Dragon Age 2 and Balance in Story Telling.

So, now that the game has been patched to properly support DirectX 11 and it no longer crashes my computer at regular intervals, I've been spending more time with Dragon Age II than I probably should be this late into the semester. The direct successor to 2009's Dragon Age: Origins, itself the long-developed spiritual successor to Bioware's much beloved Baldur's Gate franchise of genre-defining PC RPGs, there was a lot expected of this game. Cursory glances around the internet would suggest that it has failed, and while the game certainly has its failings, I would happily direct most of the people who are incessantly bitching about its "simplifications" (of which there are far fewer than one would be led to believe) to a post I wrote addressing similar complaints about Mass Effect 2 last year.

The most obvious and most frequently cited failings of the game are the unfortunate bi-product of a blatantly rushed development cycle. Environment reuse stands out particularly. I clearly recall the first time I was running through a cave and my map showed an area that lay sitting behind what was so obviously an unmarked door that I spent nearly 15 minutes running around the cave trying to find some lever to open it so as to plunder the riches that must be waiting for me on the other side. I can understand reusing resources, and even building dungeons/instance areas piecemeal from stock parts. Simply re-using the exact same environments with certain areas sealed off, though, is sloppy. At the very least, keep the map from reflecting the unreachable areas.

The second trouble area is the general flow of combat. Now, for the most part, I like many of the changes made here. Full disclosure, I rarely used the top down view in Dragon Age: Origins. As far as I was concerned, it existed almost solely to target area of effect spells without getting stuck on specific enemies. As such, being stuck with the lower, more cinematic camera angle doesn't bother me. The faster animations don't bother me at all, and, contrary to what many people seem to be saying, this is the only significant difference in how combat plays out between Dragon Age 2 and DA:O. In fact, there are a wider variety of skill trees available to work through and, due to the absurd bonuses from cross-class combos, greater attention to be paid as to how your party members' skills will mesh together. Combat is just as tactical and engaging as it ever as.

The problem I have with combat is the way fights are now entirely scripted. Sure, it wasn't uncommon in DA:O to open a door and find a room full of enemies you'd have no choice but to fight, but that wasn't always the way things worked. There were plenty of fights in Origins that I only managed to win by scouting ahead with a rogue and using ranged attacks to carefully pull outlying enemies away one or two at a time before engaging the main force. This doesn't work in DA2. Enemies aren't persistent on the map. Instead, they only appear when you step into a designated area. Then, as the battle rages on, more will show up (either dropping in from the city walls or mystically appearing right out of the ground) to take advantage of the fact that your AI controlled teammates shot their wad against your will and are either stuck in cooldown or have no stamina/manna left. It's an irritation that seems designed to force you to play the game within a somewhat limited framework endorsed by Bioware. Fights are rarely tough enough that I would have liked to have the option to do things the old way, but it just doesn't feel even remotely organic.

These aren't major complaints, though. They are quirks that you adapt to as you get into the real meat of the game -- the combat itself and the story telling. Having already touched on the first topic to the extent I need to, I'll turn my attention to the second.

One of the first posts I wrote on this blog was about Chrono Trigger, a game I have played more times than I care to count. In that post, I credited its success and longevity not just to its innovative combat mechanics, wonderful score, and engaging plot, but to the overall story-telling style and the way it merged the perspectives of its creators' signature franchises (Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy). I'll recap the argument in brief here.

Historically, Dragon Quest has been a series about exploration and creating a world filled with people whose problems you get tangled up in. Caring about this world, more than about any particular vendetta of your own, is what drives you to complete the plot and defeat whatever evil is looming on the horizon. Final Fantasy, on the other hand, has long been primarily concerned with its own characters and their struggles. Nearly everything you do winds up having some particular meaning for some member of the cast, and you finish the game because you want to see their problems resolved. Chrono Trigger manages to combine these approaches by throwing you into different eras of your world's history. At each step, you have some larger goal towards finding the cause of humanity's destruction, but you also help resolve the problems of that particular era. Further, each era lends you its own voice to your party in the form of a playable character to whom you develop attachment, furthering your attachment to the game world as a whole.

Nearly all RPGs (except, perhaps, for open world games like the Elder Scrolls series) fall into some point on this world vs. character spectrum of story telling. Few nail the balance as perfectly as Chrono Trigger, but Bioware games tend to come close. I think that the problem that many people have had with both DA2 and Mass Effect 2, is that both shifted focus slightly, relatively to their predecessors, in the direction of character-focused story telling in an effort to better find that balance.

Let's look quickly at Dragon Age: Origins. Throughout everything you do, the threat of the Blight looms in the background, and your personal motive of being a Grey Warden -- not only sworn to stamp out the blight but the only individuals capable of it due to your ties to it -- drives you to continue. And yet, you need to put your concerns on hold as you run around the country side, easing political tensions and freeing up factions to pledge resources to your crusade against the Darkspawn. You become directly involved in the fate of every civilization in the nation of Ferelden (perhaps too much so, but whatever) and are made keenly aware of the tenuous balance that you're trying to keep in place. Meanwhile, your companions travel with you and have problems of their own that they would like to put behind them -- from Alistair learning to cope with his lineage to Morrigan asserting freedom from her mother to Shale learning some semblance of respect for squishy beings. These stories are engaging, and the banter between particular party members may help to dictate who you bring with you in battle, but they don't drive you directly to defeating the blight or hook you deeper into mythology of Thedas.

Similarly for Mass Effect. You move between planets, uncovering details about Saren's plot and eventually learning about the Reaper threat. You come to an understanding about how humanity's ambitions impact their relationship with the established space-faring races and how you, as an exemplar of your species, will inevitably impact that. Your companions are an entertaining diversion, but contribute nothing to the real plot beyond providing key information at certain points.

Both Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2 tell much smaller stories. In ME2, the entire game revolves around recruiting and building trust with a squad capable enough of determining why the Collectors are abducting human colonies. You focus on your crew because their allegiance and dedication is the only thing that will get you out alive. As much as I enjoy the game and the characters, I'll admit that this story is almost too small, and there are a couple of revelations that could have been handled better.

Dragon Age 2 is about a slowly building avalanche. It's a story about how one man and his decisions -- fueled by his relationships -- change the entire history of a city on the brink. Because Hawke is meant to be affected by his experiences with his companions, we spend a lot more time with them and their personalities are much more thoroughly established. We see them engaging one another, developing friendships and rivalries within the group instead of just with you. The nature of the game as a story within a story (one of your party members is relating the true events of your life to a less-than-friendly interrogator) places unfortunate limits on your freedom. These are events that have occurred, and there is a framework that must be followed. But by building so much around your relationship to your friends and family and the organism that is the city of Kirkwall, we can see different reasons that some of these same, unavoidable events could have come to fruition.

Compounding this is the fact that Dragon Age 2 only barely touches on the major topics of Dragon Age: Origins. Nearly the entirety of the game takes place far removed -- in time and space -- from the events of the first game. Few familiar characters show up, and none of the lingering questions are answered. Taken together with the drastic change in tone, it's a shock that people expecting another grand, nation-spanning adventure weren't ready to deal with.

For the most part, though, it's an interesting approach and, so far, an engaging time. It had some bugs out-of-the-gate, but it really doesn't deserve the hate that's been spewed its way by PC vanguards insistent that any sort of streamlining (to visuals or gameplay) is a sin meant to take advantage of the supposed naivete of console playing "babies". I'd definitely recommended it to anybody who likes games with strong writing and entertaining combat -- in that order.

Videogames Storytelling and the Problem with Plot Twists

This has been brewing for awhile, but I'm still not quite sure how to say anything on the topic coherently. Let me start by saying I don't require the games I play to be narrative driven. I've sunk more time than I care to think about into Borderlands since it came out last October, and the biggest drive in that game is to gain levels and pick up loot. It's good clean fun built around the random positive reenforcement that we love so much. When games do try and compel progression through narrative, though, I like that narrative to be able to stand on its own merits, preferably with writing that doesn't make me cringe. Unfortunately, this seems to be too tall an order for many game creators. This is largely because videogame writers don't seem to know terribly well how to handle what I will generically call "twists" for now -- i.e. those plot elements that shift the immediate focus of the action or the meaning of those actions that have already occurred.

Prime example: towards the end of April, I picked up Assassin's Creed 2 -- nearly universally lauded as one of the best games of 2009 -- on the cheap and started playing through it. The first half of the game is quite enjoyable. I didn't even mind the "ancestral memory" conceit used to link the games in the series. The story (technically the story-within-the-story, but the main plot for all intents and purposes) is a simple but relatively compelling one of revenge against those who have unjustly wronged your family. It felt good saving the city of Florence from these corrupt men. Moving on from there, things start to get a little bit less enjoyable plot-wise as you move on to unravel the larger conspiracy that said men were pawns in, but the city of Venice is even more fun to explore than Florence, so it works out alright for the most part. All the while, there are opportunities to unlock secrets about the larger story surrounding the game -- the historical and modern activities of the Assassins (proper noun) and the Templars in which Ezio, the effective protagonist, is not a part.

This background information is generally pretty ridiculous. It involves elaborate plots and partnerships, not to mention ancient aliens (and alien-human hybrids!). One of the major failings is an attempt to assign roles in this conflict, particularly among the Templar, to far too many historical figures. If a historical figure has ever been vilified in any medium, whether it's Hitler or Edison, they were secretly a Templar. Anybody whom the game creators thought was a Pretty Cool Dude, be it Dante or Tesla or Machiavelli, was secretly a friend of the Assassins. It's unnecessary, distracting, and ridiculous; but it's also entirely optional and thus tolerable...until the last hour or so of the game.

Suddenly, in a major "twist", the alien relics show up within the main plot of the game. And then you have to kill the (evil, Templar-colluding) Pope, who bears another of these relics. And then you find a message recorded and left by the super-powerful-but-now-extinct aliens (whom ancient man thought to be gods) about how the sun is going to blow up someday, so screw your petty conflicts. It's ridiculous, it comes out of nowhere, and it leaves you saying, just like it does the sub-protagonist, "What the ****!?". I have no use for twists of this sort in any sort of story. If it doesn't make sense within the context of what we've been told or shown. If there have been no details to suggest that something is happening other than what we've been led to believe. If the mechanism that instigates the revelation requires supernatural origins. If the entire point is to cause surprise or speculation rather than concern or curiosity...leave it be.

Unfortunately, this is mighty common in videogames, including those that have story as a primary component and not just a generic motivator. I've been slowly working my way through Tales of Vesperia the last several months; and I can't help dropping it for awhile every few weeks because of the absurdity of its plot. The character interactions are mostly pretty great, and the first large story arc -- setting out to retrieve a stolen artifact necessary for the survival of your hometown -- is, again, straightforward and effective, even if I ran into plenty of problems with annoyingly "creative" words made up for the game (as always, xkcd proves right). After that first arc concluded, though, I realized that they were intentionally keeping everything about the workings of the setting as nebulously defined as possible so that they could make up as much crap as they wanted to to prolong the story. Pretty much every single major shift in the plot for the last 20-30 hours has begun/ended with the "genius mage" character going "oh snap! these magical crystal thingamabobs we've all relied on for basic survival for centuries are reacting in some weird way that nobody has ever documented before or thought to be a remote possibility! But now that I've observed it once I understand it completely and can say conclusively that we need to go do X next!" Either that, or some ancient, wizened creature says "puny mortals. you cannot comprehend what's really happening...unless you go do Z, in which case, yeah, you can comprehend it just fine. So...yeah, go do Z." It's ridiculous and makes it legitimately hard to play the game at times.

Even games from the same series or writer can use plot twists exceedingly well in one entry an quite poorly in the next. I complain about its popularity a lot, but Final Fantasy VII is a great game that has a handful of twists, all of which work. None of them seem too far-fetched (even if at least one is borderline traumatic in its surprise), and all work to make the eventual revelation about Cloud's real past and his relationship with Sephiroth make sense. Final Fantasy IX, on the other hand, doesn't handle its twists nearly so well. Whether it's Zidane's origin or the final boss, once you get past the second disk, the big twists all come out of thin air. Hell, as much as I love it, Mass Effect 2 even slips a little bit with the final encounter. I'm willing to overlook that as it makes a certain (if small) amount of sense based on what we know at that point, not to mention the fact that nobody makes any real claim to understanding beyond conjecture what was happening.

That really touches on the key thing. If a twist happens after it has been telegraphed, whether it's through subtle hints that take on greater meaning after the event or more obvious foreshadowing, that's good use of a twist. If a twist happens and there is no prior evidence to explain what happened or to make us think that such an event might happen, but the next portion of the plot is (at least in part) dedicated to illuminating the twist -- to seeing the characters come to understand why their world has suddenly changed and what that means, then that's a good use of the twist. However, if a twist occurs out of nowhere and somebody, instead, immediately comprehends the significance and cause of the event based entirely on knowledge which the audience didn't even know might exist, that's poor use of a twist.

Don't get me wrong. This isn't something that just happens in videogames. I'm still upset with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for this sort of sloppy story telling. It just seems to be more readily accepted in videogames, and it shouldn't be. People have been using games to tell legitimate stories for 20 years or more now. We shouldn't allow the overly-frilly drivel that passes for plot in most of our games today. I'm not demanding narratives that are going to blow my mind. I'm not even demanding narratives that are universally complex and multi-faceted. I'm asking for one simple thing: If you're not willing to take the time to make sure everything makes sense, keep it simple. Moreover, realize that if the characters are ever spending less time in a state of shock or confusion than the audience, you're probably doing something wrong.