Dragon Age II: The Decline of the Classic RPG

This is certainly a topic that’s on the front of many minds, whether in disagreement or agreement, as Hooked Gamers editorializes on what they see as BioWare (and the industry) leaving classic RPGs behind.

None of this would be so much of an issue if BioWare lived up to their promises and actually provided two viable styles of playing the game. Everyone can sympathise with their decision to add real-time combat to the game and make it easier for new players to get into the game, in fact we support it. The more people you can get to play your game the better; cRPGs are notoriously hard to start off with so making things a bit easier for beginners is great. However, the issue arises when you change the very core of the game. The real time combat should in fact be harder to play. At the beginning of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, players were asked if they would like high or low player reflexes enabled, the slower being easier because players could adopt (a more cautious and thoughtful playstyle). This is the kind of option that should be given in Dragon Age 2. Instead the game only truly caters to the fast, button-mashing style.

Playing with these kinds of settings just isn’t right for the traditional pause-play style. People have argued that if you want that traditional experience then you can simply play on a harder game mode, but this does not solve it. The difficulty simply makes the game harder with modifiers such as friendly fire (in nightmare mode) tougher enemies and so on, but it is still played as an Action-RPG. While playing the demo, pausing the game to issue an attack on an enemy just felt completely ridiculous, as they would have already landed 3 attacks on you by the time you have done one. The only possible way to do it is to pause and unpause the game every half a second, therefore forcing players to simply mash buttons until the enemy is dead. Dragon Age 2 is a real-time Action-RPG, and so having the pause-play (that only really works with the slower pace of turn-based RPG’s) is just an unnecessary feature rather than another way to play through the game.

Like many other developers, BioWare have made their three main cRPG series into Action-RPGs with Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. There is no doubt that these will be great games, but the problem is that they have been sculpted to what will sell, rather than making the gaming experience that a number of players are struggling to find nowadays. The market has always been driven by sales, but nowadays the publishers and producers are sacrificing genres in order to make more money. As said previously, Dragon Age: Origins was a commercial success so there was no real need to change the game so dramatically. This declination is inextricably tied in to the popularity of consoles over PCs amongst today’s gamers. As gaming spreads to mass audiences, producers and publishers are lured by the money that comes along with it. In this case it seems that EA have encouraged BioWare to open up the game to a bigger audience, and in doing so have lost many aspects of the genre it once was.

Worse still, there are signs that the game has been rushed out to meet publisher demands. The graphics are not going to mesmerise anyone, in fact they don’t look any better compared to Origins, environments are fairly dull looking but worst of all is weak level design. The review in PC Games has said that the majority of Dragon Age 2 plays out very much like the demo, meaning a lot of copy-pasted and narrow paths – ugly. Narrow paths in an RPG is actually an oxymoron as the genre requires freedom and an open world and should not be bottle-necking its players. What this effect does however, is focus the game more towards combat as is the nature of an action-RPG. It’s quite understandable that all of these shortcomings have occurred as BioWare are making an effort to bring out all three of their big RPGs in one year. Given that Dragon Age 2 has only had a maximum of two years in development, many of us suspected that the game would fall short in some areas. This lack of an open world, combined with the simple combat means that the game slides even further from its origins.