Dragon Age: Origins: Part Two: Origins

Now it’s time to start bitching out Dragon Age in excrutiating detail. Might as well start with the origins. Like I said before, having a selection of character origins to choose from is a great idea. Too bad some of the origins suck harder than Zevran in my tent last night. Gay zing!

Dalish Elf: Let me tell you right now: I fucking hate elves. They’re basically the Eurotrash of the fantasy world. If your fantasy setting has elves in it, they’d better be pretty fucking creative to convince me to like them.

Dalish Elves are pretty fucking uncreative.

This is what elves look like in real life.

Coincidentally, this is also the worst origin. It gets off to a promising start when you get to slaughter some humans in cold blood, but then it turns into a boringly unoriginal dungeon crawl that you have to backtrack through twice, and then your stupid-ass friend who you (the player) don’t care about dies. Then you get infected by Darkspawn and have to join the Grey Wardens and you never get to see your clan ever again.

Basically it’s a huge fucking waste of time that has nothing to do with the main story. It reads like it was written by somebody who just thought “elves + magic = cool” and that adding interesting characters or emotional connections to that premise would be unnecessary. It would’ve been nice if that magic mirror was important later on, but no, Bioware just throws that away like they forgot it existed.

At some point you get to bore some children to death by telling them about the history of the elves. Just thought I’d mention that.

City Elf: See, Bioware can do something creative with elves. They can make them into pointy-eared Jews.

I do actually like the idea of the City Elves, probably because it takes those fucking treehugger fashion models down a peg or three. It helps that this origin is one of the better ones. It’s got pathos! Characters you’ll develop emotional attachments to! A cartoonishly evil villain who wants to rape some hot elf ass!

Well, two out of three ain’t bad. Seriously, though, having a villain kidnap some female characters to rape them is the edgy new version of having them tie ladies to railroad tracks while twirling their mustache. It’s fucking lazy characterization. That’s nothing unusual for Bioware villains, though.

A dwarf.

Dwarf Commoner: This origin starts with your sister being whored out, so, way to keep things classy, Bioware. The rest is fairly unexciting except for that arena fighting sequence that went on way longer than it needed to. Bioware had to throw in their mandatory boring arena fight somewhere, I guess.

What you can take away from this origin is that the Grey Wardens will recruit damn near anyone. Got a criminal background? Been arrested for a heinous crime? Here’s your griffin, here’s your sword, here’s your magical immunity to legal prosecution.

Dwarf Noble: Now we’re getting into the good stuff. You’re a prince, there’s political intrigue everywhere, and you get the chance to do a little political manipulation yourself. And you have a butler!

Here’s the best part: the character you thought was the obvious villain turns out not to be the real villain! See, at first you’re thinking that the ending’s going to be really predictable because Bioware likes their villains big, loud, and obvious. But then you realize they’ve actually managed to be clever for once! Even better, this origin actually ties into one of the main plots later on!

Then they ruin it by making you go through a boring dungeon crawl and then you just kind of randomly run into the Gray Wardens and join up with them for no good reason.

I can just imagine the writers pounding their heads against the wall trying to figure out a way to get an exiled dwarf prince into the Wardens. It’s midnight and they all just want to go home and drink themselves in a stupor so they don’t have to think about any more stupid fucking dwarves. “I’ve got it!” one of them says, grinning like a twelve-year-old on crack. “Why don’t we just have him join up with the wardens for no good reason? That way, we can leave it up to the player to figure out his motivations!”

“Sounds good to me,” says another guy, “but do you think you could throw some rape in there?”

Human Noble: Attention Bioware: this is how you do it. Almost. You only fucked up one thing!

The key is that you actually get to care about your family. The whole first act of the origin is so endearing that I didn’t even mind too much that my first quest was to go kill some rats in the kitchen – and, by the way, that kind of metacommentary isn’t cute any more, it’s just a lack of creativity passed off as humor. Of course, now that you’re attached to your family, it’s time to kill them all off. That’s where the origin starts to fall down.

You can tell he's a villain because he looks like one. That's "good character design."

If Arl Howe has been your father’s trusted friend for years, then why would he slaughter your entire family? If you guessed “just because Bioware wanted to make him into a villain,” you’re goddamned right. It’s possible that your father is just the most unobservant motherfucker in Thedas and thought Howe was just joking when he said, “I hope you don’t mind if I bring my army to your estate, because I was planning on slaughtering your family and taking your land.” I give my fictional dad more credit than that, though.

The phrase “poorly-written Bioware villain” is going to come up so often that I’m just going to go ahead and abbreviate it as “PWBV” right now. Actually, I take that back. Cute acronyms are stupid.

Magi: The problem with the Mage origin is that it isn’t about the main character, it’s about two other random characters who your character is really interested in helping out for some reason. The entire point of having these origins is that they’re supposed to be about your character. Apparently your mage is so unimaginative and/or lazy she never thought about breaking out of the Tower on her own.

STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO MOM AND DAD

This brings up an issue with RPG writing in general – nothing is ever the player character’s idea. Whatever you do, some NPC always has to suggest it to you first. Just once I’d like to see the player character decide what needs to be done instead of running around taking marching orders from some random fucker who’s too lazy to do things for himself.

Dragon Age: Origins: Part One: Overview

Dragon Age is the modern revival of old-school RPGs like Baldur’s Gate. What this really means is that it’s got an excuse for being boring, generic, and badly designed, because that’s how they did it in the old days! Actually, Dragon Age somehow gets a lot of things right, so it’s like Bioware is just taunting us. “We could be making innovative, original games,” they’re saying, “but we’d rather churn out crap like this because it’s easy to make and you’ll buy millions of copies anyway.”

Combat is Boring as Shit: Old school RPGs are the worst thing to base your combat system on, because those games are modeled after tabletop RPGs – the least exciting combat simulation in the universe. The difference is, when you’re playing tabletop RPGs you can imagine that your character’s doing something exciting and badass when you roll the dice to attack, while in video games you just watch your character stand there and swing his sword with the same three animations over and over again.

The only tactics you'll ever need to use.

Dragon Age features an exciting innovation: you can program your characters’ A.I.s to automatically do things in battle. This means that you don’t even have to stand there and watch your characters, you can just go to the kitchen to cook some delicious Moroccan tagine and stop in every now and then to see if they’ve killed everybody yet. Don’t worry, even if you’re fighting a boss you won’t have to dodge its attacks or hit its weak points or do anything interesting. That wouldn’t be true to the spirit of old-school RPGs.

There’s No Skill Required: Unsurprisingly, a game where your characters will do stuff without you is rather easy, assuming that your healer doesn’t get stunned and die. But don’t feel too bad if that happens, because there was nothing you could have done about that anyway.

(Side note: Stuns/paralysis/etc. are the worst RPG mechanic of all time, but developers have yet to figure out that a mechanic that unavoidably makes you lose control of your character and could cause them to unavoidably die is a terrible idea. ATTENTION RPG DEVELOPERS: STOP PUTTING FUCKING STUNS IN YOUR FUCKING GAMES.)

I tried to find a screencap of somebody throwing a grenade to put here, but I couldn’t because nobody has ever used a grenade. Here’s a pretty picture.

Character customization is shit. There’s only three classes, and warriors and rogues are basically identical except warriors can use two-handed weapons and rogues can open locks, disarm traps, and use some other shitty rogue abilities that are too much trouble to bother with. You’re going to want to have at least one mage and rogue in your party at all times, which severely limits how you can build your party, especially since Bioware felt like giving you a metric shit-ton of warriors but only two rogues and two mages.

Want to make your character a mage so you don’t have to deal with Wynne’s bullshit? I hope you like the mage starting level, because you’re going to have to play through it again every time you make a mage. I guess this is “important to the setting” or something but it is still fucking stupid. If Dragon Age 2 doesn’t let me play an apostate mage instead of visiting that goddamned tower again I will go to Texas and strangle Bioware to death one by one.

Incredibly Cliched Settings: Let me tell you the backstory of Dragon Age: An ancient empire ruled by grotesquely corrupted mages cast a spell that opened a doorway to the divine city at the center of the spirit realm, but the instant they set foot inside, their evil forever stained the city and God cursed them, turning them into monsters condemned to live deep beneath the earth, where they spread their corruption to the old gods buried there and raised them as the dark leaders of a nightmare horde.

Sounds cool and original, right?

It’s all just an excuse to have an army of fucking orcs led by a goddamned dragon.

These are fucking orcs and don't tell me otherwise.

Dragon Age took one of the most interesting world concepts in recent video game history and made it into just another shitty Tolkien knockoff, except everything’s painted brown because it’s “dark” and “mature.” Congratulations, Dragon Age art team, you have officially won the “Illustrate an Original Concept in the Least Creative Way Possible” competition! Your prize is that I hate you.

You’re Always Saving the World: You are saving the world in this game. You are the only one that can do it. Actually, some other guys can do it too, but they’re off being lazy or something.

You Are a Blank Slate: Hey, Bioware actually did something right! You’ve got a whole six background options to choose from, all of which have an effect on how people treat you, and all of which are actually integrated into later plotlines.

Your character still doesn’t remember anything about the world they live in, though. But that’s okay – everybody else can’t remember your name, even your best friends. Oh, they try and hide it by cleverly never referring to you by your actual name, but I know the truth. Fuckers.

Illusion of Choice: As is traditional in Bioware games, you always get two options at the end of each level. One of them’s good and one of them’s evil. Any decisions you make won’t change the course of the story, but, if you’re lucky, they might change a couple lines of dialogue in the sequel. Both options are always open at all times, so even if your character’s a paragon of moral virtue, you can choose to make them murder and rape the kindly old man instead of saving his life. I guess this game was designed by Calvinists.

(Note to people who haven’t played Dragon Age: Origins: You don’t actually get to rape anybody. That privilege is reserved for badly-written, clichéd villains.)

Mission Statement

I’ll be honest. There are worse video game genres than RPGs. Hentai games where you get to fondle 3D anime girls in swimsuits, for instance. But nobody ever claimed Sexy Beach 2 is a triumph of human achievement, whereas every video game critic thinks Final Fantasies IV through X are apparently artistic goddamned masterworks. Even American RPGs – the poster boys of interactive storytelling’s true potential – are awful by any normal critical standard. The problem is, video games have set the critical standard so low for so long that video game criticism has become a sweaty adolescent Cheetos-stained version of Plato’s cave analogy.

It’s time to stop handing out Game of the Year awards and nine-out-of-ten reviews to anything that manages not to be a complete piece of shit. RPGs have been getting a critical free ride for too fucking long. It’s time we acknowledged that, one way or another, they all suck. Yes, all of them. Yes, even Planescape: Torment or Fallout or Bioshock or whatever it is you’re going to tell me is the one counterexample. To prove this, I’m going to dissect them all in great detail. There will be a lot of swearing. That’s because, like the Zen masters, I understand that sometimes you have to hit people on the head with a metaphorical stick to get them to understand.

RPGs have been making the same six mistakes over and over again for so long that they’ve become accepted genre conventions. It’s not stupid, it’s traditional!

GAMEPLAY

Combat is Boring as Shit: RPGs are video games for people who hate video games. They’re designed for people that love spending endless hours looking at menus and numbers. Combat is either A) turn-based, which involves you hitting the “attack” option on some menu over and over again, B) real-time but with RPG combat mechanics and requires you to pause so often it might as well be turn-based, or C) a shitty watered-down action game. Try and change any of these elements and hardcore RPG fans will accuse you of betraying the rich depth of strategy that turn-based games allow. Which brings up my next point…

There’s No Skill Required: RPG fans claim that their games are pure and intellectual, as opposed to those horrible action games made for ADD twitch-gamer 8 year olds who can’t appreciate the nuances of staring at blocks of numbers and using formulas to try and figure out the proper balance between strength and agility. Even assuming you can master this system, you might still die anyway, because some random number bullshit somewhere will decide to kill your character instantly, or, better yet, stun them over and over again so you can watch them slowly die but be unable to fucking do anything about it. Of course if your character gets strong enough none of this matters, because then combat will be trivially easy.

Incredibly Clichéd Settings: I’m pretty sure there’s never been an RPG set in anything that wasn’t either a licensed property or a ripoff of another licensed property.

Okay, so Japanese RPGs have original settings, if by “original” you mean “completely incomprehensible.”

Imagine how much better this would be if Atticus Finch had to save the world from a dragon!

You’re Always Saving the World: Going hand in hand with that last point, apparently RPG writers can’t think of any plot that doesn’t involve a total apocalypse. You’d think there might be an RPG about somebody’s personal quest, like trying to save the life of your true love, or a young boy trying to survive during wartime. No, at some point ancient evils and universe-spanning conspiracies always have to come up, and you always have to stop them.

This problem’s endemic to video games in general. Try to think of a video game that doesn’t involve you saving the world. Don’t try too hard, there’s less than ten in the entire history of time. Now try to name a classic of film or literature that involves people saving the world. Again, less than ten. It’s almost as if nobody in the industry ever grew up and stopped reading shitty sci-fi and fantasy novels!

You Are a Blank Slate: Probably the reason that RPGs are never personal stories about your character is that your character has no personality. Developers have this horrible mentality that player characters should be as faceless and voiceless as possible in order to help the player identify with them. You know, like all those great novels where the main character has no name and never speaks.

Nobody will ever call you by your name because the designers wanted to give you the freedom to name yourself Eowynn or Bloodkiller or Ballsaq or whatever the fuck shitty name you came up with. Your character has no personality or moral compass, because they want to “roleplay” by choosing between different dialogue options. Feel free to be an altruist one second and a murderous thief the next – your character won’t care because he has no fucking personality. He was also apparently born yesterday, because he keeps asking people questions that any eight-year-old should know the answer to.

Illusion of Choice: This is one I’m going to ride Bioware’s ass about in particular. RPGs are allegedly non-linear branching stories where you make choices and deal with the consequences. In reality, there’s a switch you flip at the end of each level that lets you choose between the “good” ending and the “evil” ending and, whatever you choose, it’s not going to affect anything significant. Maybe one NPC will get pissed at you, but that’s about it. The direction of the story is always going to be the same, you’re always going to have to visit the same locations, and you’re always going to have to fight the same end boss.

I didn’t just start this blog because I love talking shit about RPGs. I did it because I think the current state of video game criticism is fucking terrible. Which is appropriate, because the current state of video games is fucking terrible too. Sure, you can make a game that’s fun to play (unless you’re making an RPG, in which case you can’t even do that). But nobody’s managed to write a video game story that isn’t shallow and painfully clichéd. The sooner everybody in the video game industry reads some actual books and grows the fuck up, the better. If I have to yell and swear at you in order to realize just how badly you’re fucking up everything you make, then that’s what I’ll do. I only hit you because I love you.