The Bishop
Cipher
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2012
- Messages
- 360
One other point about DA:O writing that is often overlooked and underappreciated is that it's functional. Videogame writing is supposed to underpin gameplay. It's supposed to give you reasons to care about going into this dungeon or looking for this item other than "I need to trigger the quest node" or "I need to farm xp/gold/materials". At no point in DA:O you feel like you just pushing forward for the sake of doing it. There is always a convincing reason why your character should care about whatever it is you're doing right now, how this thing resulted from that other thing before it. The writing isn't super deep, super original, or super groundbreaking. But it works. It ties in all the strands of gameplay into a thing that can be reasonably construed as adventure.DA:O was the last great Bioware game and it's setting and writing were good for a videogame. It's one of the last games and RPGs which were progressive and not woke. Even if it has some subtle hints of what became woke later. It has an isometric view and a party of 4 with a silent protagonist. I don't hate voice-acting and cutscenes provided they're good and DA:O voice-acting was great. MMO combat could've been implemented better and improved upon but alas. An amount of the DA:O trash combat is the biggest thing which hurts replayability.
Bioware wasn't that good with a videogame plot except BG2. Their strength was always great and larger-than-life characters and DA:O has them in abundance. For example, the Cousland massacre is a ripoff of the ASOIAF Red Wedding and as others already mentioned Gaider and others were obviously inspired by ASOIAF. Gaider and other DA:O writers were last RPG writers who read the literature and fantasy unlike modern narrative designers who only watch the movies and TV shows.
DA:O sure has some pozzed moments like a sob story of Avelline - the first female knight who was killed by evil patriarchy but you could always roleplay an authentic medieval aristocrat not caring about peasants with Human and Dwarf Noble origins. Leliana and Zevran are bisexual and romanceable but Leliana is feminine and is straight for all intents and purposes unless you court her as a woman and her lesbian tryst with her mentor is only hinted at.
Vault Dweller in his Codex review liked C&C and reactivity in DA:O with an example of a Redcliffe quest with so many permutations and reactivity.
This is in stark contrast with pretty much everything Bioware put out since. And it's not just Bioware. For some reason stories that work in most basic sense have become very rare beasts in videogames. As a player you know that you're completing quests and consuming content, and the game doesn't try to convince you otherwise.