14 DAY TRIAL // I was initially determined to give the Best Narrative award of the 2011 Softpedia series to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim because my last few weeks were dominated by its expansive world and adventures.
Then, by chance, I watched the last episode of the Redemption web series created by BioWare and Felicia Day and I remembered that Dragon Age 2 and its development team managed to create a much better story earlier in the year, even if their game universe is inferior to the one in Skyrim.
The most intriguing element of the Dragon Age 2 story is the unreliable narrator, embodied by Varic, the dwarf, who is recounting facts according to his own interest rather than to trying to stay as close as possible to what really happened.
There are two segments in Dragon Age 2 where this mechanics is clearly used but there are hints from BioWare that other sections of the game might also have been tweaked and the very experience that the player had might be proven in other titles in the series as false.
This is a very courageous position for the developer of a mainstream video game in a series which is supposed to keep selling millions of copies in the long run but it is not the only good thing when it comes to narrative in Dragon Age 2.
I initially loathed this move but making Hawke a set character and building the game around him actually gave the game grounding and allowed the writers to create what felt like a smaller but more important adventure.
The player was not saving the world yet again but just focusing on one person and trying to make the most of his unique abilities and his current situation, with some well written quests and some bad ones, but always with a clear end point.