I’m sure that same switch will one day flip for Skyrim, but the scope has increased in so many directions that it’s proving to be incredibly resilient. More towns, more dungeons, more quests, dragons, shouts, housecarls, cooking, mining, smithing… The overwhelming sense of freedom and possibility persists as I close in on one hundred hours, and I still feel as though I could play the unmodded vanilla game forever.

So, yes: I like Skyrim a lot. With that said, though, I want to talk about one thing that’s been bothering me: Radiant Story.

The common wisdom with open-world games is that developer-created quests are all well and good, but the real story emerges from the interaction between the player’s choices and the world. That rings true to me, but most players still rely on quests over freeform exploration to push them along towards those moments. Bethesda realizes this, and has introduced a new system called Radiant Story that places potential quest markers over virtually everything in the game.

The general idea is that key elements of the story — the one told by the game, not by the player — can be generated procedurally to direct players to the most appropriate content. So, for example, the quests you pick up at the inn or guild hall can point you to a variety of locations and NPCs, and will prefer level-appropriate ones that you haven’t seen yet. From a purely mechanical perspective, this is a big win. Narratively, it’s not.

While I’ve always found the Elder Scrolls world compelling on a macro level — visit the loremasters at the Imperial Library, or read Kateri’s mind-bending series “The Metaphysics of Morrowind,” to see fans who appear to be playing a completely different game — I’ve never felt very strongly about the in-game stories. A few are great, most are serviceable, and some are dull. Many, though, are ultimately forgettable.

To its credit, Skyrim makes progress on this front by imbuing its characters with a bit more life. Thanks to improved voice acting and tighter writing, I could infer the motivations and foibles of Balgruuf and Ulfric in a way that I never could for, say, Baurus and Martin. (Even Lydia’s much-derided delivery of “I am sworn to carry your burdens” packs more personality into one line than some NPCs mustered over all of Oblivion.) No one’s going to confuse Skyrim for a Tolstoy novel, but it’s a welcome improvement — it feels like something more is at stake here than in past games.

Unfortunately, Radiant Story subverts that feeling; its biggest weakness is its tendency to make characters lifeless and interchangeable. One quest I got involved killing a random wild animal — in my case, a sabertooth tiger — that had invaded someone’s home. When I arrived, the tiger and I fought by the front door while a young girl watched from the living room, unfazed. (Her parents, presumably, were out at work.) Another quest tasked me with roughing up a random NPC in retaliation for some unspecified offense. As it happened, I had to pick a fight with Rorik of Rorikstead, a war veteran so revered that he had a town named after him, in the middle of an inn. Once the deed was done, no one acknowledged that anything had transpired between us — not even Rorik.

The implementation is crude in other ways as well. Because the people and places involved vary, quests are awkwardly presented in writing to circumvent the voice actors (or, worse, the relevant information simply appears in your quest log with no explanation). Also, some Radiant Story quests are repeatable — that is, you can keep going to the same quest-giver and keep getting new quests to kill animal x in location y, highlighting the system’s artificiality. Such a coarse approach obliterates even the meagerest attempt at telling a story.

Radiant Story frays Skyrim’s narrative threads exactly where they are already weakest — not only are the quests often nonsensical on their own (as with that indifferent girl and her neglectful parents), but they erode the progress made towards creating more distinguishable characters (as with Rorik’s obvious inappropriateness as a target). And by laying bare the mechanics of its quest construction, it threatens to flip that world-to-sandbox switch in my brain before I’ve fully absorbed what the game has to offer.

To be clear, this is not meant to be an indictment of procedural story as a concept. Skyrim is a first cut, and it’s easy to a imagine a more sophisticated system that addresses the issues I have. In fact, Bethesda designer Shane Liesegang has a great blog post on the potential for procedural story, and I’m confident that future iterations of Radiant Story will only improve. As implemented, though, its addition is doing more to dispel Skyrim’s magic for me than any number of quest bugs or repeated lines of dialog.

(Apologies for the consecutive non-post posts — Skyrim soon.)

Additionally, I’m going to try a new policy: comments will automatically close after three months. Hopefully that will cut down on the spam building up in the moderation queue.

Regular content to follow soon!

11/24/11 update: Thanks to those who pointed out that I had somehow broken all of the music and picture embeds. That should be fixed now! (And, while I was at it, I fixed a bunch of old typos and formatting errors.)

Within hours of my publishing that last post, Kotaku did their best to convince me that they were not, in fact, improving with articles like “Korean Pop Is Better with Chun-Li Cosplay,” “When the Street Isn’t Safe for Work,” and “It’s Ladies Night Here on Kotaku’s Cosplay Roundup.”

Meanwhile, my cynical tweet from January started making the rounds again for some reason. As it turns out, it was picked up by rather more Twitterers this time, including some heavy hitters like Notch. The ironic upshot of my attempt to praise Kotaku was putting some ten-month-old snark in front of half a million people. I was then in the odd position of trying to defend them against my past self while their new posts actively discredited my position.

Among the people who saw that old tweet was Joel Johnson, who I had championed as the man potentially responsible for pulling Kotaku out of the gutter. We had this conversation via Twitter (keep in mind that the first message is from January):

danbruno Why do girl gamers get so little respect? I DUNNO, KOTAKU. YOU TELL ME. http://is.gd/ydHoiy (article: http://is.gd/kaNqKn)
joeljohnson @danbruno I suspect it might be because of some male gamers’ lack of nuance.
danbruno @joeljohnson FWIW, that Tweet is from January and is getting RTed again (out of context) because of this: http://cruiseelroy.net/2011/11/the-ne…
joeljohnson @danbruno Got it. I appreciate the write-up. But I also am the person who came up with the “Fetish” column, so I’m the problem, too.
danbruno @joeljohnson Ah! The plot thickens! :-) Well, I hope it was food for thought, if nothing else.
joeljohnson @danbruno I enjoyed it and appreciated it. I’m simply of the mind that there is room for a lot more in gaming w/o losing the sex, etc.
danbruno @joeljohnson Agreed, but I think there’s a qualitative difference between e.g. one of Leigh’s Aberrant Gamer columns and a cosplay gallery.
joeljohnson @danbruno Just read Kotaku for the articles.

That last comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but there’s a kernel of truth there — because to some extent, this does resemble the Playboy model of pairing intellectual stimulation with the other kind. They’ve improved on the former, as I tried to highlight in my last post, but I now worry that I misinterpreted its significance and it won’t be at the expense of the latter. If so, that’s a shame, but it’s their choice to make.

Anyway, that’s probably enough for now. There are games that need critiquing!

However, Kotaku has historically posted a lot of bullshit too: sexy cosplay galleries, and gratuitous shots of booth babes, and vaguely game-related antics from porn stars, and the inexplicable “What Is Japan’s Fetish This Week?” series. Stuff that reinforces the stereotype that all gamers are maladjusted, oversexed teenage boys. Stuff that sets the tone for the more noxious comments, which too often represent those stereotypes most forcefully. Stuff that, as I called out back in January, makes their attempts at more serious coverage seem half-hearted and disingenuous.

To be clear, Kotaku is of course allowed to post whatever they want. Mostly I was just disappointed that, given the choice, that is what they decided on. They were clearly excluding a large part of their potential audience — you know, the people who might not stay for the incisive commentary if the article above the fold looks like this (picture likely NSFW). In short, it seemed they were missing the chance to leverage their popularity and move the community forward.

Now, it seems like they’re trying to do just that by injecting more social consciousness into their writing.

I’m not sure who to credit for this shift. One possibility is Joel Johnson, who migrated back to Kotaku from Gizmodo earlier this year and took over as Editorial Director. He’s written posts like this one questioning why there aren’t more gay protagonists in games, and this one in support of Gamespot reviewer Carolyn Petit, who is transgender. I don’t know if he’s responsible for killing off that fetish column, and for the apparent decrease in titillating nonsense posts, but I’ll give him credit anyway. And he followed that up by hiring Kirk Hamilton, who he rightly describes as “one of gaming['s] most exciting writers.”

Whether it’s Joel’s doing or not, the change of pace has been refreshing. Look at these posts from the past month: Kirk Hamilton wrote about the worrying fixation on using “bitch” as an insult in Batman: Arkham City. Denis Farr wrote a powerful and heart-rending guest editorial on the word “faggot” and its hidden personal implications. Leigh Alexander wrote about sexism, and how tired she is of having to write about sexism. Stephen Totilo wrote about Capcom responding to misogyny in the Street Fighter community — and then ran a guest editorial from Nicole Leffel about how their response wasn’t good enough.

Compared to the Kotaku of a year or two ago, this feels like a pretty staggering improvement. Naturally the commenters have not all taken to the new direction, and there are still some posts that don’t seem to either, but that will hopefully improve further with time. Meanwhile, the writers and editors deserve an enormous amount of credit for what they’re attempting here. As Kill Screen’s Chris Dahlen said on Twitter: “It’s rare to see a publication work as hard as Kotaku to drag its audience kicking and screaming into maturity.”

Kudos to everyone trying to make Kotaku, and the games community more generally, a better, more thoughtful and more inclusive place.

The hyper-streamlined action RPG mechanics are slick and well-crafted, but retread familiar ground. The early plot development is vague to the point of meaninglessness. The much-hyped dynamic narration feels gimmicky, making snide comments when you wander off the edge of a cliff or overuse the dodge button and occasionally reaching for pathos that the story doesn’t yet support. Ambivalent, I stopped playing after about two hours.

Then I began to notice that literally every other person I know who has played Bastion can’t stop talking about it. I went back to it, and in another hour everything had clicked. Not only that, but I somehow found myself retroactively pleased with the beginning of the game and couldn’t imagine wanting to change anything.

My delay in appreciating Bastion is wholly attributable to its deliberate pacing. The gameplay feels shallow because it is — until the weapons and enemies and spirits and idols start rolling in. Similarly, the plot is delivered via a gradual accumulation of detail; it takes a bit before there’s a large enough corpus to start connecting the dots. The narrator’s blend of world-weary crypticness and casual familiarity slowly coalesces into the game’s soul; by the end, even the loading screen factoids seem incongruously matter-of-fact.

My ex post facto enjoyment of the opening mirrors Bastion’s great narrative trick: recontextualizing your past actions in light of a major plot decision. Nathan Grayson, for Maximum PC:

For many reasons (narration, innovative usage of music, etc), Bastion is the type of story only a videogame can tell. However, the biggest of them – in my eyes – is that it can so effectively put me in two entirely different, largely opposite states of mind. Bastion can shift the ideals and motivations behind every action I perform, and – more importantly – it can make me believe in them.

Bastion accomplishes this, Grayson argues, through consistency and restraint, which seem like as good an explanation as any. It’s the narrative equivalent of the ground flying up to meet your step; any direction you choose feels like the right one.

(This site being what it is, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the music. It is, in a word, fantastic, and is unlike any game soundtrack I’ve heard. Composer Darren Korb calls the genre “acoustic frontier trip-hop,” but even that seems too narrow for the variety of styles he’s appropriated. I don’t have an angle for any deep-dive analysis — not yet, anyway — so for now I’ll just recommend that you listen to it. It’s my favorite game soundtrack of the year, and very listenable as a standalone work. More on it later, perhaps.)

From that perspective, Portal 2 was at a disadvantage from the start. Valve had already played their plot twist card, their novel mechanic card, and their Jonathan Coulton epilogue card; while continuing along those lines seemed like a safe bet, I wasn’t sure if bouncy gel and the like would be enough to support several more hours’ worth of test chambers. At the time I expressed this doubt by asking if Portal “needed” a sequel, though that framing seems odd in retrospect.

Regardless, my fears were unfounded. Portal 2 doesn’t — and, indeed, couldn’t — recreate the tremendous effect of its predecessor, but it’s still fresh and funny and stunningly executed. For more on that I refer you to Mitch Krpata, Kirk Hamilton, Michael Abbott, and Matthew Burns, all of whom wrote wonderfully thoughtful pieces while I was dicking around for two months.

So instead of rehashing those posts further, I thought I would talk a little about music and sound.

From Geoff Keighley’s must-read feature “The Final Hours of Portal 2”:

The first Portal was renowned for its musical ending, and in Portal 2 composer Mike Morasky wanted to up the ante with interactive music that would subtly evolve as players completed a puzzle. Run along orange speed paint and the music speeds up. Successfully jump across a ledge and the music shifts to let you know you’re doing a good job. “The puzzles are thanking you for playing with them,” is how Morasky puts it. “They love you.”

Interactive music isn’t new, of course, but I haven’t seen anything quite like Portal 2’s approach before. Sound and music are more thoroughly interwoven, and the distinction between the two is less meaningful.

Film editor and sound designer Walter Murch has a theory about categorizing sound. Using the spectrum of visible light as an analogy, he imagines an aural spectrum with “encoded” sound at one end and “embodied” sound at the other:

When you think about it, every language is basically a code, with its own particular set of rules. You have to understand those rules in order to break open the husk of language and extract whatever meaning is inside. Just because we usually do this automatically, without realizing it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It happens every time someone speaks to you: the meaning of what they are saying is encoded in the words they use. Sound, in this case, is acting simply as a vehicle with which to deliver the code.

Music, however, is completely different: it is sound experienced directly, without any code intervening between you and it. Naked. Whatever meaning there is in a piece of music is ‘embodied’ in the sound itself. This is why music is sometimes called the Universal Language.

What lies between these outer limits? Just as every audible sound falls somewhere between the lower and upper limits of 20 and 20,000 cycles, so all sounds will be found somewhere on this conceptual spectrum from speech to music.

Most sound effects, for instance, fall mid-way: like ‘sound-centaurs,’ they are half language, half music. Since a sound effect usually refers to something specific – the steam engine of a train, the knocking at a door, the chirping of birds, the firing of a gun – it is not as ‘pure’ a sound as music. But on the other hand, the language of sound effects, if I may call it that, is more universally and immediately understood than any spoken language.

What Portal 2 does, I think, is push sound effects and music towards each other so that they meet somewhere in the orange on Murch’s spectrum.

Let’s listen:

(You can hear this without the ambient natural sounds on the soundtrack as “The Future Begins With You,” but I recorded it, and the others below, in game for context.)

This piece has what I would call a primitive electronic sound: simple waveforms are spread into octaves-wide arpeggios, with a sparse arrangement and raw timbre. In this way, the music is more effective as sound qua sound than as a composition: its harsh, antiseptic quality reflects Aperture Science’s ethos, and the erratic buzz of the synthesizers evokes the facility’s disrepair after years of neglect. In other words, it leans towards the violet or “encoded” end of the spectrum even though it’s ostensibly musical.

Many sound effects in Portal 2 exhibit the opposite behavior. Here’s a laser, or “Thermal Discouragement Beam,” connecting with its target (most audible at 0:13):

And this is the sound of soaring through the air after bouncing on an “Aerial Faith Plate” (at 0:09):

(These are “Triple Laser Phase” and “15 Acres of Broken Glass,” respectively, on the soundtrack.)

Both of these “sound effects” are, I think, better understood as musical events. They slot too perfectly into the already-playing song when they’re triggered, and they don’t make sense as diagetic sounds that Chell would hear anyway. (Soaring through the air doesn’t actually make a noise, after all.) These sounds, then, lean towards the red or “embodied” end of the spectrum.

There are more early examples of this, but let’s move a little further in. Here’s a short sample of a theme that plays just after the big fall, when you begin the 1950s-style test chambers with Cave Johnson:

We’re back to featuring arpeggios, as with “The Future Starts With You” above, but the effect here is quite different. This music is much “redder” — the instrumentation and the arrangement allow us to immediately and decisively identify it as musical, and we aren’t caught up in deciphering an encoded message.

As it turns out, it also provides the harmonic basis for the music in the next set of puzzles.

Here’s a snip from the first repulsion gel test chamber. Beginning at 0:13, you can hear a floaty high-pitched arpeggio play each time Chell bounces:

And here, in the first propulsion gel test chamber, you can hear a tremolo effect as she sloshes along starting at 0:04:

Here sound and music are so intertwined that I don’t think they’re meaningfully distinct on Murch’s spectrum; they are only differentiable insofar as some events are triggered by the player and some are not. It’s an unusually unified sound design that prevents the music from fading into the background.

After playing Sword & Sworcery for twenty minutes, I scrapped that post.

Sword & Sworcery — more formally Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP — is a collaboration between musician Jim Guthrie, artist Craig “Superbrothers” Adams, and indie developer Capybara. Unusually, the idea for the game grew out of the music and art — Guthrie was inspired to compose some tunes after seeing Adams’s pixel art, and in an interview with Now Guthrie describes the eventual result as “an album you can ‘walk through.’” Naturally, that phrase alone was enough to get me excited.

The actual appeal of Sword & Sworcery, though, is more difficult to describe. Yes, the music and art are fantastic, and they complement each other well, but I got the sense that I was responding to something deeper. I might call it intentionality: everything in the game feels like it belongs, in a way that seems rare for video games with their piecemeal development and iterative design. It’s as though the entire project fell out of someone’s head in one piece and they shipped it, warts and all. The focus on aesthetics certainly helps with this cohesion, but I think there’s also some ineffable quality that I haven’t nailed down yet.

On top of that are a million small touches that make Sword & Sworcery something more than the sum of its parts. I love the inscrutable main menu. I love the on-screen directions like “tip tap?” and “believe.” I love that you can tap every bush in the game to make it rustle. I love that the girl (named Girl) stands up every time you pass by. I love that the writing invests phrases like “our woeful errand” with ominous power and then subverts them with lines like “groan not another fetch quest amirite?” I’m not really sure how or why all of this adds up, but it does; it has substance, and gives me what I’ve been missing from iOS games thus far.

That said, it’s worth mentioning that the gameplay itself is not particularly engaging. If I had to tie it to existing titles, I’d say Sword & Sworcery mixes together elements of Out of This World, Prince of Persia, The Legend of Zelda, Punch-Out!!, and, er, Twitter. At its core, though, it’s a simple adventure game where most puzzles (and battles) can be completed by just tapping a lot. There are a few LOOM-like moments of brilliance where you move mountains or call down lightning, but these are rare and unintuitive enough that the game must nudge you towards their solutions.

That kind of criticism seems unfairly reductive here, though; the aesthetics so thoroughly dominate that the shallowness of the game mechanics don’t hinder the experience. The developers’ precious descriptions of Sword & Sworcery — a “brave experiment in I/O cinema,” a “psychosocial audiovisual experiment” — seem to pick up on this as well; it’s the kind of game where you can spend half your time wandering, listening, and tapping the screen at random and still somehow enjoy yourself. Perhaps for some it only evokes the experience of playing a game without providing the real thing, but for me it was enough.

[...] if RPGs can’t evolve and can’t change — and I know people yell at me for daring to use the word “evolve” — but if they can’t change or experiment, then the genre itself is going to stagnate. Not only in terms of mechanics, like in rehashes and stuff, which I think we mostly manage to avoid, but the bigger problem is that if we don’t have RPGs that present a different type of experience, then we kind of encapsulate our potential audience to people who enjoy just that experience, and we drive others away.

In [and] of itself, that runs the risk of genre death — it becomes too referential or too reliant on people understanding that STR means strength which feeds into accuracy which results in damage done, and so on. You end up in a case where, the genre eventually burns out, or falls flat, or becomes too risky to take any risks in development, and so on and so forth, and that’s not something I want to see happen.

I mentioned in my last post that Dragon Age II’s changes have been polarizing, and I think this design philosophy is a big reason why. Rather than doubling down on making a traditional RPG, BioWare opted to aim for a broader market at the risk of alienating some of their more hardcore fans. It seems they accomplished both, though perhaps not in the proportions that they anticipated.

Given his goals, I think Laidlaw and his team accurately pinpointed what needed to change from Origins — the combat was indeed slow, the customization options were proliferative, and so on. Unfortunately, they were prone to overcorrecting these problems and lost some of Origins’s positive qualities through aggressive streamlining of its (perceived) negative ones.

One especially grating change, even for fans of the game like myself, is the frequent reuse of environments. Rather than creating unique dungeon layouts for each quest, Dragon Age II relies on the same handful of maps and varies them — or at least attempts to — by walling off certain sections, such that each trip to a dungeon reveals a particular subset of its tunnels.

Origins’ scope was so massive that it set expectations at an unsustainable level, so it’s easy to see the appeal of such a compromise. This was a poor implementation of it, though. For one, the scenery is actually too well-crafted; it’s very easy to notice when areas recur because of the layouts and landmarks are so memorable. (So ironically, as few environments as there are, it would have been better if the level designers did even less work.) Even then, the dungeon maps also look the same because they always reflect the entire area instead of the currently available subsection — an oversight that all but ensures players will notice the repetition.

The reused environments are emblematic of the worst of Dragon Age II’s streamlining: the changes whose damage to the game’s immersion outweighs their benefits to its accessibility and simplicity. Other select offenders: unusable items are literally labeled “junk,” and no longer have item descriptions or even artwork; enemy reinforcements inexplicably drop in from the sky during battles, or sometimes simply pop into existence; an entire class of quests consists of picking up a random item, immediately divining who it belongs to, and returning it for a meaningless thank you and a bit of gold.

One can imagine the arguments for these changes. Why waste time writing item descriptions for vendor trash? If we need multiple waves of enemies, what does it matter where they come from? It’s tedious to figure out whose doodad you picked up — why not just cut to the chase? As players, though, we don’t want to notice these things. When quests and items are abstracted to the point where they have no context, the fiction is that much more difficult to maintain. Or, put another way, Dragon Age II makes too little effort to hide its artifice and allows us to see behind the curtain.

All of that said, I think Dragon Age II hits nearer the mark than Origins with most of its changes, even when guilty of overcorrection. Battles were slow before, for example; now they’re a bit too fast, but still much improved. The cross-class combos and frequent adds make them more dynamic, and I still felt like I was playing tactically despite the flash and frenzy. This is one area where I thought the PR buzz quotes — “Think like a general, fight like a Spartan,” “Press a button and something awesome happens,” etc. — were sufficiently backed up by the gameplay.

Repetition aside, I’m also glad that the dungeons were smaller because it did wonders for the pacing of the story. It’s nice to have a lot of content, but Origins dragged sometimes, and not just in the infamous Fade sequence — I actually found many of the dungeons to be unnecessarily grueling. (It was the size of the dungeons, not their difficulty, that made me turn Origins down to Casual.) By contrast, nothing in Dragon Age II felt like it dragged; I thought most of the quests and dungeons were of appropriate length (with some that were too short), and the game itself, while still beefy, is shorter enough than Origins that it encourages more replayability.

Speaking of pacing, one of the more jarring changes in Dragon Age II was to the companion interactions. Origins offered a staggering number of conversation topics to pursue at the camp, but they were too front-loaded; it was possible to exhaust them with a dozen or more hours left in the game. There are some plot-related scenes that are meted out more gradually, but in general the exposition goes about as fast as the player wants it to.

Dragon Age II handles this by taking companion interactions out of the player’s control — companions are only available for conversation when they want to talk. This is, in theory at least, a more elegant solution. It ensures that they won’t run out of topics, and it makes the companions behave more like people than information receptacles. The three-act structure helps here, too; major character development is more believable when spread over a period of years, and the writers were smart about giving people room to grow during the gaps in the narrative.

The downside is that there is simply too little content now, both in terms of the number of “conversation quests” and the length of each one. I realize I was spoiled by Origins’s ridiculous scope, but I think Dragon Age II took this one a bit far. I was hoping for something closer to Mass Effect 2: fewer lines overall than Origins, but not so few that it felt sparse. (Certainly I didn’t hear about Garrus’ calibrations nearly as often as I heard about Merrill’s messy house.) It’s a testament to the quality of the writing that the characters are as strong as they are; I didn’t get as much time with them as I would have liked, but on the whole I found them more convincing than the Origins cast.

To summarize: the compromises in Dragon Age II are far more obvious than they were in Origins, and though it solved some of its predecessor’s problems it created new ones in the process. Meanwhile, the new design direction pulled it further afield from its roots, and they’ve scaled back my favorite part of the game. And yet, even with all of this, I still maintain that it’s better.

More on that soon.

Judging by the reactions I’ve read, I’m in the scant minority of players who not only enjoyed Dragon Age II but preferred it to the original. I thought I would try to explain why.

I wrote this at the end of 2009, after finishing Origins:

In most RPGs, I either fall in love with the narrative elements (the story, the characters, the plot) or the mechanical elements (the classes, the combat, the strategizing). Even in games where the two are particularly well-integrated, the dichotomy still exists in my head and I invariably like one better. I then alter my playing style to maximize my experience with one at the expense of the other.

Dragon Age: Origins fell squarely in the first camp for me. I enjoyed the combat, and eventually even got pretty good at it, but the lengthy dungeons and tactical tweaking took a lot of time and effort. By the fifteen-hour mark I had dropped the difficulty to Easy so I could get through the dungeons faster and spend more time with my favorite part of the game: chatting up my companions.

It would be easy (and true) to say that I preferred Dragon Age II because of it was more of what I liked and less of what I didn’t, but I think that undersells what BioWare has done here. I found Dragon Age II more narratively sophisticated than Origins, and closer to what I think the series ought to aim for.

I argued last year that moral ambiguity lies at the core of the Dragon Age series. When at its best, it asks the player to make decisions where all of the choices seem unacceptable, whether because they will anger friends, betray allies, break laws, or allow some unscrupulous group to go unpunished. Getting anything accomplished requires accepting shades of grey, the consolation being that if you couldn’t do the right thing, you could try to do the least wrong thing.

Origins mostly got this right, but the writers were too sometimes too soft; some tough decisions can be circumvented with a third option that has little or no downside. You can get the Circle of Magi to intercede in Redcliffe and save both Connor and Isolde, for example, or you can break the werewolves’ curse instead of choosing between their genocide and the elves’. These alternatives were satisfying to discover (and I took them when I could because I always play goody two-shoes characters), but they felt like copouts nonetheless.

Dragon Age II, by contrast, is not in the business of providing happy third options. From a metagame perspective, it often refuses to even provide a second option. Anders will destroy the Chantry regardless of Hawke’s assistance; Marethari will submit to the demon whether she is warned of Merrill’s plan or not; Leandra will always die by Quentin’s hand before she can be rescued; and, most surprisingly, Meredith and Orsino must both be slain whether Hawke sides with the templars or the mages. You can “choose” what to do in these situations, but your decision makes no functional difference — they are all unavoidable tragedies.

The lack of meaningful choices when compared to Origins is a sticking point for a lot of fans — not only in the above situations but in (for example) the predetermined race and backstory for your character. Those are fair complaints, but I also think that it made for stronger and more focused writing. In a forum thread where fans were lamenting Leandra’s inevitable death, lead writer David Gaider had this to say:

If you’re of the opinion that every story should have an outcome that the player can directly control—I’m not going to argue with you. Not everyone is going to like that sort of tale, and certainly I think there’s a limited amount of that you can really do inside a game. But this is the sort of thinking that led to the “Save Everyone” option in the Redcliffe Quest, which ultimately became the quest option that everyone thought was the only “real” solution even though it was the least dramatic. I don’t really intend to do that again, and I’m not about to re-write it simply because some people feel uncomfortable about it.

In other words, the ability to always make things turn out okay, or even to turn out how you want, does not fit with the series’ thematic underpinnings (compare Mass Effect 2). Dragon Age II is designed with that in mind. It was a polarizing change, but one I was very happy to see.

Following the same analysis, the best conflicts in the Dragon Age games are driven by characters who are unable or unwilling to see anything but absolutes. This is reflected throughout Origins on a small scale in bit players like Zathrian and Cullen and on a large scale in Loghain. These characters work because they are not mustache-twirling supervillains; they have believable and reasonable motivations — Zathrian’s hatred of the werewolves, Cullen’s fear of mages, Loghain’s devotion to Ferelden — which they refuse to compromise on, and which the player must reconcile with her own.

There is considerably less ambiguity with the Archdemon and the darkspawn, however, who are thoughtlessly hell-bent on destroying the world. (BioWare seems to have realized this, what with Awakening’s attempt to humanize them.) The Archdemon was functionally an antagonist, but narratively it was a structural conceit: at the beginning you vowed to kill it, you spent the bulk of the game preparing to kill it, and at the end you killed it. It was a vague epic backdrop for the more interesting stuff going on with the real characters.

Dragon Age II has no epic backdrop, the idea presumably being that it is all “interesting stuff” now. Instead, the story comes out piecemeal as the Hawkes find their place in Kirkwall and deal with new situations as they arise. This has also been polarizing — the pacing is inconsistent, and the companions’ motivations for palling around are necessarily weaker than in Origins. Despite its flawed execution, though, I thought the change was an improvement. It effectively turned Dragon Age II into a character drama, allowing the writers to foreground the personal interactions which I consider BioWare’s strength.

Dragon Age II has headstrong but misguided characters like Loghain in spades. The Arishok’s unwavering devotion to the Qun makes him harsh and unforgiving, but his disgust with Kirkwall’s depravity is not entirely unjustified. Meredith and Orsino make reasonable arguments about the mage-templar problem, but are so entrenched in their opinions that they are blind to compromise.

Hawke’s companions have their biases too: Anders is so fervently pro-mage that he resorts to terrorism, but still despises blood mages like Merrill; Sebastian is so pro-Chantry that he demands Anders’ execution, but sees Merrill as a target for proselytizing. This makes for more nuanced interpersonal conflicts than Origins, where you can count on Alistair, Wynne and Leliana’s approval (and Morrigan’s disapproval) for doing generic good deeds.

All of this is not to say that the story went off without a hitch. As mentioned earlier, the pacing needs work. Act 2 has the lion’s share of the character development, including the best companion quests, the consummation of the romances, and the most cohesive chunk of the main plot. By comparison Act 1 feels like a plodding extension of the prologue, a bit of filler while Hawke makes enough money for something interesting to happen. Most disappointingly, the endgame in Act 3 goes a bit off the rails; Orisino’s transformation and Meredith’s psychosis undermined what would have been a perfectly legitimate climax.

I can understand why Dragon Age II was polarizing. The changes ran deep, and it’s strange for a sequel to have a largely different set of strengths and weaknesses than its predecessor. For what BioWare is good at, though, I think they compromised in the right areas and ended up with a stronger title.

There’s more to come, including thoughts on the frame narrative and the actual gameplay, but for now I’m going to borrow the conclusion from Kris Ligman’s review at PopMatters and bow out:

I’m making this impassioned plea right now: we need more quality games. We need games like this that court a more cerebral sort of controversy and subtlety in equal doses. Perhaps eventually we’ll work up to “quality” being a general descriptor and not simply refer to the themes of its premium cable cousin, but for now, I’ll take poorer production values as a more than acceptable trade off if I get characters even half as dynamic as Anders or half as quirky as Merrill or Isabela. It’s been too long.