In the beginning, there was an A, and it went straight to Z. Such was the way of computerized roleplaying games.
The storylines of RPGs have expanded somewhat since then, but every RPG has an interesting conundrum at its heart: you want to give your players the illusion of freedom, but realistically you need to keep your players pressed firmly against the rails of the plot. Sure, it'd be great if we had an RPG where you had three or four completely separate storylines - a series of noble quests for the good guy who wants to save the kingdom, a series of brutal conspiracies for the evil guy who wants to rule it, and a third series for the whacky guy who doesn't give a crap about the kingdom but wants to seduce nubile, beautiful conquests.
Alas, it's hard to justify creating large, expensive setpieces that won't be seen by two-thirds of your player base, so RPG writers do what Hollywood folks have been doing since movies began: they recycle sets. Whether you're good, bad, or just plain crazy, they have to engineer a plot where you're going to start at the carefully-balanced Shallows of Lakeshore and end up facing down the Big Bad in the very-expensive-to-create Grindguts Cave.
This, in turn, creates a really fascinating writing constriction: you have to create a separate emotional arc for each kind of player you allow. If the PC wants to be a good guy, that's great; everyone loves him, and he'll nobly set out to end the evil in the land. But if the PC wants to be a jerk (which
4.9% of you default to), then not only do you have to give him a motivation for setting out after the MacGuffin,
but you have to create a set of separate goals for all your NPCs that explain why they put up with this bloodthirsty wahoo.
In other words, when writing a big RPG like this, you're essentially writing a separate storyline for each kind of playstyle you want to have. That's a lot of words. And if you do that poorly, then you run the risk of having every NPC being a punching bag. If the players feel like the NPCs are going to give you the Staff Of Plot Coupon no matter how they act, then they become less involved.
The way Bioware's gotten around that (at least partially) is to have players in your party have their own motivations. If you act too evil, the good NPCs will leave you, or even attack. Be too much of a nice guy, and that most excellent tank you've spent all that time levelling up will turn on you. Which is also a nice way to encourage a second runthrough.
The other thing Bioware has defaulted to (since it's mostly bulletproof) is to give you a Four-Plot Coupon structure. See, if it's a straight line from the start to the finish, then you run the risk of getting bored/stuck somewhere between A and Z. The standard Bioware structure is to get you past an introductory challenge, then branch off to an "open-ended" segment where you must complete four tasks before you can get to the end game - in the case of Dragon Age, you must do four things to bring the kingdom together against the Darkspawn. Those four tasks are each easily accessible, in a location with their own side quests, so you have the illusion of free will as you pick your choice of plots.
That choice, however, leads to another flaw: you're wandering around in the middle of the game with no ticking clock. Yes, everyone tells you that the Foobari invasion will start any time soon, but realistically you're just meandering and levelling up.
What they've done in Dragon Age to remedy this, however, is really brilliant: they've started tying the tasks together again. Which is to say that when I finished one quest, the only way it could be completed was to get the help of the Circle of Wizards - and when I got to the Circle of Wizards, guess what? They needed my help before they could help me out with my prior quest.
Truth is, I would have gotten to the Circle of Wizards anyway since they were on my Plot Coupon Shopping List. But requiring their help as part of my prior quest made it feel like more of a
plot. Now they were a large complication, not a check-off.
BioWare's also started having triggering events in between each of the Plot Coupons to keep the story rolling. For example, when you complete your first Plot Coupons, assassins strike at you on your way to Plot Coupon #2. Complete #2, another mini-quest triggers. This gives the illusion of movement.
It's fascinating, because every RPG has the same core elements: a player, who may or may not be a jerk, must go to various locations, kill monsters, and level up enough to kill the bad guy. BioWare is obviously feeling the restraints on that, and particularly for Dragon Age (I'm just getting to Plot Coupon #3) they're really trying to battle against those shackles. They did that already (most notably in The Twist in Knights of the Old Republic, which cleverly answers an eternal RPG canard), but it's really evident that they're going for broke here.
Dragon Age has a lot of flaws thus far: a hackneyed backstory, NPCs who fucking love jumping in front of you the second you try to open a chest (HAY GUY YOU WANTED TO TALK TO ME, RITE?), some sketchy level design (why, yes, I
would like to walk into an ambush of six mages who I can't hurt until they've fired the first six shots!), every NPC is a pinata full of words that you can't really skip past, and of course there's the usual poorly-explained welter of controls. But the story is fascinating to see in its mechanics, because they're definitely trying to break the mold - and it shows, and it's compelling. And for that, I have to give them the long, slow clap.
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