Okay, BioWare. Sit down. Let’s have a talk.

Now, you and I both know that we’ve had a bit of a rocky relationship lately. We both said and did some things that we regret over the past few years. You tacked on a terrible ending to an otherwise fantastic game when you unleashed Mass Effect 3 upon us. And I sent you a thousand cupcakes in protest. You rushed a buggy and incomplete Dragon Age II through development at the behest of your friends at EA (who I have to say have been nothing but a bad influence on you). And I, gods help me, I paid full price for that game on release day.

I think we both regret these things, but it is only because I know you can do so much better. Baldur’s Gate changed the way we thought about RPGs, convincing us that they didn’t just have to come from Japan. Mass Effect remains one of the best science fiction series in any medium, with the second one being a showcase in the kind of open ended storytelling that you’ve become so good at over the years. And Dragon Age: Origins swallowed up weeks of my life, yet always left me feeling content.

I know you’re better than your mistakes. I know there is more to you than that.

On release day, I felt that hope stir as I picked up Dragon Age: Inquisition. I loaded it up on my PS3 and immediately spent the next six hours roaming through Thedas once again, beating demons to death with a giant hammer as my newest avatar, Harold the Herald of Andraste. And it felt so good. Like putting on an old pair of shoes after years of trying to get new ones to take their place.

Now, I’m not saying this is a perfect reconciliation of our once perfect relationship. There are still some things that we need to discuss, but I want you to know that I’m happy. Happy to be moving in the right direction and to be seeing so much of what I love in you. I can see you trying to learn and grow as a company, incorporating the open world of Skyrim into Thedas, allowing us to explore your world a bit more and to take part in seemingly endless quests. Even though some of them are a bit too “Go to this place and kill X number of Y and bring them back to me” for my liking, the intention is appreciated. I feel the kind of freedom I missed while playing the previous entry in the game. You’ve done better and that’s the important thing.

I must confess something to you, though, and that is that I’m clearly not as well off as you seem to assume I am. I know that it is the assumption of game developers that their customers are playing their games on the finest and biggest screens available, the fact that I’m playing on a PS3 should warn you that I might not have that kind of disposable income. My standard definition TV has shrunk your text to the point where I have to play with the settings every time I want to read about the silly fetch quest you’ve sent me on. It may seem a small issue, but anything that keeps me from enjoying the time and effort you’ve spent building this fantastic world greatly hinders my enjoyment of the game.

There are also a few technical hiccups, which seem to be the norm for AAA games these days. I know you have a deadline, but releasing a game that crashes and freezes every other time I play it? That just feels lazy and convinces me more and more that you should not be hanging out with that EA character. I know you’ll be releasing a patch soon that fixes issues like this, but why sour the rekindling of our romance with such petty things?

Perhaps these issues aren’t on the next-gen (which we should really start calling the current-gen at some point), but that doesn’t seem to be a good enough excuse to me.

Still, I keep wanting to come back. I want to wrap myself in the warm blanket of Dragon Age and forget my troubles and my worries. Part of me knows that you may hurt me again and that we may never capture that magic of our early relationship, but as long as you put out games like Dragon Age: Inquisition, which is perfectly satisfactory, I will continue to hold out hope that you’ll do something else that is bigger and better in the next instalment.

You can do it, BioWare. I believe in you.

Sincerely,

A Fan

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