Requiem for the Darkspawn
The darkspawn squatted in a hole off the Deep Roads, gnawing morosely on the leftovers of a few unwary dwarven miners they’d stumbled over last week. The fire glowed garishly in their pale green skin, shadows fleeing from their oddly simian features. The Hurlock Alpha daintily picked a crusty canine with a dwarf phalange while the weird grinning little Emissary stirred a thin-looking and suspicious gruel in a cauldron.
“Hey, Sarge,” grumbled one of the new Genlocks, a barely hatched Grunt sent up, by the looks of him, from a particularly ill-favored and disreputable broodmother, “how much longer are we gonna stay here? The rations are getting pretty short.”
The Alpha cuffed him just for GP. “No orders. Be nice to get some.”
“We won’t starve, oh no,” said the Emissary, giggling unpleasantly. “Plenty to eat, plenty to eat—giant spiders and brontos and tastier fare too.” He cast a measuring eye over the Grunt, winked, and took a thoughtful stir of the vile pottage.
An old Genlock veteran, an Archer who’d served with the Alpha at Denerim and Amaranthine when they’d both barely escaped with their lives, picked the Grunt up off the cave wall and set him back on his rock. “The kid’s got a point, Sarge,” he said. “If I have to eat one more spider stew, I’m going to shoot webs out my ass. Since the Big Lizard got fragged and the Architect crapped out, seems to me we’ll be waiting a long time to hear from HQ. We may be on our own. I heard the pickings are richer in the Free Marches. Something brewing around Kirkwall, they say.”
“I heard that too. It turned out to be a bit part—a few days scrounging for extra work in some abandoned thaig.” The Alpha sighed. “After the Architect, I thought we’d be set for life. The Blight was big business, you know. The Antivans, the Orlesians, even the Tevinters put in a bid for the road show, and the organizing committee hands it to the Free Marches.”
“Then there ought to be jobs, right?” asked the Grunt, cowering a little.
The Alpha was just too bored to smack him. “Not for darkspawn.”
“What the stone kind of nug-humping show are they trying to run over there?” the Archer sputtered in frustration.
“Mages,” said the Emissary. “The mages are fighting the mundanes with the Qunari in the grandstands, and you can guess whose side the Qunari are on.”
“The Qunari’s,” the Alpha and Archer replied in unison.
“Who in the rock cares about mages anyway? What kind of a Blight is that?” whined the Grunt.
The Emissary giggled and idly fired a blast of flame at the Grunt, just enough to singe beneath the armor. “Never speak ill of a mage, rookie.”
“Things were better in the old days,” the Alpha said, dousing the Grunt with the slop bucket. “At least you know where you stood with a guy like the Warden.”
Out in the darkness where the firelight faded, the ogre rattled in his chains and lowed in fear at the Warden’s mention.
“True,” said the Archer. “He was a bastard, but he was our bastard. He had class, not like this little nobody from Kirkwall everybody’s on about.”
“Who’s that?” asked the Grunt.
“Some refugee from Lothering, a mercenary or something who made good as a trouble shooter for the Kirkwall court.”
The Alpha popped his cheek derisively and twirled a stubby talon. “Big deal. The Warden had every elf, dwarf, and arl in Ferelden lining up to kiss his ass while he told them where to go, how to get there, and what to do on the way. He could have been king if he’d wanted to, so they say, but he’d rather butcher us.”
“He was a bastard,” said the Archer again, almost with affection. “It was an honor when that guy disemboweled you.”
“Best backhand decapitation in the business,” said the Alpha, and coming from such a seasoned pro it was probably the greatest compliment the Warden never got. “When he killed you, you stayed dead. No, there’s nothing in Kirkwall for us. Scuttlebutt says the future’s in Orlais.”
“Maybe,” the Archer said gloomily.
“More mages,” the Emissary muttered over his cauldron, and the ogre lowed again miserably in thickening darkness.
Alas, poor Alpha, I knew him well. I knew them all, every Hurlock and Genlock in the whole sweet Horde, every spurt of their blood and bounce of their heads. And if he’d only known, the Alpha has put his claw on the problem of why Dragon Age II failed to live up to Origins. Tragically, it didn’t have to be that way at all.
DA II was the most anticipated video game sequel in years and debuted to a huge warm, fuzzy glow of goodwill. While universally acknowledging that it didn’t quite measure up to the original, most reviewers raved, although it sometimes seemed like they were meeting somebody who reminded them of an ex and reaching for reasons to fall in love. Even from the onset, though, the cracks appeared. DA II garnered significantly more negative reviews than had Origins, many of which panned it as a mindless button-mashing dungeon crawler utterly lacking the charm and humor of its predecessor. Reaction online was typically either hostile to the game or apologetic for its shortcomings, and DA II seemed to lose traction against the headwinds of an increasingly negative word of mouth. Over time, players noted with asperity the interminable tedious fetch quests, the insultingly recycled scenery, the puny scope of the game world, the monotonous companion armor, not to mention the ultimately meaningless moral choices forced upon you by a screechy cadre of hammy companions, complete with tempers, tics, and agendas. Certainly DA II has never garnered the kind of devotion Origins inspired in its fans, in large measure because the almost legendary replayability that made Origins such a standout deserted its spin-off.
I could go on, but I won’t, because some if not most of these objections are matters of personal taste. But it’s a matter of observable fact that the character of the gameplay changed. Partially all of this is the result of the producers’ entirely understandable decision to get a bigger slice of the console game pie. Thar’s gold in them thar X-boxes! Besides, even Origins’ most ardent admirers, myself foremost among them, would have to admit it was buggy and glitchy, causing more crashes than a Hurlock with a Porsche. The character movements were often clunky, performance the producers vowed to improve so that, as one developer put it, when you pressed a button “awesome happens.” Just coincidentally, this strategy had the happy effect of making the game that much more console friendly. And although I’m a computer gamer, I’d be the last to begrudge the developers their chance to expand their share of the console market.
Still, I would’ve put up with it all, happily, if only the story had been any good. But the experiences I underwent seemed episodic and disconnected, and I never found myself caring much about the characters I met along the way. (To give an idea of how inconsequential the characters are, almost your entire family dies, more or less horribly, to advance a series of minor plot points, and the only change in your circumstance is that you have an extra room in your mansion,) Of course, since motive is a product of situation, if the story had been more compelling, the characters might’ve had more depth. But DA II’s narrative seems to crumble at its foundations. The situation seems arbitrary, the motives forced. It’s almost as if the story is missing something, something basic, something fundamental…
Darkspawn.
Some people wondered after Origins, with the Archdemon neatly skewered, how the producers could have a Dragon Age II with no dragon. One of the developers early on hinted at a new direction. He scoffed at the idea of a Blight redux, ridiculing the image of two Archdemons sewn together, and alluded to the conflict over magery that in fact motivated the events of DA II. The bigger problem is how you can have a Dragon Age II with no darkspawn. They defined the player’s experience in Origins. They provided function, identity, and status. Wherever you went, you were the Warden. Whether you were respected by the dwarves, suspected by the elves, or feared by the regent, you were the Warden and there was no getting around you. But without darkspawn in DA II, you’re just a scheming little opportunist ingratiating yourself with the local yokels in hopes of nailing down an occasional piece of the action. Without darkspawn, you have nothing left to do after slaying the final boss expect walk off into the sunset. Nobody knows where. It’s a wonder anybody cares why. With darkspawn, on the other hand, you decide the future of nations and the fate of thrones. If you can’t be bothered to reign yourself, you at least become the esteemed and beloved Warden-Commander and Champion of Ferelden, maybe with a little hanky-panky on the side behnd Anora’s back if you’re so inclined. Even if you die (always an enthralling option), you get a swell funeral and they set state policy in your name during the eulogy.
Even more crucially to the story, the darkspawn perform an indispensible narrative function without which DA II, crippled by their absence, limps to a murky conclusion. Especially in fantasy, darkspawn, like orcs and goblins everywhere, are an archetype. They represent chaos, entropy, mindlessness, and death, an existential threat to the very fabric of reality. Their looming menace gives lesser conflicts, between mages and templars, say, or between Rohan and Isengard, their moral perspective. In such situations, the greater good, even if morally ambiguous in the moment, is easier to measure against the standard of the greatest evil. Orsino’s and Meredith’s squabbling, so reminiscent of Gregor and Irving in Origins, would stack up to even less than it does if weighed against the carnage and destruction of a darkspawn resurgence.
Developers of DA II have argued that the absence of an Archdemon, which apparently in their view precluded using darkspawn at all, made the moral choices presented the player even more ambiguous. I would say they are made less meaningful. As the Warden, you have a purpose higher than crowning dwarves or slaying werewolves, higher even than vengeance or the throne of Ferelden. How you define that purpose determines how you will decide all those other matters. In DA II, you decide between the mages and the Templars on the basis of no more pressing concern than preference and prejudice.
Personally, I’ve tried it both ways, but it made my skin crawl to side with the Templars. Maybe it’s because I’ve always favored magic users in my RPGs. Maybe it’s because organized religion and state authority figures have always been two of my least favorite things. But it’s hard for me so see how you could really sympathize with the Templars. They are what they were in Origins—a bunch of happy-go-lucky fun-seekers, always open to new ideas and new experiences and always willing to compromise when necessary. Just kidding. You couldn’t pull a needle out of a Templar’s ass with a tractor.
Granted, the plight of the mages raises some pretty vexing questions about freedom and responsibility, even more about society and the individual. Of course, so do the plights of the elves and dwarves. One subplot of DA II proposed a Final Solution to the mage problem, which wouldn’t have been too surprising if you’d lived in Dust Town or an Alienage for a while. But if you’re a mage, your choice is fairly self-evident, and if you’re not it’s fairly irrelevant. So instead of a Blight guiding your decisions, you have your companions, as dysfunctional a collection of whiny neurotics as you’ll find this side of Alistair’s family reunion, chirping their opinions in your ear like so many lyrium-runed Jiminy Crickets. I haven’t felt so blatantly manipulated since I dropped a bag of gold pieces in a massage parlor in Orzammer. Trying to appease them all is like inviting an ogre and a golem to lunch. Sooner or later, the crockery must smash.
Because there are no darkspawn, your companions perforce are motivated either by their own personal backstories or by their relationship to magic. Avelline, for instance, is a law-and-order type, so she leans toward the chantry for policy reasons, but her personal quest is an embarrassment. Sebastian, if possible even more sexless than Avelline, is just another random Chantry stooge. Anders’s motivations are easiest to grasp, but he’s only included as a straw man for the plot, the rogue mage as broody anti-hero. Merrill is contrived to show the Dangers Into Which Magic Can Lead You If You Don’t Watch Out, Jowan in elven drag. Fenris is even more contrived, the anti-Anders, put into the story only to provide a Pathetic Victim of Magic in the Wrong Hands. Varrick, everyman and frame narrator that he is, takes as little personal interest in magic as he does in everything else. Then again, Varrick’s not really allowed to have opinions because if he did, it would be possible to offend him, and then who would tell your story in the cut scenes?
Isabella is the exception, since she has no real reason to exist, apart from every fantasy RPG’s twin requirements for sex appeal and a thief. Neither do the Qunari, who wouldn’t be there at all except for Isabella. Hating mages the way they do, you might expect they’d be a powerful force on the Chantry’s side at the end of Act III, but you’d be wrong. They’ve already blown town. Maybe a hundred thousand darkspawn marching north might have given the Qunari a better incentive to stick around, not to mention a better reason to show up in the first place. Sadly, the Qunari’s sole purpose seems to be to fill up Act II until the deus ex machina in the person of the aforesaid Isabella shows up to cut them loose. The plot of Act II, as we see, is so neatly circular that it pretty much swallows itself. It’s an isolated episode that doesn’t advance the events of Act I or complicate those of Act III, which are the only two purposes in narrative that an incident can have. If you didn’t play Act II at all, would it make any difference to the outcome? No, but you’d miss forty or fifty fascinating fetch quests.
Isabella is only the most glaring and egregious example of how all these characters, from Hawke on down, lack organic dramatic function. Characters are a product of the situation in which they are placed, and the situation of DA II has no real urgency. Templars and Circles have existed for centuries. Either the mages are powerful or numerous enough to resist or they are not. If they are, the Chantry could not possibly have caged them all nor, for that matter, could the Tevinter Imperium have fallen. But if they are not, the Templars exaggerate the threat mages represent and Ander’s act of terrorism can lead only to their inevitable defeat. Either way, especially the latter, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. That’s the darkspawn’s job.
The game itself conveys how hollow your choices really are. After three acts’ worth of fearless and often painful decision making, it’s time for the showdown. Your cards are on the table, you’ve declared your sympathies. The riveting consequence of all this agonizing adjudication is that one or another of your companions tries to kill you, and you get to fight Orsino and then Meredith or Meredith and then Orsino. (I am reminded of the developer who sneered about giving us a super-Blight with two Archdemons and then capped the finale with an ingenious twist, two Archbosses, instead.) Then you walk away, presumably a fugitive, with the same nothing you came to town with. Kirkwall mops up the blood and ten years later it’s Hawke Who. Choosing sides in Kirkwall becomes the proverbial distinction that makes no difference. In the end, nothing much has changed. Nothing has been saved, not even a Ferelden, much less the world.
Of sole lasting consequence, the mage rebellion against the Chantry is at least out in the open, and producers imply that the conflict will continue in Dragon Age III in a place, as one developer said, “with more of a French accent.” No need to be coy, we get it. The mage war will continue in Orlais, and that’s too bad. Not that it’s Orlais, because I hear you can get really great shoes there, but because it’s the mage war. The producers are making DA III a sequel to the sequel when I’d prefer they made a sequel to the original, and that means darkspawn. You don’t necessarily need a Blight to bring them back. Dragon Age: Awakening blazed the trail from which DA II turned blindly aside, but it’s not too late for DA III to find its way.
The darkspawn are presented in Origins as mindless, ravening beasts without an Archdemon at their head. But as Awakening showed, they need not necessarily be entirely mindless. All the darkspawn need is a leader and a mission and if it wouldn’t technically qualify as a Blight it would do until the real mess came along. The Architect says he was born sapient, why not others? The darkspawn still have options open to them as potentially menacing as an Archdemon. There is the Archdemon’s soul itself, still floating around bottled up in Morrigan’s child. Perhaps the darkspawn might seek to reclaim it. There is the Black City. Perhaps the darkspawn might seek to sunder the Veil, enter the Fade, and reverse the fate they brought upon themselves. There are the Deep Roads to be reconquered. Perhaps the dwarves, delving too deep, might disturb some nest of balrogs. Other uses for the darkspawn that don’t depend on an Archdemon may be readily imagined, but that doesn’t matter. Once they show up, they’ve done their job—giving the other characters a job that’s worth doing.
Some would say that darkspawn without an Archdemon would be anti-climatic. Really? Compared to a Templar and a mage, no matter how big and bad a boss they’re made in the game? The Archdemon would’ve eaten Orsino and Meredith both and belched once. The whole point of an Archdemon is that it only comes along every few centuries, thank the Stone. Anything that followed in the narrative was bound to be an anticlimax. It doesn’t have to be a dragon, but for Maker’s sake put some dragons in there. And in the name of Andraste, put in some darkspawn.
An eerie wind began to rise in the Deep Roads. The Genlock Archer shivered in his cloak and sat up. The others were just starting to awaken while the weird little Emissary was still there, tending a banked fire and stirring his pot. He had no idea how long he’d been out. That was the thing. It was hard to keep track of time down here. That, and long, rambling lectures of the type he’d just read put him unusually deeply asleep. Time was strange in the Deep Roads, as strange as the wind. He knew it meant a lava vent had erupted hundreds of miles away, maybe, or a tunnel had caved in somewhere. He knew the strange wind wasn’t wind at all, just a random change in pressure, but it was an ill wind for all that and if it was blowing good to anybody, it wasn’t to them.
“I was thinking of calling the union,” he said as the Alpha rose and stretched, rolling boulder-like muscles under his knobby shoulders. “See if maybe there’s something they can do for us. We’ve all got journeymen’s cards except the kid, and we can probably get him apprenticed with no problem.”
The Emissary giggled. “Not a problem,” he murmured, stirring.
“You’ve still got a master’s ticket, don’t you, Sarge?”
The Alpha began strapping on his armor. “Yeah. But the union don’t have the pull it used to. Even the Dragons Guild has taken rollbacks. What do you want the International Brotherhood of Orcs, Trolls, Goblins, and Boogeymen to do? Strike?”
“Maybe a walkout, a work stoppage, something to show we mean business.”
The ogre lowed placidly in its chains. “Hey,” said the Alpha, buckling on a greave, “did anybody scrounge anything to feed the pet?”
“Not a problem,” the Emissary murmured, giggled, stirred.
A flash of inspiration, dimmer than some, struck the Archer. “How about we wait until there’s some big slaughter planned, and then we all cash in a sick day at the same time? They’d have a hell of a time getting replacements.”
The Alpha strapped on his scabbard. “There are plenty of unemployed devas in India who’d be happy to have your job, you know. If you don’t like the Horde, you can quit. Maybe Jackson’s still hiring for The Hobbit.”
“Aw, Sarge, I was just saying…”
“Yeah, well, shut your yap and grab your pack. We got a good twenty miles to hump before we’ve even got a chance of finding a decent meal. We’ll make for Kal’Hirol, we’re sure to find at least a few deepstalker dens along the way. And I don’t wanna hear you complaining. As hungry as I am, I’d eat a whole flock of deepstalkers and smile. Has anybody seen that stupid Grunt?”
“Not a problem,” the Emissary murmured and giggled. He took one final stir of the cauldron, spooned some of its steaming contents into the Alpha’s mess kit, and presented it to him. “Breakfast?”
Requiem For the Darkspawn
Débuté par
Fuggyt
, août 18 2012 07:36
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