do this quiz that took me wayyy too long to do

I’m sure you all guessed this but if you’re lookin for something to do between Thursdays I’m gonna recommend Baldur’s Gate II to e v e r y o n e. Especially if you don’t have a D&D group at home, because it’s the closest you’ll get to D&D without one, and ESPECIALLY if you’re also a Bioware fan. I have some thinky thoughts about it & Dragon Age II here. Not so much the usual #currie academia, but along those lines nonetheless.

So I said in a post before that Baldur’s Gate II is very much like what Dragon Age 2 should have been, and I want to pull that apart for you somewhat. Disclaimer here that while I’ve played DA2 a disgusting number of times, I’m only 20 or so days into BG2 (Chapter 3, I think)

I acknowledge that technically speaking, DA2 is rightfully the lowest-rated game of the Dragon Age franchise, but it’s also my favourite by far. This is largely because I admired what it aspired to be. It wanted to be an in-depth exploration of a single, fascinating locale, and all the conflicts that could arise from it across time. Some of the things people complained about - such as Hawke having such a limited background, the divisiveness of the companions and their behaviour, and the lack of a single overarching villain - were the result of reaching for this goal and failing. Bioware either lost their direction or lacked the time to pull it off . A lot of the other problems with the game, particularly the repeated dungeon maps, but also the useless junk-gathering and slimmed-down combat (which I actually liked, but I get that it’s controversial) managed to cripple this particular aspiration even further. Kirkwall lost parts of its complexity and bigness, but clues of it remained behind - particularly in the morally complex sidequests, which often hold a mirror up to the larger conflicts. My favourite one is when you head out to find the son of some noble or count and it turns out that he’s just a regular old straight-up murderer. No demons in his head, but suffering a mental illness - not one I’m qualified to diagnose, but one that each of the party members misinterprets as a pathetic excuse for his violence. Their preferred solution is to kill the bastard, but a player - if they actually know what mental illness is, and how it can be mismanaged - is left with much more to think about.

The resemblance between Dragon Age II and Baldur’s Gate 2 started out as simple allusions and parallels, which I thought were amusing. Now I know who Edwina the barmaid is, and now I know why the loading screens say “gather your party before venturing forth”, and now I know why they make you collect pantaloons. I’ve also met some of the predecessors of the Dragon Age party members. Imoen looks a heckofa lot like an early-2000s Leliana and gets the same broken-bird treatment. Jan Jansen is Varric after several heavy doses of hallucinatory drugs, from the family merchant business to the hand-made crossbow to the penchant for tall tales. I’m pretty sure Velanna from Awakening is a re-skinned Viconia (and I think they share a VA, to boot). Also, I feel like some of the flatter BG2 characters were revamped, re-examined, or re-incarnated. Anomen is pretty much a sexist prick so far, but he’s had some interesting chats with me about his lawful-neutralness. I wonder if their answer to him was to take the same ethics but fix the sexism problem with a genderflip, because in a lot of ways he reminds me of Aveline. (Disclaimer: this in no way takes away from the fact that Aveline is the greatest thing ever and Anomen is a lil shit). Moreover, Morrigan’s eternally grumpy power-hungry practicality, as well her potential prideful fall, and her return, in a sequel, as a semi-friendly spy embedded in a political clusterfuck (Orlesian court vs. Shadow Thieves) makes her quite reminiscent of Edwin. There are others, too, as there are exceptions. I don’t see a clear Fenris analogue in BG2 yet, nor has Minsc ever been properly revived (though Iron Bull maybe comes close). I think that’s smart, though. Imoen/Leliana is a good template to reuse but Minsc shall never be equaled.

Beyond the people in my party, I started to see traces of Kirkwall in Athkatla. Some of the districts have obvious analogues (Keep = Government, Hightown = Waukeen’s Promenade (same aesthetic, even, with all the white stone), Darktown/Lowtown = Slums/Graveyard, Docks = ....well, Docks). There’s also the sense that there are some really hecked-up things going on in the underbelly of the Athkatla, what with the random lich I found in the Egyptian-style tomb under the graveyard (?), the beholders in the sewers (FUCK) and the strange women Naruto-running around at night and casting dominate on random thugs (???). Plus they have a strangely perpendicular policy on magic. Mages in Athkatla are both the Circle and the Templars - that is, the practice of magic is heavily restricted, but it’s restricted by the Cowled Wizards (who have conveniently cast Immunity to Government on themselves). Or perhaps Athkatla is what the Tevinter Imperium looks like from the inside?

Quest structures are also re-used between the games. The overarching quest of the first part of BG2 is identical to Dragon Age II′s - I have to raise enough money to Save my Sister, either to protect her from the Circle or steal her back from Irenicus. The anti-qunari cult and the weirdness of the Primeval Thaig are not dissimilar to the Cult of the Unseeing Eye quest (except for the FUCKING BEHOLDERS aaah). There’s somebody skinning people in the Bridge District at the moment, and though I haven’t advanced very far in that quest I’m catching the horrible, creeping scent of All That Remains about it. One of the very first quests was to return a handful of acorns to a faerie queen, which requires that you leave Athkatla - and it felt almost exactly like turning over Flemeth’s amulet, even before I found the red dragon hanging out in the same area. I’m even getting companion loyalty quests now (hence, Edwina) and while reuniting Keldorn with his wife was considerably less funny (though just as heartwarming) as convincing Aveline and Donnic to Cup each others’ Joinings, I’m not surprised I’ll be helping people with everything from marriages to magic mishaps. Let’s just hope Jan Jansen doesn’t make me gather poo for his turnip-based explosives so he can bomb the Cowled Wizards or something (Cheers, Justice, I’ll always love you).

But these similarities aren’t really a bad thing at all. I’m certainly not accusing Bioware of copying their own homework - I’m actually accusing them of failing to copy their own homework. Or, to stretch the metaphor, for their horrible teacher Mr. EA to change the deadlines to their homework without telling them so they had to rush it and get a C+ from all the game critics. Poor muffins.

Here’s the thing. The inklings I had about The Point of setting things exclusively in Kirkwall are full-on confirmed by the existence of Baldur’s Gate II and Athkatla. Games like DA:O and DA:I are explorations of breadth, spanning countries; games like DA2 and BG2 are explorations in depth, spanning time, and digging deep into a particular city. Athkatla feels amazingly alive to me, and endlessly fascinating and complex. There are multiple underground ruins alluding to ancient magic and long-forgotten deaths. There are hints in the government district that everyone from nobility to turnip farmers regularly drown in ineffective bureaucracy. The Shadow Thieves, the Cowled Wizards, the noble families, and the Radiant Heart, and the Circus, all of them fill out the middle ranks of a squabbling, rule-breaking, living populace. Party members have ties to everyone from peasants, to nobility, to Cambions from Sigil. And there are strange individuals everywhere, spies and liars and con artists and performers and collectors and people who will only sell me turnips. I just finished a quest where three young boys asked me to buy them swords and I bought them a keg of ale instead. It was awesome.

Anyway, this actually segues into something else that’s interesting for me - Dragon Age 2 was all set to tackle the coolest thing that emerged, quite organically, in BG2 - the fact that of all the characters in the game, Athkatla is the most interesting. Playing it, you begin to understand why the quests are so similar between it and DA2. Exploring things like lost ruins, or the different rewards, invitations and behaviours of different organizations, or serial killers and justice systems, or problems with merchants, or entertainment venues like theatres and circuses, or religious conflicts - those are all quests that deeply engage one in the character of a place. Quite frankly, I like that better than hopping town-to-town and solving problems as you pass, which is the DA:O/DA:I model. It’s far too easy to seem random that way (what did those werewolves in DA:O ever amount to?). And conversely, it’s also why things like the party in Orlais are the most exciting things in those games: they offer you glimpses into the operation of society, into how the fantasy world truly works from the crowns to the cobblestones. BG2 is made of that experience of depth, and DA2 was prepared to be that but more. 

In certain places, you can see how DA2 fixed the very, very few problems BG2 actually had (alongside a decade of technological development, of course.) The rivalry/friendship system in DA2 is a huge improvement on the reputation/alignment system of BG2. I am effective as shit at solving problems so why does Edwin grouse at me just because I’m nice? Moreover, why do I have to choose between mega-discounts and the game’s best wizard? I much prefer the idea of friendship/rivalry, because real people can respect and disagree with you, and (although this might just be because I have his romance mod installed *ahem*) the DA2-esque Rivalry relationship seems to better characterize how Edwin thinks of me anyway. And while I’m on my soapbox, why’d they take that system away from Inquisition? Rivalry was certainly would have given me a better time with Vivienne, whom I desperately wanted to love but couldn’t because I could never get her approval high enough to offer me any quests. Heck, at least Edwin will still get Nether Scroll’d even if he constantly complains about me rescuing kittens.

Moreover, before its flawed execution, the skeleton of DA2 is far more ambitious and intriguing than BG2′s. BG2 is still a defeat-the-evil wizard game, and it stumbled across the story-of-a-city model largely by accident (one of the most graceful stumbles I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure). I assume (though correct me if I’m wrong) that I’ll still be kickin’ Irenicus’s unsympathetic ass as an endgame (unless he goes Sephiroth Supernova or has an evil boss or something). DA2’s conflicts with the qunari, and especially the conflict between the mages and the templars, turned the city into DA2′s most interesting character and its primary villain, which is the logical, brilliant extenstion of what BG2 accomplished. Meredith, Anders and Orsino - the trifecta of DA2’s endgame catalysts - were all emblematic of an impossible social and political conflict, born out of everything Kirkwall was over the span of a decade. Almost every little plotline in DA2 gives you something new to think about in terms of law, order, magic and rule in Kirkwall, and the finale was a culmination of that. It was a narrative waterfall into which the stream of every sidequest fed. It’s a brilliant structure - but it failed to spark the love its narratively inferior predecessor did, and certainly failed to achieve the quality of BG2.

And it’s only because Kirkwall is no Athkatla. It could have been, but it wasn’t. It felt emptier, and thinner, less populated and less complex, even though all the bones were there. This was largely because of those repeated dungeons - there’s something new in every corner in BG2, and the exploration of the wilderness outside the city is more extended, and every room is different, whereas the dungeons in DA2 wear out their welcome before the first act is over. It’s immensely frustrating, because Dragon Age 2 was so close to being BG2 but better. And there are things (particularly that friendship/rivalry thing) that are marks of improvement and reflection borne of lessons learned from BG2 and DA:O. It makes DA2 even more of a tragedy than it already was. Suffice to say I love both these games a lot, and I am indeed recommending that anybody whose curiosity has been piqued immediately download BG2 from gog.com (I hear there’s a bear companion in the Enhanced Edition. His name is Wilson).

But if I might replace the soapbox a second, I think the biggest tragedy of all of this was that Bioware didn’t try again. For all that Dragon Age 2 felt unfinished and unfocused, it was nowhere near as soulless and directionless as Dragon Age Inquisition, at least for me. Inquisition functioned fine, and it’s not a “bad” game by any quantifiable metric, but I could not be asked to play it more than once. I know people like it, and there are things about it to like - from my own perspective, I loved the fancy-party sequence, and there have been few companions in any game as interesting to me as Blackwall (is that a weird choice? I don’t know, I’m not really In This Fandom). But I did not care about my Inquisitor the way I cared about Hawke. I didn’t care about something as indistinct as The Inquisition the way I cared about Kirkwall, as underdeveloped as it was. I admired DA:II’s aspirations; I do not admire Inquisition’s attempt to be Skyrim when that’s not what we come to Bioware for. I don’t want Bioware to make Skyrim, I want Bioware to try BG2/DA2 again. It could be so phenomenal if they pulled it off.