All people hating long texts be warned. This post is a huge beast intended for the developers and for me, to basically write down what was bothering me from the first day I played DAO. Now I have finally done it and I feel strangely at rest, at least, until the next DLC will be released. So feel free to read, to discuss, to comment or to flame, its up to you.
First of all let me state, that I love the Dragon Age franchise. This is not a thread meant for trolling, but love is not blind. I simply like to think about what Dragon Age could be, if some design decisions were not made or done differently.
Why do I call the whole series an example of wasted opportunities? Well, because it could be so much more, than it actually is. DA could be the defining game of the decade, if some things would have been done differently and all games would stand true to their marketing.
Let's start with Dragon Age Origins, the spiritual successor of the beloved all time classic Baldurs Gate series. This game is important, because without it, we wouldn't even be talking about things like Pillars of Eternity, but also because it has set the standard and the expectation for all its successors.
One of the very first design choices that has drawn me to this game is the implementation of a dark, gritty and somewhat "realistic" fantasy world. And DAO delivered to a certain degree. One of the major failures of its successors are, that they do not hold true to this idea beginning with graphic design e.g. for the darkspawn, to horror elements like the brood mothers, or the tough decision like doing the dark ritual and who has to be sacrificed. DA2 continues this to some extent with blood mages bringing the dead back to life. DAI in turn seems to have no memory of "dark" or "gritty" at all. Its a very shiny place, a fairy tale wonderland. For me, it is ok to change the graphics as long as you keep the art direction, but the anime look of DA2 is a failure in itself because it cost the darkspawn what Bioware was actually trying to emphasize, the iconic and memorable look.
Still, DAO also did not hold true to this promise. A lot of things weren't pushed to the extreme. We were never shown things like lyrium addiction or the full extend of blood magic. Shale was fun to have around despite the very horrible things that must have happend in her past. Despite their back stories, all characters were entertaining and not broken and damaged, as some should have been. We were told a lot of times, that life is dire, but we were rarely shown. Maybe one of the most touching moments was an event, that lead up to Morrigans first love scene, with her stating in camp how cold it is out there. It is a moment where you are confronted with the reality of an hostile environment and people are not sitting happily around a camp fire. In truth, they don't know if they will survive the next day and everybody tries to get as much comfort as possible. Even a hard witch from the wilds.
But that was a rare moment. Hell, even if you play as a city elf, once the game really starts there is not so much difference any more between playing an city elf or a human noble. That choice alone should have had a ton more of consequences. Imagine a warden being denied access to a tavern with Alistair having to threat everybody so that the elf is allowed in to do what must be done. Imagine Morrigan being the only one to be kind to him in the beginning, as she was the only one raised without a bias to elfs. Imagine the satisfaction of gaining the trust and maybe love of Leliana by someone so low, an Orelesian noble would normally deny the very existence of the creature next to her.
Another thing DAO introduced quite nicely via lore and to some extend via gameplay, is that magic is powerful and dangerous. If you play a mage in DAO you actually feel powerful, especially compared to other members of your party. You have a repertoire of spells, that can really hurt enemies and wipe out a lot of mooks, this is especially true for spell combos. However, mages are nowhere near overpowered, as the lore implies. There is no single spell that can utterly slay a single foe and there are, apart from blood magic, no ways of controlling the mind of other people. Magic in cut scenes, especially blood magic looks way more powerful, than what you can actually use in-game.
When you have to face abominations they fall pretty fast and there is no single incident where a would-be-mage does something terrible. All in all there is no real explanation why templers are actually necessary and why mages are treated with so much fear and loathing. And once again, if you play as mage, you feel almost nothing of that loathing. I would have expected my mage run to be pure hell, being bullied where-ever I go, but nothing of it happened. It was quite akin to my rogue run. Once again imagine the possibility where your mere presence maybe enough to make people shiver from fear and call out to a templar for help.
Alas, from that point on, things went south for my poor mages. In each subsequent game their power was reduced and they became normal, oppressed, misunderstood poor things. Awakening introduced a lot of warrior and rogue skills that seemed very magical to me and DA2 expanded upon this in the most ridiculous way. What do you get in real life, when you hit the ground with a sword? A broken sword. In DA2 you get enemies flying around in a 20 foot radius.
In turn, mage spells hurt a lot less, a fireball in DAO was a killer, in DA2 it is useless. If we go back to times from Baldurs Gate those spells were game changers in combat and could take out a dozen mooks. If an enemy was not effected, it was because of his high resistance to fire. The DA2 explanation is an uber amount of hit points even for mooks. Even clearly burning mooks continue hitting you, because ordinary humans seem to be immune to pain these days. Or maybe its some bandit condex kind of thing, doesn't matter if you are burning and hurting like, continue to whop your enemy or the dreadwolf will bite you in the a...
What is really bad about this is, that this is one of many times Bioware broke their own in-game rules. One of these rules is "only mages do magic and magic is very dangerous", starting with Awakening, everybody does magic starting with teleporting, to running at light-speed across a battlefield, to jumping 50 feet in the air and throwing around enemies with blasts of kinetic energy, or firing dozens of arrows at once. The best example for this is the Tempest of DAI, a single rogue is able to kill a freaking high dragon in seconds by basically putting a million hits in ten seconds on him, while a true mage would have to chop away for hours. Beware of rogues, they are walking nuclear weapons.
Another rule Bioware implicitly set is, that the world is akin to ours and laws of physics apply. Things have weight, people have to eat and sleep, at night you gather around a fire and share stories, people die from wounds... you get the idea. It definitely is not a world, in which giant caterpillars sit smoking on a mushroom and shrink girls following white rabbits down a hole.
In DAO most classes were able to use almost every weapon. Everybody could use a bow and even mages were able to use swords once they got the Arcance Warrior specialization. In the past, DnD rules prevented this and gave explanations like clerics being restricted to blunt weapons by their faith and mages simply being to week to use a sword or to much metal interfering with their spell casting. Starting with DA2 we got severe class restrictions with no lore explanation. From that point on it was simple fact that rogues can't touch anything bigger than a dagger and warriors are allergic to bows. Which is plain silly and it breaks the rule of the world being based on real world. A good swords weighs around 3kg and it is pretty easy to find out which end is the dangerous one.
That is maybe the single most biggest lost opportunity. Bioware started from scratch and had every freedom to implement a system based on skill and the right setup of a character. Instead they opted for a system of immersion breaking rules forced upon the player by the developer and dumbed it down from game to game. Leveling up in DAI barely feels like an RPG at all. The reasoning behind might be complexity, but if you want a beginner and casual player friendly system, you can still hide these things. Let the player chose his desired role like an archer and do an auto level up with maybe a distinction between investing in the offensive or the defensive and provide a detailed version for whoever likes to distribute points manually.
Speaking of immersion. Another lost opportunity is the implementation of the world. Lets get back to this spiritual successor thing. One of the biggest assets of Baldurs Gate was actually the city of Baldurs Gate. It was huge, it had a lot of things going on, it had a ton of NPCs and it felt alive, even with the limitations of the engine. DA was lacking this from the beginning. The game is beautiful in every incarnation, but it feels empty. There simply is no big city, even Denerim feels small and is strangely underpopulated. Orzammer is amazing, but also amazingly lacking in the number of dwarves and buildings and everyday life. Val Royeax finally, can you cheat more on a player? The biggest city in all of Thedas and what is available? A market place with maybe 20 NPCs and most of them are static. I know that game engines have limitations, but if it was possbile to do better 20 years ago, it should be possible to amaze today. And that is not even talking about simulating a world where NPCs follows his own daily cycle, where a city makes sense, meaning it would be able to survive by providing work for the people, food coming in, guards patrolling, places to sleep and so on.
In contrary, one of the sings DAO did amazingly well was giving me the illusion of power. The final battle had am amazing scale and as most of the enemies were low-level, I was able to kill them by the dozens. That felt awesome and really rewarding, especially with the different armies at your command. DA2 somewhat continued with this, I remember fighting quite a lot of enemies at the same time, basically the dreaded wave combat, and being able to do this by using things like cross class combos and my beloved nuclear warfare strategy.
However, that was not the same feeling and of course, no armies. DAI reduced combat to little skirmishes. I haven't counted, but I can't remember facing more than 5 enemies at a time, even if it would have made so much sense. The game tells you that a freaking army is waiting for you, you ready your troops and got barely an enemy at all. Speaking of armies, while the war table was nice, where in hell are my troops? Certainly not in Skyhold.
Now imagine Denerim sized battles taking place with the graphics DAI is capable of. Or imagine Witcher 2 scale of battles. Wouldn't that be awesome and feel much more appropiate?
Let's skip to another core element of the series, the implementation or should I say the illusion, of choice. DAO did this quite well. The story is progressing quite differently based on your choices and in the end your army will depend on all these choices. What is most important is, that the result of these choices is immediate and it has impact on the player. Who is fighting with me, who lives, who dies, nobody dies, an old god is on the loose and so on. I still call it a good illusion, as the final outcome can't be changed. There is no option to not fight the archdemon or even choose the location of the battle. There is no "let's have a beer and conquer this place together" option for all the evil-doers out there.
DA2 was supposed to build on this and it starts with a quite a choice about who lives and who dies. Which is in turn implemented in the most silly way possible by choosing your own class. I hate Carver, but Hawke is a mage for me, so I'm pretty fu... The very advertising of DA2 is about choice and your impact on the world. Guess what, most of the story happens with Hawke standing on the outside. It's like nobody is listening to you. You are like a ghost, you run around in a world and scream at the top of your lungs "don't do this" but nobody listens to you and everything goes south. Most of the time you can't even scream, like in telling your mother not going out alone as a women killing madman is on the loose.
All choices are made by other people like Isabela or Anders, Hawkes only choice is how to react. I think, that is maybe the major flaw of the game, yet from a story perspective these things had to happen. In truth DA2 is not about Hawke, it is about preparing the world state for the inquisitor. DAI can only happen, if the world is in turmoil, so Hawke's intentions don't matter, because everything has to happen. While it is necessary, this is somehow cheating on the player, because you are actually watching an interactive movie and not playing a full blown RPG. At the very least it should have been possible to stop Anders from blowing up the chantry. Of course, it would still have happened, but maybe based on former decision it could have been by either Meredith or Orsino.
And what about DAI? Choices are there, but I have the feeling, the developers missed out on what is important for us. It is nice to decide who is ruling Orlais especially if you have read the books. But it has no impact on the current game and we basically want choices that matter immediately. Some choices like the new devine, people don't even realize that their actions matter in the outcome. That is one thing I would have liked dumbed down and actually it is the most complex aspect of the game.
In more general terms, one of the major flaws of the franchise is giving the player to much freedom. The idea is very noble, there is no canon and everybody is experiencing his own private version of the dragon age. Truth is, it does not work. All games are story driven, implying that you need some fixed events, some fixed protagonists and so on. This leads to a lot of complexity and to a lot of retconning. DAI needed Leliana, so the possibility to kill her had to be retconned. From a story perspective, a single canon world state would be better and would lead in the end to more stable, more bug free games.
Speaking about DAO and DA2, another missed opportunity is not connecting these games. They share a common location and from the timeline both Hawke and the Warden should have been present. Some shared moments, a sort of origin story for Hawke, experiencing the fight would have done wonders for the overall story. DA2 feels like a movie where you have missed the first minutes, you can still follow the story, but it is not the same experience.
Talking about experience, a major shortcoming of both games is, that they don't resemble their marketing campaign. Do you remember the sacred ashes trailer? It was awesome and yes, this quest is actually in the game. But the differences are huge, the environment is completely different, the colors are different and the fighting is different. A major part of this is Morrigan. In this battle she uses her staff for melee attacks quite efficiently, in the game, a mage in a meele fight still slowly fires projectiles and is basically dead in seconds. At some point of time she changes into a huge spider, she is very fearsome and very powerful. In the game her shapeshifting skills are all but useless. Finally Morrigan kills the high dragon with lightning, showing how powerful our witch of the wildes is, in game, well, won't work.
The same is true for the DA2 trailer. Man, the destiny trailer is maybe the single best piece of game advertising I have ever seen. I still watch it from time to time and silently hope for a dragon age movie made exactly like this and not like this shabby anime thing featuring Cassandra. And well, then you got a game, where literally everything is differently, from color tones, to scale, to why Hawke actually battles the Arishok. Where the trailer is epic and shows two enemies at the height of their power duking it out, in-game truth is, that you are fighting in a small room for no one to see, not for the city but for a woman, by running for at least half an hour in circles around the Arishok. That was lame. That was the single moment where I thought about simply deleting the game and never ever talk about it again. I actually felt ashamed of my character.
DAI in contrary had no real trailer, however, a lot was shown that has not made it into the final game. I believe there are quite some threads about it, as I never really experienced, what was missing, I'll simply skip it.
If we continue with DA2, my best guess is, this game could have been awesome, done with a little more love and a lot more time. As many people, at first I had to cope with not continuing with my warden. A part of me still thinks, that after the witch hunt DLC there is an open story to be told. But I grew quickly fond of Hawke, he is an amazing character and the sarcastic version suits me better, than my warden ever did. Unfortunately apart from the things already mentioned, the game fails with its very main concept, the passing of time. The game stretches over a time-frame of ten years and nothing every really changes. People don't age, hell, they don't even clean out corpses from their living rooms. If this single aspect would have been done right, everything else would have been forgivable, even the anime style with Sailor Meredith punishing Hawke in the name of the red lyrium moon.
In looking back, DA2 feels to long and to short at the same time. Without having played DAI, I remember complaining about the endless amount of useless side quests especially in the first chapter. Hawke power on, I know exactly who has lost this stinking shoe, will return it in a moment. From my current point of view, I guess the following has happened.
After the huge and somewhat unexpected success of DAO Bioware was desperate to publish a sequel while everybody was still talking about DAO and the community was doing nicely keeping it alive using mods. At the same they had huge plans for the next chapter, I think the real DA2 including the canceled expansion, would have been an amalgamation of what we got as DA2 and DAI. At some point of time they realized that they had to switch technologies so they started DAI in parallel to DA2, basically splitting the story. To compensate for this, they lengthened what would have essentially been the first chapter or the origin story of Hawke to a somewhat full game with a lot of filler material and pushed it out into the market.
That would also explain the heavy reuse of environments. That was never a willing design choice, but they had no other option for adding more content fast. The following DLCs delivered the next parts of the story, effectively setting up Orlais and the big bad of "DA2". Unfortunately, DA2 was ill received due to all its short comings and DAI was stuck somewhere in development hell, maybe not even with the right engine available. Before matters could get even worse they canceled the expansion, pulled the draft of the content into DAI and postponed the release sending out a "we understand" message to the community.
I still fully believe after having played all games and reading some statements from David Gaider, that Hawke actually was planned to be the protagonist for DAI. Just imagine, what great a game we might have missed. Some statements from David Gaider indicate a much darker version of the story, maybe more in line with DAO. You might want to checkout this link:
That would in turn explain one of the two major shortcomings DAI has. Just to remind you, the game is freaking huge, insanely beautiful and simply amazing. What it is lacking is however, a good protagonist. The inquisitor stays pretty shallow compared to his companions. There is not much of a back-story to him, apart from a few connections mentioned by scribbles. Just replace him in your mind with Hawke in a setting, where Varric let him to a meeting with Cassandra at the conclave. Maybe our sword maiden convinced Hawke at least to try to talk some sense into both parties. He did, or at least tried, because in the middle of it an old enemy resurfaces and things go south. A huge part of DAI would make so much more sense. Cory would make more sense, hero and adversary would be much more connected and a lot of scenes would have played out differently. Hawke would be a true tragic hero as everything unfolding is based on his inability to stop Anders.
But I mentioned two shortcomings. The second is, DAI simply wants to much at the same time. This time the developers actually had to much time, and apart from implementing different races and beautifying everything, they used it for a lot for filler content. The true length of DAI is not much above DA2, if it is actually longer. I perceive both games to be roughly half the length of DAO in terms of pure story, this also lends to the theory that both were actually meant to be one game. So the game has to much fetching, to much collecting, to much crafting, to much dragon killing, to much mounts, to much shards and so on. Simply imagine a more compact version of DAI, which in turn would be much more intense.
Is this all? No, of course not. I could get into detail regarding the combat system which developed from to slow into to flashy into I'd rather not play a melee character until they fix this ****. I could also talk about specialization which are a wonderful thing done completely wrong from the very beginning. I could complain about still not knowing whats going on on a larger scale, mostly because I don't like to read tons of condex entries or I could give you my thoughts about healing potions. Or I could give you my 5 cents about how love scene should be done in a game created for adults, but I have already covered the most important aspects.
Instead I'd like to imagine a kind of directors cut. A DAO in a modern engine with all the stuff that was intended to be in it, but skipped, like lyrium addiction or consequence of race, class and specialization. I'd like to play DA2 the way it was intended with the skipped Exalted March expansion. I'd like to play a version of Dragon Age where they simply stick to their own rules and make warriors unique not by copying mage skills but by something new and exiting. And last of all, I'd like to spend a lot more time with companions like Morrigan, Leliana, Alistair, the Iron Bull, Cullen, my sweet Josephine and Varric, because they are the heart of Dragon Age and turn it into a wonderful experience despite all the ranting above.
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