Sex, Potions, and Dragon Age II
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Tom Bissell, journalist and author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, described Dragon Age: Origins as "boner-killing." I didn't play the game but I know what he meant. It seemed to have been assembled like an encyclopedia, an arrangement of attributes, stats, skills, factions, proclivities, and magical fancy. A design that comprehensive and obscure can still prickle my fur, but there's something about high fantasy that sends my game phallus into the hammock. I don't mind delayed gratification, but it takes more than an old man in a robe talking about dwarves and mystic jewelry to keep me interested. So then, I really didn't want to play Dragon Age 2.
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As finely charted as its dialogue and story decisions are, Dragon Age 2 has a dull underbelly in its combat. BioWare is stingily holding onto a vision of combat taken from the dark days of PC game design, when a phrase like "damage per second" could be taken seriously. In the days of Baldur's Gate you watched your characters from above, delighting as they drained numbers from enemies in minutely varied ways. The crucial metric was time, and so combat proficiency became a kind of SAT test for wizards. You'd have to balance the hit points you could extract from enemies each second against the amount of stamina or mana you had, how much damage your characters could take, and how long you could postpone total depletion with healing items.
The great innovation in Dragon Age 2 is that you're no longer looking down on your characters but are now tethered to them with an over-the-shoulder camera angle. Which is to say BioWare has made a superficial change to presentation as a way of covering for the fact that the system is still the same basic design as it was all those years ago. As a number balancing game it's satisfying in the same way that Sudoku is, but it really shouldn't have a place in a story game about moral equivalencies. It's got an opaque but machine-like efficiency that contradicts the theme of moral grayness.
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Combat becomes more and more a process of pausing to save your comrades from their robotic stupidity. Healing them, replenishing their mana, running them out of crowds, or making sure they know to attack the ranged enemies before bothering with slow-moving heavies. The reward for winning is loot, which makes it possible to buy your comrades a little more leeway to behave like empty puppets and not be prematurely expelled from the fight. This is not role-playing, it's micromanaging digital scarecrows so you can get back to the interesting parts of the game. A braver design choice would have been to excise combat all together, or at least cut ties with a ten year-old mouse and keyboard model built for a chess-style abstraction of humans in conflict.
