MrProliferation wrote...
"Gritty" and "dark" I think are about the most unhelpful words out there to describe anything: be it television shows, movies, video games, comic books, or other forms of literature. "Gritty" seems to mean foul language, sex, graphic violence, and amorality. "Dark" seems to mean horror elements. "Low-fantasy" I would think is a little more helpful because that targets a sub-genre. Dragon Age is more a combination of low and high fantasy. There's more magic and more powerful magic in it than a lot of low fantasy, but it's a lot more morally gray and pessimistic than most high fantasy.
Which is a fair point. Low fantasy is almost certainly a clearer descriptor, and I'd be happy to use it in place of gritty and dark - although as most people refer to low fantasy as being both dark and gritty, we may be on a hiding to nothing.
Persephone wrote...
craigdolphin wrote...
Wozearly
and Redcoat...great posts and my opinion matches pretty closely with
both of you. I didn't like the change in style subjectively, and I felt
it undercut the dark and gritty theme from Origins.
Out
of honest curiosity: What dark and gritty theme is that? The
story? Nothing dark there, it's as cliché as they come. The
companions? Interesting guys and gals but hardly dark or gritty. Not
even Loghain, if you do recruit him, fits those words. The world? Even
with the Blight around DAO seemed colorful, downright nonchalant in its
prettiness.
Dark and gritty....The Witcher 1 (II much less so,
given how sparkly the graphics are) was dark and gritty. Bioware games
are loads of things but dark and gritty they are not. Not even BG (Which
had exploding bodies ad nauseam as well) was dark and gritty.
Whether something is cliched or not is irrelevant to whether its a dark storyline. Or at least 'comparatively' dark - as you rightly point out, Bioware games are not designed to be packed to the brim full of grimdark and use humour and strains of high fantasy to keep them from going there.
But you asked about what was dark. As an example, you're frequently presented with morally dubious choices, or at the very least some hefty shades of grey. A good example is Avernus. Here's a blood mage who unleased demons in battle and ended up getting trapped in a tower for years...during which he conducted fatal experiments on all the other survivors for their blood. And siding with this guy is the "good" option at Soldier's Peak - very much a case of the lesser of two evils.
Now, the high-fantasy element rescues this by almost always giving you the chance to offer some form of redemption. So you can forgive people like Avernus, Zathrian and Loghain. You can risk your life trying to rescue Connor. You can be an all-round good guy.
But, unlike the typical high fantasy trope, where you MUST be good and always do the good thing like a good little pet hero, in DA:O this is just one option. You also have the opportunity to mete out justice, or seek revenge, or pursue whichever route is likely to give you the greatest gain for your own selfish aims and whimsy.
What I was gunning at by "gritty" was about realism and believability, or at least the illusion of it. Characters who are as moral and immoral, judgemental, biased and treacherous as you could expect from a medieval-style era, warts and all - including your own character.
By dark, as you might have guessed above, I'm thinking of the setting itself. The blight is corrupting the world, everyone is at each others' throats, Loghain's strewn a ton of cowpats on the road to victory and, figuratively speaking, your character has the choice to either pick up the shovel and get busy, or push people into the bovine excrement if they get in the way of his most expedient path.
Now don't get me wrong - DA2 did a number of these things too. But for me it didn't add up as strongly - incredibly hard to dissect exactly why, but in my case it was a combination of the changes in style, my perception of my own power, place in the world and motivations, a general lack of empathy with other characters (NPCs and companions) and a less broad variety of things that could all go south from a moral perspective.
Yes, there were some brilliantly difficult decisions in DA2. But personally, and this is highly subjective, the decisions in Origins felt more frequent, more impactful, and I was more inclined to care about the outcome...even if its most notable in-game effect was only a change to the ending narrative. As mentioned in an earlier thread, the fact that you could end up with about two thirds of your companions storming out on you or trying to kill you is not something you would expect from a typical high fantasy game...and that level of depth just seemed missing in DA2.
Modifié par Wozearly, 08 août 2011 - 11:23 .
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