Never On Sunday

Eileene’s trying her hand at the new Dragon’s Age II game tonight, and I’m helping by sitting near to hand and making snarky comments.

What little we’ve seen so far looks pretty good, a decided refinement on the original Dragon’s Age: Origins. Gear, especially, requires less fuss: you only have to worry about equipping yourself, and not your companions, so there’s no need for a five-minute pause every time you pick up a new weapon to make sure that it isn’t a microscopic improvement onw whatever each member of the team is carrying.

The thing I’ve noticed most so far is the dialogue trees, and I haven’t yet made my mind up about them. Your end of the conversation feels a little more organic, as it is no longer limited to the polite/selfish/complete psychopath trio of responses. The disjoint of abbreviated responses conceal some nasty surprises, however. You might choose to tell a companion “We need to keep moving,” only to see your actual on-screen alter ego say “If you don’t get a grip, we’re all going to die!”

Depending on how the system treats your response, this could be a good thing or a bad thing. If companion reactions reflect the short statement, it’s easier to “read” the situation for the tone—friendly, bitter, greedy, flirtations, whatever—which may make it a bit easier to predict and manipulate your friends, creating the story you want to create in proper role-playing fashion. If companion reactions reflect the longer statement, however, it’s much, much harder to control your speech, and you’ll be “penalized” with highly arbitrary swings of story and relationship. Perhaps all of this is moot; I gather your actions, and not your statements, are supposed to have sole influence on your companions’ attitudes toward you…but if so, where’s the fun of talking to them?

Perhaps we’re seeing in action a sly little device Bioware has employed before: a disjoint between what you intend to say and what you actually say dependent on your stats. Baldur’s Gate players who pumped up their charisma (or something similar) enjoyed more (and generally more profitable) dialogue options; players who neglected their charisma in order to max out their combat stats suffered both from limited response options and from surprising and/or embarrassing slips of the tongue. I hope that is what’s at work here; I missed a lot of Bioware titles, and it might be fun to see it in action. But I suspect to be disappointed on this count. Eileene is playing a rogue and therefore has invested fairly heavily in her cunning score. Her avatar is still saying things Eileene doesn’t intend—although tactfully, it must be noted.