JaegerBane:
To be honest I'm not too keen on conjecture regarding how people 'just don't understand it' to explain why people don't like the story. I've heard that old chestnut more times than I'd care to count and frankly, I find it a rather condescending approach to explain away the plot's shortcomings as simply being a failing of the player. The kind of gamers who buy stuff like Dragon Age aren't normally prone to simply 'not understanding' plots.
Actually, the kind of people who buy stuff like Dragon Age have been exposed to the barren narrative landscape that's fantasy gaming for decades. Something like DA2 is an alien to them. Also, I've read a lot of feedback. Most gamers who don't like DA2's narrative say things that suggest that they really don't understand what's going on.
The same goes for the label of 'power fantasy' which sounds suspiciously like a label concocted to distinguish stories that concern the player and storylines that don't go anywhere without exposing it's shortcomings. Forked narratives are all well and good, but they're largely meaningless when the story they're representing covers a re-hash of subplot material from the first game and does so in such a way that reduces the impact of what the player is doing to the point where, essentially, the player is simply grinding. In games of this length, there really needs to be an overriding motivation to justify what the player is doing. In this case, you have the amaterurish first act where Hawke finds himself saving up a fortune so that he can finance an expedition so he can.... uh.... make his fortune. You have the second act which started to go somewhere than effectively deflated, and the third act which was basically the first game's subplot, but done in such a crass and monolithic way that it was diffcult to take seriously. The major players were cardboard cut-outs who effectively telegraphed everything in the act hours before it happened. All the way through, Hawke seemed to bumbling from one minor story to the next, smiling and nodding but otherwise giving little for the player to do beyond vapourising legions of sky-diving lunatics while beggars standing right next to explosions and demons simply looked on as if they were in a coma.
Now you're mixing gameplay issues with narrative issues. The first Act was actually pretty well done for a setup to a long narrative. It was subtle, but many threads begun in Act 1 only culminate in Act 3. Act 2 itself was a setup for Act, so if you didn't see Act 2 going that way (since you say it deflated), then I also have to question your understanding of the overall story.
Ultimately, where the storyline in DA2 fell down wasn't in the forked narrative, it was that it made the assumption that players actually cared about what was going on without making any effort to involve them. I couldn't care less what was happening at the end, as it wasn't Hawke's fight, it didn't honestly concern Hawke and (in my case) there was never a good reason given as to why Hawke didn't just haul anchor with isabela and continue making his fortune in exactly the same way that the game claimed was his original motivation. To put it short, it was basically a live-action codex entry. That isn't really enough to keep most players interested for 40+ hours.
I totally understand the problem. All games have this problem. Even DA:O did. I was in no way invested in the Warden at any point, and to be honest I was sick and tired of all the companions at camp who would spew codex entires like an encyclopedia at the slightest provocation - even the supposedly taciturn Morrigan.
I can't tell you that DA2 is better in this regard, but IMO, it is no worse. I haven't been gripped by a fantasy RPG since, well since forever. Fantasy RPGs have always had bad characters and stories in general.
Comes with the territory.
I'm not debtating whether making a fortune is a legitimate motivation for Hawke - my point was that we had this ludicrous situation where Hawke was having to rev up a fortune to finance an expedition to make his fortune that he'd already earned. To use your logic above, does it really make sense for Hawke to risk his own life, the life of his sibling and his mother's sanity by going on this expedition when he's already earned a significant amount of capital in the first place? It just seemed like such a half-baked idea that I got the feeling the developers just couldn't be bothered to come up with a realistic reason.
It seemed reasonable and realistic enough to me.
For instance, having $50, 000 on hand is pretty rich. It's significant capital that you can live on for a year. But then you're broke. You had a fortune, now it's gone.
Investing that into a venture is the wise move. It just so happens that Varric's is the opportunity that Hawke fell on. That and the Bone Pit, but the Bone Pit turned out to be a money sink.
I think that's ideally what Bioware wanted the players to feel, and while it's great you were able to get into it, there's never any good reason why Hawke should care. As Kim says, after a certain point in the storyline there is literally no reason given why Hawke should stay in Kirkwall. For my Mage character it was even worse, as voluntarily staying in a city that is unusually harsh against mages even by the Chantry's standards, when he had nothing keeping him there, was the height of stupidity.
I was under the impression that they gave you a choice on how to answer that question. You can thus either have a Hawke who's staying, or a Hawke in transition. A Mage Hawke who wasn't planning on staying anyway is perfect for the pro-Mage ending - he just did what he had always set out to do.
My impression in Act 2 was that most of Hawke's earnings from the expedition was set up by Varric and herself in properties and titles and various interests. Hawke has an annual income and holdings in Kirkwall. Even if she were to uproot and go after Act 2, it would need years to liquidate that kind of money.
Besides which, her Champion Status, recognized by Meredith herself at the end of Act 2, gives her no small additional power and relative immunity to persecution by the Templar. It's strong enough, even to protect Anders and Merrill.
No, it isn't a straightforward hero's story. However, I'm seeing a recurring attitude being displayed by proponents of the DA2 storyline that essentially states that the DA2 story is a welcome change purely because it's different.
I would submit that the fact that it's different is not an adequate reason for praise. The storyline still has to make sense and involve the player, regardless of it's style, and DA2's storyline failed miserably in that regard.
I would say that those two go hand in hand. The story made sense to me, so it engaged me in the manner that most such stories generally do. Since it made sense to me, it stands to reason that the story makes SOME kind of sense.
You couldn't make sense of the story, so you failed to become invested.
I would submit that it's a failure of DA2's writing that it doesn't attempt to engage gamers at the usual literary level enjoyed by the usual fairy tale power fantasy fare, if you can say that the lack of such pandering can be called a failure.
jds1bio:
Yes. We got to choose between mercenaries and smugglers at the very beginning. Athenril at one point says "come back, I'll have more work for you" and then after one more quest, doesn't actually have any more work. That choice could have been expanded like the character made it sound like it would. It's not too hard to imagine Hawke rising through the ranks of the mercenaries or smugglers, secretly funding the guard to gain influence with the viscount, or a number of things.
A year of ultimately pointless questwork to get enough money to bribe guards? Seriously?
Agreed. And for a story, that's fine. And for an RPG, a few events like this are par for the course. But there are too many main-story events like this where the game offers you options of choice and then does what it does anyway no matter what you choose. The game doesn't even come back to tell you "hey, I remember that you chose this, here's why you had a hand in it.", and when you have a story that insinuates that the subject of your role-playing is responsible for what happens, I think something is missing here.
Actually I rather thought that that was one of the themes for DA2. Sometimes, you don't get to choose what happens.
There are many events and main-story choices under which you do get to enjoy the results of your choices. For instance, if you befriend Isabella and duel the Arishok, you get to keep her for Acts 2 and 3. That's a substantial narrative and gameplay difference, particularly since some of the choices narrative sequences in The Long Road only happen when you have both Isabella and Aveline in the same room.
Many choices in DA2 seem to me to be
too organic, to the point where gamers forget that it's just a game. They save Isabella, assume that's what was meant to be, and move on. Later they lose her, but it fails to register that every quest with her going forward is a constant reminder of the effects of prior choices, as opposed to just a random guard you happened to save who lets you into a room somewhere down the road.
The latter one presents itself to your face and makes a show and dance about how "choices MATTER!!!!" The former just lets the cards fall where they lie and lets you live with continuing consequences.
All that said, it is a core concept in the game that Hawke is acting in the vicinity of other potent actors. How he wants things to happen isn't always how they will, and I think that's what gets many gamers' goats.
Modifié par Roxlimn, 16 avril 2011 - 02:55 .
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