between the rock and the cold, cold sea

I average something less than a videogame a year. Nearly always an rpg: I play for the story, and the replay value on the ones I finish tends to be high.

Anyway. I've been playing DA: Origins since December 2009, hooked from word one. (I've lost count of playthroughs, so they must be many.) So when DA:2 came out last Friday, I was very much there.

I'm now about eighteen or nineteen hours of gameplay in, at the start of Act 3. And... I'm not sure how I feel about it, yet.

Spoilers follow, if you're bothered.

What Bioware is doing with the frame story, attempting to tell a game that progresses through time instead of space? It's ambitious, I grant.

But frame stories are one of those things that either work really well or fail hideously. The frame of Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History works because the protagonist of the frame is also discovering and reinterpreting the events of the main story. The frame of The Princess Bride film doesn't work very well because it's not only completely unnecessary, it adds nothing to the experience of the film.

A frame can either be a complete story in itself which adds something to the experience of the main narrative, or it can be an attempt to manipulate the audience which, best case scenario, doesn't actively detract from the experience of the main narrative.

DA:2's frame is too manipulative to work for me. And it sits awkwardly, because as the player-character it is your decisions which are being recounted by someone else in the frame, and from the beginning, you have the sense that it can't end well. If things can end well, then the local kinder gentler version of the inquisition shouldn't be that interested in you.

I really don't like feeling as though I'm being set up for a sequel from the word go. It makes me irritated. And I find the inquisition's interest in the player-character (in the frame, as it is constructed) to be a lazy way of increasing in-game tension. The events of the main narrative should, dammit, have enough tension to carry themselves. If they don't? People, you are not writing your game right.

So much for the frame. The effect of telling a game through time means jumps of a year or three years at a time between sections of gameplay and main-event narrative. This worked reasonably well for me the first couple of times, because of the nature of the player-character's situation and the state of local power-politics. The third time - folks, you do not just defeat an invasion and kill off the local ruler and then jump forward in time three years with a, "Nothing much happened until some time later," for lo, this is not logic. It is rather irritating unlogic, in fact, and disinclines me to trust your ability to pull off meaningful choices in the remainder of the narrative.

Irritating, sure. But I'll give Bioware a pass on time-compression issues, because I think this might be one of the first times anyone's tried to pull off a videogame rpg set over the course of a decade. They'll improve with practice. (The frame story, I carry a grudge over. Because it could be so much better. And if not less blatantly manipulative, at least most interactively manipulative.)

Functional things which irritate me: the subtitles are bloody tiny (I play on the Xbox. Possibly this is a platform-related issue) and the menu-screen is squint-worthy and awkward compared to the intuitive tabs of DA:O. This is seriously annoying: half the time I don't know what I'm doing during levelling up because I can't see the icons properly.

So much for my cavills. I quite like the new combat mechanics, although they took a bit of getting used to. The fact that the player-character's decisions have consequences over time is quite wonderful, and adds greatly to the experience. The dialogue wheel is a definite improvement over bland old lists of conversation options.

The best thing about the game? The other party members, the flirting, and the random snark. Merrill, voiced by Eva Myles, is particularly hilarious but also moving. Conversations involving the pirate Isabella frequently go places... Yes, those places.

(An exemplar: "Men are only good for one thing. Women are good for six.")

It is trivially easy to wander around Kirkwall and environs with not a single male party member, without even noticing it, which is noteworthy in and of itself - I went half an hour with Aveline-the-tank, Merrill-the-mage, Isabella-the-pirate, and the player-character before I realised. At which point I sat back and said to myself, "Self, this is pretty damn unprecedented." (It's possible in DA:O, but not entirely natural, since unless you play the player-character as a tank, you kind of need one of the boys for that. Unless you have the Golem DLC. (And it was possible in Mass Effect 1, but there you only dragged around a party of three.))

I'm not saying DA:2's treatment of gender is above reproach. But Bioware has a track record of making me feel as though I'm being sold to, not past. And so far, DA:2 is not only good about putting women in the party, it also puts women in positions of power in the environment, as well. It's nice to see Knight-Commander Meredith breaking the old glass ceiling.

I'm pretty sure I'll have further thoughts when I actually finish the game (whenever I have, you know, time again), but for now, I've said my piece.

I haven't played a videogame all the way through to the end since the second (disappointing) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

This is only partly because I haven't had the time to get seriously into a game, or the money to buy very many: I've played a number of games since then, Oblivion and the more recent Neverwinter Nights among them, and they didn't grab me. For me, a game is like a book: it has to have a good story and interesting characters before I'm willing to give it a significant amount of my life. And games take longer than books, so there's a lot more time for them to lose my interest.

Dragon Age: Origins... doesn't. I got it (and my Xbox) in a really quite unbelievable deal from Amazon just before Christmas, and I have spent upwards of a hundred hours playing it since then. (Consider: a fiction book takes me between one and ten hours to read, depending on length and complexity.) To start with, I wanted to find out what happened next - rather desperately, in fact.

But once I'd got mostly to the end in one play-through, I went back and started again. Several times, in fact. Because one of the most appealing things about DA:O is that there are six "origin stories" from which you can start - and depending on which one you choose, characters in the different areas of the game will react to you differently. And depending on the choices you make, characters in your party (party of up to nine - or ten, if you access the downloadable content, which I haven't, not having the internet connector thingy) will react to you differently.

Oh, it's subtle enough, I suppose, and wouldn't matter very much were it not for one of the other very appealing things about DA:O: it's solid. The world-building may contain quite obvious influences from a number of the fantasy magnum opuses of our time, but it mingles its influences with a certain amount of originality, and it goes all the way down. It hangs together remarkably well, and makes sense within its context. So does the story, and the little differences depending on where you start from add to the overall sense of it's-got-its-shit-together-ness.

And it's well-written. From the overall arc to the dialogue options to the random voice-acted snark between other party members that crops up in the background when you spend a lot of time running around without doing anything. The voice-acting is kind of made of win all around, actually: I'm rather fond of Claudia Black voicing the rather brutally pragmatic Witch of the Wilds, but they're all pretty excellent.

I've come across a couple of bugs when - very occasionally, but it's very frustrating when it does happen - conversations fail to trigger at the right moment, so you're left running around in circles until they do; or, more frustratingly, at a couple of moments the previous conversation will trigger instead of the one you're supposed to have. And, well. It manages to be rather egalitarian for a videogame, but there are moments when you realise, "Oh. Boys wrote this." (And the romance options appear to assume you are young, but at least they don't assume you're heterosexual. Small gains, I approve them.) I'm also not sure I really like the gore, but hey, it's amusingly over the top - sort of like a Quentin Tarantino movie, except a whole lot less self-absorbed, smug, and self-referential.

My favourite moment of dialogue occurs quite near the beginning of the game, though. You meet a new party member, and - if you choose the right dialogue options - one of your party members says, "More crazy? I thought we were all full up."

Snark. I approve.

Yeah, I like it a whole lot. Enough that I thought I'd tell the whole internets.