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“Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” review: Not too bad

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2024-11-11

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Author: Space Bear

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Sophisticated installation art.

Dragon Age: Shadowkeep is a frustrating game.

For fans of the series, Dragon Age: Shadowkeep is an absolute outlier. It completely abandoned the classic squad strategy gameplay and turned to action-based combat with a faster pace and more rapid feedback. The tone of the dark fantasy series has also been swept away, visual elements of violence or sexual innuendos have been basically stripped away, and the overall plot is more positive. The cartoon-like art style is incompatible with other realistic previous games.

But this does not prevent it from becoming an exquisite product supported by the modern game industry.

The game is very well-made, with abundant plot text and stable gameplay design. In many places, it is above the standard. From a design perspective alone, as many players hate Dragon’s Dogma 2, there are just as many players who will love, or at least be able to accept, Dragon Age: Shadowkeep. Compared with the former, “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” is undoubtedly smoother and more complete, and the positive feedback is clearer. Its goodness is standardized, and most players can find fun in it.

If there was no political correctness controversy, this work should have gained a better reputation and even had the potential to become a masterpiece. The value preaching in “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” is far from being overwhelming, but its slogan-like semi-forced introduction is really hard to praise. It’s like watching a necessary but embarrassing theme movie, but it’s the American version. Maybe the production team really hopes to convey positive social concepts, but the end result is undoubtedly the opposite.

However, there is a point that needs to be made: “political correctness” cannot destroy “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep”, or even any game.

Thinking about it in reverse, “political incorrectness” can’t save those manufacturers who are inherently low in ability and perfunctory – to put it incorrectly, butter is still divided into three, six or nine grades. A foreign object that can be inserted can easily affect life and death. How can video games be such an inconvenience? At least I don’t think so. If it’s good, it’s good, and if it’s bad, it’s naturally bad. Even though it has been labeled so much, at least as far as the game itself is concerned, “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” is not ugly.

Its graphics performance is excellent in this generation, and the optimization performance of the first release is so good that it is even a bit uncomfortable. Under the gameplay framework that emphasizes third-person action elements, the game has not even a single graphics or physics bug, which scared me for a while and wondered if this game had abandoned the Frostbite engine. If you look at it from a software engineering perspective, then “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” is really BioWare’s most mature work.

In terms of gameplay, the real-time combat is completely in line with the “Mass Effect” series, coupled with the low-end “3D Mario”-style map exploration experience, making this game truly an action game with detailed content and complete systems. It doesn’t need to be covered up with crappy combat animations and an open world like the last two games in the series. If we only talk about the fun of operation, then “Dragon Age: Shadow Keeper” undoubtedly surpasses all the works in the series.

The protagonist Locke controlled by the player is a typical ARPG protagonist – you can suppress the enemy with a combination of long-range and melee light and heavy attacks, choose to dodge or rebound to counter the enemy’s specific attacks, and release finishing moves by accumulating energy resources. The game provides three major operation types: mage, warrior, and ranger. Each profession has three specialties, and a total of nine different skill sets and combat styles.

Each specialty has its own talent build and combat techniques. For example, the talent set of the Gray Guard Warrior is more suitable for defending against shield strikes and fire elemental damage, while the Reaper Warrior is more suitable for continuous output and necrotic elemental damage. In addition, specializations can be combined with general talents at will to slightly change the character’s performance tendencies. Although most of the talent points are numerical values, there are also some key active and passive skills that can change the operation method.

Of course, as an action game, the specialization distinction of “Dragon Age: Shadow Keeper” is definitely not as big as that of role-playing. After all, players can smooth out the differences through techniques. For example, as a warrior profession, as long as you are proficient in basic action mechanisms such as shield counterattack and power charging, it is only a matter of time before you kill the enemy. The combat experience of a single specialization will become repetitive in the middle stage. Fortunately, the game can freely refund upgrade points, leaving enough room for players to experience.

Physical professions such as warriors and rangers have naturally become more fun, while mages have inevitably been reduced to skill launchers by this real-time action system. This so-called “mage” with fixed functions and the inability to form his own spell book is also the epitome of the entire series’ continuous simplification of role-playing elements.

Despite the lack of depth in character building, the combat in “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” can still maintain a certain amount of fun, or at least a certain sense of excitement. This is first of all due to the excellent visual performance and action tuning. Although the camera scheduling is a bit dull, the game’s attack and hit feedback are obvious, and it is full of large-scale, high-density gorgeous skill special effects. At the same time, all enemy movements can be Interaction is interrupted, but it is a pity that there are not enough people on the same screen, otherwise it would be played as half a “Wushuang”.

In addition, the equipment construction system of “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” also provides a variety of new mechanical experiences. Epic-level equipment in the game can provide unique genre effects, such as increasing the number of stacks of sustainable damage, or allowing different types of damage or shield treatment to be converted into each other, thereby strengthening the damage output of a certain core skill. In addition to ordinary upgradable equipment, there is also a unique equipment in the game. The values ​​and effects of these unique equipment are often not as good as top-level equipment, but they can completely change the player’s output method.

For example, there is a shield that can siphon surrounding enemies when it bounces, which is very suitable as a starting point, paired with short-range burst range skills; a certain piece of armor will trigger a large damage reduction deflection when the health is low, which can be combined with another to reduce the health. The upper limit of the value, but it can be used together with rings that increase the trigger threshold of low health to improve the fault tolerance rate of low health and damage-increasing flow. These, coupled with the character’s talent construction, provide considerable content thickness for the action combat gameplay of “Dragon Age: Shadow Barrier”, ensuring the basic fun of the game as an ARPG.

What’s interesting is that the game’s equipment system not only participates in combat, but also connects another major part of the action gameplay, namely level exploration, through the placement of collectibles and loot.

“Dragon Age: Shadow Keeper” abandons the repetitive and empty open world of the previous game and returns to a wide linear level system. The game has created small and small levels for different maps. The design density of these levels is very high, and the height difference and loop-type map structure are commonplace. Especially for Devante, a large city in the game, the production team connected a large number of branch lines and small boxes on this large box map. At the same time, these small boxes are also connected in all directions, so that the exploration routes of the entire city are intertwined into a complete dense network. .

Although there are many violent stacks of “shortcuts for the sake of shortcuts”, and because the transmission points are too convenient and dense, many routes are unnecessary for players to take a second time. But as the old saying goes, it’s better to have a design than no design. At least when you play it for the first time, the game’s map can provide enough exploration.

In addition to the connected structure extending in all directions, the game’s map also contains a fairly high density of environmental puzzles. Unlike some troublesome puzzle-solving links, the environmental puzzle-solving in “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” is very light. It is basically some simple perspective switching and platform jumping, which can be completed very naturally and smoothly during the exploration process. , will not overwhelm the focus, and at the same time allow players to maintain a state of flow with something to do.

It can be noticed that in order to maintain a smooth exploration experience, the production team has obviously modified the original design concept, such as the special abilities of companions. Due to the high density of the map design, players need to frequently trigger companion abilities during exploration. If you look at the design ideas of previous role-playing games, of course you have to bring different teammates to solve specific problems, but in this game you can use all the skills of your teammates at will, even if they are not in the team.

At first, I was a little disgusted with this design that harmed the uniqueness of teammates, but later, I began to be glad that it did not let me go back to the teleport point to change teammates, because there are so many mechanisms that can be triggered by abilities. If the skills are not universal, licking the map is cumbersome. The level becomes unacceptable and the entire operation needs to be “simplified”.

The “high-density, low-intensity” level exploration and environmental puzzle solving of this game, in my personal opinion, have reached a sweet spot of the same type of design, so that the exploration part of the game becomes a bit like the unimaginative “3D Mali” Oh” – this is a positive comment.

Of course, in terms of the density of level design and the fun itself, “Dragon Age: Shadow Barrier Guardian” is far inferior to those real box games. What really makes the exploration experience of the entire game roll is the equipment system mentioned before. It’s counterintuitive to say that, because the equipment collection system in “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” is very simple, even crude. There is no material creation or material upgrading, but simply merging similar items. Picking up duplicate equipment can improve the quality. It is not as complicated as some mobile games.

But it is this short, flat and quick design that supports the exploration experience of the entire game. The reason is very simple – as long as you ensure that each box is filled with a piece of equipment, you will continue to receive immediate positive feedback. Every time you open a new box, you can always get a new piece of equipment, or upgrade an existing piece of equipment. This design eliminates the negative experience of exploring the map for a long time and only getting some materials. Even if you are not a fan of this system, at least it will not disgust you or make you feel uncomfortable. At most, it is just a bit mechanical.

In my opinion, “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” has many similar clever designs. This kind of design that maximizes positive feedback and thereby degrades possible negative feedback has almost become the core design idea of ​​​​this game, highlighting the idea of ​​not seeking merit but seeking no fault. All mechanisms and systems are being de-accidentalized and de-unique, instead forming countless progress bars with stable expectations and visible information, and countless progress bars will eventually come together to form the grand progress of the final battle. bar, this large progress bar will determine the final direction of the ending.

This makes all operations in the game, even picking up a piece of garbage, have a slight but clear benefit, so you will keep doing it. No joke.

For example, there are a lot of debris in the game. If placed in a CRPG, the role of these debris may only be to provide a sense of life. Unless you are a hamster party, there is not much need to resell pots and pans. But in “Dragon Age: Shadow Keeper”, sundries can not only be sold for money, but also increase the faction power of the seller’s faction, and the faction power directly determines certain plot branches. So in this game, I can’t wait to pick it up automatically and fill it up without even looking at what it is, because I know it will definitely be useful, just inhale the storm and that’s it.

There are even more exaggerated ones. In addition to grades, ordinary equipment in the game will also have a separate grade system. The higher the grade, the higher the overall numerical strength. Newly acquired equipment will automatically upgrade with the character, but old equipment will not. If you identify an old piece of equipment, you need to continue to collect materials to upgrade it. It doesn’t really matter what the materials are, because when you vacuum the floor, you will suck in the materials, equipment, and garbage together. But the problem is that in addition to the equipment, the workshop itself that upgrades the equipment level also needs to be upgraded.

The materials for upgrading the workshop are actually some kind of encyclopedia of entries built into the game.

Yes, you heard it right, the way to increase the upper limit of equipment level in this game is to collect the entire map. Just vacuuming the floor isn’t enough, you have to search the various merchants on the map to see if they sell these “souvenirs.” When I was buying souvenirs, I also bought all the equipment I could buy, because I had to synthesize a big watermelon, so I might decide which piece of equipment would be epic.

Therefore, my gaming experience can basically be summarized into two categories – Rag King and Shopaholic, which happen to be the two types of gameplay that are most likely to brainlessly detonate dopamine.

You may ask, isn’t the formula homework for Ubisoft games similar? You can just pick it up without thinking and upgrade it without thinking.

Yes, essentially the same idea. However, “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” very wisely removes the most repetitive part of the homework, which is also the most boring part for players, leaving only the sense of completion of checking the to-do list. On the other hand, Ubisoft’s canned gameplay is so path-dependent that it puts the cart before the horse – I upgrade my equipment because I like to keep pulling weeds and mining on the big map?

I went to upgrade my equipment, of course because I wanted to upgrade my equipment. Yes, the open world is really great, but it’s really boring.

The process of achieving the goal is naturally more concentrated, the better. As for the balance point between brain death and repetitive boredom, it depends on each person’s ability. The crux of the problem is that after the soup of the open world is poured out of the can, it is difficult to fill the stomach with the remaining content. “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” is different. Of course it also has soup, but this soup has obviously been tempered by the fire. It is thicker and more flavorful. It just hits the critical value of brain-dead entertainment.

This critical value is actually an interval, and different players have their own interval positions. It’s just that I happened to be stuck in the interval covered by this game. However, I personally feel that the coverage of this area of ​​”Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” is likely to be larger than imagined. As mentioned at the beginning, it will be a clear, standardized game that can accommodate more players.

But then again, this kind of fun is just fun after all. It is designed and does not have any special transcendence. If I really had to choose, I would rather play with a burning pile of cow dung than a device like this precision instrument, such as “Dragon’s Dogma 2”. Although the latter is messy and smelly, with irrational garbage designs everywhere, it does have a special heat.

This feeling is very ambiguous. Just like the same skill launcher, the companions in “Dragon Age: Shadow Barrier Guardian” are controllable, and you actively control them to launch combat skills, and they can also detonate each other’s status. Both the visual effect and the actual effect are very explosive. They are all useful; the companions in Dragon’s Dogma 2 are uncontrollable, and it’s good if they don’t mess around and trick you to death. But I just think “Dragon’s Dogma 2” is more fun. I think this kind of taste is contrary to the public. Players naturally still like clear and clear mechanisms, just like everyone thinks that the ecology of “Monster Hunter” is useless.

I am a different kind of person. Although I will find the ecology annoying even if I play it 1,000 times, I hate making everything a progress bar and turning gaming into a particularly utilitarian behavior. This distaste reaches its peak in Dragon Age: Shadowkeep—a game where even giving gifts is a separate task. The performance sometimes has nothing to do with what gift you give. As long as you give it, a plot will be pushed forward, which almost destroyed my immersion in the game.

Because I can’t imagine myself buying a gift and having an exclamation mark pop up above my head, and then “expressing kindness to the person I like” becomes a task behavior to advance the progress bar. Even after the progress bar is full, this good behavior will definitely have results. As long as you keep doing this, you can reach an ending that makes everyone feel happy. But this is a game after all. At least in “Dragon Age: Shadow Guardian”, what everyone wants to see is what everyone wants to see.

Of course, even if you pour out the soup, it actually still has enough plot content-after all, it is still a role-playing-centered content. Even if its characters and dialogue are sometimes very thin.

In fact, the plot of “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” itself is not perfunctory. On the contrary, it is even a bit too saturated. Its various world settings and key plot points have almost reached the limit of an RPG work. If you don’t rely on relevant supplementary content inside and outside the game, it will be difficult for you to digest the plot of this game smoothly. Referring to the previous works, until the story of the “Dragon Age” trilogy is completed, it only describes the two main countries of Ferelden and Orai, which is almost one-third of the known continent of Thedas.

And “Dragon Age: Shadow Guardian” has completed almost two-thirds of the remaining continent of Thedas in one go. Each area on these maps has appeared in the past series of works. Some are very small-scale scenario copies, and some simply appear in a line of dialogue, or just an entry. That Wishop, thousands of miles away, is the only remaining Gray Guard fortress on the entire continent; the city of art, commerce and passion, Antiva shrouded in family assassinations and political conspiracies; the lost empire that was punished by God, Devante, who plunged the continent of Sedas into endless misery.

This is the scope of the Dragon Age: Inquisition strategy table

Nevara where the undead culture flourishes, the Gold Coast where freedom and wealth are worshiped, the dwarf dungeons submerged in the first dry tide… “Dragon Age: Shadow Barrier Guardian” has done it all. Each region has a corresponding story encyclopedia, a map landscape that can be explored, and companion tasks corresponding to the camp and origin. Although some of the non-mainline areas are not too big, at least they do it. You can truly set foot in and observe every corner of the world of Thedas, instead of just reading an illustrated article like the strategy table of “Judgment”. Select results.

If you are interested in the text of “Dragon Age”, you have checked the game’s wiki, and read the multimedia derivative works of the series, then I can responsibly say that, at least in terms of worldview supplement, “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” You won’t be disappointed. On the contrary, its restoration and presentation of the series is almost “obsessed” and has even affected the normal narrative. Just like a summary Marvel movie, if you haven’t carefully examined the various textual connections in the series, you will most likely not feel that there is a “plot” when playing this game.

From this point of view, I think the production team of “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” at least really loves this series, although this kind of love is quite paranoid, very primitive, without any skills, all emotions, just like that A straight-shooting fanfic written by an enthusiastic “wife fan”. There is no need for any foreshadowing or shaping, it is a close encounter with stereotypes, showing a fairly high level of fetish plot. Rather than being a complete plot game driven by story and characters, it is more like a collection of plot fragments and various silhouettes stacked up. Past characters and plots are forgotten, and some settings are lost. These are naturally inevitable.

I’m actually not surprised that BioWare has become what it is today. It hasn’t been very good at telling stories since its birth, at least it certainly can’t tell stories like Black Isle and Obsidian. They are better at character creation and world view presentation than storytelling, and in a BioWare game, the two are usually carried out simultaneously, embodied in a large number of long-term companion tasks. After all, compared to a dead set collection, living people can carry information better, and the way the information is output is also easier for people to accept. BioWare used this technique to the extreme in “Mass Effect 2”. The entire game was neatly divided into several companion mission lines, and the final ending also ended with a “big showdown” climax where teammates gathered together.

The script framework of “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” is exactly the same as that of “Mass Effect 2”. If you think “Mass Effect 2” is good, then the general direction of “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” will definitely be to your liking. The game has many more companion quests than the main quest line, and each quest line will affect the final ending.

Many players regard “Mass Effect 2” as an RPG that will go down in history – through it, BioWare has truly realized the popularization and modernization of Western-style RPGs. But I personally dislike the structure of “Mass Effect 2” very much, because it is too clear, too symbolic, and too progress bar-based, so that it loses the most important sense of reading in a CRPG, like a visual blockbuster. After all, the setting is dead. No matter how vivid it pretends to be, it is just a dead thing.

Similar to superhero movies in recent years, the two have also fallen into a flat and symbolic narrative dilemma. The problems encountered by “Dragon Age” are even more severe, because the game’s plot emphasizes interactivity. During the trilogy period, messes caused by a large number of plot branches have already emerged one after another. “Dragon Age: Shadow Guardian” chose to avoid the southern continent and gave up the long-standing Keep archive inheritance mechanism. It is more a helpless move than forgetting the ancestors.

After abandoning all kinds of shackles, “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” has become the ultimate form of this symbolic fast food. Everything in this game is part of the progress bar, everything you see, hear and use , all are outputting information, all are providing positive feedback, and all are useful. Although there is nothing wrong with “useful” in itself, extreme efficiency also means extreme flatness, because everything is equally important and there is no priority. As we all know, people talk nonsense, and only plot tools have the mission of conveying information or emphasizing values.

Therefore, the character dialogue in “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” is very flat. Rather than being a living character, they are more like a prop that outputs information, or some kind of personality. Behind these props and characters is huge narrative pressure, and the narrative pressure comes from the overly large and excessive world view of this game. Even if all the plot is assigned to the companions, the content of the game is still not enough to support vivid characters.

“Dragon Age: Origins” uses almost the entire work to support the image of the Gray Guard, a major faction. In this game, the Gray Guard is only one of the six main factions.

Players of the series certainly know what kind of organization the Gray Guard is. For us, the Gray Guard has become a symbol and a symbol. The game does not need to write more about this aspect… But what about other factions? This experience is also similar to a superhero movie. Many things and people simply appear without a process of formation. Many of the new factions and characters in “Guardians of the Shadow Tent” have appeared in previous multimedia projects such as comics and novels, including Tash, a Qunari with gender identity deviation.

There may really be stories behind them, but how should players actively discover them? Why does the protagonist Locke team up with Varrick, Neveu, and Hardin at the beginning of the game? If you want to know, go watch The Missing and Tevinter Nights first, catch up on this, nibble on that, and do your homework.

Of course, a good and thick plot can have a threshold of understanding, but this threshold of understanding should not deviate from the work itself. A good work or a good character will eventually become a symbol, but you cannot abuse this symbol and forget the process of symbol creation. Because symbols have no meaning, we only need symbols when the meaning itself is not present. Good works are often in reverse. After all, everyone understands the truth. What is difficult is to restore the process of the initial formation of symbols.

Such works are bound to be unclear, incoherent, chaotic and ambiguous. Take “Dragon Age: Origins” for example. In my opinion, this work itself has a strong value output of equality, diversity, and inclusiveness, just like most RPGs made by BioWare. Although it looks very violent and pornographic on the surface, it is very unpolitically correct, and it contains a lot of naked systemic violence against ethnic minorities and women.

Especially the background story of the female city elf, almost the entire game is against you.

Where you live, the lord has the right to rule the elves under him. The human lords wanted to occupy you from the beginning, and slaughtered all your lovers, relatives and friends, just because the elves were born low, and you are even lowlier than the elves – you are still a woman, and people like you deserve to be nobles by birth. Men ravage and play with them like objects. But you feel like it’s all unfair. So, like the bloody bride in Quentin’s movie, you kill the stinky men who insult you one by one, like slaughtering pigs.

I applaud this female awakening and racial equality with all my hands. Not only do I agree with it, I think it’s fucking cool. It doesn’t need to instill any symbols into me at all, because I have already read the formation process of the symbols and understood the meaning behind them – if it were me, I would not hesitate to kill the domineering noble master. Even if I am a human male myself. The truth is actually very simple, but I don’t know why many people just don’t understand it.

Restoring violence is not to support violence, but to restore the meaning of “fighting violence” so that it is no longer just a superficial slogan. This situation can extend to the DEI movement as a whole. When the social concept of “diversity, equality, and tolerance” becomes a purely symbolic label, it itself has lost its meaning, and may even cause reverse discrimination. If you have read history, you will know that expecting movement-style administrative orders to stimulate social trends and change social atmosphere is bound to fail.

Back to the game. The overly symbolic plot also intensifies the thinness of the entire worldview. In fact, the text density of “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” is very high, but the various standardized and one-dimensional presentation completely destroys the reading experience of this work. The production team is so obsessed with the efficiency of conveying information that the game text cannot form an effective dialogue with the player. One of its most important manifestations is the ring dialogue option that BioWare has promoted. This design almost destroys the most important personal perspective of CRPG.

The dialogue loop is a dwarfing of reading behavior. It compresses dialogue logic into emotional tendencies. Players can only choose one of these clear emotional options to respond: good, angry, serious, funny, sad, or excited. These conversations often make no sense and are just options in disguise. You only need to express your emotions to the instilled content, and you don’t need to care about what you really said. The game will not really ask you questions, and there will be no rumination after reading the text.

However, this kind of dialogue ring-like design is actually the most modern, and it is what BioWare and many game manufacturers are pursuing. The dialogue branches with a clear framework are designed to be more unified, and a large number of regular “dialogues” can be written in a targeted manner. The vast majority of players will only choose the options with the most intense emotions, rather than some useless chat text – such as Old CRPGs like to stuff a bunch of useless investigation options.

Because the dialogue of old-fashioned CRPG relies more on logical progressive relationships rather than emotional reactions. When you hear a sentence from an NPC, your reaction is not whether should I die laughing, or should I be angry or indifferent, but should I say “what”. This “what” is often a very specific sentence. For example, you can refute the other party’s point of view, or in turn question the other party’s questions. Some key options will also open more sub-dialogues, rather than one dialogue ring leading to the next. Mechanical repetition.

You must carefully observe the content of the conversation and select the most correct one from many possible options, or choose the sentence that best fits your inner thoughts, rather than fixedly outputting a few limited emotions. If you really don’t want to express a specific opinion, it’s better to just add an “I’m mentally retarded” option to the dialogue like Black Island, so that when you don’t want to consider the dialogue, you can justifiably skip the plot.

I often don’t understand the roulette dialogue options

This may be a unique communication characteristic of the Internet era. The output of emotions and “I am a fool” sounds very much like the behavior of netizens. Under this behavior, it is impossible to have any meaningful dialogue. At this point, “Dragon Age: Origins” is an outlier among the new generation of BioWare games. This is not to say that its dialogue text is more witty and informative than that of “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep”. To say that is a bit dwarfed – it is that the dialogue form itself is different in dimension.

To give a specific example, it is also about conveying gender issues in a fantasy world.

“Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” will directly tell you through dialogue text that the Qunari can choose the gender they want. Tash’s companion missions touch on this issue of gender diversity many times. Tash’s mother and the second-generation Isabella will repeatedly emphasize this point in the dialogue as both negative and positive sides. Tash’s personal quest line also has a large plot devoted to his inner struggle. If you follow this line, you will have the opportunity to encourage him to complete his identity and get out of the vicious cycle of self-doubt. The development process of this story and characters is not problematic in itself, and the values ​​​​are worthy of recognition.

It’s just that the form of implementation is too flat and one-sided, as if all this is just an illusion that can be dispelled by personal efforts. Players do have choices, but they seem insignificant. On the contrary, if you choose to be a woman in “Dragon Age: Origins”, you will find that not only do you have no choice in many things, but these “no choices” will be throughout the game, repeatedly deepening your understanding of gender issues.

After all, Thedas is a medieval world with a dark fantasy background. Women are highly discriminated against in this continent. Except for the magic circle and the church, it is rare to see powerful female characters. When a female character participates in the Gray Robe Trial for the first time, the sunny and cheerful boy Alista will tell the player that he has basically never seen a female Gray Guard. You can ask him why he pays special attention to gender issues, and Alistar will say that it’s not out of obscenity, but out of pure curiosity.

This seems to be the author’s ridicule, or it may mean something. You can’t judge the specific nature of this topic. Unlike “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep”, the game does not give you a clear answer. Even the hidden setting itself may have been forgotten by BioWare, or has been denied internally.

In the follow-up plot of “Dragon Age: Origins”, players will encounter a monster called the Broodmother in the Black Spirit Lair on the Abyss Road. Since the Black Spirits themselves do not have women, these monsters will force women to devour their own body tissues, thereby transforming them into bloated and evil fertility machines. The Gray Guard trial happens to require recruits to drink processed black spirit blood to establish a spiritual connection between the gray robe guardian and the black spirit. Although the game never directly points out this, the lack of female members of the Gray Guard is likely to It’s related to women’s difficulty in overcoming special mutations.

It is a pity that in “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep”, the Black Spirit and the Wither Tide have been completely transformed into tools, turning into symbols like Nazis and zombies. Even the Great Demon is nothing more than a puppet of a high-ranking god. They are abstracted into cartoon minions of evil forces, and you just need to defeat them when defeating evil.

BioWare did pack a lot of content into the northern part of Thedas continent, but as mentioned before, these content are just a bunch of suspended settings. It’s like a hardcover book, but there are no words in the book, which is really a pity. Because, the plot of “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” originally had much potential: the villain Solas is a gray figure who is both good and evil, and the truth of the world is enough to shake the foundation of order in the entire Thedas continent, but the game does not Start a discussion.

Gone

For example, universal religious issues: The origin of the Andrast Holy Light Religion is questionable. If this secret is revealed to the continent of Thedas, will it trigger a crisis of faith? Do the people have the right to know the truth? Is justification by faith personal freedom? These conversations appear in the game. But it’s just a conversation, maybe only five or six sentences. After throwing out the concept, the topic is over.

There are many such plots in “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep”. The screenwriter actually considered the possible consequences of many things, but due to space reasons, it was completely impossible to expand on them. Even so, the complete experience time of one game of this game has reached fifty hours. If you want to push through all the “progress bars” visible to the naked eye, the process will be even longer. Concepts appear quickly and then disappear immediately, whizzing by in the rapidly developing character arcs and plot points. Just looking at the story itself, everything is complete and clear, and it is even difficult for you to “understand” this story.

But is this really what everyone wants? At least I don’t want to.

This manuscript is the most tangled review of my career. The development of the “Dragon Age” series is very similar to the development of the entire stand-alone game genre. The trilogy and “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” have undergone drastic changes. It seems logical again. The complex becomes simple, the chaotic becomes clear, and everything is developing in the direction of systematic industrialization. Although everyone scorns industrialization, outside the core player circle, industrialization and standardization are still the most popular choices. Game manufacturers are not idiots. If it didn’t work, the industry wouldn’t be where it is today.

Some places should be changed

Just like “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep”, it is too clear, too intuitive, too controllable, and too large. Even if it is self-consistent and reasonable, it still looks flat. But with a reasonably designed and self-consistent gameplay system and a huge amount of content worth the price of admission, aren’t they the qualities that a good game should have? Who is at fault? Even if it can be regarded as a qualified ARPG, “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” has too many controversial contents that have nothing to do with the game. The fig leaf of the rating has been completely removed, and there is no way to be objective.

Emotional options are indeed more powerful than physical choices. They forcefully instill values ​​and players can naturally vote with their feet. But without the subjective output of emotions, “Dragon Age: Shadowkeep” is definitely not a pile of garbage. In this matter, I support neither players nor manufacturers. And if you choose to stay out of it and treat it as a job, does that mean you are supporting the manufacturer? When did games become such an impure thing?

Maybe, nothing is pure in the first place. I am just a narcissist who thinks he is a businessman. When I write a review, I write a good review and present the game to the players completely. Then the task is completed. The conclusion is that it is affected by DEI, but the quality of the game is indeed okay. This thing is not complicated, and if it were like Dragon Age: Shadowkeep itself, the review could have ended in around 3,000 words.

So why does it turn into a burning pile of cow dung? Why do you still give the game 8 points after mentioning so many shortcomings?

I don’t have a clear answer myself.

The hardware configuration specifications for this game evaluation are as follows:

Configuration model

MSI brand console Codex Dark Knight

motherboard

MSI B760M BOMBER WIFI D5

CPU

Intel i7-13700F

graphics card

MSI RTX4070 VENTUS 2X 12G OC

Memory

Ying Ruida D5 16G 5600

harddisk

Ying Ruida P3 OLUS 1T M.2

monitor

MSI MPG321UR-QD

Product Picture Appreciation Performance Test Product Details

3DM rating: 8