I’ve noticed a nice touch in Dragon Age II: weapon and armor shops sell good stuff. Dragon Age: Origins had a few nice things in its shops: magical tomes that would increase your attributes and backpacks to increase your carrying capacity. But weapons and armor? On rare occasion, you might find gear superior to your own, but only marginally so. Any arms you bought would quickly become obsolete, often in the next adventure or two. Almost all the good gear—most the weapons and all the armor sets—worth having were scripted drops for killing specific monsters or completing specific quests. The few exceptional items available in the shops were the very best of the best—but as such, you could only buy them for the final few encounters; the cost was very nearly the total value of the booty you accumulated throughout the course of the game, which money you would easily have by the end of the game. There was no reason to shop, except to note where to return to buy your superweapon before the big showdown. Until then, save your cash.
DA2 isn’t quite like that. I know enough not to buy small upgrades, but significant upgrades are available at a price, one which I’ve been sorely tempted to pay. Buying occasional upgrades might mean giving up the very best weapon available by the climax, but it would mean operating with good gear throughout the rest of the game, probably a good deal. (In theory, the big boss fight might be nigh impossible without the best gear, so there’s a bit of risk here, but this proved not to be the case with chapter-ending boss fights, so I figure I’m safe.)
Money is largely an outdated holdover from old-school D&D, which serves as great-granddaddy to all these electronic “RPGs.†We kill bad guys and loot the corpses for money because we’ve always looted the corpses for money. Even though rifling goblins’ pockets for spare change doesn’t really serve the heroic image. Even when the story is no longer about accumulating riches. Even when money contributes nothing to your chances of success at whatever the story is about. Just because players expect it. So game designers keep giving us virtual pocket change and inventing some excuse to spend it.
Done artlessly, it simply leaves the players piling up ever greater warehouses of useless lucre (Borderlands, Fallout 3). Done somewhat more skillfully, but no less transparently, you earn ju-u-u-ust enough to afford to purchase upgraded gear from the shops at whatever pace the designers feel is appropriate for the next set of bad guys, calibrated to be just barely beatable with the aid of the new gear. (And why do we insist on upgrading our gear, for that matter? Another relic of granddaddy D&D.) But we could do better, even in a game like DA2, which is all about navigating moral dilemmas and not about becoming rich and powerful. Perhaps especially in a game like DA2.
See, money isn’t good for anything in itself; money is only worth what you can spend it on, and if there’s nothing worth spending the money on, the money itself is worthless. And if the value of money is nil, the temptation of bribes, theft, and blood money is likewise nil. DA:O and DA2 both offer such temptations, but they’re toothless: you don’t need money to get the best gear in DA:O, and you don’t need the gear in DA2, so you have no reason to sell your principles. Want to make a game about navigating moral dilemmas? Make that money—or rather, the gear it can buy—important to success. Really important.
I can understand the hesitation to make the selling of principles really worth something. Standing on principle has to be a viable option; you don’t want players unable to finish the game because they didn’t knife dear old dad for the inheritance back in Scene 8. But what if knifing dad means the difference between finishing the game by saving the kingdom by slaying the dragon quickly and cleanly or saving the kingdom by slaying the dragon only after it devastates the countryside, because you didn’t have enough firepower? Now there’s a dilemma to give pause even to bleeding heart paladin types. What if a beloved companion actually dies if and only if you don’t fight sufficiently effectively?
Well…reality check: player abilities vary widely, from video game superstar to putzes like me, so calibrating such challenges through combat may be impossible. A challenge that asks me to sell my principles or reload the big boss fight ten times might not make my brother-in-law blink; a game that asks if he’ll sell his principles for success is probably one I’d find unplayable. Still, there should be workable non-combat situations to exploit the issue. Cough up 50 gold (and be unable to afford the +15 sword of vorpalness) or kidnappers kill the duke/your sister/a super-cuddly kitten.
DA2 flirts with such issues: early in the game, you have to perform a morally questionable task to earn bribe money to get into Kirwall, and antisocial choices are occasionally worth a bit of extra coin. But the game never really pursues the possibilities to their logical conclusion. Bribes and theft and blood money are only worth a small fraction of your income—maybe 5%—and the things money can buy, while nice to have, aren’t necessary for victory, even for a video game putz like me. The game could do so much more, with a little healthy cruelty from the game designers. Money is a major contender for the title of biggest single temptation to moral failure in the real world. Why not exploit it in a game of moral decisions?
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