Too Much of a Good Thing

Over the long weekend, I took CRPG-playing way too far by spending at least 30 hours on four separate CRPGs--and I have almost nothing (blog-wise) to show for it.

The first game was, of course, Skyrim. I've taken a hit on some discussion boards for praising this game, but honestly, the only reason I can think not to like it is that you deliberately want to be contrary. Sure, there are things not to like about it, but to not like it as a whole? Do you like games at all?

Running into dragons keeps cramping my style, though. I get stocked up on potions to make a run at some dungeon, and on the way there I have to drink them all fighting a dragon.

       

The second was Dragon Age: Origins, and playing it has entirely been against my will. My wife, Irene, went and picked up Dragon Age II a few weeks ago, but she insisted on replaying Origins, and all its expansions, this time as a female PC, so she could marry Alistair. Much of my weekend was a fight with Irene about playing Skyrim longer versus stopping it for Dragon Age. First-world problems, I know.

I've had a curious reaction to Dragon Age. On the surface, it seems to have all the things I like about CRPGs--an original game world with lots of lore, memorable NPCs, copious dialogue options, loads of side quests--and yet I find it curiously soulless. Few CRPGs are brilliantly original in their game worlds--most are derivative of Dungeons & Dragons in some way--but Dragon Age more than most feels somehow...assembled. It has that characterless feeling of "master-planned communities" in the mid-west and west, where the streets are all arranged in a grid and there's a strip mall at every major intersection.

It's interesting to compare the two modern games in respect to their approaches to role-playing. In Dragon Age (like most Interplay and Bioware titles), role-playing is almost entirely through dialogue. You decide who you are and you speak accordingly. Someone says something and you get maybe five choices:

1. The "good" option
2. A slightly lamer good option
3. The selfishly-evil option
4. The psychotically-evil option
5. Something to kill the dialogue in case you hate dialogue

    

Sometimes there are fewer, but they basically boil down to good, selfish, bad.

    

Thus:

A young girl approaches, crying. "I've lost Mr. Snuffles!" she wails. "If you can find him, I'll give you these five shiny pieces I found in my da's desk!"

• "I'll do it! And don't worry about the gold. Use that to buy more bread for your family." [Morrigan disapproves]
• "I'll see if I can get to it."
• "Sure, I'll find Mr. Snuffles. But why don't you go home and see if you can find some more shiny pieces first?"
• "I'll take those 'shiny pieces' off your corpse!"
• "Go away, kid."

Again, this is normal in a lot of games from these developers and publishers, but it just feels so much more formulaic in Dragon Age. While I generally like dialogue, I agree that basing role-playing and quests around it forces you along a limited selection of paths. Dragon Age way overdoes it both the dialogue and romances for my tastes, anyway. The fact that I like both doesn't mean I want to spend 20 minutes reassuring Leliana that she's good in the sack.

In Skyrim, on the other hand, role-playing is based on how you interact with the game world--on what you do rather than what you say. The dialogue options, though better than in Oblivion, can't hold a candle to Dragon Age. More than once, indeed, I've found myself forced into accepting quests because I had no dialogue option to tell the quest-giver to sod off. In one city, a knight asked me to accompany him into a haunted house and started me on a path where the only option to get the quest off my quest board was to beat a helpless priest to death with a rusty mace.

I care more about clearing my "to do" list than I do about role-playing!

    

But what happens in between the dialogue in Skyrim is priceless. In Dragon Age, no matter how you role-play, combat and exploration go the same ways. You fight the same enemies in the same places for the same results, and all that matters is your overall motivation. Skyrim offers essentially limitless possibilities in combat and exploration. I'm just outside a bandit chief's room and I need to get a key off him. I could:

• Snipe him with a poisoned-soaked arrow
• Sneak up behind him and try to slit his throat
• Sneak up behind him and pickpocket the key
• Use an invisibility potion to walk up next to him and then let him have it with lightning blasts from both hands
• Summon a wave of skeletons
• Send a follower to take care of him
• Lead him outside and use a "shout" to send him spinning off a nearby cliff, then take the key from his corpse
• Lead him to the nearest guard outpost and let them deal with him
• Get him to chase me into a room full of his bandit friends, then use my "rage" scroll in the room, causing everyone to attack each other

The only way they could make it better is if I could talk to the bandit chief before attacking him, then try to persuade or bribe him for the key. Unfortunately, the game features two types of NPCs: those that you can talk to, and those that come charging at you, swords drawn, the moment they see you. Dragon Age usually has dialogues even when combat is inevitable.

Aside from combat, role-playing in Skyrim manifests itself in doing things like running from animals rather than killing them, ambushing every wandering Thalmor patrol you find, happily stealing from jarls' palaces but not the homes of townsfolk, and of course choosing to specialize in certain skills. The game doesn't generally acknowledge any of this, so you're essentially role-playing for yourself, which I guess some people find lame.

If you're curious about the third and fourth games I was spending time on, well, they're the ones this blog is supposed to be about. If you haven't been following, last Wednesday, I decided I couldn't get any further in Wizard Wars because of copy protection issues, only to have Skirie immediately find the information I needed. I had done a GIMLET and everything. So I spent some more time trying to win that game, and I determined that knowing the ingredients that go into certain spells means nothing if you can't find these ingredients. I visited every territory several times, ending up no further than I was on Wednesday. I'll keep trying.

I need five items to progress, but a golden potion isn't one of them.

      

The last game was Wizardry V, and I confess I devoted the least time to it. I got hung up a bit on the character creation process, which I will detail in the next posting, and I barely got out of the gate.
              

Hint: bonus points of 28 are only possible in 1 out of every 3,426 rolls.

         

Travel has again made both Skyrim and Dragon Age impossible this week, so I should have some more stuff on Wizardry V and maybe Wizard Wars for the next few days.