First off, I hope everyone had a great holidays. Enjoyed your Christmas, revelled in new years and generally took it easy.

With my time of I decided to finally start up the game I was scared off. Dragon Age. Scared because I know what I am like with Bioware games, I stop all required functions to survive to play those games as they take over my life. So I picked up a copy when the game came out but waited, left it sitting there taunting me. I needed time when me disappearing from reality would not be so detrimental.

I am glad I did. I started Dragon Age last Thursday, now on Monday my stats are showing I have put a shade over 60 hours into this game. Sickening? maybe… worth it? Totally.

I will not gush fanboy style over it, as I can easily see its faults. However this is easily the game of the last year. No question. The other thing it should be is the poster child of gaming. This is what people should associate with gaming, this grown up, adult story of grand fiction. Filled with care and depth that extends past most novels. With characterization on such levels that sometimes I had to just stop and walk away, unable to continue the conversation.

Instead we get Modern Warfare 2. MW2 is what is the public face of gaming and that makes me sad. When MW1 came out it was a big hit, you could make the argument, rightly so.  Not to get onto my PC gaming is king spiel, but what made MW1 so popular is that it feels right, the movement, the aiming and the shooting are all spot on. You know, Counter Strike for the console generation. So after the popularity of MW1 we got a slew of games that suddenly had to be like Modern Warfare, copycats if you will. Now with MW2 reaching such heights of exposure you can bet your ass people are going to copy…oh what’s that? Medal of Honour the big competing console franchise is shifting its focus of Warfare into the Modern era? Really?…..

These are the two big games of last year and the influence on them is easy to see. They are both trying to achieve the same thing, an immersive, epic experience for their players. But they are coming from two different directions, MW2 has looked at the money and popularity of movies and gone “We can do that better”. Hence it playing like a summer blockbuster, exciting and noisy but when you scratch away its surface you find it hollow underneath. Dragon age comes from books and storytelling so it is unapologetically involved. The sheer amount of history and writing involved is scary to think of, designing a whole new world with a coherent power, economic and religious structure.

As I said before it is not without its faults. They are mostly on the technical level, the camera is like a wayward child who has gotten drunk out the back, the fact it starts up and goes “here is the world… have fun!” Not hand holding, no real tutorials, it is a PC-assed PC game. I had played for 30 hours before I found out I could pick pockets, or that = would select my entire party.

Sure gaming has a long way to go to be grown up. But it will be games like Dragon Age that will be maturing the field, companies like Bioware that will expand on what is possible.

Thank you David Klemke. I had a few things I wanted to put up for today’s post but nothing grabbed me. Then your Modern Warfare 2 piece came along and I knew what I needed to write. You’re wrong. Should I just leave it at that?

Modern Warfare 2 is an example of what is wrong with gaming. To not come across as an elitist asshole I am going to have to ask you all for patience. Follow me as we go, hold off on condemning me until you have read through what I have to say.

The game is a failure, a spectacular looking, and wonderful handling failure. If we break a game down into the component parts we come up with:

• Story
• Graphics
• Mechanics

I am going to leave multiplayer alone as it is its own beast. Let’s start with the easy one. Graphics. That is a fairly easy thing to assess. It looks great. A lot of it is the general muddy brown but it is realistic looking muddy brown. The art direction is solid and well defined. It is a shame it is boring as it sticks to the tried and true military realism however it is a cohesive system that never really breaks the feeling of the game. So I am on board with you there, not to the same extent however, I think it is competent but not gorgeous.

Mechanics. Well the mechanics of the game work. Infinity Ward are pretty much at the top of the ladder when it comes to movement and shooting. It feels natural and fluid to move, go into cover, and scale over things. Shooting again has the perfect feeling of reality. You don’t need to think about how you are going to use the weapon; it works exactly as you believe it should. Some of the game play mechanics are a bit screwy like the Snowmobile scene as the shooting there felt off as there was a slight lag but ultimately they are the best at what they do mechanically. So again I am on board.

With me agreeing with you so far why do I think it was a failure? The story, pure and simple. Not only was it poorly written, trite, confusing, down right stupid. It was mostly a lie. It was cheap hacks taken directly from Modern Warfare 1.

The story is so poorly written the majority of it boils down to “go kill those guys”. Your motivation is largely missing. The dialogue is the sort you would find scrawled in an eighth graders math book. Everyone comes across as the ultimate badass with no real defining characteristics. The players you play as? Nameless, faceless nobodies. You just go from player to player and even if you could get attached to them emotionally there is no point. In Modern Warfare 1 they had an amazingly powerful moment where the character you were playing dies. The effect was profound. Well IW had to do better didn’t they? In MW2 your player characters die all the damn time! It no longer has any effect on you because you just don’t care about them.

The narrative beat to the story is equally as poor. Segueing straight from the Snowmobile ride which I imagine they called “high-octane” during the development process straight into That Level. The tonal shift, the beat is so off it does not provoke shock it provokes puzzlement. Puzzlement in who would think that was a good idea.

We all know about That Level. The one that makes no sense in reality and no sense within the game world. There is so many factors wrong with this. To bring the uninitiated up to speed That Level has you playing as an undercover agent in a brutal Russian crew. You all step out of the lift with incredibly powerful guns into a crowded airport. They just start mowing down civilians left and right. You have control over your character at walking speed. You don’t have to shoot your gun but there is nothing stopping you. At the beginning of the game you are given the choice to skip this level if you want as it is judged too shocking.

Its shit. No matter how you spin it, it is a bald faced lie run for shock without the slightest nod to reality or what the overarching goal is. There is no lead up and once done there is no call back. To start with you are in a large area and you are coming from one end. These guns would make an incredible amount of noise. Do you think anyone would be sticking around to check it out? Of course not, yet there were more than enough civilians to do the slow run of terror away from you. The Russian airport rent a cops are all wielding tiny pistols. They stand and try to fight. Nothing in this makes any internal sense in the game. You finally make it to the end and surprise! You are killed to pin the blame on the Americans. If you are already there, surrounded by the higher ups of this brutal band with the ring leader you were sent to find, you have an immensely powerful gun in your hands and you DON’T shoot him? Its pathetic in its attempts.

What makes it worse is that, okay if I am to buy this idea, this event. If you are going to put it in your game as a pivotal moment in the plot then fucking own it. Don’t give people an escape clause, put time and dedication into it being what it should be, confronting and powerful, a strong beat in the narrative of the game. Instead we get a school boys attempt to be shocking.

I believe that Kieron Gillen sums up the whole even in one perfect paragraph:

“In other words, Infinity Ward have taken great effort to render a scene of a massacre which bears no relation to any massacre that could ever happen. It’s nothing more than that moment of revulsion (or, for those sort of gamers, excitement) when you open up on civilians. It means nothing human because it’s about nothing that’s human.”

The rest of the game follows these ideas. Of trying to one up the last game and waving any shred of realism goodbye. I don’t envy the job they had. They had originally created a critically acclaim game that started to really break into the mainstream in Modern Warfare 1. To follow that up would have been horribly difficult. But this does not try anything new, does not change the game, only filled with attempts to one up the previous game, it is just sad to see.

With the expectation and broad appeal they had the chance to do something wonderful, they could have shown the true face of war, shown that they can craft a narrative worth following, something which sits with your emotions and leaves you thinking about your decisions.

Instead we end up with an on rails shooter, full of lights, fury and sound but is at the end, empty.