Since the release of Mass Effect 3 about eight months ago, I've been following much of the BioWare staff wherever I can. Like many players, I was incredibly disappointed with the ending of Mass Effect 3, and was interested in the responses and opinions of the staff to see the reasons behind such a mistake and the likelihood of it happening again. I haven't played the Dragon Age games, but I've spent time on the forum since because some of the writers have been much more active on the forums and such since the announcement of Dragon Age III.
One of the things I picked up quickly is that the writers are very eager for 'bittersweet' stories. Some of the most enthusiastic reponses I've seen by the writers are how much they love 'bittersweetness.' And it makes me uneasy, because I feel as though they might well be making the same mistakes that have been made beforehand. There's a general simmering frustration amongst fans that the Mass Effect team is still unaware of why and how they messed up. I have to admit - considering the Extended Cut certainly made things better but failed to address any of the core problems, I'm not convinced myself. This does little to ease my concerns. If the writers are putting 'bittersweetness' above everything else, there's a very good chance that the quality of the story will suffer for it. The worst of that, worse than anything else, would be the writers deciding 'bittersweetness' is more important than heroism.
Heroism needs to matter.
That's one of the reasons why Mass Effect is one of the most outstanding stories ever told. Any other video game would present the situations Shepard finds him/herself in as unwinnable and the protagonist as helpless. But not Mass Effect. And not because Shepard is lucky or because of silly circumstances or nonsense science like so many other stories resort to. But because Shepard is smart. Because s/he's a hero. Because s/he's the ideal hero. And because heroism is meaningful.
It's also the primary reason why Mass Effect 3's ending was so horrible. Because heroism is meaningless. Because love, hope, unity, friendship, and every other quality a hero like Shepard embodies count for nothing. Because every friend, every ally, every ship, and every struggle encountered by Shepard in 120 hours of gameplay contribute so overwhelmingly little to the resolution of the conflict. So much less than we expected. So much less than Shepard deserves. I never want to see that happen again.
Finally, it's the reason why I've yet to play the Dragon Age games despite being blown away by Mass Effect. I spend a lot of time on TV Tropes (which is generally an excellent source for this sort of thing), and there's a fair number of examples of conflicts in the series and Dragon Age II in particular that were handled less-than-ideally. Conflicts that could have been avoided if characters had been a bit smarter. Conflicts where the protagonist is helpless to prevent a situation that the player sees a solution to.
It essentially boils down to the same problem. Heroism doesn't count for enough. Characters are cruel and selfish and foolish no matter what. Everything goes to hell no matter what. What's the point?
Now, does that mean the Dragon Age writers are sub-par? Of course not. This is an issue to at least some extent with every RPG. There's really a fairly small pool of what we would consider 'modern RPGs', but nonetheless the ones that exist are filled with supposedly heroic (or optionally heroic) protagonists whose heroism doesn't actually count for much. Not only are many of these stories eager to throw heroism under the bus, they very often sacrifice continuity, characterzation, plot coherency, and scientific accuracy. The moral that these stories seem to imply is “No matter what, you lose, because that's just so mature and hardcore and realistic!” Frankly, it disappoints me how easily many players seem to be impressed with this sort of thing.
There's been only one "lose-lose" choice that I truly feel was well done with a 'heroic' protagonist, where both sides had solid reasons for doing what they did, where it truly made sense for the protagonist to be forced to chose because there is really no other option, where the choice wasn't devalued by annoyance or even frustration on my part because there was a clear good choice or words of course of action that my character was unable to carry out . One - which is the choice made at the conclusion of The Pitt DLC for Fallout 3.
The point of all this is that creating such situations is hard. It's a hard, hard, hard, thing to do. It's hard to write plausible situations and conflicts where characters are heroic but still helpless to make an impact. The reason why is because it is a fundamental contradiction to have heroism matter and yet have heroic characters meet bad or even bittersweet conclusions no matter what. It only gets worse when the Theory of Narrative Causality is considered, as it should be for all epic stories such as Dragon Age.
Now, does this mean every story in existence needs to have meaningful heroism? Absolutely not. Since we're talking about video games, Kane and Lynch is an excellent example that comes to mind. Kane and Lynch and its sequel are mediocre games, but the story stands out for being one of the absolute bleakest you can find. Everything that could go wrong, goes wrong, and it's made worse by the complete lack of romanticism and the sheer miserable realism that pervades the story. The first game ends with a lose-lose choice (The achievements for ending the game for each choice are even called “Damned if you do.” and “Damned if you don't.”) But it's all perfectly okay, because the story never pretends for a moment that heroism exists for this setting and these characters, so there's no verdict for how powerful heroism is one way or the other.
In summery, the writers have a choice. You can have heroism mattering, or you can have bittersweet endings and consequences no matter what. One is relatively easy to create while the other is considerably more difficult. One is commonplace and the other is rare. And one will draw me into Dragon Age III while the other will almost certainly disinterest me.
Your choice.
Modifié par David7204, 27 octobre 2012 - 05:26 .
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