Dragon Age III: What Must Be Done
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There is a strength to this way of storytelling, a strength which is intensified by the great depth of characters Bioware has created over the years. Yet somehow in Dragon Age 2 Bioware lost it way. Granted the adventures of a certain Commander named Sheppard had a mass effect on the sequel: gone was the tactical combat of it predecessor, in was a more console friendly combat system. The protagonist was given a voice. Yet somehow Bioware, in their attempt to Frankenstein the original Dragon Age and the highly successful Mass Effect together, forgot to put the heart of what made Mass Effect 2 a game of the decades to begin with.Here's to hoping that Bethesda has proven that millions and millions of copies can be sold without voicing your protagonist and stripping away depth from your character development, combat, and equipment systems. In this post-Skyrim world, anything less than an improved take on the Dragon Age: Origins formula just isn't going to cut it for me.
We all love Sheppard's story, but what drives Mass Effect are the characters. Whether you are learning about the Normandy's favorite engineering duo, Gabriella Daniels and Kenneth Donnelly, having a long conversation to Thane, or just pondering wtf to do with Legion, it is these various interactions that provide the constant heartbeat for the rest of the game. They make you care.
Dragon Age provided much the same, albeit around a campfire instead of a sleek stealth ship. Somehow these crucial interactions got lost in translation in the development of Dragon Age 2. Whether it was due to a hurried development schedule or simply forgetting what made their games so popular in the first place, they were all too absent and infrequent.
As such the first thing that must be done to restore the next Dragon Age to its proper place is the inclusion of these campfire conversations. The banter while walking around the oft overused environments of Kirkwall was good, but not so great as to omit a staple of Bioware storytelling from the game. I see no reason we can't have both.
