Dragon Age Is Not the Next Baldur’s Gate
Baldur's Gate III: Shadows of BioWare
We can cite their names like the holy litany of computer role-playing games: Baldur’s Gate I and II, Planescape: Torment, and (to a lesser extent) Icewind Dale I & II. They are all unified by the now dated, but once sacrosanct Infinity Engine, which I love like my own future hypothetical child. They, alongside Fallout 1 and 2, are the greatest gifts Black Isle Studios gave to posterity. Any single one of these titles would have rightfully inscribed Black Isle into the pantheon of legendary game design, excepting maybe the wonderful but oft-underappreciated Icewind Dale series (which I think is a damn shame considering that it did so successfully what other lesser but vastly more popular games have struggled to do, which is to translate D&D faithfully to an action RPG environment — Neverwinter Nights, anyone?). To their undying credit, Black Isle delivered not one, but seven beautiful titles, each of which occupies a space of high privilege in my memory.
'Only slightly more imaginative than Dragon Age'
So it’s not surprising that my proverbial neck follicles went on high alert when Ray Muzyka, BioWare’s CEO cum Electronic Arts vice-president (after selling BioWare to them) came along with a press release in 2008, saying, “We’re thrilled to be returning to BioWare’s fantasy roots, with Dragon Age: Origins representing the culmination of over a decade of experience. Dragon Age: Origins is a dark heroic fantasy that doesn’t pull any punches. Our fans are in for the most emotionally intense gaming experience we’ve ever created, and we hope to surprise them with just how dark and gritty it gets!” I don’t know who first described Dragon Age as the “spiritual successor” of Baldur’s Gate, but that phrase caught on like wildfire across the blogosphere and review community, taking on the veritable quality of fact. We were all calling it that, and we all very much wanted it to be precisely that. And we had good reason, too.
In 2008, BioWare was the strongest candidate for creating a plausible successor to Baldur’s Gate. It was BioWare that developed the Infinity Engine, which introduced the revolutionary fusion of real-time and turn-based strategy into role playing games, and was an integral component of Baldur’s Gate’s success. To their credit, they have produced a number of high-quality role playing games since then, including Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic I and II and Mass Effect I and II, which both employ a three-dimensional combat system that, like the Infinity Engine before it, enables the action to be paused so the user can issue strategic commands. They’d also proven themselves to be competent storytellers. It really seemed that if anyone could make a successor to Baldur’s Gate, it had to be BioWare. And it would certainly seem, if you were to go by the strident voices of mainstream critics, that they succeeded. Let’s look at the facts.
A flawless, visually stunning masterpiece. One of the best games ever made.
Over at metacritic, Dragon Age: Origins has received a glowing 91% “metascore”, aggregating 65 critic reviews, a whopping 8 of which deigned to convey grades of 100% (a ninth mincing some particular qualms to impart only 99%, and I wonder why he even bothered). That’s 8 declarations of perfection. 8, I would assume professional, reviewers out there who consider Dragon Age to be a flawless masterpiece, or one whose flaws were so trifling, so inconsequential, as to make denying BioWare a perfect score an affront to the ethics of criticism. Let’s not forget the 44 other reviewers who gave 90% and up — for all we know theirs may have been the highest possible score permitted by their editors, and which may for all intents and purposes describe a broad reviewer tendency towards perfection. If I were to be cynical, I might suggest you could almost see the bandwagon careening down the path of gaming history, a coterie of followers clinging desperately to it, hollering such indications of their hard-earned fealty like, “Remember me? I was your champion! I gave you 100%!”
To give some context, of the top 500 PC games of all time on metacritic, Dragon Age is (at the time of this writing) ranked #64. It’s score, 91%, is only 4 percentile behind Baldur’s Gate II, ranked #6 of all time. It is rated more highly than such incredible games as Portal, Deus Ex, Civilization 3, Duke Nukem 3D, Starcraft and even Fallout. Now to reveal my personal viewpoint (not altogether mysterious based on this article’s title, I expect): Though I don’t actually hate Dragon Age, I do consider it to be a work of remarkable mediocrity and unoriginality, in no way worthy of the hyperbolic accolades it has received from all quarters. I’m most inclined to disparage it, frankly, because it has positioned itself to be one of the best games of all time, a true successor to one of my absolutely favourite games, and it is anything but.
The critics have spoken. 'Just not as good as Dragon Age.'
Let’s take a more discerning look. What criteria should a game be evaluated on? Storyline, graphics, gameplay? On these points, Dragon Age is at best entirely average, and at worst a resounding flop. I know saying this is in staunch opposition to the public consensus, but really how can anyone who has earnestly and soberly tried the game claim it is a pioneer on any of these fronts? The story, for instance, is notable only for being one of the most hackneyed and derivative ones I have encountered in recent memory. It employs virtually every conceivable trope of the Fantasy genre: a daemonic blight is encroaching, plaguing the land. A hero must rise to unite the divided kingdoms and stop the great nemesis. Elves are sequestered in their remote, ancient forest, tending to their trees and xenophobia; mages are governed by a militant authority that fears an outbreak of untrammelled magic: they are consigned to a great tower to conduct their studies. Dwarves live underground in stone halls and are excellent blacksmiths. The blight itself consists of trolls, orcs, goblins, ogres, and an archdemon. What here is even slightly original? The whole narrative smacks of an inexcusable laziness, considering that it is a story-driven game that demands the player navigate through countless cut scenes of plodding, uninspired dialogue about unimaginative and two-dimensional characters, on a quest utterly predictable in its every twist and turn.
Breathtaking.
The graphics, while in a limited sense contemporary and decent enough, are in terms of imagination, wonder, and pure raw creativity just as banal and uninspired as the story. The environments are generic dungeons, castles, and small towns, utterly bland in comparison to the intoxicating, dark, and wonderful city of Sigil in Planescape: Torment, or the richly detailed and original hand-painted locations in Baldur’s Gate II (like the creepy organic Beholder lair, or the variously delightful and horrifying planar spheres). The voice acting is good, but the character animations are invariably wooden; it is disconcerting to be given a riveting speech about action by a character who has all the subtle mannerisms of a marionette. The magical effects are for the most part colourful light blooms and explosions. There is no great inventiveness, visual play, or breathtaking artistry here.
Displayed here: the best generic golden rings, generic belts, generic longbows, and generic armor in the game.
The gameplay is not much better. The battles often feel tacked-on, as if the enemies were not there owing to some plausible aspect of the plot, but rather because it is a fantasy game and as such requires copious slaughter. Nor are they especially fun. The fact that your characters heal instantly after each encounter makes things feel like an arcade game, the enemies the limitless hordes of some fantasy version of Smash TV. The action feels hollow where it is clearly attempting to be ’streamlined.’ The skill system, invented from scratch, is not just contrived and bizarre, but sometimes outright confusing. For a long time I had no idea what any given skill was good for, and what’s worse, I could never really bring myself to care. To my dismay, since every single point invested in a particular tree unlocked an entirely new ability, it required an instant and complete familiarization with the entire system’s subtleties and nuances, lest I accidentally acquire at the outset skills for which I had no real use. Case in point, Alistair uses dual weapons, but I selected the two-handed weapon skill not realizing that these two skill trees were basically incompatible. A skill point was thus wasted, irrecoverably.
'Mostly derivative, unlike Dragon Age.'
New characters likewise become sources of frustration and tedium. Do I choose between this spellcaster with a preference for healing spells, even though I know her interactions with Morrigan will result in conflict and an overall reduction in their approval levels? Somehow the game’s designers succeeded in making secondary character interactions annoying exercises in trial and error, as I tested one and then another “gift” on different people to derive the most positive reaction, and felt compelled to replay certain dialogue sequences that resulted in a dramatically poor character reaction because I happened to choose the wrong dialogue option. To completely reveal their personal story trees you must skillfully and attentively nurture their approval ratings (not only difficult, but annoying to do), yet the unfolding stories proved to be so underwhelming as to be unworthy of the effort required in unlocking them. Contrast this to the marvellous secret lives of your party members in Planescape: Torment. For example, I still think about the joys and immediate rewards of unlocking each of Dak’kon’s incredible philosophical discs.
These are just some of many objections I could raise. The game is riddled with issues concerning pacing, design, and, simply put, fun. What’s more, these objections are fairly easy to see. Within moments of playing the game I was struck by its overall lackluster and generic qualities. Where is the critical review mindset that addresses the merits and flaws of a game regardless of the hype around it? I feel that, out of the fervency of our desire for this hallowed successor, we have dulled our collective better judgment as to Dragon Age’s real worth. I say resolutely that Dragon Age is not the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. Earlier, I deliberately held off mentioning one striking coincidence: Dragon Age and the original Baldur’s Gate both scored 91% on MetaCritic. Is this a manifestation of our collective will to power? Did we all so strongly wish for Baldur’s Gate III that we willed a mediocre and unoriginal fantasy RPG up to the status of legend? Or perhaps it’s a testament to the brilliant marketing of one of the most successful video game publishers in the industry? I leave these questions to you to answer; for the time being, in my own eyes, I will continue to consider the true successor as yet unnamed.
[...] Andrew at Little Bo Beep takes somewhat more of a contrarian viewpoint on the game this week, in a post entitled ‘Dragon Age is not the next Baldur’s Gate’. [...]
I hate to break it to you, man, but Black Isle only developed five of those titles. Bioware not only made the infinity engine, but they also developed Baldur’s Gate I and II.
I do have to admit, though, I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said here. Dragon Age has got nothing on BG.
Andrew, thank you so much for this honest review. I feel exactly the same as you about Dragon Age, and I was dumbfounded when all these overhyped reviews came pouring in about the game, even from folks whom I expected to be very critical in their views of games (such as the guys at rockpapershotgun).
I wanted to write something, to slap people and say wake up! Look at this game! How can you say these things that are so abhorrently not true? But even though I was so disappointed, I am no blogger nor journalist. Who would heed my writing or even read it? Now you’ve gone and said what I wanted to say, and thank you for that.
I think, as you mention in your post, Dragon Age is a good example of contemporary ‘bandwagon-ism’ we see in game reviewers and journalists. Take a look at the scores of the “big games” like Dragon Age, or Mass Effect2, or Fallout 3, and you’ll see all high scores, very gradually going down and then one or two 70s at the end. You never see reviewer scores that are at the other end of the spectrum, or even in the middle. But if you look at the comment’s reviews, which is open to the public, you’ll see scores all over the place, high, low, medium, even zeroes sometimes.
Of course you can’t use these as credible sources of review, because one might score a game as zero out of spite for one reason or another, but there are plenty of people that openly speak their minds and score fairly. So why can’t “professional” reviewers do so? Why does it seem to me like they are all afraid to openly speak their minds like the anonymous folks in the comments section? Is it because of their “stature”, their “cred”? Do their editors not allow them to score a certain game below a certain point? In the case of magazines, that is understandable (who would want to upset a major corporation that has just poured years of work and millions of dollars into making the game? Personally for me, published magazines have ceased to be a source of “credible” review many years ago), but what about smaller websites with no publication or major investors to worry about? Well, they are just riding the bandwagon. That, or their reviewers play in the shallow end of the pool, not bothering to truly critically assess a game.
Thanks for the heads up, whitebrice! I’ll have to be more thorough in my fact-checking next time. If that is indeed true, though, I would say it just makes the failure of Dragon Age all the more upsetting.
5/5 or even 100%, which metacritc and the like would turn “4 sighs out of 4″ into, does NOT mean perfection. Only one’s highest recommendation.
And getting into “ooh Dragon Age has a .1 % better average than X on gamerankings, people must believe it’s the superior game”, is just silly. Don’t go there.
“Why does it seem to me like they are all afraid to openly speak their minds like the anonymous folks in the comments section?”
Really? I feel that videogame’s journalism is full of bandwagonism (and I thought DA was fantastic btw, if not nearly as good as BG2), but to suggest an entire media do it intentionally and consciously is absurd.
I enjoyed the game. Frankly, a 91 (or, in other words, a 9 out of 10) sounds about right. It’s an astonishingly fun game, which is odd, because I hate the gameplay. I’ve played the game through twice now, as well as its expansions, and I’m not completely sure why.
I personally enjoyed managing the characters and seeing how they reacted to my decisions in game. I know my desire to see how things played out differently was part of the reason I decided to play again.
Oh, I completely agree that the story and combat are awful (the art style is quite impressive in my opinion, even if the way the game renders things at a distance is boring; I loved the little elven boat-wagon things, for instance), but in spite of the poor gameplay, there’s something… odd that compels me to play. Right now, I’m considering playing Awakening again, and I’ve got no idea why.
All that said, I think you’re missing the point of the game. Dragon Age wasn’t trying to be original or anything; instead, it was trying to fill a void for the traditional Tolkien/DnD-style RPG. Playing the game felt like they were checking off a list of things that a traditional RPG should have. I’ve seen plenty of games pretending to be original while still using a good number of cliches, but Dragon Age never felt like it was attempting originality. Instead, it was just trying to be a very competent traditional RPG, and it was.
Wish there was an edit feature; I forgot to mention that I knew almost nothing about the game when I bought it. I actually thought it might handle something like Mass Effect (which was, at the time, the only Bioware game I’d played). My reasons for enjoying Dragon Age are, therefore, my own and not some bandwagon/blogosphere’s excitement, especially since they were excited about it being the spiritual successor to some game I’d never played.
It is possible that you’re feeling somewhat nostalgic about the Baldur’s Gate games, and as we all know, nostalgia makes everything seem better than it really is. When DA didn’t live up to your memories of Baldur’s Gate, you felt disappointed by it. Just a possibility to consider.
I know I had absolutely no expectations of it and, when 2009 came to an end, it was definitely my game of the year.
Great article…
Just reminded me how effin’ amazing Baldur’s Gate(s) were…
These days I barely spend 8+ hours in any game and even after that, I can just remember the overall pace of the game at best. But thinking of Baldur’s Gate 2.. that thing was freakin 400+ hours of gameplay and I literally remember every single moment of that greatness (and I just played through the game and and half times – don’t ask why half, because I figured out I could play much more efficient if I started from scratch) Same goes with Torment and any Fallout
Great review! One thing I liked about BG was that it was something I would call realism in fantasy. Even though it was typical fantasy world with dragons, elves and orcs, it made you feel like real world, especially original BG-story was political and you found out all about the god thing at the end of the first game, all the time it was the secret you were trying to reveal, so it was not typical fantasy that made you fight dragons and evil forces from the beginning, story was graduated. Also the races. They had their homelands(elvens living in woods of Tethyr, drows in the Underdark etc…) but they were not isolated there, they lived freely in other parts of Faerun.
There are other things I was dissapointed with, like no sceneries, sometimes poor ambience(compare atmosphere of main city Denerim from DA and main cities of both BG1,2 or Kuldahar in Icewind Dale. AND implementation of isometric view was really really poor.
BG wins in nearly all fronts.
I hope my enlish was not so bad.
I do agree with your opinion about professional reviewers being band-wagoned, but you have to put more details and examples to make your statement to be convincing. For instance, why do you think the battle system of DA is bad? Why do you think the characters in the game is 2 dimension? Also, about your compaint about skill system was only your mistake because the game clearly stated purposes of each stats and skills in texts when you moved your cursor on to them. And why didn’t you mentioned about Baldur’s Gate in detail? I can talk on and on about how incomplete your statements are, but I will stop here.
To me, it just sound like you are bashing the game because you want to believe that Baldur’s Gate is the best game ever created in history or something. And don’t make your criticism sound like everyone have to believe in everything you said. Its only your opinion. I am not denieing the flaws of the game, I’m just not convinced by your writing.
Your thesaurus button is stuck.
I agree….much ado about nothing. After the 5-6 year wait, what a let down. This game does not have the feel of BG what so ever. Baldur’s gate buries it in terms of voice acting, ambiance, music, story line, and immersion.
I actually thought The Witcher was more enjoyable than Dragon Age. Not that Dragon Age is bad….just a big letdown from our lofty expectations.
RPGs are like works of art though, and an artist can’t always make the “magic” happen twice.
Being a CRPG enthusiast and having had the pleasure of playing a few high quality games of that genre along the years, I couldn’t agree more with this article.
While I think DAO is a good game, it’s in no way the epic made out by all those big size game “journalist” sites pulling the mainstream critic shots out there.
Today’s game journalism has grown either too corrupted or too incompetent to provide any valuable input to the informed player; their target audience is now casual players, ignorant kids and fanboy types. And THERE’S your explanation for all those 99% scores given to average, boring, corporate-made games who’re often a shadow of many a smaller, independently-made game made over a decade ago.
When I think about places like GameSpot, with their big size coverage of big marketing games and their big company props, I can’t help but think how valuable it would be for people like you, Andrew, to be writing their reviews instead. But then again, maybe your boss would come over before approving your review and tell you that you have to change it due to company obligations…
I would agree that dragon age is hackneyed and derivative , but all it’s doing is copying Baldur’s gate and dnd. I found that dungeons and dragons to be the epitome of fantasy cliches, and baldurs gate being just as generic.
Totally dug DA! I liked it more then the BG series. Mostly for the quality voice acting and fabulously witty moments.
BG was freakin awesome too, though I liked Torment better.
I’m sure bandwagoneering happens in all media critical communities. But I think it’s particularly pronounced in video games because so few game critics really understand games and what makes them good or bad.