No, Mr. Hawke, I Expect You To Feature A More Robust Inventory System

Introduction

I have spent a fair amount of time of late think­ing about the com­plex­i­ties of the rela­tion­ship between a seri­ous game player and a seri­ous game devel­oper, and have iden­ti­fied three trends which I wish to dis­cuss. The cat­a­lyst for this dis­cus­sion was my rel­a­tively recent playthrough of Dragon Age II, a game which left me feel­ing rather jerked around.

So, for the next three weeks, I wish to dis­cuss three speci­fic trends in the gam­ing com­mu­nity: Expectation, Entitlement and Exploitation, and though I will dis­cuss these trends in var­i­ous con­texts, each dis­cus­sion will use Dragon Age II as a cen­tral exam­ple. I have cho­sen to use DAII as the lynch­pin for this con­ver­sa­tion partly because it has been some­thing of a per­sonal obses­sion, but also because its var­i­ous con­tro­ver­sies have shown that it is thus par­tic­u­larly related to sev­eral issues in the games indus­try.

A Quick Review

Before I get started, I fig­ured it would be worth pro­vid­ing a brief review of Dragon Age II, so that there isn’t any doubt about my opin­ion of the game.

Generally, the first two thirds of the game aren’t quite per­fect, but are very, very excel­lent, and the last third exag­ger­ates the prob­lems of the first two thirds, con­tain­ing moments of bril­liance, but pri­mar­ily being char­ac­ter­ized by a sort of unfin­ished, buggy rushed­ness. Finally, though its last few hours begin with a moment of absolute bril­liance, the rest of the cli­max is absolutely dread­ful and is char­ac­ter­ized by a dra­matic and incon­gru­ous shift in tone and style, major char­ac­ters (par­tic­u­larly antag­o­nists) behav­ing in wholly unbe­liev­able ways, and, in a tremen­dously egre­gious exam­ple, the reuse of a char­ac­ter model from the first game’s DLC as the penul­ti­mate boss. They didn’t even bother to make it a palette-swap.

To deal with a few issues specif­i­cally: the changes in the com­bat sys­tem are inter­est­ing and enjoy­able, and many of the mechan­i­cal ideas are fresh and worth explor­ing, the teamwork-inspiring “cross-class combo” mechanic in par­tic­u­lar. That said, the design­ers skimped on the num­ber and com­plex­ity of antag­o­nists: you spend most of the game fight­ing the same four or five kinds of enemy, and even the most com­plex of vil­lains rarely have more than two or three sep­a­rate kinds of attack. Furthermore, some­times the game’s more action-oriented spin gives it trou­ble– it is both easy and nec­es­sary to kite a few of the ene­mies, for exam­ple. (Though this is prob­a­bly part of a whole ‘nother arti­cle, mechan­ics which encour­age or even really allow kit­ing or other silly mechan­i­cal exploits are bad.)

The deci­sion to half-heartedly limit the inven­tory sys­tem, such that you can change allies’ weapons, but not their armor, is more than a lit­tle con­fus­ing. It is impor­tant to note that there is noth­ing essen­tial to the idea of a role­play­ing game which neces­si­tates inven­tory micro­man­age­ment, and I can def­i­nitely under­stand the the­matic sym­bol­ism of not allow­ing you to change your allies’ equip­ment– the UI’s repeated admo­ni­tion that “your friends make their own deci­sions about what to wear” makes sense. The game repeat­edly reminds you that these are peo­ple with their own lives above and beyond your own adven­tures, so it makes sense they might want to be a bit less com­mu­nal about their pri­vate pos­ses­sions than char­ac­ters in other RPGs. But if that’s true, why can I fid­dle with their weapons and acces­sories? An indi­vid­ual who is pro­pri­etary about his or her cloth­ing is likely to be more so about his or her tools and jew­elry. In short, it just ends up feel­ing lazy, and pleas­ing nei­ther camp: peo­ple who enjoy equip­ment micro­man­age­ment feel cheated, and those of us who might have pre­ferred a Mass Effect 2–style stream­lined sys­tem still have to deal with too many menus.

I have already come out in favor of the nam­ing and voic­ing of the game’s main char­ac­ter, and found the con­ver­sa­tion mechan­ics joy­ful and excel­lent. Further, all of the recruitable char­ac­ters, includ­ing the DLC char­ac­ter, are excel­lent, some of the absolute best and most nuanced char­ac­ters in role­play­ing games. Several moments in the first two acts con­tain some of the most amaz­ing bits of con­ver­sa­tion I have ever expe­ri­enced in a role­play­ing game. The game also prac­ti­cally dou­bles the num­ber of strong and inter­est­ing female char­ac­ters in all of video game his­tory. Aveline is awe­some. The plot is won­der­ful, up until the third act, when it is quite rushed– character-specific quests, which up until that point have been absolutely excel­lent, begin to feel very rushed and con­fused.

In short, Dragon Age II con­tains bril­liant ideas and some­times excel­lent exe­cu­tion, but the game is clearly not fin­ished. It’s a really, really, really excel­lent sec­ond draft.

With that said, let’s move on to the actual meat of the arti­cle.

Quality and Enjoyment

The first point I wish to make is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion which will be quite rel­e­vant to this arti­cle and any other arti­cle I ever write again.

The dis­tinc­tion can be sum­ma­rized as the dif­fer­ence between “lik­ing” a work of art and stat­ing that a work of art is “good,” or the dif­fer­ence between “favorite” and “best.” The words “like” and “favorite” refer to the amount which a per­son enjoyed a work of art, whereas the words “good” and “best” refer to what the per­son per­ceives as a work’s qual­ity. These are two very dif­fer­ent con­cepts.

Enjoyment is a purely sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence, and offers no real room for dis­cus­sion. The state­ment “I liked it,” refers only to the feel­ings gen­er­ated in me by the work. Quality, on the other hand, is an objec­tive char­ac­ter­is­tic of a work. The state­ment “It is good,” is inher­ently a nor­ma­tive state­ment– it states that not only did I find the work valu­able, but that most other peo­ple ought to, too.

In this way, you could not really argue with me if I said “I really liked The Phantom Menace.” You could be sad for me, and might be morally oblig­ated to pray for the state of my obvi­ously degraded soul, but would have no real avenue for dis­agree­ment. The facts involved relate wholly to whether or not I liked the movie. I am only mak­ing a claim about myself, and I am, after all, the only real expert on the topic of my own likes and dis­likes.

If, how­ever, I was to say that “The Phantom Menace is a good movie,” there would be room for dis­cus­sion. In that case, I would be mak­ing a claim about the movie itself. Should you feel com­pelled to argue this point with me, you could point to the lack­lus­ter script, the obnox­ious spe­cial effects, the fre­quently wooden act­ing, the exe­crable plot, etc, etc, etc, as rea­sons why The Phantom Menace is not a good movie, regard­less of how much I might like it.

It is wholly pos­si­ble to like some­thing that isn’t very good, or to not like some­thing which is. I hap­pen to have some­thing of a soft spot in my heart for Lady in the Water, though it’s not what you would call a par­tic­u­larly good film. Similarly, though I gain lit­tle to no enjoy­ment from the aver­age Gran Turismo game, I under­stand that they are usu­ally very good. Furthermore, there’s noth­ing wrong with this. Taste dif­fers, and not every work of art will appeal to every per­son.

You’re Not A Very Good Dog, Cat

One of my Fundamental Axioms of Games Criticism is that a game’s artis­tic qual­ity is at least partly deter­mined by its scope, and I wrote an arti­cle a few weeks back dis­cussing that idea in some detail. The fun­da­men­tal point behind the axiom is that a game’s artis­tic qual­ity should be judged, in large part, based on what sort of game it is try­ing to be. This is, fur­ther­more, just as true of any other work of art as it is of video games.

At a very macro level, no one’s going to dis­agree with me about this. It would not make sense to be mad at Portal for not includ­ing an inven­tory sys­tem, or to crit­i­cize Final Fantasy VII because it’s not a very good sur­vival hor­ror game, but it does make sense to crit­i­cize Gears of War 2 for hav­ing a non­sen­si­cal plot. But on a more speci­fic level, I find that this ties in very closely with the Problem of Expectation.

By “expec­ta­tions,” I sim­ply mean the pre­con­ceived notions of what you believe a game ought to be that you bring to the table (or couch, more likely) when you start play­ing a video game. These expec­ta­tions can orig­i­nate from a game’s asso­ci­ated mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, pre­vi­ous games in a fran­chise, other games made by a devel­oper, the opin­ions of friends, recur­ring tropes in the game’s genre, or any num­ber of other sources. These expec­ta­tions are part of what allow us to sort through a col­lec­tion of games on Steam and decide which ones are likely to appeal to us.

The Problem of Expectation can arise when one’s expec­ta­tions become too speci­fic, and thus engage in con­flict with the design­ers’ artis­tic vision. Allow me to illus­trate what I mean with an exam­ple.

When I first began to play Assassin’s Creed, I had a very speci­fic con­cep­tion in mind for how I thought an assas­sin should behave, and attempted to play the game accord­ingly. Assassins, I rea­soned, should attempt to flit in and out of a given area com­pletely unno­ticed, deal­ing as lit­tle extra dam­age to per­sons and prop­erty as pos­si­ble, and draw­ing as lit­tle atten­tion to them­selves as pos­si­ble. While play­ing the game, I thus attempted to be per­fectly unde­tected in my every move, never to engage in com­bat except when absolutely nec­es­sary, and only to do high-profile actions like run­ning on rooftops or attack­ing mis­cel­la­neous guards when I absolutely had to.

And I wasn’t having a par­tic­u­larly good time. Getting across any of the cities took forever if I strolled casu­ally through the city streets, and was just as monot­o­nous as it was time-consuming. I over­planned my major assas­si­na­tion con­tracts only to have my intri­cate plans thwarted by scripted events which called for me to rapidly run on rooftops in mor­tal com­bat with sev­eral ene­mies at once.

Frustrated, I com­plained to Matt (I was play­ing it on his Xbox) that “I thought this was sup­posed to be a stealth game.” He looked at me and said some­thing to the effect of “No, not really. It’s a sand­box game with stealth ele­ments,” and the lights of heaven opened up above me. I finally under­stood! Assassin’s Creed is not a game where you play an unde­tectable shadow, it’s a game where you play a badass. Suddenly, all of the jump­ing off of impossibly-high build­ings and bru­tal coun­ter­at­tacks made a lot of sense to me, and I found the game much more enjoy­able. Assassin’s Creed is far from per­fect, but it works a lot bet­ter when held to its own stan­dards, rather than what­ever arbi­trary things I had cooked up and brought to the table.

I had let my expec­ta­tions for the game get in between me and the artis­tic vision of the devel­op­ers, and in so doing, dam­aged both my enjoy­ment of the game, and my per­cep­tion of the game’s qual­ity. Rather than engag­ing with the game itself, I was try­ing to engage with the game I thought it was, thereby gain­ing a skewed and incor­rect per­spec­tive about the game’s qual­ity and enjoy­a­bil­ity.

“Look, I Found A Slightly Better Hat,” and Other Epic Tales

I think very few games have suf­fered more from the vagaries and foibles of Expectation than Dragon Age II, which, as men­tioned above, opted to dra­mat­i­cally change sev­eral key mechan­i­cal ele­ments and design philoso­phies from Dragon Age: Origins, and instantly received a great deal of flak for said deci­sions. At the end of the day, it deserved some of this flak, as I’ve men­tioned in my quick review above.

But what is most curi­ous is that it received a great deal of this crit­i­cism long before the game ever hit stores. Longtime BioWare fans com­plained at the con­sol­i­da­tion of the numer­ous char­ac­ter options from Origins into a sin­gle named and voiced char­ac­ter. They com­plained about the less tac­ti­cal and more action-oriented nature of the com­bat. They com­plained about the sim­pli­fied inven­tory sys­tem, and they did all of this even before the demo came out, when at most, if they were very lucky, they might have played 20 min­utes of the game at PAX or some sim­i­lar con.

Most of these folks did not seem to con­sider that it was con­ceiv­ably pos­si­ble that the design­ers behind Dragon Age II had very good rea­sons for the changes they made. Further, at the time every­one first became so upset, since the game had yet been released, it was still pos­si­ble that each of the changes worked beau­ti­fully and con­tributed to a dynamic and beau­ti­ful whole. The only pos­si­ble rea­son to be upset at this point was if the game did not con­form to your expec­ta­tions.

And that, my friends, is a silly rea­son to be mad at a video game. Players whined that they were going to be forced to play the role of Hawke, rather than one of a num­ber of pos­si­ble char­ac­ters from dif­fer­ent back­grounds, when that is the entire point of Dragon Age II. The entire devel­op­ment team behind Dragon Age II fre­quently described it as a smaller story, focus­ing on one indi­vid­ual person’s rise to power. Whether you “like” this kind of story bet­ter than the sweep­ing epic of Dragon Age: Origins is up to you, but it is pre­pos­ter­ous to crit­i­cize DAII for hav­ing a small focus when that is exactly what it was try­ing to do. It’s like pick­ing up a jar of grape jelly, clearly labeled “GRAPE JELLY” in large, attrac­tive let­ters on the label and then some­how being sur­prised when it con­tains a sticky, jam-like sub­stance fla­vored largely like the fruit of Vitis vinifera.

WTF is this?

You don’t have to like grape jelly. You are def­i­nitely allowed to prefer straw­berry jelly, or even peanut but­ter. But the qual­ity of a jar of grape jelly needs to be eval­u­ated com­pared to other jars of grape jelly. The reduced scope of the game should be used as one of the premises against which to eval­u­ate it, not an eval­u­at­able (not a word) fact in and of itself. The prob­lem with DAII’s tight­ened scope is the fact that it aban­dons it at the very end of the game. Dragon Age II deserves to be crit­i­cized for a vari­ety of rea­sons, but among them is not the fact that it is not peanut but­ter.

Conclusion: On Expectation and Art

Some will argue that the design­ers behind DAII shouldn’t have made the changes they did because the audi­ence clearly didn’t like those changes. If every­one prefers peanut but­ter, and you make grape jelly, it might be good grape jelly, but you still haven’t pleased your audi­ence. This is a prob­lem I will mostly tackle next week, in my dis­cus­sion of Entitlement, but I will leave you with the fol­low­ing thought about the dif­fer­ence between art and enter­tain­ment.

Art is about what the artist(s) want(s) to com­mu­ni­cate. It is not about giv­ing the audi­ence exactly what they want to hear/see/play. Successful art cer­tainly needs to engage with the audi­ence in order to com­mu­ni­cate with them, but art is not sim­ply about giv­ing the audi­ence exactly what they expect. Giving the audi­ence what they want is the pur­pose of enter­tain­ment. Art may some­times func­tion as enter­tain­ment, and usu­ally needs to be some­what enter­tain­ing in order to appeal to a large crowd, but it is a fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent thing.

No fan of 19th-century sym­phonic music would have said that he or she par­tic­u­larly wanted to hear loud, bom­bas­tic brass and per­cus­sion in the con­cert hall, and cer­tainly would not have expected it. But that’s what Beethoven gave them, and we are very, very glad that he did. If Beethoven had focused only on giv­ing the audi­ence what they wanted, not only would we be with­out the great mas­ter­pieces he wrote, the whole his­tory of west­ern music would be much, much less inter­est­ing.

Game devel­op­ers do need to keep gamers’ expec­ta­tions in mind, as any game which com­pletely sub­verts them in every way is likely to be very dis­ori­ent­ing and dif­fi­cult to fol­low. But if we, as gamers, want to expe­ri­ence games as art, and not merely as enter­tain­ment, we have to be will­ing to put our pre­con­ceived expec­ta­tions of genre or con­ven­tion aside, and try to engage with games on their own terms. We will almost cer­tainly end up pre­fer­ring cer­tain types of sto­ries and modes of sto­ry­telling over oth­ers, but this does not mean that we must dis­miss out of hand as “bor­ing” or “bad” works that fall out­side our favored gen­res or styles.