Why I will not be buying Dragon Age: Origins

Warty Goblin is back. I hope you didn't miss me overmuch.
No, this does not have to do with the DLC. That's annoying, but not lethal. I'm not going to buy DA:O. I referred to it earlier as a Witcher wannabe, and I think there's a lot of truth to that. Not perhaps in the sense that Bioware looked at the Witcher, and decided to copy it, but it seems to be aiming for the same gritty, dark fantasy feel. I just don't think Bioware has the talent to pull it off.

The first problem is that Bioware insists on making you play a super important person tasked with saving the world. That's usually the point where my brain checks into the Cliche Hotel and gets the Three Week Deal on a luxery suite. This is not to say that you can't have good games based around this concept, but unless your name is J.R.R. Tolkien, it's probably not going to make me do any deep thinking.

The Witcher's Geralt is certainly well known, and a bit super human, but he's not tasked with saving the world. That alone buys a lot of my respect. Instead, while Geralt certainly has goals, none of them are as large and all consuming as Saving Everything. This both makes the side quests seem like more reasonable ways to spend time, and roots him as a member of the world. Saving a world almost always pulls me out of it, the job is so large, the stakes so high they could be used to justify nearly anything. It also automatically renders all the characters either well meaning and helpful, well meaning and obnoxious, or some combination of ignorant and downright malign in an insane laughter sort of way. People who oppose you with worldsized stakes don't just occupy rival points of view, they are actively and totally evil. This does nothing to engage me with the material.

The second problem is that you are tasked with saving the world from a bunch of really ugly, semi-humanoid monsters. This is boring. They are by construction beings I can kill without remorse, anybody who sides with them is automatically just as bad. It in short is another method of polarizing the world into a manachian wet dream of black and white, and I don't like it.

This is not to say that you cannot get away with inhuman monsters. The Witcher has plenty of those. They are not however the real focus of the story, but rather simple facts of life. You don't go to the lake at night because the drowners will get you, just like hanging out in a gully after a large rainstorm is likely to get you drowned. CD Project realized that mindless monsters bent on indescriminate murder are boring, and assigns them to the proper role of background radiation. They pop up every now and again, you kill them and collect the reward. The real enemies of interest are human, and figuring out what they are doing, and why they are doing it is a lot of the joy of the game. Nor is it even a forgone conclusion that they are wrong. Bioware puts the inhuman monsters front and center. Anybody who sides with the speciescidal monsterous horde is by construction either a fool or hopelessly malignant. CD Project's seperation of the two is a very savvy move, and one of the reasons I think they are fundamentally better developers than Bioware.

The third reason is the use of deception. I have never, ever been decieved in a Bioware game. Everybody is either telling the truth because they understand that I'm the world's last best hope for a happy ending, or else obviously lying through their teeth. This further polarizes the world, and I don't like it. But deception, I think is key to making a dark, gritty sort of world. A place where everybody's intent is fundamentally judgeable at a glance is not a place where you have to worry overmuch, and it keeps me from fully engaging with it.

I didn't pay enough attention in one or two sections of the Witcher, and as a result I got played like a fiddle for pretty much the entire second act. That, more than anything else made me buy into the Witcher's world as a place where people actually had their own motivations, and were capable of carrying them out. It also means that you really have to pay attention, and even sometimes that isn't enough. At one point I ended up performing a quest for one of the most despicable characters I have ever encountered in a game, but he was competant enough to conceal his socially frowned upon and unacceptable dietary habits. Thus when I was helping him he gave no indication of his tastes. Only later did I realize what he really was. The game in short realized that other people besides the player were capable, and that trust was something of which you should be a jealous guardian.

The fourth is graphics design. Bioware has never, in any of its games, made a really, truly good looking game world. They might check boxes, but the landscapes alway feel somehow empty and sterile, and the characters tend to move like animatronic ducks. They are, to me at least, things I will look because they are gateways to the story, but I have no fondness for them. Mass Effect was better this way, because Bioware does know how to direct a cutscene, and they had the budget to make the Unreal Engine look good, but their self coded efforts fail miserably, and also tend to run like animatronic ducks. Simply put, there are other worlds I find more attractive, so all other things being equal, I'd rather spend my time there.

The fifth is combat. I really do not like party control RPGs. They're too big to make me really latch on to one character, and too small to make me flex any more than the most rudimentory of tactical muscles. Their interfaces also usually seem like a beta release of the version of Powerpoint used in Hell. On top of that, the combat in DA:O looks, from trailers hideously fake. It is 2009, we can do better than a couple of guys in impractical armor standing next to each other and whacking away like uncordinated lumberjacks, each 'hit' accompanied by a pint of blood spraying in all directsion, until at last one combatant or the other's health bar empties and they keel over. The Total War games have better looking combat than this, and they put hundreds of units on screen at a time. A game with perhaps a dozen has no excuse.

And Bioware does provide some more graphically interesting special attacks, like an ogre picking up a dude and bashing him. But if anything, this makes the combat appear even more stilted and fake. If a twenty foot tall beast with teeth like a Ginsu Bargain Pack picks up a person, I personally feel that the individual should be looking for a new career in the pancake and toothpick industries because he should be flattened and then consumed. Having him get back up, sans a bit of their health bar simply takes the remains of my suspension of disbelief and chews them up like that ogre should have done. Finishing moves, they should finish a combat people. It's not that hard, indeed it is why they are called finishing moves. Plus, there's the fetishistic obsession with gallons of fake looking blood spraying everywhere. It was cheesy when Gears of War did it, but Gears of War was at least consistantly cheesy. In a game I'm supposed to take seriously, every character acting like a plasma pinata is simply stupid.

Thus I'm skipping Dragon Age: Origins. I've got enough of a backlog, and there's enough interesting looking titles coming up, that the loss will not be keenly felt. Anyway, there was that leaked Witcher 2 video, that'll sustain me just fine.