Here Be Dragons Edition
I appreciate what BioWare is doing. Generally, I mean. What I’m saying is that those people are doing Good Work, capitalized and everything. But the one thing I find lacking from their experiences is a sense of player-driven character. Or, frankly, character at all. In Dragon Age they’ve gotten better about not merely offering you the Good Dialogue Choice, the Bad Dialogue Choice and the Greedy Dialogue Choice such that you can’t always readily identify which is Good and which is Bad (making them more genuine in terms of conversational decisions) plus there are other nuances like sarcasm, sincerity, dismissal, disapproval and other non-agenda items which can push the conversation forward. This is certainly a step in the right direction and quite a feat from a writer’s standpoint, but what I feel is left out is the character-based option.
Sure I could decide my character is really sarcastic and always choose the snarky retort but what happens when I’m in a situation that my character would treat differently? During the character creation portion I would have liked to have seen a section that allows me to define, for the sake of the game system, what I intend my personality to be. The BioWare Way, as it were, I think hopes that you’ll create your character from the choices you make with each dialogue tree but I find so often that the attributes I want to project on my avatars aren’t reflected in the choices because when I think about characters I imagine them with a level of nuance that isn’t possible with a handful of possible phrases.
It’s easier for me to think of BioWare games as super elaborate Choose Your Own Adventure novels than role-playing games. At least with games like Oblivion or even something along the lines of Portal where the silent or mostly silent protagonist is essentially a blank canvas I can ascribe certain traits to the character I’m inhabiting and nothing about the game works to dismantle that, but when presented with a dramatic choice in those games I have at most my extracurricular imaginings to provide the emotional context because events happen or not. In Dragon Age and its ilk I’m being given the illusion of influencing the event via my choices but these almost always boil down to some sort of binary decision. It is more compelling to me to imagine the sense of betrayal and outrage my character in Oblivion felt after finishing the Thieves Guild questline in Oblivion, even if it is never borne out in-game, than it is to be given the option to casually lie or impertinently gloat about my actions with the Urn of Sacred Ashes to the helpful scholar. I wanted to have my character be remorseful about it because I was remorseful about having done it. I chose to lie to him because it allowed me to maintain my illusion but in the effort to provide characterization BioWare stunts role-playing by accident.
I have another complaint about Dragon Age, but it’s less esoteric: The Codex system in the game is deeply flawed because you can’t scroll through the codex headings without marking each one as read as you scroll down but they don’t populate within the topic headings via any particular order so while you can tell which topics have unread entries, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate which entries are new once they begin scrolling off the pane which is quickly (I have like 250 Codex entries at the 40 hour mark). Factor in the way that not every Codex update adds a new entry as some merely update existing ones, and I quickly get to the point where I want on an intellectual level to stay abreast of the data being presented, in large part because it’s expertly presented and incredibly exhaustive world-building which I appreciate, but on a practical level I simply can’t. It’s one thing to spend a good 25% of your limited available gaming session time reading fictional history books, it’s another to double that amount because you spend twice as long searching through texts you’ve already read trying to figure out what’s changed.
In related real-life news, the baby has regressed from her earlier pattern of sleeping most of the way through the night and now wakes up most mornings around 04:00 and generally refuses to be put back to bed, insisting that she sleep only while being held. Since it feels particularly dangerous to try and hold her while I sleep myself, I’ve taken to using the Xbox as my means of staying awake until around 07:30 or so when my wife gets up for the day (often after having been up until two or three trying to get the baby to sleep in the first place). As such my console gaming time has been pretty significantly elevated from 6-8 hours per week to perhaps twice that, even if it means I’m doing so in a semi-fugue state of half consciousness and involves some careful and frequently uncomfortable contortions to hold the controller such that it doesn’t touch or disturb Sleeping Beauty. What suffers as a result is my handheld gaming time which I used to put in occasionally between various parental tasks or any stolen moment of downtime but now I’m so tired most of the time that when granted a ten minute reprieve I sort of sit slouched low in whatever chair is available and stare unfocused into the distance and make this sound at a low volume: “Uhhnnnnnhhh….”
The only time I do play DS or PSP is during my daily restroom break which means I play almost exactly 12 minutes a day. I got a little bored of New Super Mario Bros. so I decided to give something altogether different a try and I picked up Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and played through the first couple of missions. I think I detailed my struggles with the Ninja Gaiden reboot (up through Black and including Sigma) before but suffice to say that I liked the idea of the new game but the execution was broken as far as I’m concerned because—and I realize I risk having whatever tiny scrap of hardcore gamer cred I possessed stripped by saying so—games that are so difficult that they require the sort of practice you might devote to learning a new marketable skill defeat the point of gaming. There was something distastefully elitist about Ninja Gaiden that made me effectively boycott the sequel but I thought that a DS game might be different considering the perception of the DS market. It turns out the game is better than the console game(s) on which it’s drawing its inspiration and, like Resident Evil: Deadly Silence, it is impressive to consider what they were able to fit onto a DS cart. Still, though, the controls are kind of imprecise to the extent that I feel less like I’m playing it and more like I’m learning to sew by murdering some fabric with a knitting needle.
It basically involves drawing various lines across the enemies that appear on the screen which is supposed to represent sword slashes. In truth it’s a clever solution to the control problem for a console-style game on a handheld, but the execution on something like this would need to be so much more precise which, honestly, I think could be solved by simply slowing the game down. Maybe this is heresy but I think games that are fast because the processors they run on are fast sort of misses the point of game design which—call me crazy—should be about what’s fun. I know everyone flipped out about how fast Sonic was after years of ponderously paced NES games but to me that didn’t make Sonic fun it just made it a tech demo. Mimicking things flying by so fast that you can’t make them out is interesting I guess but as with real life, when things whiz by or when something happens too fast for you to really react, it’s not an experience people relate with the adjective “enjoyable.” I’d prefer to have Dragon Sword move slower, not turn-based slower but at least slow enough that you could make the sword swipes precise and have them matter in terms of things like placement, direction and technique. Flailing on the touchscreen with the stylus is fun for a short period of time, but all action-y games that use the stylus end up feeling distressingly similar which is why I lean toward games that at least offer the chance for me to play with the D-pad.