BioWare is relying on its upcoming game Dragon Age 4 to help reestablish the studio’s reputation on the upcoming generation of consoles. Between the disappointments of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, the developer is depending on Dragon Age’s success more than ever before.
There is a long-standing problem with the Dragon Age franchise which will need to be addressed for Dragon Age 4 before the developer can reclaim its place as one of the top Western RPG studios. With tough competition in the RPG market, BioWare will need to reckon with this problem if it’s going to get its bearings in a quickly changing gaming landscape.
Every Dragon Age game has a new protagonist but does not tell a completely new story. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, for example, the player has fan-favorite companion Varric Tethras return from Dragon Age 2. However, because the player is now the Inquisitor and not Hawke, the relationship is completely reset to square one. Furthermore, the actual player’s relationship with Varric already exists from the previous game, making them far more likely to trust him and treat him like an old friend as a result, despite that not fitting with their character.
Similarly, Morrigan’s appearance in Dragon Age: Inquisition is compelling in the meta-sense that players who enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins want to see what became of one of its most iconic characters. As with Varric, however, there is a disconnect between the player’s level of investment in the character, and the player character’s lack of relationship with them.
Having met these characters in previous games, the player is as invested in them as they can be, while these characters are nowhere near as involved in the life of the player character. A player whose Warden romanced Morrigan and went through with her ritual will even see their Old God Baby, Kieran, make an appearance in Inquisition, driving this dissonance home for any who made it that far.
The problem with this approach becomes clear when put into comparison with BioWare’s other flagship RPG franchise, Mass Effect. If Mass Effect 2 had a different protagonist to Shepherd, then meeting characters like Garrus again would not have been nearly as rewarding, because they wouldn’t be continuations of the same relationship in the story, even if the player already knows that character.
The fact that Shepherd is the player character across the entire original trilogy helps with the fact that, as a character, Mass Effect‘s Shepherd is also a relatively blank slate. In essence, what the player is actually experiencing is their own relationship with the other characters in Mass Effect developing, which are able to be properly reflected in the games as those NPCs can consistently refer to the player as Shepherd and to reference that single developing relationship.
In Dragon Age, the main player characters are also blank slates, but over the three games released so far, they are three separate blank slates. The result is that the game encourages the player to identify with their player character, while the player’s developing relationship with the world and the characters in it can not be reflected in the actual story of the ever-changing protagonist.
It may be too late for Dragon Age to change trajectory in this regard. Bringing back the Warden in Dragon Age 4, for example, would only make sense for the players whose Warden survived the events of Origins, and would invalidate the stories of the many players whose Wardens died. However, BioWare should take this lesson forward for its future games and any new IPs it chooses to develop on the next generation of consoles.
Other RPG developers should learn the lesson too. If the protagonist is going to be a blank slate that the players are encouraged to project themselves onto, then having a new protagonist with every game only increasingly creates a disconnect between the player’s relationship with the world and the player character’s, making that identification and immersion more difficult with every subsequent game.
Dragon Age 4 is in development.
![\"IT電腦補習](\"http://itteacheritfreelance.hk/test/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/logo2-2.png\"){kind=logo}
www.itsec.hk
www.itsec.vip
www.itseceu.uk
Leave a Reply