Why Kotaku Hopes Dragon Age III is a Lot Like Dragon Age II
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Strong characters, female and otherwise.
What They Did Right: I spent a big chunk of DA2 wanting to punch Anders in the damn face. The man pissed me off. He was self-righteous, manipulative, and self-centered. Even after I, as Hawke, had earned his friendship and should have earned his trust, he still outright lied to me and kept secrets that shouldn't have been kept. I was furious with him.
And that is absolutely brilliant. I was thinking of Anders as a person with motivations and layers. That I was angry with him meant that as a character, I took him seriously. That I felt personally betrayed meant that I was invested in the game. DA2 also featured the best combination of women characters I've seen in a video game probably ever, bringing forward the three different kinds of strength from Isabela, Merrill, and Aveline. Isabela is the very rare character who positively demonstrates the difference between "sexy" and "sexual object," and Aveline's character arc had me cheering aloud more than once.
DA:O likewise had a number of memorable, reasonably nuanced companion characters in the game. Wynne, Leliana, Zevran, Alistair, Shale, Sten, and Morrigan each bring something vital to the tale, and to the Warden's life. However, with Hawke as a voiced protagonist, character relationships the platonic, the romantic, and the antagonistic take on a different kind of depth in the later game.
And on the note of romantic relationships, BioWare did something very right in DA2 by making all four romance options Fenris, Isabela, Merrill, and Anders comfortably available to either a male or a female Hawke. Indeed, there is a plausible case to be made that a male mage Hawke, in a relationship with Anders, is the closest-to-"canon" option the game offers, based on how much story he hears. At the very least, it's not an awkward or "lesser" choice, and that's a great precedent for games.
What Needs To Change: For companions that have such life to them, they sure are static. A game's worth of conversation can be "used up" too early in DA:O, leaving the Warden's camp eerily quiet during some of the more dramatic sections of the story. And in DA2, companions never move, in a literal sense. Triggered conversations show how NPC lives are delightfully intertwined (finding Varric at Merrill's house, or Isabela deep in conversation with Fenris) but otherwise they barely even blink. Varric always sits in the same chair, Fenris always stands in the same disheveled room, and Aveline always haunts her desk. They never sit; they never wander the halls of their own homes. In comparison with vivid party banter, while grouped, it's downright eerie.
The Dragon Age series could stand to take a cue from Mass Effect 3 here and give its companions the illusion of autonomy. Finding NPCs wandering around the Normandy, bustling through their tasks and conversing among themselves, was one of the little highlights of ME3 for me (best: Garrus on the bridge, hanging with Joker). If my future companions in Thedas could, say, stand at a slightly different position around the campfire of an evening, that would help.
