Hype Intensifies

I can't believe it has been a whole year since I've replayed the first two Dragon Age games. Dragon Age: Origins is still one of the greatest RPGs I've ever played and Dragon Age II... sigh. Yeah. And then there's Dragon Age II, which is an okay RPG that doesn't deserve to be called Dragon Age and isn't much more than a husk of a proper BioWare RPG. I didn't hate it or anything, but it turned the original Dragon Age experience into a console-friendly arcade experience for morons, with very little customization or role playing aspects and a bunch of companions I just can't give a shit about.

Dragon Age: Origins had some incredible, memorable party members like Morrigan, who was a bit unpredictable and antisocial and had this constant rivalry going on with her "mother" Flemeth, who just so happens to turn into a fucking dragon whenever she's in the mood. Yes, the game also had its boring, stereotypical dwarf and an elven assassin, who was basically a much gayer version of Shrek's puss in boots, but you could genuinely care about most of the companions and the banter between group members like Alistair and Morrigan was brilliant and often hilarious. Meanwhile, Dragon Age II had a shaven dwarf and a bunch of guys, who couldn't wait to betray you.

In fact, one of them nukes a whole bunch of people and starts a war, forcing you to exile or outright kill the fucker, while another one simply runs off at some point, so you can choose to go after her and sell her into slavery. This is not how you make the player care about their companions. And don't get me started on the dark, brooding, stereotypical white-haired anime elf named fucking Fenris, of all things. With tribal tattoos and a ridiculously oversized sword. What the fuck is this, Final Fantasy? Yes, I get it, the game was also released on consoles, you want to appeal to a younger audience, but that's no excuse to give your characters no fucking personality, even if they're walking cliches of themselves.

Don't get me wrong - it's interesting to put some assholes or traitors in the party and things can get boring when everything is happy-happy-joy-joy, but maybe add a few likable ones here and there, too? I couldn't care less if any of those guys died. I'd be sad to lose Wynne, Morrigan or Alistair from Origins. I'm aware that it's totally possible to get most of them permanenty killed, but I don't do shitty playthroughs like that.
Anyhow. Dragon Age II is still an okay game and you should totally play it if you've enjoyed Origins. It's just a lot more shallow than the first one, but it looks glorious and the combat is fun and fast-paced, so there is that.

And now the third game of the series, Dragon Age: Inquisition, is less than three weeks away and promises to fix so many things that it's hard to judge how much of that is just the usual PR-bullshit and how much if it is actually true.
People complained about how their decisions didn't really have any effect on the three "different" endings of Mass Effect 3, so BioWare promised over 40 unique and different endings for Dragon Age: Inquisition. They also promise over 200 hours of gameplay. And when something sounds too good to be true, well...

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. What I've seen so far looked absolutely incredible and I'm not seriously expecting those alleged 40+ endings to be vastly different from each other. So I won't really be disappointed when it turns out that the differences between endings will be very minor. I'm more concerned about the artificial stretching of content in those "200 hours" of gameplay. I don't give a shit about collections, hidden achievements and tons upon tons of secrets, especially if you are forced to waste lots of time with them to get a "good" ending.

Nobody gives a fuck about boring errands. "Good sir, it would help me tremendously if you handed these 20 leaflets to the people in town" or some shit. Dragon Age: Origins did it, it didn't make the game any more fun and spending hours trying to find every last asshole you were supposed to hand random shit to didn't feel fun or rewarding. Look, I get it, you have to add some useless filler here and there in order to give people the advertised amount of gameplay, but I'd much prefer if games were advertised as featuring only 30 or 50 hours of gameplay and you actually get to play the damn game in these hours, not hunt after stupid flowers and rare beetles and lost family signets and other useless crap nobody really cares about.

I also have mixed feelings about the Dragon Age Keep. You know, the website, which lets you create a starting savegame for Dragon Age: Inquisition, based on your actions and decisions in the predecessors. First of all, how fucking stupid is it that PC users can't just import their fucking savegames from previous games? I've been keeping my save files on my computer for years and years, anticipating the next game, fully expecting to carry over my heroes and decisions. Instead, I have to answer over 300 stupid questions on a website, telling the game what I did or didn't do in the first two games.

What adds insult to injury is how you can "import" your characters from the first two games into the keep, but it will only use the names and (attempt to) recreate the likenesses of your custom heroes and that's it. Nothing else carries over, you'll have to set it all by hand. And if you haven't uploaded your original characters to your BioWare account, then you won't be able to import them into Inquisition at all. You can choose from a bunch of premade heroes on the website to make up for it, but why not just allow people to upload their damn savegames or skip the stupid Dragon Age Keep completely and just let them move their savegames from one title to another, like in Mass Effect?

Probably fucking DRM. If you can only use a legit BioWare account and their website to move custom heroes from one game to the next, then you'll be forced to actually own all three games on the exact same BioWare account or it won't work. I have the games right here, but I have never bothered to upload any characters or data to the Origin cloud, so I had to download and reinstall Origins and Dragon Age II just to get all of that shit into the Dragon Age Keep. Not remotely fun or user friendly.

The biggest problem is how there is never enough context when the Keep asks you about your decisions in the previous games. For instance, I was faced with the following options for a particular NPC: Nathaniel is well and alive / Nathaniel is dead / Haven't encountered Nathaniel.
Great. How the fuck am I supposed to remember if I met some asshole named Nathaniel in a game I haven't touched for a year? I had to google that shit and read up on most of the questions on Wikipedia. It took me a half hour only to recreate a world state, where both my main character and Alistair had survived the final battle. Turns out this only works if you've boned Morrigan (which I did), but her child has to be "an old god" and not human. I don't fucking know what the child turned out to be, because I didn't play any of the DLC and never met Morrigan again, so I played it by ear, picked a human baby and doomed my main character. Took a lot of trial and error to figure out why the keep always declared him dead.

Besides, knowing exactly which actions in the first two games do or do not have an impact on the world of Dragon Age: Inquisition also brings a few spoilers. The website asked me whether my character in Dragon Age II was a goodie-goodie, a sarcastic prick or a nasty old cunt, so it's relatively safe to assume that he'll make another appearance and have whatever personality I picked for him on the website. I'm genuinely excited about his comeback and I hope I'll get to fight alongside him and my main character from the first game, but the surprise would have been so much nicer, had I experienced it ingame and not through a question in the keep.

The keep asks whether certain characters lived or died in your playthrough, telling me I'll see them again in Inquisition - if they lived. Heck, if I fucked up and got them killed in my game, I can just lie to the keep and say they totally lived and get them back, anyway. It's not the end of the world, but it spoils a few surprises, it allows me to cheat and it makes my original playthroughs a little meaningless. I know, I know, I still got to experience the story and I know what it's all about, but now I can change any detail I want with a click, no matter how hard I tried during my actual playthrough or how much I sucked.

I noticed something funny when I played through Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom the other day. There is this RPG cliche where your main character is the son of some legendary swordsman, who once saved the world and then died or vanished or some shit and you have to pick up the family sword and save the world all over again and yada, yada, yada. Phantasy Star III takes it to a whole new extreme by letting you play that world-saving swordsman, then letting you play as your own son. And his son after that, once that storyline is over. It's funny. My old man played and finished all of these games when I was a kid, then I started finishing them all when I got older, just like he used to and now my son is getting into these games some more. Three generations of world-saving sofa swordsmen.

We're re-watching all the old Star Trek movies right now and it's funny how, once you reach a certain age, everything is and always has been about being "too old for this shit", long before they came up with the first Expendables movie. Many of the pre-TNG movies are about how the Enterprise and her crew are outdated, they're taking a rather humorous look at how none of them are getting any younger and sometimes things get downright depressing and characters question themselves, wondering if they have grown too old for the whole ting, altogether. They sound a bit like my late grandmother.

In the 32 years I have known my grandmother, she always seemed obsessed with death. When I was a little kid she'd tell me that most of her time was up and how she was sad that she wouldn't be around to watch me get old enough to visit her with kids of my own. She totally lived long enough to experience exactly that, but talking to her you'd get the impression that she may just crumble to dust at any second and without warning. Heck, I remember blowing soap bubbles when I was a kid and she'd tell me that the bubbles die when they pop. "But they really live on when they pop, right? They just lose their form." - "No. They're all dead." Thanks, grandma!

Ugh. I'm not sure I want everything in life to be about death or about being too old for shit now. Columbo is dead, Leslie Nielsen is dead, a whole lot of actors and famous people I grew up liking have kicked the bucket and with a bit of luck I'll live to see Jackie Chan, John Cleese, Patrick Stewart and a ton of other cool people die in no particular order. Imagine you're 70+ years old and in a world where Han Solo, Captain Kirk, John McClane and Rambo are dead and the young generation won't know who the fuck they were. Wow, that's gotta suck!

Well, there might be funny aspects to becoming a modern old geezer, as well. Large-scale war is going out of fashion and for all we know, we might grow up to be Warcraft veterans, instead. After all, I fought in all three Warcrafts, long before most of you young, ignorant fucks ever heard about WoW. And cybersex is probably gonna be pretty fucking epic. I don't think I'll ever become too old for that kinda shit. Bring it on, future!

-Cat