For fans of fantasy role-playing video games, this has been a great year. In November 2014, BioWare released the long-awaited Dragon Age: Inquisition; just a few short months later, CD Projekt Red followed with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It’s rare to have two blockbuster RPGs released so close to one another, and that proximity means that I’ve spent – conservatively – 200 hours this year running around imaginary continents, fighting dragons and griffins, saving empresses and killing emperors, and generally having a blast. Both games are massive, beautiful, well-written, and nerdily obsessed with their own lore, and I loved them both.
But though the two games are outwardly similar, the writers of each game took strikingly different strategies when constructing the game narratives. Those differences result in interesting impacts on the gameplay and emotional weight of each story, and make each game satisfying in some ways and unsatisfying in others.
Let’s start with Dragon Age: Inquisition. This game tells the story of the Inquisitor, a woman (in my case) who is the only survivor of a magical cataclysm that kills the world’s most important religious leader. The cataclysm also opens a breach in the sky through which a variety of malevolent spirits escape into the real world. Along with a ragtag team of allies, your job is to investigate who opened the breach and, eventually, to raise an army to stop the forces of evil from destroying the world.
Dragon Age was made by Bioware, the studio also responsible for the Mass Effect and Baldur’s Gate series. Bioware tries to make games that are about choice, and Dragon Age is no different. At the beginning of the game, you’re invited to choose your gender and species, design your character’s physical characteristics, and choose a backstory. As the game progresses, you choose who to ally with, who to save and who to sacrifice, who to seduce and who to ignore, which tenets your Inquisitor clings to and which they discard.
All of this makes for a narrative that feels truly personal. I wrestled with the decisions that the game presented me with, and the story that emerged felt like it belongs to me. At the same time, the game does a good job of showing the consequences of the choice you make. For example: in a interesting gameplay mechanic, the Inquisitor is occasionally called on to sit in judgement of other in-game characters. In one instance, I condemned a villain to life in prison; many hours of gameplay later, having mostly forgotten the villain, I found him languishing in a dank cell beneath my castle.
Well, this is awkward...
At the same time, the choice mechanic has interesting limitations. The first problem is that the game has a tension between the written narrative (which is presented through cutscenes and dialogue with other characters) and what the video game critic Tom Bissell calls the ludonarrative. The ludonarrative is all the things you spend your time doing between cutscenes: exploring, fighting, looting, riding horses. It’s the gameplay part of the game. Some games are all ludonarrative, but role-playing games are a mixture of written narrative and ludonarrative. In Dragon Age, there’s a dissonance between those two elements.
For example: through the choices presented by the game’s written narrative, I gradually built my Inquisitor’s character. She was a heroic, compassionate leader, thoughtful and kind but still keenly aware of the responsibility placed on her by the forces of evil.
In the ludonarrative, though, my Inquisitor was a psychopathic killing machine with no regard for life, human or otherwise. There are only two types of living creatures in Dragon Age: those you can talk to, and those you should kill. This even extends to wildlife. “Why are you always killing wolves?” my wife asked, distressed, after watching me burn and dismember an entire pack. The truth was that in a game ostensibly about choice, I didn’t have one. The game designers decided that wolves had to die; I was only the instrument.
Another example of that ludonarrative dissonance is the fact that the gameplay doesn’t really change over the many hours you play Dragon Age – even though, over the course of the game’s actual narrative, you progress from an anonymous nobody to the leader of a massive army. Even late in the game, when my forces were massing for a final assault, I was forced to spend time gathering herbs and chasing monsters away from a local watering hole. At basically all times, there was a sharp disconnect between who the game was telling me I was and what it forced me to spend time actually doing.
But the main problem with Dragon Age is that the game’s choice mechanic muddies the waters of authorial intent. In most narrative art, the writer makes choices that define the plot, character, theme, and moral of the story. In Dragon Age, those choices are made partly by the writers and partly by the players, which leads to the question: what story were the Dragon Age writers trying to tell?
In a prior game, Mass Effect 3, BioWare’s writers tried to winnow all stories, no matter what choices had been made, down to the same three endings – all of which were thematically resonant with the story they were trying to tell. This did not go well: there was a massive backlash from gamers who believed their choices had been ignored. In Dragon Age, they make no such mistake. Depending on your choices during gameplay, the game can be either about upholding ancient religious traditions or tearing them down to begin anew; about believing you are fated to be a hero or believing you became one by happenstance; believing that you have to be true to your ideals or believing that the ends, no matter how abhorrent, justify the means.
The multiplicity of choice actually results in a final experience that rings a little hollow. We’re so used to having a strong hand of authorial intent that when it doesn’t exist, the natural inclination is to wonder whether you played the game “right,” a question that means nothing in this context. We’ve become accustomed to art that’s opinionated, that has a point of view, that tries to impart some wisdom or experience. Dragon Age is so open-ended that it’s difficult not to wonder why the game developers went through the trouble to create it in the first place.
This year’s other new blockbuster fantasy RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, avoids some of these traps while stepping into others. The game tells the story of Geralt of Rivia, a monster-hunter-for-hire who is searching for his adopted daughter, Ciri. His search takes him from war-torn swamps to snowy islands to dense cities, all of which are full of people in need of his particular skills.
The most immediate difference from Dragon Age is that you don’t get to design and choose your protagonist. Every player of The Witcher plays as Geralt, and this is definitively Geralt’s story. This has some immediate and compelling advantages. For example: because he’s defined in such specific terms, Geralt is a much better character than the Inquisitor could ever be. I love Geralt. He’s impulsive but practical, deadpan but hilarious, seemingly emotionless but also, at his core, a big softie.
The ludonarrative dissonance I encountered in Dragon Age is also lessened because of Geralt’s backstory. In The Witcher, I also spent a lot of time collecting herbs – but unlike the Inquisitor, it makes sense that Geralt would spend time gathering herbs and crafting potions. After all, he’s an itinerant bounty hunter, not the leader of a massive army. Similarly, Geralt also kills a lot of creatures and people over the course of The Witcher 3, but because of who he is as a character, this doesn’t conflict with the values he espouses during the actual narrative. Killing things is basically what being a witcher is all about.
The Witcher 3 doesn’t entirely abandon choice as a gameplay mechanic. Throughout the story, Geralt is called upon to make important decisions, and just like Dragon Age, those choices can have far-reaching consequences. But The Witcher’s choice mechanic has a nihilistic streak that Dragon Age, for better or for worse, mostly avoids. For example, early in The Witcher, you meet some children who live in a swamp with an eccentric caretaker. A little while later, you encounter a malevolent spirit that you can choose to either kill or set free. If you kill the spirit, the children die and the caretaker is driven insane. If you set the spirit free, the children live, but the caretaker dies, her husband hangs himself out of grief, and the spirit massacres a nearby village just for good measure. These situations are supposed to be realistic and gritty, but when you encounter them over and over again, they have a numbing effect: at some point, I became so frustrated with the no-good-choices approach that I just started picking options at random.
The truth is that the choices that The Witcher presents to the player have narrative – but not thematic – consequences. Depending on your choices, some characters may live or die; kings may rule or be dethroned; Geralt may retire or continue his wandering lifestyle. But the themes of the game are the same no matter which ending you get. The Witcher is a game about the importance of your loved ones in a world ruled by brutality and pain; it’s also a game about the importance of allowing other people to find their own path and make their own mistakes. Those are good themes and they make for a satisfying resolution to the story – which is probably why the writers declined to let the player have much influence over them.
But the specificity and strong authoritorial intent that makes The Witcher so great also creates its greatest drawback: namely, that everyone who plays The Witcher is forced to play as, well, a white dude.
There’s been a healthy debate about diversity in The Witcher; I particularly recommend reading more on this from Tauriq Moosa, Mike Williams, and Anita Sarkeesian. For my part, I think that on issues of race and gender, The Witcher is occasionally successful (several women in the game are great, complicated characters with plenty of agency) and occasionally misses the mark (several side quests rely on sexist tropes and there are no characters of color in the game whatsoever). Sadly, that’s better than average, on the whole, in the context of both video games and fantasy in general.
But regardless of what you agree with me or not, it’s impossible to argue that playing The Witcher is a deliberately exclusionary experience: you play as Geralt, or you don’t play at all. This is a defensible choice and, as I’ve discussed, it pays dividends. But it also weakens one of the core elements that distinguishes video games as an art form: the ability to literally inhabit your character. More than any other art form, video games invite you to take ownership of the protagonist – but most gamers are unlikely to see much of themselves in Geralt.
So: one game is too specific, and the other is too broad. What’s the lesson here? Only that we’re lucky to live in a time where this art form can support such different styles of narrative and experimentation. Would you rather play as a character in a detailed and vivid fantasy world – or would you rather build your own character from scratch? The good news is that whichever you prefer, adventure awaits...
For fans of fantasy role-playing video games, this has been a great year. In November 2014, BioWare released the long-awaited Dragon Age: Inquisition; just a few short months later, CD Projekt Red followed with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It’s rare to have two blockbuster RPGs released so close to one another, and that proximity means that I’ve spent – conservatively – 200 hours this year running around imaginary continents, fighting dragons and griffins, saving empresses and killing emperors, and generally having a blast. Both games are massive, beautiful, well-written, and nerdily obsessed with their own lore, and I loved them both.
But though the two games are outwardly similar, the writers of each game took strikingly different strategies when constructing the game narratives. Those differences have interesting impacts on the gameplay and emotional weight of each story, and make each game satisfying in some ways and unsatisfying in others.
Let’s start with Dragon Age: Inquisition. This game tells the story of the Inquisitor, a woman (in my case) who is the only survivor of a magical cataclysm that kills the world’s most important religious leader. The cataclysm also opens a breach in the sky through which a variety of malevolent spirits escape into the real world. Along with a ragtag team of allies, your job is to investigate who opened the breach and, eventually, to raise an army to stop the forces of evil from destroying the world.
Dragon Age was made by Bioware, the studio also responsible for the Mass Effect and Baldur’s Gate series. Bioware tries to make games that are about choice, and Dragon Age is no different. At the beginning of the game, you’re invited to choose your gender and species, design your character’s physical characteristics, and choose a backstory. As the game progresses, you choose who to ally with, who to save and who to sacrifice, who to seduce and who to ignore, which tenets your Inquisitor clings to and which they discard.
All of this makes for a narrative that feels truly personal. I wrestled with the decisions that the game presented me with, and the story that emerged felt like it belonged to me. At the same time, the game does a good job of showing the consequences of the choices you make. For example: in a interesting gameplay mechanic, the Inquisitor is occasionally called on to sit in judgement of other in-game characters. In one instance, I condemned a villain to life in prison; many hours of gameplay later, having mostly forgotten the villain, I found him languishing in a dank cell beneath my castle.
Well, this is awkward...
At the same time, the choice mechanic has interesting limitations. The first problem is that the game has a tension between the written narrative (which is presented through cutscenes and dialogue with other characters) and what the video game critic Tom Bissell calls the ludonarrative. The ludonarrative is all the things you spend your time doing between cutscenes: exploring, fighting, looting, riding horses -- the gameplay part of the game. Some games are all ludonarrative, but role-playing games are a mixture of written narrative and ludonarrative. In Dragon Age, there’s a dissonance between those two elements.
For example: through the choices presented by the game’s written narrative, I gradually built my Inquisitor’s character. She was a heroic, compassionate leader, thoughtful and kind but still keenly aware of the responsibility placed on her by the forces of evil.
In the ludonarrative, though, my Inquisitor was a psychopathic killing machine with no regard for life, human or otherwise. There are only two types of living creatures in Dragon Age: those you can talk to, and those you should kill. This even extends to wildlife. “Why are you always killing wolves?” my wife asked, distressed, after watching me burn and dismember an entire pack. The truth was that in a game ostensibly about choice, I didn’t have one. The game designers decided that wolves had to die; I was only the instrument.
Another example of that ludonarrative dissonance is the fact that the gameplay doesn’t really change over the many hours you play Dragon Age – even though, over the course of the game’s actual narrative, you progress from an anonymous nobody to the leader of a massive army. Even late in the game, when my forces were massing for a final assault, I was forced to spend time gathering herbs and chasing monsters away from a local watering hole. At basically all times, there was a sharp disconnect between who the game was telling me I was and what it forced me to spend time actually doing.
But the main problem with Dragon Age is that the game’s choice mechanic muddies the waters of authorial intent. In most narrative art, the writer makes choices that define the plot, character, theme, and moral of the story. In Dragon Age, those choices are made partly by the writers and partly by the players, which leads to the question: what story were the Dragon Age writers trying to tell?
In a prior game, Mass Effect 3, BioWare’s writers tried to winnow all stories, no matter what choices had been made, down to the same three endings – all of which were thematically resonant with the story they were trying to tell. This did not go well: there was a massive backlash from gamers who believed their choices had been ignored. In Dragon Age, they make no such mistake. Depending on your choices during gameplay, the game can be either about upholding ancient religious traditions or tearing them down to begin anew; about believing you are fated to be a hero or believing you became one by happenstance; believing that you have to be true to your ideals or believing that the ends, no matter how abhorrent, justify the means.
The multiplicity of choice actually results in a final experience that rings a little hollow. We’re so used to having a strong hand of authorial intent that when it doesn’t exist, the natural inclination is to wonder whether you played the game “right,” a question that means nothing in this context. We’ve become accustomed to art that’s opinionated, that has a point of view, that tries to impart some wisdom or experience. Dragon Age is so open-ended that it’s difficult not to wonder why the game developers went through the trouble to create it in the first place.
This year’s other new blockbuster fantasy RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, avoids some of these traps while stepping into others. The game tells the story of Geralt of Rivia, a monster-hunter-for-hire who is searching for his adopted daughter, Ciri. His search takes him from war-torn swamps to snowy islands to dense cities, all of which are full of people in need of his particular skills.
The most immediate difference from Dragon Age is that you don’t get to design and choose your protagonist. Every player of The Witcher plays as Geralt, and this is definitively Geralt’s story. This has some immediate and compelling advantages. For example: because he’s defined in such specific terms, Geralt is a much better character than the Inquisitor could ever be. I love Geralt. He’s impulsive but practical, deadpan but hilarious, seemingly emotionless but also, at his core, a big softie.
The ludonarrative dissonance I encountered in Dragon Age is also lessened because of Geralt’s backstory. In The Witcher, I also spent a lot of time collecting herbs – but unlike the Inquisitor, it makes sense that Geralt would spend time gathering herbs and crafting potions. After all, he’s an itinerant bounty hunter, not the leader of a massive army. Similarly, Geralt also kills a lot of creatures and people over the course of The Witcher 3, but because of who he is as a character, this doesn’t conflict with the values he espouses during the actual narrative. Killing things is basically what being a witcher is all about.
The Witcher 3 doesn’t entirely abandon choice as a gameplay mechanic. Throughout the story, Geralt is called upon to make important decisions, and just like Dragon Age, those choices can have far-reaching consequences. But The Witcher’s choice mechanic has a nihilistic streak that Dragon Age, for better or for worse, mostly avoids. For example, early in The Witcher, you meet some children who live in a swamp with an eccentric caretaker. A little while later, you encounter a malevolent spirit that you can choose to either kill or set free. If you kill the spirit, the children die and the caretaker is driven insane. If you set the spirit free, the children live, but the caretaker dies, her husband hangs himself out of grief, and the spirit massacres a nearby village just for good measure. These situations are supposed to be realistic and gritty, but when you encounter them over and over again, they have a numbing effect: at some point, I became so frustrated with the no-good-choices approach that I just started picking options at random.
The truth is that the choices that The Witcher presents to the player have narrative – but not thematic – consequences. Depending on your choices, some characters may live or die; kings may rule or be dethroned; Geralt may retire or continue his wandering lifestyle. But the themes of the game are the same no matter which ending you get. The Witcher is a game about the importance of your loved ones in a world ruled by brutality and pain; it’s also a game about the importance of allowing other people to find their own path and make their own mistakes. Those are good themes and they make for a satisfying resolution to the story – which is probably why the writers declined to let the player have much influence over them.
But the specificity and strong authorial intent that makes The Witcher so great also creates its greatest drawback: namely, that everyone who plays The Witcher is forced to play as, well, a white dude.
There’s been a healthy debate about diversity in The Witcher; I particularly recommend reading more on this from Tauriq Moosa, Mike Williams, and Anita Sarkeesian. For my part, I think that on issues of race and gender, The Witcher is occasionally successful (several women in the game are great, complicated characters with plenty of agency) and occasionally misses the mark (several side quests rely on sexist tropes and there are no characters of color in the game whatsoever). Sadly, that’s better than average, on the whole, in the context of both video games and fantasy in general.
But regardless of whether you agree with me on the importance of diversity in gaming, it’s impossible to argue that playing The Witcher is a deliberately exclusionary experience: you play as Geralt, or you don’t play at all. This is a defensible choice and, as I’ve discussed, it pays dividends. But it also weakens one of the core elements that distinguishes video games as an art form: the ability to literally inhabit your character. More than any other art form, video games invite you to take ownership of the protagonist – but most gamers are unlikely to see much of themselves in Geralt.
So: one game is too specific, and the other is too broad. What’s the lesson here? Only that we’re lucky to live in a time where this art form can support such different styles of narrative and experimentation. Would you rather play as a character in a detailed and vivid fantasy world – or would you rather build your own character from scratch? The good news is that whichever you prefer, adventure awaits...