I like this idea, and it sounds like what they were going for, but I think it still doesn't work in practice for largely the same reasons I think it doesn't work as fantasy.CharlesPhipps wrote:I think a big problem is people went into Dragon Age 2 expecting it to be epic fantasy and judge it based on those standards when it seems clear they merged fantasy and noir fiction. Hawke is as close to a private detective as can exist in a fantasy setting as is humanly possible without any actual concept of being a detective existing yet.
He investigates murders, kidnappings, is friends with the local police and criminal underworld both, and every.single.person.is.corrupt.
It's Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe in fantasy.
THAT'S why everyone is an asshole. You're in Sin City and Gotham rather than Middle Earth.
Like all genres, noir requires certain conventions in order to work, whether played straight or deconstructed. For Hawke to work as a noir antihero would depend on exploring an inter-connected web of intrigue between different factions instead of isolated, individual sidequests. For example, Petrice should be a great noir femme fatale, except we interact with her exactly twice - one sidequest with the requisite betrayal, and then one cutscene at the end of Act 2. There is no sustained drama, no sense of Hawke being descending deeper and deeper into the morass - it's just "do this quest", then "do that quest" then get to the next plot point.
The same major critiques I have on DA2 as a fantasy applies just as much, if not more, as it does to DA2 as noir. Because there's no emotional connection to anyone or anything in Kirkwall beyond your companions, Hawke has no stake in anything. Because Hawke's actions have no impact on the game world, there's no sense of consequences for your decisions - and noir is all about unintended consequences. Because of how shallow and isolated the sidequests are, you never get a sense of how Kirkwall operates or who the players are; noir depends on the protagonist's isolation and alienation.
It's not enough to just have corruption and deceipt around you; that's just the trappings of noir without the soul of it. Noir isn't interesting because you're surrounded by assholes; it's the tension between the protagonist and those assholes. Jake Giddes' problems all came from the fact that he started to care again, and put himself into a case beyond just doing "as little as possible". Sam Spade still lived by a code even though he knew it was outdated; against his better judgement, he went after the person who murdered his partner, because that's just what you do for your partner. Without a connection to the crapsack world you're stuck in, what you are left with is a series of quests instead of a cohesive narrative.
All of that is a function of its incomplete state, because you can see all the ways it might have tied together and worked if they just had more time to work on it. Your sibling is your reason for not giving in to corruption, and is effectively being held hostage by one of the city's shadowy factions. Aveline is the honest copper in a corrupt world. Varric is the ostensibly selfish and corrupt merchant who keeps his integrity hidden. The Viscount is the figurehead swamped by sinister powers more powerful than him. The Qunari are the looming outside threat that nobody knows how to deal with. The fundamentals are there, but the connections are not. Heck, everything in this paragraph sounds like it could come from Casablanca (which I suppose is technically not noir, but it had Humphrey Bogart in it).
