I’ve been doing a rerun of Dragon Age: Origins the past couple of weeks and it has me thinking about a few things. First of all, when I initially played this game I loved it. The story, the character development, the choices and their consequences, the looting, just about everything. DA: Origins is one of those games I can come back to time and time again and never feel bored. This go around I played as a Dalish Elf for the first time and found new things you can’t find in other classes. It’s amazing.
However, this game has frustrated me beyond all reason. To begin, I own an physical copy of this game. I bought it the year it came out and have since bought all the DLC. Of course, games don’t last forever and I uninstalled it to make room for other games. When I came back to it this time I expected to have access to all that DLC. Well, Awakenings wasn’t available. I went looking, the Bioware website has in my profile that I own it but doesn’t give me the option to download it. I would have to buy it again. Full price. I got lucky Steam had the DA: Origins Ultimate Edition on sale for about eight bucks, so I bought that.
Next, I made a mistake. I entered a console command. I had just started my trek through the circle tower and made a wrong pick in my party. I decided a quick command to pull up the party screen and switch out that character would be fine. It wasn’t. This caused a number of bugs I never ran into when using the old copy of the game. I don’t know what the differences are between the version on my disk, with all patches included, and the downloaded Ultimate Edition from Steam, but they are vast.
But I worked around the bugs. Had to use a few more console commands to do it, but I managed. Still, my frustration abounds. Why? Because I ran into spots where the game became impossible. I’ve taken time to explore the strategy of DA:O and, compared to my first play through where I never even looked at the tactics screen or another characters skills, vastly improved my skill but still failed time and again. On “normal”! I’m not a big fan of playing a game just for the difficulty, I don’t think games should be so simple as to let a gamer walk through, but at times this felt less like a game I needed to be good at and more like a game I needed to type in “runscript pc_immortal”.
I know what you’re thinking, I’m a grumbling little baby. Why am I even writing this?
I could rant all day about what’s wrong with the world, why I am depressed and anxious about everyday life. I could prattle about how terrible it all is. When I play a game I do so because it isn’t the real world. This game isn’t telling me I have to pay $1,200 to take two college courses. It isn’t telling me I can’t face the cashier at the grocery store. It isn’t telling me I’m going to spend the rest of my life broke and jobless. This game is supposed to be the one place I can go that tells me the opposite of all of that.
Again, you’re calling me a babbling fool. But I’m simply trying to express what’s broken in the industry. Gamers don’t run it. Games are made for profit alone. The news today is about Steam Boxes, Titanfall not having modding capabilities, and the terrible prices attached to games. I can’t give you physical proof (I’ve never been a good researcher but request it and I’ll do my best) but this industry has floundered. Steam Boxes are simply Steams version of the console. Titanfall without modding capabilities is EA’s and Respawn’s way of keeping the profits in their court for longer. In game purchases and sky-rocketing prices are about the industry raking in more money. Go back to Watch Dogs being delayed, and I’ll bet you almost anything it was because they wanted to extend profits for both Assassin’s Creed 4 and Watch Dogs as far as possible. The list goes on.
I have spent the last two weeks raging at a game I once loved so much I played too many times to count and the reasons I’ve been raging are outside of the game itself. Sure, difficulty is relative, but even that changed from the original version. I love gaming, but we’ve become a bit delusional as gamers. For some crazy reason we think the people in charge really care. There are plenty of gamers in the industry, plenty of artists and writers and developers who do care, but the people at the top don’t.
I’m a bit cynical. I’m part realist, part idealist, part beaten by the world. I’ve been cheated by this game after years of it being mine. I’ve been cheated and I’m not happy. I believe in gaming, believe that Indie and AAA games alike can do amazing things if we let them. However, I think it’ll be a bit of a time before I can stop feeling cheated by these games I’m supposed to dedicate so much time and money to.