After a Twitter conversation about this with @Longasc and @adarel, I thought I would be better suited to write down my feelings on the matter.
The discussion was the dialogue mechanics in Dragon Age: Origins versus the Mass Effect series. Adarel and Longasc both prefer the lengthier responses in Dragon Age, while I prefer Mass Effect showing me the Cliff’s Notes list then Shepard gives his actual response.
Adarel and Longasc each went on about how they felt Dragon Age gave them more real choices, but after after playing both of them myself, plus a lot of DLC for both DA:O and ME2, I really don’t see a difference in the available choices or their influence at all. Both titles give players a “Good Guy (White)” choice, a “Bad Guy (Black)” and a somewhat “Neutral (Grey)” choice. From there, character advancement may present additional options such as the Paragon or Renegade selections in the Mass Effect series. Each game may have a much longer list during the “gain more information” phases of dialogue but when it comes down to the actual story-influencing decisions, Good, Bad and Neutral are all you’re left to choose from. Many players have complained over the years that BioWare really only craft their stories based on Good or Bad (my own experiences corroborate this argument) and the varies “shades of grey” have no bearing or influence on the story progression whatsoever. From dialogue choices to story progression itself, there’s a reason the (tongue-in-cheek) BioWare RPG Cliché Chart exists, after all.
When it comes to CRPG’s, the thing is we don’t really have much choices available at all. We’re playing in someone else’s creation, through someone else’s story using someone else’s characters who say someone else’s dialogue. In Mass Effect, or even games like the Final Fantasy’s we play a specific character – Shepard, Cloud, Tidus, etc. – written by someone else. All we really do is put points into their RPG attributes and collect gear. Even Dragon Age, which lets me create my own character, fails to really give me real choices because it’s a hard-coded storyline in a CRPG. It doesn’t matter which race or origin I started off with, because I’m funneled into the same storyline with the same choices: play the Good hero or the Bad hero.
Taking a look at MMORPG’s, even when some story might be available, we have no choices whatsoever because the games have to be tailored for so many players. The stories are nearly always about the NPC’s and rarely our own characters anyway. The only choice we have as players is whether to do a batch of specific content or not. BioWare’s first MMORPG, the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic, simply looks to be a fusion of by-the-numbers “been there, done that” MMORPG content with BioWare’s trademark Black or White dialogue choices during the story arcs, primarily to serve as “new content” for additional replayability when leveling alts.
Back to Dragon Age vs. Mass Effect, my perception of what both Adarel and Longasc were getting wasn’t so much the issue of available choices (or the lack thereof) as the presentation of them. In Dragon Age, your character is mute, lacking any voice acting at all, therefore the dialogue choices can be a bit lengthy because the player has to read each and decide which to respond with. In Mass Effect we are shown a very brief response onscreen then after choosing one we see Shepard act it out in the cinematic, complete with voice acting which gives the lengthier dialogue audibly since it was never a visual presentation. Longasc in particular voiced his distaste for Shepard not saying precisely what he wanted him to say, but honestly, are the choices in DA:O any different? There are only so many available, and being forced to read the selections verbatim I can say that many times I would not have had my character say those phrases so I had to choose which one was closest to how I wanted to role-play that character. Again, same end result but simply a different presentation to achieve it.
I think pretty much everyone agrees that having voice acting for each race and gender in Dragon Age: Origins would have been expensive; perhaps prohibitively so for a new and untested IP, and I still feel the cost was the major factor behind the mute characters. The other is that it’s easy to simply insert a character’s name in text but the voiceovers would have to be generic to accommodate players being able to name their own characters versus using pre-written characters such as the aforementioned Shepard, Cloud or Tidus.
What did BioWare themselves have to say on the matter? First, go read this article on IGN. Back already? Good! According to BioWare, they did test out a Mass Effect-style dialogue system during the development of Dragon Age but chose the lengthier text trees because it worked better due to the perspective of the writing. Mass Effect is written from a third-person perspective, which is why we get the entire dialogue acted out with voiceovers based on player input on the dialogue tree, but leads some players to feeling like they’re not fully in control of the game. Dragon Age: Origins, on the other hand, was written from a first-person perspective. The player makes the direct choice from the dialogue tree, verbatim, and the NPC’s respond accordingly. The cinematics in Dragon Age never truly include our character in the conversation because we have made our choices, reading the words onscreen and mentally applying the voice we’ve given the character instead, so the cinematic skips ahead to the NPC responses being acted and voiced.
Additionally, I feel that some players, myself included, may have viewed Dragon Age: Origins distastefully if it had kept the lengthy textual dialogue and then had verbatim voiceovers. I’ve been in too many classes where the “instructor” (I use this term as loosely as possible within this specific context) does nothing but read PowerPoint slides verbatim with no exposition. Personally, I feel insulted by this “technique” (which is also proven to be one of the worst for educating) because I already read the slide faster than he was able to speak. I’m not an infant; I don’t need to be read to, and if he’s incapable of expanding on the message of the presentation then he is not doing his job. Of course, Dragon Age is not an educational lecture so that argument may not have applied, but I felt that case needed to be stated nonetheless.
In the end, I suspect what Adarel and Longasc were getting at was a simple preference for the first-person writing of Dragon Age: Origins. If they fall within the subset of players who felt a certain “lack of control” with Mass Effect’s more cinematic third-person writing (and it sounds as if they do) then Dragon Age: Origins would have felt more like they were in direct control of everything the whole time. Perhaps that feeling of control gives a perception of more available choices?
A lot of Dragon Age fans are skeptical of Dragon Age 2 since BioWare has stated now that Origins gave the… origins (ha!) of the setting and its races, Dragon Age 2 will be a story about a single character, Hawke, who will be fully voice-acted. The player can choose the gender and whether the character will develop along the Good or Bad story arc. In other words, similar to Mass Effect. Whether or not BioWare shifts to a third-person writing perspective for Dragon Age 2 has yet to be announced, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
When it comes to sequels, game or otherwise, I personally don’t demand an identical experience to the first. In the case of an RPG, it’s the world, the setting, that I want to come back to, not specific characters or specific dialogue perspectives as we’ve been discussing here. If BioWare totally changes the feel for DA2, I’m fine with that because at least I get to come back and have more adventures in that world. Conversely, if they make a future Mass Effect game in the style of DA:O I would jump on board that as well. I am a gamer for varying experiences; I do not “demand” each title within any given genre, of any given IP for that matter, give an identical experience to every other within that category. This is precisely why the MMORPG genre is in such a rut and players call everything a “clone” of something else (almost always WoW) after all. However, I also do not “demand” drastic innovation or change, either. Look at the faux fury over Starcraft 2’s near-total lack of innovation to the RTS genre or to the Starcraft IP. Guess what? It will sell millions and players will be happy regardless how much they complained in forums or blogs. Nearly every review of Crackdown 2 denounces Ruffian for “merely” providing “Crackdown 1.5” because it is… more of Crackdown. But isn’t that what the fans asked for? Developers can go either way with sequels, and with various sub-factions of the playerbase, they will always be a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position. All I ask of the developers is to do what’s best for that individual title.
on 
on 
Entries (RSS)
Well, we’ll see in DA2, which is going to use the ME method of conversations. Apparently BioWare prefers that method over the DA:O method themselves, enough to ditch their original/NWN style convo trees for the “you get the idea” method.
Honestly, I HATED that Shepard speaks in ME, because after several paragraphs of NPC voice overs, Shepard’s response would be lame and stilted. There was never any emotion in his responses. I would have prefered him to be mute.
Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of dialog trees. I want to play a game not read a game or watch a game, that is why Books and movies exist. True, I’m a small portion of the community that feels this way but I just can’t see the appeal of choosing a path for your character and in the end you only get two distinct endings, good or evil.
If they offered a not so good or not so evil ending that would be fantastic or varying grades of endings or some super alternate storyline where you could get back on the good side by offering you this lifeline to pull you up from the bottom of the evil bucket. Alas, they don’t and your left with playing evil or good. True, there is a neutral but who wants to play the middle of the road? What is the fun in that?
Then you have to contend with reading or listening to your choices. Again, I want action. If I’m not killing something every 5 minutes I get bored.
But this has nothing to do with the original discussion true, but I found DA:O to be less superficial about your choices than ME did. The choices in DA:O put me more in the game while ME made me feel like a voyeur. I can’t compare it to ME2 because I’ve not played it and I hear they added more action so you feel more a part of the game experience than before. If they make DA:O more like that, then it will bring the two fan bases together for one interesting game.
When you continue to use the same source material over and over you have to spice it up or people will get bored. Look at ME compared to ME2. They listened to fans and sprang into action, sort to speak. I don’t have an issue bringing the same world back again and again, but you have to make me want to see something new in that old tired world, not just throw on a new coat of paint. It needs to be different enough even if it is the same setting for me to want to venture back. The object of a game is for me to escape from what I perceive as every day. If my game world becomes boring and humdrum then I will need to escape it and that’s never a good thing.
Well, those are a few of my thoughts on the subject.
You are right that we are more or less bound and restricted by the master narrative anyways and that many minor different outcomes of various events can be realized with multiple choice text options and the ME style wheel as well.
Still, some people identify themselves with Shepard, maybe even more so than players with the more varied backgrounds of various chars in Dragon Age.
If he is speaking, and that rather on his own with little perceived control of the player, it indeed becomes more of a THIRD person narrative than a FIRST person narrative. And I personally think a lot of charme of a perceived first person narrative is that you are much more sucked into the action.
The length and often boring length of dialogue that can prevent any action for an hour is a problem of Dragon Age, agreed. But abandoning the complex dialogue will lead to a more streamlined narrative that cannot be as much explored by the player himself.
And this is what I fear for Dragon Age 2: It is simply cheaper to produce less voiceovers and less story choices, and they elegantly hide that behind cheaper top produce faster action. Maybe they will bother to make combat more meaningful, in Dragon Age which was initially a bit like Baldur’s Gate they managed to lower the difficulty through patches and gear power creep into nothingness. I was actually thrilled that a single player RPG had some more difficult fighting in our times.
But are these games about the combat and combat mechanics? They are for sure part of the charme, but it is the vibrant narrative that keeps me playing Bioware games. Disclaimer, I still have not played Mass Effect 2, but I can tell you I blame it on not so good writing and less meaningful choices in Mass Effect, also partly due to the different dialogue system, that Mass Effect did not do it for me.
I actually love both fantasy and science fiction, and Mass Effect is actually a bit like my ultra beloved Star Control 2. Which, here comes the funny part, had rather extensive and witty dialogue options. And was not voiced. It worked like a charm.
Some people also call the new inventory system of ME2 a double edged sword, but I won’t comment on it, still did not really play it myself and right now I am playing Awakening. Looking forward to it, right now I am drowning in games, woohoo!
A couple points:
1. In DA:O I never felt compelled to play the “good hero” or the “bad hero” as I do when playing ME/ME2. This is precisely because the dialog responses in DA:O are (a) not as black and white as in the ME series and (b) often shuffled around. (I HATE that the ME dialog wheel always has the paragon response in the same place).
2. Having a mute character encourages mental roleplay, and allows you to get far more into your character than is possible when you can only suggest what verbal path he take. I’ve had Shepard kill someone when I didn’t want him to when I picked a dialog option (in ME1) that didn’t even imply death was a possibility.
It is, as your title suggests, all an illusion… however all games are. In general, the better a player is able to immerse themselves in the game world, the better an RPG game will be…. and in this respect DA:O demolishes the ME series.
Got bored and never finished this game to be honest. Baldur’s Gate it is not