Thursday, September 25, 2014

Dragon Age 2: Blackpowder Promises

Dragon Age 2 suffers from area reuse.  It's by far my biggest problem with the game.  Other parts of the game compound it.

I played through it some time ago as a brutal but compassionate two-dagger rogue.  After disliking Origins and avoiding Awakening, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying DA2.  They seem to have gotten better results by committing to one camera mode rather than splitting between two (Origins was third-person on console, isometric on PC; DA2 is just third-person).  I prefer small stories, and I'd rather be in DA2 making a buck than in DA:O saving the world.

And I'd prefer anything in DA2 to the Circle Tower part of DA:O, a long, mandatory sequence that involves abandoning the core gameplay in favor of walking around alone, triggering scripted stuff, and using this-quest-only abilities that are the same for every possible protagonist.  In a game where the player gets to make long-term decisions about how they want to play by determining their character, their equipment, or whatever else, leaving that behind is a mistake.

It's like the Mako in Mass Effect 1: in the first place not tied into the gameplay fundamentals that got the most design attention, and in the second discarding the flexibility of an otherwise-customizable experience.  Running into something like that on a replay is like hitting a brick wall of memories of hating it the first time and foreknowledge that it'll be at least as bad the second time.

Or from another direction, I remember reading an interview about some RTS where a level designer said that his supervisor would always warn him not to rely on core gameplay in the missions he was making for the single-player campaign, and I thought "so that's why the missions were so frustrating and restrictive."

Also, why do so many Dragon Age games have a name implying they're a starting point?  Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: Awakening.  Those both sound like they must be the first game in a series to me, and on top of that, they called the tabletop RPG adaptation Dragon Age: Set 1.  I guess we're lucky Dragon Age 3 isn't subtitled The Beginning (though maybe they're saving that for an expansion).


Lately I've been replaying Dragon Age 2.  Way back when, I started a second playthrough in which I made the protagonist a mage named Hypocrite Hawke, with the goal of taking the hardline Chantry policy every time a mage appeared.  This was something I had to consciously do, because the pro-Chantry ideas always seemed senselessly cruel to me.  Basically, the Chantry wants to imprison and/or lobotomize you if you can do magic, on the grounds that mages are dangerous and unpredictable.  But in both Dragon Age games I played, non-mages are dangerous and unpredictable too, with the exception of that highly predictable guy who betrays you at the start of DA:O.  (Non-mages are also equally able to summon allies from thin air to attack you.  There's no substantive difference between demons/corpses rising from the earth and armed people bursting out of otherwise impassable doors or dropping from otherwise inaccessible balconies.)

I've recently returned to the mage-hating saga of Hypocrite Hawke.  It's been long enough that I don't remember why I gave her that haircut.  (I do remember why she's wearing that silly-looking winter hat: for the stats.)  Checking for current missions, I discover Blackpowder Promises.

I happen to remember this one.  Fascist alien beefcakes have set up a military camp and/or ghetto in the city the game revolves around, Kirkwall.  They aren't explaining anything to anyone, but they have a secret mission and won't be leaving for a long time.  They also know how to make gunpowder, and a local merchant wants to buy the formula.  They refuse to deal with him, but he believes he can befriend them by doing them a favor.  His idea of a favor is the murder of a group of alien beefcake dissidents who hang out in a remote cave instead of being stoic Fascists.

Lucky thing I happen to remember all that setup, because here's all the in-game journal tells me:


When you get quests, they point you to different locations.  When I do quests, I do every available quest step in a particular location before moving on, even if they're different quests, so more detail in journal entries like this would be nice.  This isn't even some obscure sidequest; it's categorized as part of the "MAIN PLOT," which I assume means it's required for progression.  (Later it becomes important that you've had these particular dealings with alien beefcakes.)

The quest directs me to the Wounded Coast.  Check out this awesome location:


The little arrow with the field-of-view indicator is where I start when entering the location from the world map.  The downward double arrow is where I have to go.  The thick black up arrows are exits to the world map.  Why couldn't I start from the close one?  Just because, I guess.

You'll notice right away that it's a spaghetti map — organic shapes, but dominated by long linear paths nonetheless.  Very little of this geometry is important to the combat, although once in a while a ranged attacker will be on a raised path and you'll have to detour a bit to attack them in melee.  I already cleaned out this map anyway for an earlier mission where you kill large numbers of dogs and bandits as part of a plan to let your captain of the guard go on a danger-free patrol with the subordinate she wants to seduce.

The game starting me where it does and telling me to go where it tells me to go is how it delivers the great experience of holding down W for a while.  To liven that up, I'm also holding down the right mouse button, because default mouse behavior moves an interaction cursor, and only RMB mode lets you mouselook and move where you're looking, which you may be more accustomed to from playing any game at all.  This mouse behavior is a throwback to the original System Shock, and while you may remember it fondly, interfaces have come a long way in 20 years.

That's not all.  Every area in DA2 may contain important items or collectibles.  These items usually glitter a bit, but are easy to miss unless you hold down tab, which displays object labels.  Often, containers look the same as non-interactible objects.  When is a crate a crate, and when is it just set dressing?  Hold down tab to know for sure.

It is essential that you investigate as many containers as possible, because they contain a variety of important things.  Some have useful potions or money.  Some have inventory items, including one-of-a-kind set parts, and you only get the set bonus if you're wearing the full set, so miss just one and you're out of luck.  Some have companion upgrades in the form of enhancements for their armor, and again, these can each be found in one place and no other.  Miss just one, and you'll have only three-quarters of a companion's upgrades by the end of the game.  Some give codex entries and experience points.  Some contain unique crafting recipes, and some are crafting ingredients.

You can buy missed crafting ingredients in the DLC shop.  Um, I mean you can buy them in the shop that a piece of DLC adds.  Which is to say, you can buy them in the shop added by the DLC if you creat an Origin account and log in to Origin to play your single-player game.  As the game helpfully informs me, "when you log in, you're part of the community."  This is true.  I become part of the community of people that didn't want to log in.  Judging by the (ingame money) prices that missed ingredients go for, it's assumed that players won't miss crafting ingredients.  They cost as much as a top-quality primary weapon might, and there's an achievement for getting them all.

This is why I run through the entire width of this mess of a map holding down W, RMB, and tab.  I discover an elfroot I missed before and get 200 XP (out of about 17,000 needed to level) for collecting it.  (For some reason character XP is tracked semi-independently; generally characters earn experience at the same rate and level at the same time, but each is a little different based on some factor I don't know, so instead of conveniently upgrading your party together, their level-ups are staggered a bit.  Really it should just track Hawke's experience and adjust all other levels accordingly.  More complicated doesn't mean better.)  As I see it, these are wasted minutes on a loading screen where I have to pull the progress bar forward myself.

Games should never have collectibles if they don't have appropriate environments for them.  Collectibles are most prominent in platformers, where getting to places is the core gameplay and a lot of thought has gone (or should have gone) into making it varied and interesting.  You also see a lot of collectibles in open worlds, where there's (hopefully) enough exploration and enough stuff to do that it's natural to discover collectibles while doing other things, or discover other things while hunting collectibles, and in either case to get more gameplay out of navigating the environment than holding a keyboard chord for 200 seconds.  Putting collectibles in a limited environment is only going to force players to focus on how limited your environment is.


Just for comparison, here's a DA2 city neighborhood.  The only things you'd lose by doing all your area business in a single room where all the NPCs and interactable objects are collected for your convenience are walking time and a category of sidequests involving gangs at night.  The night gangs can be encountered when visiting certain districts at night (when all the shops are closed and the NPCs are gone, so don't even think about combining it with a shopping trip), but only if you go to the right node, and never all at once.  Look at that map and picture walking to every area, then leaving and coming back to do it again.  If you don't do it, you might miss essential items, and you'll definitely miss experience and cash.

What happens when I get to that sweet double arrow indicating my quest destination?  A loading screen, and then my party enters the same cave that a dozen other quests happen in.  The game doesn't admit that it's the same cave, because it's located in different places throughout the world, but it's identical except for scrambling which doors are real and which are impassable.  They look identical, by the way.  Even a door blocked by a featureless slab of stone might or might not open to the touch.  Hold down tab to know for sure, and hold down tab because there might be collectibles in here, even if you already scoured a different instance of this exact same cave for collectibles.  And by the way, the cave's geometry is pretty comparable to the Wounded Coast spaghetti pile outside.

Why make me go through the Wounded Coast to get here?  The game itself doesn't seem to know.  Some quests let you go straight to their locations from the world map, and others don't.  I've learned from playing games that there is nothing to be lost by skipping filler.  Let me do the fun stuff that I can meaningfully interact with.  If a game starts feeling like a chore, it's derelict in its duty as a game, which is to be entertainment.

After some cave navigation and held-down keys, I discover the renegade beefcakes.  They attack immediately, not giving me a chance to hear their side of the beefcake story.  This brings me to the primary gameplay, which is the combat.  It obviously got more time and care than the environments or the collectibles, and there's far more for the player to decide in combat than in dialogue.

The fight goes almost smoothly.  We tear up the first wave of beefcakes at ground level and run up the stairs to fight their leader.  I throw a tough fighter in front of Captain Beefcake to keep him busy and try to kill the rest of the waves as quickly as possible with assorted lightning storms.  Beefcake reinforcements appear just as spontaneously as demons summoned from the spirit world do in other fights, and are just as disruptive to my attempts to keep fragile Hypocrite Hawke out of enemy weapon reach.  The boss and my fighter drink healing potions at each other.

Near the end of the fight, sudden blasts of area lightning wreck my shit, taking out my whole party except for my weaker fighter.  Turns out the last wave had a beefcake mage in it, and I'd left him neglected on the ground level.  I run the fighter down and manage to finish him off, winning and allowing the other party members to get back up, though injured.  "That was all me," says the weaker fighter, with complete justification.

By comparison to the area reuse and abuse of collectibles, my complaints about the combat are minor and disputable.  I have no doubt that some people will read this and think "That's not a problem, you just suck."  (For the record, I'm playing on hard.  Nightmare is a bridge too far; I hear it adds friendly fire and enemy damage type immunities.)

The choices a player can make in combat involve positioning and movement, setting up automated party member behavior, equipment, item use, ability use, target selection, and party composition (you choose four party members from a roster of generally more than that).  But enemies have powers that take those choices away.  Knockback and knockdown are both fairly common, with prone characters having to slowly get up before they can do anything, and thrown characters far from where you want them to be.  Some enemies can draw party members closer, pulling vulnerable back-line rogues and mages into danger.  Stun leaves party members unable to do anything at all for a time, and many enemies have not just stun, but mass stun (e.g., dragon roars).  What is the point of playing a game where everyone you control is stunned and helpless and bathed in deadly purple fog or cyan radiation?  Give me something I can do.

The game also seems to expect the player to lean on trial and error to get through difficult fights.  You won't know the pattern or composition of waves in advance, and you might not even know beforehand what kind of enemy you're fighting, so if you want to choose your party members for maximum situational effectiveness, you'll have to fail at least once.

After the trek out of the cave and over to the nearer Wounded Coast world map exit point, Hypocrite Hawke returns to the merchant and the King of Beefcakes, and the latter explains that there's still no actual deal.  Implicitly threatened by all other parties, and not as violent or dangerous as any of them, the merchant gives Hypocrite 4 gold and storms off.  Four more quests like this and I'll have the money to buy an elfroot I must have missed during Act 1.