During one of my aimless web-surfing breaks this week, I happened to run across an old entry from Hawty McBloggy, listing the ten most common things women hear on XBox Live. I feel vindicated! I’m glad to know that I wasn’t the only female gamer dealing with this sort of nonsense. Here’s what I would add to the list:
* What are you wearing? If I’m playing video games, I’m probably wearing slippers, my husband’s sweatshirt, and my pajama pants. Sexy, eh?
* [Unspeakably vulgar attempt to initiate cybersex chat.] Please. If that’s what I wanted to do, why would I bother paying a bunch of money to purchase this video game instead of going on one of the zillions of websites where I could chat with adolescent perverts for free?
* Hi … :-) Oooh, wow. Your cool, casual greeting, complete with smiley face, has totally won me over. I must know more about you, mysterious charming stranger!
Anyway. On to more satisfying video game topics. My current gaming obsession is a little game called Dragon Age: Origins.
You may have seen it advertised on TV as a hack-and-slash fantasy game with a seductive-looking female sorceress and scantily clad demons. Well, whoever came up with that ad campaign should find a new career, perhaps as a thumbscrew-tester. Dragon Age is actually a subtle, absorbing, character-driven interactive story — one that requires you to make tough moral choices, and cultivate the loyalty of your party members. It also happens to have an intricate combat system and several levels of difficulty that require serious strategy to master.
Introverted Wife articulated many of the reasons the game is great for women gamers here. In sum: the female NPCs* have well-rounded personalities, the origin stories for women PCs are equally compelling as the stories for male PCs (if not more compelling), and while there can be a romantic component to the game if you choose the right options when talking to other characters, these stories do not objectify the game’s female characters or reduce them to nothing more than potential sex partners. And, in one of my favorite features of the game, there are same-sex romance options for your PCs — and it’s not just a reenactment of some teenage boy’s “hot lesbian” fantasy! If you play as a man, you can fall for a cute male elf! (OK, he’s also an assassin. No one’s perfect.)
Two things marred my enjoyment of the game a bit. First, the setting is pretty derivative. It’s basically a reworked Lord of the Rings; the aesthetic is heavily informed by Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films, right down to the battle at the beginning of the game that looks almost exactly like the assault on Helm’s Deep in “Two Towers.” The rich characters save Dragon Age from simply being a retread, but if you’re even a casual fantasy fan, you’re going to be rolling your eyes on occasion. But to give credit where credit is due, Dragon Age: Origins does much more interesting things with elves than I’ve seen in a while (see the post at Introverted Wife for more on this).
Second, the controls on the PS3. Let me say this right now: if you own both a console and a reasonable gaming PC/Mac, and you’re interested in this game, do yourself a huge favor and buy it for the computer. A game like this, with so many skills and items and sophisticated battle tactics, is very difficult to play well with an eight-button controller. The game is meant to be played on a keyboard, where you can set shortcuts to many more skills and items.
In spite of these complaints, I’m a big fan of this game. I’d encourage any gamers who like rich storylines and intricate combat systems to pick up a copy — specifically, the copy that runs on your computer’s operating system.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* NPC = non-playable character. PC = player’s character.
G. has been obsessed with Dragon Age Origins since he bought it around Christmas! He looooooooooves it. Also he reports similar xbox live conversations when women are online. Bleurgh.
Oh Zevran you make my heart flutter!
I so adore Zevran, him and Oghren have the best comments to each other. And it’s funny how sharp he really is too, especially if you take him on The Paragon quest. He points out how Harrowmont won’t be a good king because he’s too weak.
It’s funny too the more I reflect on it the more it makes sense that say Morrigan is probably the easiest to bed for her own gains while Zev has his own more comforting reasons as well.
Shales bird thing is great fun too, but I have a deep hatred of chickens so I might just be rubbing off a bit.
The more I think about it too the more I wonder just how intentional the resemblance to LOTR was supposed to be as well.
The music of course sounds like it was ripped right off the soundtrack as anything even vaguely fantasy seems to be anymore (I hope Howard Shore is getting one hell of a royalties check) and if it were a more straight laced game like Oblivion I’d believe it was just laziness.
But there are so many inside geek jokes hidden throughout Dragon Age, the Star Wars references, the superman random encounter or even a conversation where Zevran and Oghren play out a sort of early Legolas and Gimli bit.
I’m pretty sure the Grand Oak tree was made tongue in cheek as well, judging by the horrible puns he makes. (In retrospect I’m kinda sad you never find say a skeleton that has bright yellow boots on it or something).
My husband felt much the same way you did at first about the plot, it seemed too contrite and it was so obvious this person would die and this person would be evil (black hair always a dead giveaway) but then playing it again and listening to the inside winks and stuff it started to feel a lot more meta.
But I’m babbling, just my thoughts on it. I’d still like someone to come up with different music just once so I wouldn’t feel like I suddenly slipped into Minas Tirath when I wasn’t looking.
I think you’re right that the game is aware of its LotR aesthetic, and let’s face it, it’s hard to break out of that shadow when you’re doing anything even slightly fantasy-related. Maybe they did just decide to embrace it, go with it, but have a bit of fun with it along the way. And there are definitely lots of inside geek jokes. I think my favorite pop culture reference is when your character yells, “My Warden-sense is tingling!” when heading into battle. So goofy, so inappropriate given the setting, and yet so hilarious!
But ditto on the music.
I have mixed feelings on Dragon Age. I finished it with the (male) city elf origin story and while I found the game compelling enough to put around 60 hours of gameplay into it in a month (and I’m thinking of trying out another playthrough with a different origin story, and making different choices throughout the game, but that’s a lot of committment) but it didn’t 100% do it for me.
Part of it has to do with my ambivalence towards fantasy. I *want* to like fantasy–I’ve stared at too many heavy metal album covers for settings with swords and castles not to have a pull–but it too often suffers from poor writing. Dragon Age was better than most–I’m mainly comparing it to Oblivion here–but it still could have been better. It did so many things right–I thought that the stratification of Fereldish (?) society was really well done, I loved the way that the Chantry fit into the story (ie that I could play an atheistic clergy-threatening warrior), and I found that I actually had to put a lot of thought into my choices. It felt like there was a real significance to the choices I made. I mean, shit, I actually felt bad about sending mixed signals to Leliana while schtupping Morrigan. It got the details right–it was just the bigger picture stuff that felt so derivative. Even if it was tongue-in-cheek (how refreshing was it that the game didn’t take itself entirely seriously?) it still felt like it could have been a lot better.
I found the graphics really muddy and disappointing. This was on Xbox 360. PC screenshots look far better and I wish I would have bought the PC version instead.
I thought that the game was a bit dated. Gameplay really felt like the Baldur’s Gate games–no bad thing in itself, really–but compared to the wide-open world of Oblivion, I wanted something a little bit more than the enclosed areas Dragon Age gave us. I’d like to see the DA combat system integrated into a proper seventh-generation world.
Maybe we’ll see some of this in a sequel?
Just to be clear, the nerd who posted the comment above is my beloved husband. :)
Welcome to my little corner of the internet, G.! After reading A.’s blog for so long I feel like I’m meeting a celebrity :-)
I understand your ambivalence towards Dragon Age — I’m right there with you. For me, the pluses of the game ultimately outweighed the minuses, but I had a really hard time getting over the derivative setting. At one point, my husband heard me yell, “oh, now we have f*cking ENTS in this game?!” They got the characters absolutely right, but I agree that the larger story arc was only OK and could have been deeper. And I wish we’d learned more about the Darkspawn and their relationship to the Archdemon/Old God, although I’ve heard rumors that this will be addressed in the upcoming expansion pack.
I’m interested to hear you say the gameplay felt dated. I should admit that I haven’t played Oblivion, or really many other PC-style RPGs of late. Dragon Age felt like a slightly updated Baldur’s Gate to me, and I was happy to return to that style of game, but I can see your point that it wasn’t terribly innovative, and I suspect I would have felt even less impressed if I’d been more up-to-date on recent games in the genre. Interestingly, my husband and I had the same reaction to Mass Effect 2, another recent BioWare title. I get the feeling that BioWare is putting more emphasis on storytelling and characters, and less on innovative gameplay. Is it greedy of me to wish they’d do both?
Oh, and re: the graphics — 95% of the time it looked amazing on the PS3, but that other 5% of the time, it was inexplicably (and, in my mind, inexcusably) buggy. Characters standing on top of each other, big jumps between frames, that sort of thing. I think my lesson here is to play PC games on PCs if I can. Although unfortunately, I have a Mac, which I love for everything except its limited gaming ability!
Would you recommend Oblivion? Any other games you’ve enjoyed playing recently?
Oh, I completely hear you on the Ents thing and I had pretty much exactly the same reaction. I understand some common themes running through fantasy settings…but talking tree people? Really? You’re right though that on the balance they got more things right than not.
Oblivion, on the other hand, got it the other way around. There’s a great game buried in there but it ultimately falls flat. The plot is really similar to that of Dragon Age–evil demonic forces are rising up from the planes of Oblivion and only you can stop them–but the game really lacks maturity. The writing is atrocious. Lots of “hey, let’s add extra vowels to names and words to make them sound like they belong in a fantasy setting!” kind of stuff, and too much reading to do. Imagine the stuff you pick up in DA that goes into your Codex, but without it going into your Codex. It doesn’t help that the books you pick up are uniformly really poorly written. The same goes with dialogue, character development, etc, with poor voice acting to boot. The music is absolutely wretched–I didn’t mind DA’s music so much simply because I had Oblivion’s to compare it to. A. says that of all the games I play Oblivion is the worst of them all to listen to.
That said, the game mechanics in it are for the most part good. The map is huge and unlike DA which constrains you to whatever areas it thinks you should see, you can fully explore the world of Oblivion. Many places that you’ll stumble across aren’t even plot-related, so you can spend hours plundering dungeons (unfortunately, they all look pretty much the same) or exploring cities if that’s how you want to play it. It can also be really pretty and you’ll find yourself wandering the countryside and coming across waterfalls or hills covered in wildflowers. Different areas of the map could be a little more differentiated, but that’s me being picky. The combat system really lacks the depth of Dragon Age’s…it’s really a rudimentary hack/slash/cast spell sort of affair, but I can deal with that. The leveling system is a bit wonky too. Again, I can deal with that, but the bad writing I can’t handle.
I don’t think it’s greedy to want both good storytelling and innovative gameplay–though I think that BioWare is erring on the right side of this, at least. One of my disappointments with being a gamer is that even though the median age of gamers is in their 30s, games still feel like they’re being written for teenagers. There are a few really standout games (Bioshock comes to mind, I think the GTA games are fantastic) but most games I find wanting.
I’ve been dividing most of my gaming time lately between Dragon Age and Modern Warfare 2, which is completely awesome if you’re into totally ridiculous knuckleheaded macho nonsense and have a strong stomach for cretins on multiplayer. I’m thinking that I should get back to Bioshock and finally finish it because Bioshock 2 looks fantastic.
G., have you played Final Fantasy XII? It had the same kind of incredibly expansive map you’re describing for Oblivion, with lots of areas and dungeons to discover, and a really neat combat system that I thought was even more sophisticated and polished than Dragon Age’s in some ways — fewer skills, but better ways to set up your group’s tactics. The overall story had some problems (Final Fantasy games seem to be chronically unable to bring their stories to a logical conclusion), but the voice acting was excellent and the characters were a lot of fun.
Agreed that BioWare is erring on the right side of the gameplay/storyline choice. It says a lot about both Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 that my husband and I were willing to watch each other play these games because we were enjoying the characters so much. And I think I need to get Bioshock, not least because it’s pretty much the only decent game out for the Mac right now.
I haven’t played a Final Fantasy game since…uhhh…whatever one(s) came out on the SNES. I’ll look into more recent ones.
And yeah, Bioshock is fantastic. It’s smart, engaging, beautiful to look at, and a lot of fun. Even if you aren’t into shooters I think it still holds a lot of appeal.
I just saw this and thought it was hilarious and you’d enjoy it too being one of those magical unicorns as well.
http://jezebel.com/5479953/shocker-warcraft-not-just-for-dudes
I love how the Times assumes women only play video games because they see their boyfriends doing it. Barf.
[…] into the game dialogue and scenarios.” In Dragon Age’s defense, I just read the post “Gaming as a Woman and Dragon Age Origins” by “Petite Chablis” that the Origin stories differ from male to female – I have […]
[…] into the game dialogue and scenarios.” In Dragon Age’s defense, I just read the post “Gaming as a Woman and Dragon Age Origins” by “Petite Chablis” that the Origin stories differ from male to female – I have […]
[…] am a big fan of Dragon Age: Origins, as this post will attest. If Dragon Age 2 is as good as Origins, or even almost as good, I will be a happy […]