A (Wo)Man called Hawke

In this post I wanted to take you six years back in time, to a moment, when it was announced  that Dragon Age 2, sequel to the fan­tas­tic (if flawed) Dragon Age: Origins, was going to make a fun­da­men­tal change in its design phi­los­o­phy. DA:O had allowed its play­ers a great deal of free­dom in the char­ac­ter cre­ation process. Following in the foot­steps of ear­lier BioWare games like Baldur’s Gate and Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age allowed the player to wholly cus­tomize his or her char­ac­ter. While cre­at­ing the Warden (as the player char­ac­ter of DA:O is often called), the player chooses a race, class, and ori­gin story (approx­i­mately two for each race), designs the character’s phys­i­cal appear­ance, and gives the char­ac­ter a name. The Warden never speaks dur­ing the game (except for occa­sional grunts and order acknowl­edg­ments), although every other char­ac­ter in the game is fully-voiced. (The Warden is not a tra­di­tional Silent Protagonist, either, as the player chooses lines for the Warden to say. These lines are sim­ply not voiced.)

This design phi­los­o­phy stands in sharp con­trast to that of the Mass Effect fran­chise, another role­play­ing fran­chise devel­oped by BioWare at approx­i­mately the same time. In Mass Effect series, the player char­ac­ter is a human man or woman named Commander Shepard, and although Shepard’s phys­i­cal appear­ance, class, and (in a small way) ori­gin story is cus­tomiz­able, much more of Shepard’s char­ac­ter is deter­mined by the devel­op­ers at BioWare. Shepard is fully voiced and ani­mated just like any of the other char­ac­ters, although what, exactly, he or she says is up to the player.

The Catalyst 

Six years ago, BioWare announced that, for Dragon Age 2, they would be aban­don­ing the for­mat put forth in DA:O in favor of a more Mass Effect–like approach. In Dragon Age 2, the player is put in the role of Hawke, a fully-voiced human man or woman. All the details relat­ing to exactly how much con­trol the player will have over Hawke’s back­story or class was as of yet unknown, but the point was that, with­out a doubt, the num­ber of choices open to the player at the start of Dragon Age 2 would be sub­stan­tially smaller than the num­ber of choices avail­able at the start of DA:O.

This caused quite a fuss on the Internet, with gamers every­where often lament­ing what they per­ceived to be BioWare’s cruel, dic­ta­to­r­ial restric­tion of their free­dom, or com­plain­ing that they didn’t want Dragon Age to just turn into Mass Effect with swords. BioWare imme­di­ately felt com­pelled to defend their deci­sion, and jus­ti­fied the lack of char­ac­ter choices at the onset by stat­ing that there are more choices through­out the rest of the game to bal­ance it out. I imag­ine that if you go to any major gam­ing web­site, it will not be dif­fi­cult to find a thread on the forums argu­ing whether or not this was the right choice.

I’m going to go ahead and come down and state my opin­ion on the mat­ter: for Dragon Age 2, the move to a voiced, named char­ac­ter was absolutely, unequiv­o­cally, and with­out qual­i­fi­ca­tion, the right thing to do.

The Story of Paragon Aeducan

 

To jus­tify this claim, I want to talk a lit­tle bit about the first Dragon Age, using exam­ples from the life of my first com­pleted Warden, stal­wart dwar­ven war­rior Dain Aeducan. Dragon Age is, with­out excep­tion, the story of its hero. For Dain, the game hinged upon his actions and rela­tion­ships. His betrayal at the hands of his younger brother was what forced him into the ranks of the Grey Wardens, and it was his actions that led to the defeat of the Archdemon, the ascen­sion of a new king in Ferelden, and so on. Dain devel­oped com­pli­cated rela­tion­ships with his fel­low trav­el­ers: he was the only wor­thy man Sten met in Ferelden, was betrayed by Zevran, aban­doned by Morrigan, and loved by Leliana. He placed Alistair on the throne against the latter’s wishes and finally gave up his life to quell the Blight, redeem­ing his name in the hal­lowed halls of Orzammar and becom­ing a Paragon.

He did all of these things with­out speak­ing a word, and only con­veyed emo­tion in his face per­haps twice in the entire game. No one, not his friends, ene­mies, broth­ers or lover spoke his name once in the game, instead clum­sily talk­ing about “this Warden” or “my sec­ond son.” While in Orzammar, peo­ple would refer to him as “Lord Aeducan,” but this prac­tice ceased upon enter­ing the sur­face world.

What This All Means

 

You see, Dain was clearly meant to be a char­ac­ter, and not merely an avatar for the player. Some role­play­ing games place more empha­sis than oth­ers on the con­cept of role­play­ing. For many games, the player char­ac­ter is given only a rudi­men­tary back­story before being thrust out to explore the world. The “role” that is being played is lim­ited only to fairly cut-and-dry dif­fer­ences in basic moral behav­ior. The player char­ac­ter never attempts to enter into mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships, pla­tonic or roman­tic, with any of his or her com­pan­ions or acquain­tances. In short, the pur­pose of these games is not to make the player expe­ri­ence what it is like to be another per­son, but rather to explore a liv­ing and com­pli­cated world.

But Dragon Age is not one of those games. This game’s story revolved around Dain, his actions, and his rela­tion­ships with the other char­ac­ters. And Dain never once spoke a word, and responded to every sit­u­a­tion with at most a shrug of his shoul­ders or a raised eye­brow. His lines were com­mu­ni­cated by unvoiced sub­ti­tles. It was a bit like watch­ing a ver­sion of the Lord of the Rings wherein Viggo Mortensen was replaced by a straw dummy of a rugged-looking man.

Mind you, in the Baldur’s Gate era, when no char­ac­ters were voice-acted, this would not have been a prob­lem. But to see Leliana pro­fess­ing her undy­ing love to Dain, with com­pe­tent voice act­ing and emo­tions reg­is­ter­ing on her face, only for him to stare at her the same way he would stare at a stone, or a were­wolf, or a par­tic­u­larly tasty sand­wich, did not make for an emotionally-satisfying moment. Conversely, Ashley or Miranda telling Commander Shepard she loved him was much more believ­able, even though the qual­ity of the writ­ing in the scenes in ques­tion was infe­rior. Shepard actu­ally responded to the dec­la­ra­tions of love, both emo­tion­ally and vocally.

In Conclusion

The pri­mary rea­son every­one seemed to be mad at Dragon Age 2 six years ago is because it low­ers the num­ber of choices avail­able. But this seems to sug­gest that choices are worth­while in and of them­selves, a point with which I quite dis­agree. In Dragon Age, no mat­ter which choice I make, I am con­fronted with a char­ac­ter that, no mat­ter how well writ­ten, or how con­sis­tently por­trayed on my part, is essen­tially made of card­board. All the choices in the game’s char­ac­ter cre­ation seem some­what pale and hol­low– none of my choices can make a char­ac­ter as believ­able as Commander Shepard.

This is not to say that choice is some­how a bad thing– if BioWare had run into an infi­nite amount of time and money to cre­ate six dif­fer­ent voice sets and custom-tweak every bit of dia­logue based on the Warden’s ori­gin story and so on and so forth, such that each of the six ori­gins was just as deep as Commander Shepard’s emo­tions and voice set, that would have been won­der­ful, and a mar­velous accom­plish­ment. But since BioWare does not have an infi­nite amount of time or money, if it is to pro­vide an expe­ri­ence as deep as Mass Effect’s, it is going to have to cut back on the num­ber of options avail­able.

This is emphat­i­cally the right choice. What mat­ters is not how many choices are in a game, but how deep and well-realized those choices are. One assumes that, if BioWare sticks to form, there will be many dif­fer­ent ways to por­tray Hawke. Renegade and Paragon Shepards behave very dif­fer­ently, never mind the fact that most play­ers will prob­a­bly play some com­bi­na­tion of the two. The same will be pre­sum­ably be true of Hawke.

If BioWare takes away my abil­ity to play an elf or a dwarf, but restores my abil­ity to believe it when a roman­tic inter­est tells Hawke she loves him, or a good friend praises him for his deeds, I will not even miss what I’ve sup­pos­edly lost. What I will have gained is the abil­ity to believe the story and play the role in the role­play­ing game.

So, what is all this about? Simply put, a mul­ti­tude of choices does not a deep expe­ri­ence make. Fewer choices at char­ac­ter cre­ation can allow for a deeper expe­ri­ence later. And for a character-driven game like Dragon Age, any­thing that can be done to make the char­ac­ters more believ­able and relat­able is a plus. Hawke will, hope­fully, be more than an avatar, like the Vault-Dweller of Fallout 3. Hopefully he or she will be a char­ac­ter, like Commander Shepard, or the Nameless One, a fully fleshed-out mem­ber of the cast.