BioWare was, at one time, the most important name in nerd gaming. It was them and the now defunct (and then refunct via Kickstarter) Black Isles Studio that were responsible from turning all your table top fantasies into something you could play on a computer screen. The Gold Box D&D games from the early 90s had shown us the possibility, taking pre-written stories like Pool of Radiance and The Dark Queen and making serviceable games out of them, but it wasn’t until 1998 that BioWare showed us something completely new. They released a game focused not on game play but instead on story. You were not playing something that had already been written, but instead forged a path for yourself in a game world that reacted, albeit in a limited way, to the choices you made for the character you were playing. Gamers everywhere started to understand that this was the table top drug that video games could not deliver, and “Baldur’s Gate” became one of the best selling games of the decade. BioWare's next games; Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic were enigmas in the industry. Gameplay was not evolving, instead the games focused on more and more ways to make the player matter. BioWare wanted to make games that told stories, and in every possible way put you the player at the center. This was a fantastic thing back in the time when people wanted more from a video game than flashy graphics and a few one liners, but by 2003 the simple minded FPS was dominating and people were no longer interested in turn based experiences no matter how fantastic the story. BioWare had lost the ability to make games that people were willing to play. It took 5 years, but they reacted on two fronts, first making a FPS that was driven by story (Mass Effect in 2007) and then by releasing an epic, old school RPG with a next gen coat of paint as Dragon’s Age in 2009.
Dragon Age is a refinement in storytelling. It forgoes the idea of good and evil and instead forces players to examine the context of their actions within the game world they are a part of, creating a moral dilemma that almost always boils down to picking what you think the lesser of two evils is. Do you forgive the power hungry order summoning daemons, or kill hundreds of innocents to keep them down? The game does everything it can to prevent you from simply choosing to be the “good guy” or the “bad guy” at the start and mindlessly doing what fits that paradigm. This system is one of the primary inspirations for Raven LARP, where I’m always trying to present a game world where doing the right thing is incompatible with doing the good thing. Complementing this is an incredible cast of voice actors and a diverse cast of characters, each with their own back story, plot quest, and unique romance options with the PC (regardless of gender; any character that is a romance option transcends the concept of gender preference).
Game play is a throwback to an era before everything needed to appeal to a mass market. Combat is slow, difficult, and at times uninteresting, but these are sacrifices made in the name of the complexity and polish like you would find in table top systems. There are dozens of puzzles you might miss if you are not paying attention, and you could reach the end of the game with hours of content unexplored without even knowing you looked anything over. It feels like and plays like the games you grew up with, while looking like the games of today.
To anyone who wants to remember what games were like before the big 3 publishers started pushing for mass appeal clones every year, I can’t recommend going back to Dragon Age enough. It’s a bittersweet reminder of how much the industry has changed, and in my option, how much we as gamers have lost.
No comments:
Post a Comment