Convergence
July 21, 2010
The recent announcement of Dragon Age 2 has gotten some spectacularly vehement reactions from fans of the series. “Is Dragon Age 2 the End of BioWare as a Traditional RPG Creator?” asked fan site Greywardens.com. “I beleive [sic] this can easily be considered the worst thing to happen in Dragon Age history, including the Blight,” lamented one poster on the BioWare message boards.
The majority of the complaints are decrying what fans see as a Mass Effect-like restructuring of the Dragon Age model — their particular concerns being the voice-acted player character, the dialog wheel, and the protagonist’s immutable name and race.
By now I’ve developed an affinity for both franchises, so I myself am not terribly worked up. More to the point, though, the ability to play as an elf is no more central to my Dragon Age experience than the shape of the dialog presentation is to my enjoyment of Mass Effect. The key difference, without which I will be upset, is the approach to morality.
In the Mass Effect system, your words and actions earn you “Paragon” or “Renegade” points, which approximately map to “good” and “evil” respectively. Unlike previous RPGs such as Fable (or BioWare’s own Knights of the Old Republic), these are not represented as opposing ends of a spectrum with one canceling out the other; instead, each score is tracked independently, meaning that no one will think less of the virtuous hero for socking the occasional TV reporter in the face.
Because of Mass Effect’s enormous scope, your Paragon and Renegade scores are an abstraction of how the galaxy perceives Shepard. You can earn Renegade points for everything from making sarcastic comments to setting people on fire, but their contribution to your total Renegade score will have a more potent effect than your handling of those individual situations. In essence, your actions and dialog choices reveal what sort of person Shepard might be, and the game extrapolates from there to fill out the rest of her personality.
There are some unpleasant side effects to this approach, however. Most obviously, the impacts of otherwise ambiguous moral choices are diluted when there is invisible arbiter judging your actions. Late in the game there is a mission where Shepard is effectively forced to choose between brainwashing and murder. It’s presented as an agonizing dilemma, but in retrospect it’s not; the game doles out Paragon points for the former and Renegade for the latter, clearing up any confusion about which path was the “righteous” one.
Another issue is that because some dialog options and missions are only available for characters with a high Paragon or Renegade score, it is preferable from a gameplay perspective to maximize one score instead of balancing both. And since the relevant dialog choices are mapped to particular spots on the wheel, it’s easy to short-circuit your roleplaying experience by clicking in the same spot during every conversation.
Dragon Age neatly sidesteps these issues by eschewing moral absolutism. Your decisions are only given weight by the approval or disapproval of others, and you can only predict those by understanding their backgrounds, motives, and personalities. There is no general consensus on whether your character is a good or bad person; you must earn your reputation separately with everyone you meet. It is possible, and even likely, that your actions will make you a pariah when judged by one moral code and a hero when judged by another.
I don’t mean to suggest that Dragon Age 2 ought to use this exact system, or that Mass Effect 3 ought to adopt it — certainly every approach comes with its own set of issues. But for me, the messy case-by-case morality is what makes roleplaying in Dragon Age interesting. It feels more dynamic, and more effectively represents shades of gray. As long as they can maintain that I’m happy to trust BioWare with whatever alchemy they’re planning.
6 comments
I totally agree; when I compare the two, it’s kind of a drag how ME makes you keep to the path in order to be a renegade down the line. I found myself being a dick to characters that my Shepard “liked” just because I knew I’d need the points to talk down two pissed off crew members later on.
What’s interesting is that by rocking the extreme red (or blue) options, many times Shepard actually winds up avoiding having to make a choice. So, instead of having real consequences, she kept everyone happy. Which seems odd… that the extreme renegade option can get you through with everyone happy, so, basically – Shepard is a dick to everyone in order to get the ability to please everyone.
Whereas in Dragon Age, you just gotta make choices, and people die and leave the party, and it’s just gonna happen no matter what. It’s almost like by choosing to include the “no man left behind” achievement, BioWare undercut how much drama they could force into the story. I hope that ME3 brings back the Sophie’s choices that were in ME1.
by Kirk Hamilton on July 21, 2010 at 1:47 am #
It’s been confirmed by the DA team that there is still no “morality-points” system, and that there will also be no top-option = good, bottom-option = bad structure to the wheel.
Some of the stuff coming out of the Grey Wardens fansite makes me think they’re gunning to be the DA version of No Mutants Allowed…
by kateri on July 21, 2010 at 4:11 am #
@kateri Grey Wardens is officially sanctioned by EA, isn’t it? Not sure just how much control they have over what the blog actually publishes, but yeah.
I find some of the articles interesting but have officially labelled them a pot-stirrer.
As for DA2, I’m cautiously optimistic. I like a lot of things about DA:O and quite a bit about Mass Effect. I hope it comes together like peanut butter and chocolate.
by James Bishop on July 21, 2010 at 10:58 am #
Kirk: That is a pretty bizarre circumstance, isn’t it? It only gets worse if you’re metagaming. I think that’s why I prefer to interpret the Paragon/Renegade thing as an abstraction, as I hinted above — taken literally, it’s too hard to swallow in some cases.
kateri: Thanks! That’s good to hear. I guess if I had done a little more research I could have saved myself a bit of writing!
James: I don’t know much about Greywardens.com, to be honest. I started hitting them up because I was sick of the breathless coverage on GameInformer and wanted someone to distill the facts for me.
by Dan Bruno on July 21, 2010 at 8:40 pm #
“@kateri Grey Wardens is officially sanctioned by EA, isn’t it? Not sure just how much control they have over what the blog actually publishes, but yeah.
I find some of the articles interesting but have officially labelled them a pot-stirrer.”
I write for the site and am now co-editor there. Although the blog is “supported” by EA/Bioware, they don’t have their hands in any of it to my knowledge. I don’t know specifically what that means either, as I’m not intimate with the details. However none of us work for either company and our material has never been censored or controlled by the company to my knowledge. From time to time they will link our stories from their pages or on their Facebook page (which they did recently for the upcoming Golems of Amgarrak release).
I only wish BioWare was a close partner with us and would clue us in and give us exclusives over other gaming sites, but we’re out there working the beat same as anyone else.
As for the site being a pot-stirrer – although there was some panic about DA2 by some of our staff who posted up articles (I actually wrote an article *supporting* BioWare, the new game and changes that appeared later after the one linked in this blog post) – we’re try to cover the news in a neutral fashion and our writers supply features looking at different aspects of the game as well as opinions on certain topics. I’d invite people to come back. We’re doing a lot of work and supply a lot of information about all things Dragon Age.
by Steve Garbacz on August 4, 2010 at 1:49 pm #
I admit to PERHAPS freaking out a little bit at first, but after thinking about it some more (and kateri talking me down, lol) I feel the same way as you.
One thing I was thinking about, in regards to the whole “not a REAL RPG thing,” is that we’re getting to a point where it’s just impossible to have a sprawling, epic RPG that is cinematic AND has lots of choices AND has stunning graphics AND full voice acting AND there’s a bunch of different races and origins AND and and… It’s just too much to feasibly put into one game. And I think DLC helps out a bit BUT what I would personally like to see is a more traditional Bioware RPG with the choices and the dialogue and the different characters but not the voice acting and with 2D graphics… on the DS =D
by Alex on August 4, 2010 at 6:49 pm #