Revisiting Dragon Age

A Look Back Before Dragon Age: Inquisition

It’s been three and a half years since Bioware released the last major entry in the Dragon Age series. In video game sequel time, that’s about a million years ago. An entire new generation of consoles has been released since Dragon Age 2. Three Assassin’s Creeds and four Calls of Duty were released since Dragon Age 2. Dragon Age: Inquisition is coming next week. I think it’s time for a refresher on Dragon Age, and whether or not we should be excited for Inquisition.

Dragon Age: Origins was the first major game in the series. After Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect, Origins felt like a return to form for Bioware fans like me, who remember Baldur’s Gate and their older Infinity engine games fondly. Where Infinity engine games were Dungeons & Dragons based, Dragon Age was an entirely original fantasy setting and system. What Bioware brought back with Origins was diverse backgrounds and character selections: different races, classes, entirely different prologue chapters based on those combinations. On PC, it also brought back a more tactical combat system. You could take the camera into an overhead perspective and position your characters to block melee enemies or flank them. It wasn’t strictly turn-based, but almost every ability had a cooldown time. The story was a typical fantasy epic of good versus evil but it also included some civil intrigue. A lot of attention to world-building was given in Origins, and there was a massive amount of text codex entries to flesh out the land of Thedas.

On a whole, I was a huge fan of Dragon Age: Origins. In fact, it was the first proper Bioware RPG I ever finished besides Mass Effect. Beating Dragon Age: Origins felt like a spiritual victory to me. I had played bits and pieces of all of the previous Bioware games, but Dragon Age: Origins pulled me in with a new fantasy world and traditional RPG combat. In the old Infinity engine titles, I would get sidetracked or I’d hit a difficulty wall at about the 10 hour mark, and I’d play something else. Dragon Age: Origins held my attention for the whole 40+ hours. “I can finish a proper Bioware RPG,” I thought to myself. I can do what millions of others have already figured out, but that’s beside the point. I’ve really enjoyed playing those RPGs in the past, and this was the first one I saw through to completion. It felt like a milestone for me and Bioware.

By this time, Bioware was deep into development on Dragon Age 2. Dragon Age 2? Yes, a proper numbered sequel to a game with a relatively dumb title. I mean, Dragon Age isn’t exactly descriptive, and “Origins” is usually tacked on to the prequel, not the first entry. But regardless, we were going to get Dragon Age 2, and it’s going to be a smaller, more focused game than the last! Wait, what? Instead of going for bigger and more, as most sequels, numbered sequels, do, Dragon Age 2 was promising a tighter focus and more compact experience focused on a single character and a single city over the span of several years.

I’m going to be honest here: I think Dragon Age 2 is an awful game. Rather than a diverse selection of backgrounds, you could play a human male or female, warrior, rogue, or mage. Dragon Age 2’s Hawke was a fantasy equivalent of Mass Effect’s Shepard. Like Shepard, Hawke is fully voiced, which is an improvement over Origins’ near silent protagonists. The combat in Dragon Age 2 was also punched up a bit to be more action-y and look less like characters waiting for their turn to swing at you. Those are the almost good things about the game.

The bad parts about it can be measured by what it doesn’t have compared to Dragon Age: Origins. The top-down tactical perspective is gone. That’s okay, because tactical battles are also gone. Enemies frequently warp into combat from thin air, making any kind of positioning irrelevant. Battles became slogs that made me only wish they would end sooner. These battles don’t take place in diverse locations anymore either. Nevermind the limited scope of the game, where you spend most of your time in a single city that doesn’t significantly change over the years, but areas of the game are frequently reused and passed off as entirely different locations. You’ll get very familiar with a particular cave structure. Anytime you go to a cave, it’s the same map, but with different doors blocked off. You can see the rest of the map in the minimap, but you can’t get there. You can see where the doors should be, but there’s just a giant stone block. The companion characters ranged from uninteresting to outright unlikeable. The story is on a clear rail, with no meaningful choices to be made. Dragon Age 2 is the definition of a sequel that was rushed out of the door to capitalize on the successes of Dragon Age: Origins and the popularity of Mass Effect.

Where does this leave Dragon Age: Inquisition? I won’t speculate on the content or how Inquistion looks. However, we can look at the previous games. Origins was a fantastic roleplaying game. Dragon Age 2 was a mess that didn't come close to living up to expectations. Since Dragon Age 2, Bioware has released the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Mass Effect 3. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that both of those have been divisive games, and neither of them have been unqualified masterpieces. There’s still a massive amount of Dragon Age materials that aren’t Origins or Dragon Age 2, including the Awakenings expansion for Origins, mountains of DLC for both games, mobile games, comic books, a web video series (featuring Felicia Day), and five novels, among other Dragon Age media. If you want to immerse yourself in the Dragon Age world, there are plenty of ways to do it. It's a deep, rich world with a lot of interesting characters and stories, but the mainstream games are one for two in terms of being worth playing. In the meantime, I would hold off on making any pre-release purchases on Inquisition until you can play it for yourself.

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POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014
 

Titanfall

[Titanfall, Respawn Entertainment, Electronic Arts, 2014]

Can it save the Xbox One?

Microsoft is banking on Titanfall, big time. This is the first truly fresh release on their new flagship console with expectations that couldn't be higher. Forza 5, Call of Duty, and Assassin's Creed are all either ports from the 360 versions and/or extensions of existing series. The next Halo won't be out until Christmas and Gears of War is at least two years out. The Xbox One has been lagging in sales compared to the PS4 of late and the kids at Bill Gates' house are REALLY hoping this game turns things around. It may not be the complete game-changer that Microsoft is looking for, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. 

What it gets right, it gets very right!

This game is REALLY fun. Don't get me wrong. I've been completely addicted to it despite some drawbacks. The gameplay is totally new, and that's tough to do in today's world of a plethora of developers and distribution companies. Everybody is looking for the next big thing...and Microsoft found it. The standard FPS portion is a bit like Call of Duty mixed with Halo and given a healthy dose of steroids. Your character's ability to wall-walk combined with his or her mini-jetpack help create entirely ways to move around the map. Add to that the Titans and this is clearly different from anything that has come before it. 

For the uninitiated, Titanfall is a first-person shooter that takes place in the future. The IMC is the government entity being challenged by rebels called the Militia. First, you play through the campaign from the side of the IMC. There are nine maps. Once you've finished those, you switch and play the same nine maps from the Militia side. The only real difference between the "campaign" and "classic" multiplayer game types are voiceovers that precede each mission and some short cutscenes. As an IMC pilot, you are fighting for Vice Admiral Graves. He's your standard military man looking to put down the rebellion whose control is taken over early on in the game by former IMC mutineer James MacAllen. He and Graves used to fight side-by-side before he went rogue. There really wasn't much to the story, to be honest. That's pretty much it. They had little bylines for each map, like taking down a fuel depot or destroying a spaceship while it was in dock, but the gist of the plot line can be summed up in a few sentences.

Gameplay

The best part of Titanfall is easy to identify...it's the gameplay. Movement is like a combination of parkour with jetpacks. You can run on walls, jump off, land and run on opposing walls, then fly through the air using your booster pack to get 30-40 feet up in the air. It's an entirely new type of mechanic unlike anything I've ever played before. Then there are the Titans... 

There are three types: the Atlas being a middle-of-the-road mech, the Stryder that is more nimble but can take less damage, and the Ogre that serves as a tank with massive protection. Every three minutes you are blessed from above with one of these giant killing machines, literally. The are deployed from space and come falling down from the sky, thus the game's name. You can climb into the huge robot and take personal control or choose "follow" or "guard" mode where AI takes over for the Titan and it will either follow and protect you or engage the enemy on its own, garnering you substantial XP as long as it survives. Personally, I've played about half the game each way. Sometimes I'm on a hot streak with my pilot and I just let my Titan wander off on its own to kill at will. Other times I prefer to climb in and put my personal touch on the giant's attacks. 

There are some missing components

My main complaint with Titanfall is the lack of a single player campaign. I guess I'm stuck expecting the standard format like Call of Duty and Mass Effect 3 where there are both single player campaign and multiplayer choices for the gamer. Here, there's not much difference between the two except for the voiceovers before you start a mission. The voiceovers could have used a little help from Bioware because they leave a lot to be desired. They aren't terrible, but they aren't as good as they should be, especially considering the relatively small number required for the so-called "campaign" mode. 

Not only that, but your success or failure in a mission has no bearing on the outcome of the game. Win or lose the match, the game continues on with the missions as if you were successful. I guess that taking into account the fact that the whole campaign is just a modified multiplayer game this makes sense because it could take a while to finish the campaign if you were dependent upon your teammates' abilities to clear a level, but it draws away from the sense of accomplishment you get when normally finishing a level.

Break it on down!

Despite my complaints, this really is a treat to play. I tend to lean toward story-driven games so the bare bones campaign left me feeling somewhat empty, but the fantastic mechanics and graphics more than make up for it. I hope that this, like many series before it, grow into a full-fledged, multiple-game epic in the same vein as Halo or Metal Gear. I absolutely love playing it. I was just looking for a bit more, to be honest. Maybe all of the hype and buildup led me to believe this would be the next Gears (or God) of War. It certainly has the potential to become everything those games are and more, but it needs a bigger, better backstory. One of the reasons Halo has been so successful is the completeness of the universe. I hope that Titanfall 2 builds on the skeleton of a plot that this game provides. It already has the gameplay down perfectly. Now it just needs a universe to inhabit. 

The Math

Objective Score: 8/10. It would've been a 9 if it just had even the most slightly serviceable story. 

Bonuses: +1 for the biggest improvement in unique and fluid gameplay mechanics I've seen since Nintendo went from a two-button layout to the six-button SNES controller.

Penalties: -1 for a nearly complete lack of plot. I almost would have preferred they simply leave out the Graves/MacAllen story and just include a few more multiplayer modes. 

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. Well worth your time and attention.