I didn’t get this. I thought Dragon Age: Origins has a fairly powerful marketing campaign behind it…

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I am hoping that I will quickly get used to stuff and things will get better soon, but for such a big-name game I am unimpressed so far. It feels a bit like the developers really want to be making (albeit ‘interactive’) made-for-TV sci-fi instead of games.

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My view that the game was fairly anti-science came from the fact that a large number of the side quests as well as two of the main quests revolve around the results of horrid experiments, normally gone wrong. As you cross the galaxy, you come across numerous piles of corpses as the result of experiments. Added to the fact that scientists are weird people who isolate themselves in the middle of nowhere

Again, I interpreted it more as “science in secret, with no oversight or responsibility for what you’re doing, is bad”, rather than “science is bad”. Science, when carried out in the open, is obviously a good thing in ME. (Think of the Normandy, all the nano-augmentations and such, medigel, the scientific work behind defeating the Rakhni as well as the Krogan (even if in the latter case it had a dark side as well, *some* solution had to be found, and that solution was science.)

ME presents a huge number of benefits, improvements and solutions, and pretty much all of them (except for the mass relays and the Citadel, which turn out not to be such wonderful things after all) are due to modern science. Even the most crippling diseases can be cured, pollution is pretty much a solved problem, radically different species are able to live in harmony together, spaceship technology is improving quickly and so on.

It’s more like pro-science, anti-secrecy David Brin than anti-science Michael Crichton.

All the really cool stuff comes from technology of the past, or was simply lying around anyway. Relatively little was achieved by genuinely new discoveries.

Really? The Normandy’s stealth field comes to mind as an obvious counterexample.

All the element zero stuff works too. Sure, the stuff itself has been around forever, but so has iron or silicon. We still use both today in our civilization, and I don’t think it’s anti-scientific to say that much of our technology is based on those.

Humanity discovered how to *use* the stuff, and that enabled them to travel to the stars and meet this flourishing inter-species civilization (who had discovered the same thing). isn’t that pro-science?

If anything, I think it’s telling that the relays turn out to be traps. The ancient relics that everyone have relied on are *not* just there as hyper-advanced technology to be exploited by modern species, as everyone had assumed. They’re laid out to trap, ambush and wipe out those who use them. In other words, the message is “build your own damn technology. You can’t trust those ancient artifacts”

And the key to victory turns out to be the a “new” breakthrough (new as in discovered by the protheans, rather than left around forever by the reapers) who managed to unlock the technology behind the relays themselves. True, it happened to be the Protheans, rather than a modern species who achieved this, but still, I consider it pro-science. The key to survival was not “ancient semi-mystical relics”, as in all the stuff the Reapers left behind, but “stuff discovered by the species trying to survive the reapers extinction cycles”. Whether something good is discovered by Humans, Asari or Protheans, I’d still consider it pro-science.

What do you think the Council races are going to do after ME1? Go digging for more prothean technology to save their butts the next time, or try their damned best to build their own mass relays? The former would be anti-, the latter pro-science.

As a complete aside, anyone else ever find it somewhat suspicious that while in “our” time in the ME universe, the galaxy is full of a collection of sentient species, the bulk of which live reasonably harmoniously and a few outsiders, while the Protheans were the sole spacefairers of their age? Were the Protheans actually conquerors/raving xenophobes?

Yeah, that seemed odd to me as well. But I think there are two more likely explanations:

One might be sheer coincidence. The number of species about to rise up and take to the stars must vary with each reaper-extinction-cycle. And of course, space is really really big. The various species might simply never have met each others. Some cycles may see only one race discover the citadel, others might see five or ten. It would even make a certain sense for the cycles to be interleaved: If in one cycle several species show up, that means there are more species to go looking for more – for other species who are sentient, but don’t yet have the technology to go into space, and then give them a hand — leading to still more species coming to the Citadel. And that inevitably means more species getting wiped out by the reapers in that cycle — so the next cycle might have very few species turn up – most of the candidates were boosted up in the previous cycle, so they’re no longer around.

And then, after such an almost-empty cycle, more species are going to be about ready to discover space flight, and so we’re back at a crowded cycle.

An alternative, and probably most likely, explanation is simply that so few traces were left in the first place. The “present-day races” knew next to nothing about the Protheans. The reapers made a point of removing every trace of the past civilization, after all. So present-day archeologists may have 1) uncovered traces of other races, and simply lumped it all together under the “Prothean” name, or 2) by coincidence, no traces of other races have been left.
But keep in mind how closely the present races intermingle. Would archeologists in the next cycle really have enough information to tell them apart, and to actually count them as different civilizations? Even if they did uncover remnants of different species, would they be considered different civilizations at all? It is never explicitly stated that the Protheans were a single species. It may simply have been a catch-all name for “the entire inter-species civilization that existed last time around”

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Yes You’re right, I’m deliciously evil

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But overall the thing that I remember most was how boring it was. My party (with the notable exception of Garrus – good to see he’s returning) were all duller than day-old ditchwater. I started with a male Shepard but he was so tedious in the first five minutes that I immediately switched to a lady Shepard, who was only slightly less boring. The smooth, clean, pretty, Star-Trek-i-fied world was too clinical and idealised for my liking – give me Borderlands/Firefly over this any day. Spaceships should not have carpets – they should be like submarines; claustrophobic, dingy, practical.

So far in Dragon Age the only party members I don’t really love are Sten (too quiet) and Morrigan I just dont get on with. I couldn’t form relationships with anyone in ME, but Dragon Age has me aching to be a part of their lives. ESPECIALLY MY ADORABLE DOG!

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Rated M fo’ mature!

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