Saturday, April 4, 2015

Reexamining DA2: Of Tweeted Thoughts, Pt 2



This is an olllllllllllllllld post I found chilling out in the "Draft' section of Blogger. In May 2013 I once again went to twitter with my thoughts about Dragon Age 2.  That time, Let's Player Joseph and I were retroactively discussing the supposed "shack" that Hawke lives in during Chapter 1.  I'm not a fan. Our conversations ended up addressing something that I felt was a major issue with the Hawke character. Everything below the break is from May 21, 2013.

Conversation after the break















That problem lies in that fact that gamers are supposed to just believe that Hawke is a force to be reckoned with. On one hand that is kind of a given since this is a cRPG Hawke is the player character. It goes deeper than that though. Even before the game really gets off the ground, we find that Hawke is feared/respected in certain circles had (thanks to her fighting prowess) has made quite a name for herself. The game wants us to believe that this is due to the year she spent working off the entry cost to Kirkwall. Bioware, however, doesn't put a lot of effort into explaining how she actually achieved this renown or what she did in one year. She had to have done everything in order to have her name on everyone's lips. One of my major literary pet peeves is when authors describe a character as being a certain way, never provide any concrete evidence to back the trait up, and then expect the audience just to swallow it . You know, the she-is-smart-because-I-say-so mentality. I know the intro to DA2 really dragged on, but the game could have benefited from focusing a little more on Hawke's early days in Kirkwall.

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