Dragon Age Review 9: An interesting question at the heart of game design is precisely WHO becomes a game director. And how do these precious few manage to 'Rise to the top' of the 'design game'. How do guys like Ken Levine at irrational, Casey Hudson and Mike Laidlaw at Bioware get there. It matters a lot since the director is the boss man of the project. Sigh. I guess it is ajob that isDragon Age Review 9: An interesting question at the heart of game design is precisely WHO becomes a game director. And how do these precious few manage to 'Rise to the top' of the 'design game'. How do guys like Ken Levine at irrational, Casey Hudson and Mike Laidlaw at Bioware get there. It matters a lot since the director is the boss man of the project. Sigh. I guess it is ajob that is too big and too difficult for mere mortals. With a large modern AAA game there are SO many moving parts that the director needs to be a managerial genius, a rarely-sleeping over achiever, a leader, a person-person, tech-savy, art-savy, cutting edge, savante, literary conneiseur, perfect at time-management not only for himself but for others too, steering a ship of 200 egotistic, self-proclaimed 'creative talents', into a single unified, coherent vision that will please EVERYONE all the time. The game director should have no family, no private life nothing to distract him from his vital mission of perfecting his game hour by hour and day by day from the first rough concept to final publication and beyond. The game director has to make sure everyone does their job perfectly. Leading, soothing, coaxing and whip-cracking all the way. He must inspire fear and respect, talk the talk with 3D artists and programmers who are proud (and sometimes difficult) experts in many fields. He must inspire trust and respect from his employers as well as his team. What can I say, It's a hell of a job. And he must face the music if the sum of a VAST effort somehow fails. Sorry Mike, no doubt you are a good project manager. However on the art side you are weak. A Fantasy Role Playing Game is primarily a labour of WORLD DESIGN. All the parts are subservient to that. Whatever VAST labours have gone into making Dragon Age. Nowhere has there been the needed core focus on Geology, language, architecture, culture and history. Dragon Age has a lot of stores, NPC's and narrative elements. From the Origin's period these were pretty awesome. From the DA2 epoch less so. Far more trivial and teen themed: Yet all of these elements are swimming in limbo if they dont CONNECT meaningfully into an ongoing LIVING fantasy world. You cannot build the city of Denerim for example, or Amaranthine for example and then create a trilogy where the players are unable to go there. Freedom of movement is a basic component of real life. It needs to be a basic component of a fantasy world too. So long as Bioware spends thousands and thousands of prime man-hours building one-off scenarios the effort is largely being wasted. Because the game world, THEDAS does not exist. And adventures in this non-existant 'place' are simple disconnected episodes. Since this is also so OBVIOUS, so simple, so FUNDAMENTAL, so non-controversial and self evident, and has been since 1975, my big question is how poor old over-worked, busy as a bee Mike Laidlaw doesn't get this. How too could Greg and Ray not get this. It is very exciting really, because if all these hoary, 'experts' these 'pros' don't understand the needed framing for a fantasy RPG, it leaves a nice space for a grand game design in the future when someone who DOES get it, finally clicks. And sees that it is not only possible, and possible in a non-MMO format too! The Eureka moment will eventually come. The best then is definitely in the future of game design. The near future if anyone actually listens to me, pierces the rant to its enlightened source.
THE GROT REVIEW CRITERIA: After a long time writing reviews like an anus, think its time to set a few bad habits straight: Stop insulting designers. Show some respect for the design process and getting games in circulation. Hence (1) No Red scores. (2) Game scores as follows: Bad Game 5/10. Poor Game 6/10. Mediocre Game: 7/10. Good Game 8/10. Great game 9/10. Stella Game 10/10. To get 10/10 it must be a game that can be (theoretically) play-able for 1000+ hours. Not only great but near endless fun. Games may be bad or poor but making them should earn respect. Thus even the worst POS will still be a 5/10. 0/10 no longer exists in my vocabulary. Yellow is the new red. For the sake of accountability: you can reply if needed: Orctowngrot: Tim Rawlins: timtimjp@yahoo.com… Expand
Dragon Age II: LegacyYour Score0 out of 10User Score
