Dragon Age II: Cutting the RPG Down to Size
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My right hand yearns to reach out, right across the Atlantic ocean and into BioWare's offices, seize Ray Muzyka's larynx and give him the throttling he deserves for steaming all the substance out of the traditional role-playing game. But my left hand wants to stretch the other way, across Asia and the Pacific into the same office, and pat the man on the back for his unsentimental boiling-down of this singularly bloated genre.
Dragon Age II is far from the best RPG I've ever played, but it may be the RPG I've found hardest to put down, and that's largely because it doesn't mess about. Hinging on a single character and a single city, BioWare's latest is a far more focussed game than fans of the developer's work will be used to. Genre tropes have been stripped back or elided: there's very little world exploration, only the main character has a full wardrobe, dialogue trees have been denuded, and time unfolds in edited bursts dictated by the Chantry interrogation sequence that serves as frame narrative.
Dragon Age II's pared-away design is the product both of ingenuity and obligation. BioWare spent close to eight years on Dragon Age: Origins, but knocked out the sequel within two to capitalise on the first game's unexpected popularity. Some developers would have folded under the pressure, but the Dragon Age team exploited it, using time constraints as an excuse to trim their game's fat - with occasionally brilliant results.
