This is not dark fantasy. This is Tolkien with the paint scuffed up and buckets of chicken blood slopped about. This is Glen Cook with the hardcases and sarcastic tone ripped out and replaced with concentrated Carth Onasi-grade whinging and faux moral ambiguity. This is Martin without the ever present dread and the conniving characters.
Much ado was given to the mature tone of the writing in this game. Well, here's the thing. You don't hear GRRM plugging his books like that. "Hey, check it out, the main character DIES at the end of this one. Isn't that like, so dark and mature?" Maturity isn't something that you can just flip on and on, it's not something that you can just
declare. Maturity means writing situations with an eye to realism and a realization that your audience isn't stupid (and if they are they shouldn't be your audience) and can handle things not working out, can handle feeling empathy for a guy who's not quite a hero because, hey, at least he's human.
They did it all wrong. Let's write a real mature and dark and gritty game, they said. Maybe they could. Maybe they have the chops. But they screwed the pooch here. Because this game reads like a bunch of fourteen year olds trying to be edgy. This is manufactured maturity, and maturity only works as a natural outgrowth of actual skill, not something slapped over the same thing you've been doing the past decade.
This is KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect...
And the sad thing is I'd be lying if I said this wasn't one of the best RPGs of the past five years. Which tells you something about the pathetic state the single player RPG genre is in.
There were glimmers of the old school in this one, of quests with multiple solutions and choices that have actual consequences beyond cosmetic changes. Redcliffe comes to mind. I can only describe my feelings of transcendent joy when I discovered Bioware wasn't going to railroad me into playing Seven Samurai and allowed me to leave the hapless villagers to their own devices. I returned to find the town desolate but my spirits buoyed. "Good job, Bioware," I thought.
My good will lasted all of five minutes, however. Because as inevitably happens with Bioware, it all comes down to killing things. Room after room of baddies to kill. Here's your choice--would you like to spend a half hour killing these or a half hour killing those? This or that? Pick your relative pronoun. Brutal Legend lampooned the Bioware "choice" better than I can: Want to kill the bad guys now? Or later? Because the majority of your time, you will be killing things. There's simply too much filler combat in this game. If the combat were at all interesting, well, it wouldn't matter. It would still be boring. But the combat is not at all interesting.
RTwP is truly the worst of both worlds. Either give me pure turn based, with precise control and time to work out tactics and interesting, set piece battles, or let me mash away at my fast attack button. Make it an Action RPG and call it a day. It was a noble effort to meld these two time scales but I feel enough is enough. Combat in Dragon Age amounts to mashing your spacebar and issuing orders, if you care to micromanage. If not, it's even less compelling, watching your dudes kill those dudes while you tap at your number keys and sigh forlornly, leg thrown out over your armrest and Diet Coke in your other hand. One or the other, please. Enough of this bastardized combat. And after, that, less combat in general.
Here's where I blow my credibility. I didn't finish this game. Hell, I didn't get even a quarter of the way through. Here's why: the combination of combat that feels like work and writing that makes one look forward to the combat is just too much. In a way I wish there hadn't been glimmers. I wish this had just stuck to the tried and true Bioware shtick of fake choices and even faker (or downright nonexistent) consequences. Instead I had the inestimable pleasure of having my hopes raised and then brained on the concrete. As in their failed attempts at creating a "mature" narrative, Bioware got scared. They flirted with making a true RPG. And just when that elusive Muse was cracking a smile they ran off.
Modifié par Trajan60, 16 décembre 2009 - 08:33 .
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