a decent character from the conversations I had with her (as a female forest elf), but she felt too much like a poster-girl for being an uncooperative bitch. Alister(?) was goofy, snarky, funny and... little else. And I forgot everyone else and what their purpose was in the story.
It's sad that I wanted to play a fantasy game as a thief-class forest elf sniping with a bow and I ended up playing a game that gave me too many convoluted concepts and vague literature and history that I had to put the game down to save the galaxy with my red-haired Jane Sue Shepard.
Yeah, I want to give the DA series the benefit of the doubt and say that the games aren't generic, but...well, in order to do that, I have to find something about the franchise I actually enjoy. OK, to be fair I was close to getting into DA2, but only because of the prospect of playing as a mage who could don a suit of solid stone. Cue me chanting "Rock Armor, HRUUAGH!" every time I did.
ReplyDeleteStill didn't push me more than a couple of hours into the game, though. And seeing as how DA:I gives Rock Armor the ax -- save for using a potion, apparently -- I'm not seeing the appeal.
Maybe DA just isn't for you or me. It's unfortunate, but speaking personally I can see why. It's exactly what I'm talking about here -- I don't have any personal investment in the characters, world, or story, so there's no reason for me to care about anything. I shouldn't have to put up such monumental effort just to find a reason to turn the game on.
Incidentally, Under Night In-Birth ALSO has a story that's -- well, let's go with "dense", at the very least. Going straight into Arcade Mode in most fighters will give you a good understanding of what's going on, but my initial run packed nearly every line of dialogue with a dictionary's worth of esoteric terms. And then when I actually try to learn how to play the game via a wiki, I feel like I need a wiki for the wiki. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuut its saving grace is that its gameplay is UNBELIEVABLY AMAZING. It's too early to say for sure, but when all's said and done it might have potential to be a Revengeance-tier game.
We'll see how it goes -- i.e. how badly I get wrecked in a real fight.