Dragon Age II: EA boogaloo

[CharlesPhipps]

I think DA:I was about as bad as ME:A and better than ME3.

Dragon Age: Inquisition basically feels like they took a dark and edgy fantasy world which was made for people of a certain level of maturity with moral ambiguity, racism, and class warfare then scrubbed it of anything interesting. Dragon Age was never going to be able to equal the Witcher for mature subject matter but it was a game made for adults and "Dark Fantasy" that I enjoyed a great deal. DA:I is an almost comically Black and White Morality story with Corypheus being a Darkspawn Tevinter Magister served by an army of insane rock-monster Templar mutants as well as an insidious cult.

Plus, they just ran the whole Templar and Mage thing under the rug. WTH, Bioware?

Andromeda was...okay.

It's a game designed around preserving the ending of ME3 when I think 1% of all gamers gave a crap about that at best. It's like Fallout 3's DLC "Broken Steel" where they retconned the hell out of its unpopular ending. No one was upset with the fact you didn't have to die. Just set it a decade or century later and say Shepard survived. The End.

[Fixer]

One of the reasons why I avoided DA:I in fact.

While DA:O had a "Fantasy over a gritty Medieval world" feel which was quite unique, DA:I with it's glowing green sky portals felt like generic Xbox video game fantasy setting. A first 15 minutes playthrough video I saw on youtube put me off buying it, which is a choice I haven't regretted.

Both ME:A and DA:I Have that problem. They're written like the Saturday morning cartoon version of the 18 rated movie.

ME:A Had the additional problems of extremely janky animations and horrible dialogue in the videos they were using to promote the game. Add onto that the amount of ill will built up with Mass Effect fans from the "whiny entitled gamers" retort to the ending criticism, frankly ME:A didn't just need to be a fresh new start, it needed to good enough to be an apology for that whole affair.

Being a below average, meme worthy, buggy mess was good enough to be the death knell of the series.

Honestly though. Mass Effect should have ended with 3. The entire point was that Shepard was to have shaped the universe in such a way that a sequel was impossible with entire species potentially becoming extinct. Trying to milk an already damaged franchise was a bad idea.

For me Witcher 3 and Divinity Original Sin 2 are the games that are filling the RPG hole BioWare has left behind. Possibly Kingdom Come Deliverance once they release a few patches.

[GandALF]

Origins isn't necessarily dark and gritty, it's left up to the player's interpretation. Their initial idea was to combine an overall LOTRy good vs evil fight with Conany greyness in the details. Conan and LOTR have arguably very similar psuedo-historical settings, the biggest difference is that the one is seen from the perspective of an innocent Hobbit and the other a barbarian i.e they have different origins. So it is still possible to play the warden as a genuinely heroic character and the game won't punish you for it.

As Chuck points out, trying to make things too dark tends to make a mess of things as the characters become cartoonish fanatical caricatures with little room for interpretation. Warhammer gets away with the GRIMDARK shtick because it's fully aware of how over the top it is.

[Rodan56]

LOTR mixed with Conan is an apt comparisson between both franchises. Conan is a darker take on fantasy and its influence can be easily seen in Dragon Age's design. Morrigan herself feels like something you'd see from that series, even her outfit kinda matches. The subversion of the elves being a once great fading race, while matching LOTR's depiction, specifically highlights that they're not exactly perfect either. The Werewolves subplot is very dark and clearly matches the tone of many Conan stories.

The Darkspawn are an even more edgy version of orcs, the battles are epic in scope but the blood and gore is more apparent, political intrigue matches more of the real world than a fantasy one. I'm not sure how much that figures into Conan, it feels more akin to Game of Thrones in that respect. Overall I can see the conciet.

I do wonder though, if the Darkspawn are the replacements for LOTR's orcs... where are the real orcs? Are the qunari essentially them? They don't exactly look like them, but they are the closest analogue that isn't basically a bunch of zombie knights. I mean, we have dwarves, we have Elves, you'd think we'd round it out with a legitimate orc that is called as such.

You know, if any world could've actually used some more alien species, so to speak, it was probably Dragon Age, not Mass Effect. Which was already plenty stuffed with a ton of those. Even some we never saw in the games, Raloi for example. I mean, they left out a bunch of potential fantasy races there that are commonplace in stuff like D&D. Lizard-Men, beast people, different sub-species of elves, obviously hobbits, then again Warhammer cornered the market on a ton of those. I'm also not sure if the Draenai are a completely original creation of Blizzard, but I can find no real analogue in contemporary folklore. I'm just saying, it would have been nice to have more options... although I was glad that Inquisition let me BE a qunari. It was nice to be something different for a change, essentially a monster-man, so that was fun.

You know, that was the real shame of ME:A. You give us a whole new story and everything but you still won't let us choose our race for the game. I mean, come on, it's just not entirely fair that any sense of choice on that front is relegated to freakin multiplayer.

[Fixer]

I think the introduction where mankind tried to invade heaven and turned it into a blackened hellhole resulting in god abandoning the world nudged the setting into Grimdark for me

A lot of Dragon Age was about the medieval style politics in the midst of a Lord of the Rings style invasion of evil monsters. With Alienages, possession, prejudice and betrayal mixed in body horror and existential terror. It tends towards the dark side of the spectrum. Not entirely hopeless like Dark Souls but covering very mature themes in a dark ages setting with high fantasy magic.

Even if you're genuinely heroic and act like a true saviour or the land, it's still a pretty crappy place to live.

The whole question of what the afterlife actually is now that humanity blackened the golden city and the Chantry's religion not being exactly reliable in it's own interpretation nails it for me.

[excalibur]

I remember actually being excited for this game because I prefer more action oriented rpg fantasy but then I played this game and the epic level of lazy level design was worse than Mass Effect 1. At least in that game, it was a launch product, so it had an excuse. Bioware had no excuse for the rush development of this game but it's all EA's fault.

[CharlesPhipps]

The funny thing is Tolkien actually is the guy behind, "Mankind invades Heaven and gets God to abandon the world."

It's what happened to Numenor.

Then again, the Silmarillion is grimdark as hell.

[Ghilz]

Ya know, I really want to congratulate Chuck on his french pronunciation in Part 6? As a francophone, I was surprised how well he did.

[Enterprising]

I like toying with the idea DA shares a universe with Trek and there was a lost TOS episode where the crew comes down and helps someone fix a fence or something so they name it after the captain. over time the name was shortened to kirkwall drom from Kirk's wall. you know how these things go.

Fun fact, it's actually loosely based on the Scottish Orkney Island town of the same name. I was there for work late last year and went into the cathedral when I had some free time. The pillars have a number of banners hanging from them, and I've put below a picture of one. Look familiar?

[Enterprising]

Breaking the illusion is a big one for BioWare games at the moment.

Mass Effect 2 was great in that it managed to have an ending with real consequences for an entire game of building a team for a suicide mission.

ME2 is a funny one, I think it's a very good game when isolated to itself, but an absolutely terrible sequel when considering all 3 games. When I thought more about it, swapping the events of ME & ME2 around, made MORE sense to me in the wider story context of the trilogy. Except the whole killing the PC at the start thing, that was extremely badly done. If they did at least something cool with it, or made it a key/wider theme throughout the rest of the game(s), I could put up with it. They didn't though except the odd quip, joke or Arnie like movie line here or there. They'd have been as well sticking them in a coma and it would have accomplished the same goal. Also far too many party members, put up too many variables for ME3 and even before that came out, I feared they would be relegated to cameos. Sadly that's pretty much what happened.

(Back on to the topic at hand.) DAII was a game I actually liked more than ME2, even with it's considerably more numerous flaws. I at least got the feeling with DA2 everyone involved was pulling together to make the absolute best game they possibly could under some frankly quite ludicrous time restraints, and I'm actually impressed at how much that got achieved. It pains me all the more to think what it could have been with an extra 6 months in the oven, same with Andromeda, albeit under different circumstances.

Bioware selling itself to EA 10 years ago might have been the right choice for them financially and corporately, but it cost them their soul and freedom in the process. Kinda minds me of a person giving up a job they like, for one that ends up making them miserable in the end for just a few extra grand salary a year.

It's a very sad fall from grace.