I haven't been updating this nearly enough but the good news is I've started a new blog with some like minded friends called Genre Non-specific.
I didn't pick the name.
The address is here:
See you there, yo.
-Mike
Thursday, 11 August 2011
Friday, 11 March 2011
The morality of Dragon Age 2
So Dragon Age 2 insinuated its way onto Steam a few days ago. Technically it came out in America before it came out in the UK but I’ve never let things like that stop me. In case anyone asks, I’m taking a holiday in Columbus Ohio and it’s a pure co-incidence I recently installed a VPN program on my computer.
Anyhoo, Dragon Age 2 is brilliant. Astoundingly so. The characters are all I’d expect from Bioware. I really like all of them. Even the antagonistic character designed to get on your nerves is well rounded, has good motivation and behaves extremely realistically.
The morality is what’s great in Dragon Age 2. In Dragon Age 1, as well as a lot of Mass Effect 2, you were fighting enemies who were absolute evil. There was no reasoning with The Blight in DA1 and it was only when The Architect showed up in DA: Awakening that any depth at all was given to those particular baddies. The Reapers are very slightly better in Mass Effect but they’re still just an all consuming evil. Their motivation isn’t particularly fascinating and there’s no real moral grey area. It’s all just a fight for survival.
In Dragon Age 2, though, I’ve hardly spent any of my time fighting Darkspawn. My time is spent fighting much less large in scale but ultimately more relatable and threatening; social change.
I won’t give you any plot details because I’m not a bastard but to take things in the broadest terms, one of the major themes of the game is the conflict between magic users and those who police them. Or, to put it another way, the conflict between power and authority.
The argument goes like this:
Mages are very powerful but have the potential to let daemons through to our realm who are very, very powerful and can’t be reasoned with.
Therefore it is imperative that mages be policed and watched at all times.
Any mages who refuse to be policed represent a potential threat to society and should be hunted down until they are killed or brought to the various designated zones where mages are permitted to exist.
Any mage who breaks any of the rules governing them (for their own protection, as the authorities helpfully point out) they have their mind severed from their body, leaving them essentially a zombie.
The other side of the argument goes:
The authority figures who govern the mages are despotic, malicious and revel in abusing their power. Living with their rule is like living in a prison where you are tortured as a matter of course and have no hope of ever being released.
We should be able to set up a system which keeps the daemons at bay but doesn’t have us being routinely tortured and/or kept in prison 24 hours a day.
People paying attention will have noticed that this is essentially the same argument as the Mutant Registration argument from the X-Men series. The stakes are a lot higher, though. With mutant registration, the argument goes that some people can break into bank vaults; therefore we need to know who they are to stop them doing it. This sounds reasonable until you realise that:
1) No-one’s got any way of stopping this person using her powers so they’d have to survey her 24 hours a day to make sure she hasn’t broken into any bank vaults.
2) They’re suspecting this person of a crime purely on the basis that it’s easier for this person to do than it is for anyone else. This isn’t massively fair.
3) The system would treat a person who could create 50 mile explosions in the same way as it would treat someone who can grow and retract their fingernails.
In Dragon Age 2, though, things are different. Every mage has the potential to be taken over by daemons and no matter what the power of the mage is, it would be really, really bad. Also, no-one apart from a tiny minority is saying that mages don’t need watching, it’s all a matter of how much.
And so, because of all this, Dragon Age 2 places you in a situation where a few mages have gone dark side. The authorities crack down, which causes some to flee. The authorities track them down and there are deaths on both sides. This causes another crackdown which means not only that more mages start trying to rebel, but the other authority figures who object to the draconian regime forced on the mages are starting to rebel.
There are essentially two ways the situation could go:
1) All the mages are killed. A new policy is started where all people who show a talent for magic are killed. This is a case of causing a certain number of deaths in order to prevent the possibility of many more.
2) The mages are all freed, most of the people policing them are killed. They set up another system but in the confusion and turmoil, many mages escape and are taken over by daemons.
I’m broadly in favour of option 2 because I’m a liberal pussy and not a big fan of convicting people of crimes they haven’t committed on the assumption that they might one day do so. However, it’s a far more interesting moral dilemma than whether to save Little Sisters or not.
Anyhoo, Dragon Age 2 is brilliant. Astoundingly so. The characters are all I’d expect from Bioware. I really like all of them. Even the antagonistic character designed to get on your nerves is well rounded, has good motivation and behaves extremely realistically.
The morality is what’s great in Dragon Age 2. In Dragon Age 1, as well as a lot of Mass Effect 2, you were fighting enemies who were absolute evil. There was no reasoning with The Blight in DA1 and it was only when The Architect showed up in DA: Awakening that any depth at all was given to those particular baddies. The Reapers are very slightly better in Mass Effect but they’re still just an all consuming evil. Their motivation isn’t particularly fascinating and there’s no real moral grey area. It’s all just a fight for survival.
In Dragon Age 2, though, I’ve hardly spent any of my time fighting Darkspawn. My time is spent fighting much less large in scale but ultimately more relatable and threatening; social change.
I won’t give you any plot details because I’m not a bastard but to take things in the broadest terms, one of the major themes of the game is the conflict between magic users and those who police them. Or, to put it another way, the conflict between power and authority.
The argument goes like this:
Mages are very powerful but have the potential to let daemons through to our realm who are very, very powerful and can’t be reasoned with.
Therefore it is imperative that mages be policed and watched at all times.
Any mages who refuse to be policed represent a potential threat to society and should be hunted down until they are killed or brought to the various designated zones where mages are permitted to exist.
Any mage who breaks any of the rules governing them (for their own protection, as the authorities helpfully point out) they have their mind severed from their body, leaving them essentially a zombie.
The other side of the argument goes:
The authority figures who govern the mages are despotic, malicious and revel in abusing their power. Living with their rule is like living in a prison where you are tortured as a matter of course and have no hope of ever being released.
We should be able to set up a system which keeps the daemons at bay but doesn’t have us being routinely tortured and/or kept in prison 24 hours a day.
People paying attention will have noticed that this is essentially the same argument as the Mutant Registration argument from the X-Men series. The stakes are a lot higher, though. With mutant registration, the argument goes that some people can break into bank vaults; therefore we need to know who they are to stop them doing it. This sounds reasonable until you realise that:
1) No-one’s got any way of stopping this person using her powers so they’d have to survey her 24 hours a day to make sure she hasn’t broken into any bank vaults.
2) They’re suspecting this person of a crime purely on the basis that it’s easier for this person to do than it is for anyone else. This isn’t massively fair.
3) The system would treat a person who could create 50 mile explosions in the same way as it would treat someone who can grow and retract their fingernails.
In Dragon Age 2, though, things are different. Every mage has the potential to be taken over by daemons and no matter what the power of the mage is, it would be really, really bad. Also, no-one apart from a tiny minority is saying that mages don’t need watching, it’s all a matter of how much.
And so, because of all this, Dragon Age 2 places you in a situation where a few mages have gone dark side. The authorities crack down, which causes some to flee. The authorities track them down and there are deaths on both sides. This causes another crackdown which means not only that more mages start trying to rebel, but the other authority figures who object to the draconian regime forced on the mages are starting to rebel.
There are essentially two ways the situation could go:
1) All the mages are killed. A new policy is started where all people who show a talent for magic are killed. This is a case of causing a certain number of deaths in order to prevent the possibility of many more.
2) The mages are all freed, most of the people policing them are killed. They set up another system but in the confusion and turmoil, many mages escape and are taken over by daemons.
I’m broadly in favour of option 2 because I’m a liberal pussy and not a big fan of convicting people of crimes they haven’t committed on the assumption that they might one day do so. However, it’s a far more interesting moral dilemma than whether to save Little Sisters or not.
Friday, 25 February 2011
Dragon Age 2 demo
It took me bloody ages to get into Dragon Age 1 but I did grow to love the great hulking dungeon crawling beast that it was. However, when I heard that Bioware were going to make the same sort of leap they made with Mass Effect 2 from Mass Effect 1, my little heart jumped for joy.
It really seems to have worked as well. I've tried out being a mage, rogue and warrior and your character jumps about like nobodies business. Gone are the days where a mage would stand stock still, emiting a variety of coloured lights from their staff. Now there is some proper animation and it adds a real sense of energy to the game.
There is one major problem with this, though. Because your character moves so much whilst attacking, it's quite hard to consistantly click on enemies. Often I was hammering my mouse button in the best traditions of Dragon Age 1 and half the time found myself moving across the map because my avatar had decided to do a flip which had shifted the camera angle and thus the mouse pointer a few cruicial pixels to the left.
This has, however, been countered by the inclusion of a "target and attack nearest enemy" button (R by default). I have no idea if this was in ther first game or not, there was no real need for it, but its inclusion in Dragon Age 2 is a welcome one. Yes, it is the equivilant of sticking the game in automatic but no-one's forcing you to use it and it does help you maintain some sense of order in the game.
The controversial redesign is good and bad. The new darkspawn look... well they look okay I suppose. I'll get used to them. New Flemmeth, on the other hand, has changed from a pretty standard crazy old woman into a quasi-deamon figure with wierd hair-horn things. On the one hand, some of the subtlty has gone. On the other hand, she looks utterly badarse so it's forgivable.
Overall, it was a good demo and it made me wish there wasn't a two week gap between it's release and the release of the full game. At least I have Dawn of War Retribution to tide me over.
It really seems to have worked as well. I've tried out being a mage, rogue and warrior and your character jumps about like nobodies business. Gone are the days where a mage would stand stock still, emiting a variety of coloured lights from their staff. Now there is some proper animation and it adds a real sense of energy to the game.
There is one major problem with this, though. Because your character moves so much whilst attacking, it's quite hard to consistantly click on enemies. Often I was hammering my mouse button in the best traditions of Dragon Age 1 and half the time found myself moving across the map because my avatar had decided to do a flip which had shifted the camera angle and thus the mouse pointer a few cruicial pixels to the left.
This has, however, been countered by the inclusion of a "target and attack nearest enemy" button (R by default). I have no idea if this was in ther first game or not, there was no real need for it, but its inclusion in Dragon Age 2 is a welcome one. Yes, it is the equivilant of sticking the game in automatic but no-one's forcing you to use it and it does help you maintain some sense of order in the game.
The controversial redesign is good and bad. The new darkspawn look... well they look okay I suppose. I'll get used to them. New Flemmeth, on the other hand, has changed from a pretty standard crazy old woman into a quasi-deamon figure with wierd hair-horn things. On the one hand, some of the subtlty has gone. On the other hand, she looks utterly badarse so it's forgivable.
Overall, it was a good demo and it made me wish there wasn't a two week gap between it's release and the release of the full game. At least I have Dawn of War Retribution to tide me over.
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