The Secret Lair

Build Your Kingdom: Be Legendary! And Buy Our Stuff!

Dragon Age: Legends is one part solid turn-based tactical combat game, one part blatant marketing whoredom¹ for Dragon Age 2 and other Electronic Arts games, and one part a sterling example of why Facebook is an ulcerative chancre on the loins of the Interwebs.

Legends is a free-to-play game on Facebook that is currently in open beta. The hook, especially for those like myself who eschew spending too much of our precious recreational time on that damnable Social Network, is that by completing quests in Legends, one can unlock special items in DA2 if they own it. The story of Legends has nothing to do with DA2‘s, however – you are an adventurer called upon by an old contact to help him track down his missing son. Predictably, this isn’t as straightforward as what it seems, and involves all manner of villainy specific to the rich world of Dragon Age, from hordes of darkspawn to horrifying abominations.

The gameplay is relatively simple, but has a solid foundation of strategic depth. Much like all fantasy-combat-games-with-roleplaying-elements since the dawn of Gygax, you create a character from one of several classes – in this case, a warrior, mage, or rogue – that you will eventualy customize further as you gain experience. The meat of the game is tactical combat. In each combat encounter, you assemble your party from a list of available Facebook friends’ characters and NPC’s, then fight through waves of enemies for rewards of gold and items. The combat is reasonably satisfying as you get deeper into the game, as the key to success in each encounter increasingly hinges on the balance of abilities you construct your party with, and the choices you make about when to use them.

The game’s website describes Legends as a RPG adventure game, which is a bit of a stretch in the role-playing department, given that you never actually get to play any sort of role beyond a killing machine²³. Apart from the aforementioned tactical combat, the other elements of gameplay are character customization and resource generation via maintaining a castle. The effects of enhancing ability scores or choosing different combat talents are significant, and what you choose can notably change how your character is best used when fighting. Castle design and upkeep is almost a separate game unto itself. It involves spending your hard-earned gold on different specialized rooms and workers to generate more resources to aid in combat later, such as healing potions or shard bombs. As much as I find it unpalatable that a core component of a Dragon Age game is building and decorating one’s house, this element of the game cannot be ignored – without a well balanced castle, you will run out of critical resources quickly.

Despite being a solid game, Legends simultaneously serves the marketing purpose of being an interactive commercial for DA2, among other games. Legends encourages you to sign up for a free EA online account, which allows you to connect your progress in this game to other EA games you own. Already noted is that playing Legends lets you unlock special items in DA2, but owning DA2 (or other recent EA releases, such as Dead Space 2 or Mass Effect 2) can also unlock items in Legends, leading to a vicious cycle of positive consumer reinforcement. While none of the items are overpowered or critical to victory in any of the games involved, the designers are keenly playing off the desire of most gamers to acquire More Shiny Things when there are More Shiny Things to be had, even when that means More Money to be Spent.

All that noted, the greatest criticism I can level at Legends is of its marketing and gameplay elements tied into it being a Facebook game⁴. For example, there is an arbitrary resource called Energy that you use to move around the map, and once you’ve depleted your Energy, the only way for it to be replenished is slowly over a period of four minutes per energy point. Additionally, once you use the character of a Facebook friend or an NPC as a member of your party in a combat encounter, you can’t use them again until a period of hours has passed. These two mechanisms encourage short bursts of play over repeated sessions as opposed to a long streak of play, which might seem appealing… except that the whole point of this is positive reinforcement to keep you coming back to the Facebook experience, increasing your exposure to advertising and the indirect chances you’ll spend money. Furthermore, there is a mobile web version of the game that has been developed (and apps for the various smartphone platforms are in the works) to entice you to check in on the resource development of your castle while you are away from a computer with a full web browser. Interestingly, the mobile version of the game only allows you to manage your castle, which is considered to be the interactive portion of the game with your Facebook friends.

Speaking of spending money, no major Facebook game would be complete without having a way to entice you to spend real world cash, and Legends is no exception. While the main currency in the game is gold that you earn as you go along, it turns out that you can only spend it on castle maintenance and certain resources. In order to purchase new weapons and armor (as oppose to those you find during the course of your adventures), more powerful items, the ability to bring back recently used characters into the party sooner, and other perks, you need to spend Crowns. You start the game with a limited number of Crowns, and the only way to acquire more is to buy them with real world money⁵. While the designers of indie Facebook games rely on the cashy money people spend on the premium resources therein to continue to develop those games, I suspect that’s far less the case for a corporate juggernaut like Electronic Arts. As with many things in life and on Facebook, Legends is billed as free to play, but requires money if you want an easy advantage.

The website for Legends states that it is “the first real game for Facebook”, which may very well be true. Sadly, this means that it comes with the slimy tendrils of Facebook’s advertising and marketing focused social media strategy intercalated within it, groping for your time, money, and very soul. Legends is a fun, solid game, but in a world where my most precious commodity is time, I’ll be spending more of it on deeper creative experiences… like, uh, Dragon Age 2. But first, I need to unlock Air of Confidence, the Ivo Family Crest, and Dura’s Blue Flame…

Dragon Age: Legends launch trailer

1. Without the syphilis, insofar as I’ve been able to discern. [↩]
2. This isn’t, per se, a bad role to play. It requires limited acting skills, and isn’t creatively taxing. There’s something primally satisfying about knowing that the scope of your thespian endeavors is to take the pointy thing and stick it in the eye of the grunting, slimy actor opposite of you. [↩]
3. Yes, I am well aware that in the digital realm, any game that uses experience points as a success metric and lets you improve your character as a result is smacked with the label of a RPG. Which makes less sense than the role-playing described above. [↩]
4. The only thing that would make it more morally ambiguous would be if it was developed by a pharmaceutical company, and all of the characters were named after antibiotics. [↩]
5. In what will come as a staggering surprise to you, you can also buy gold outright as well. [↩]

Tags: Dragon Age

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 17th, 2011 at 8:11 am and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.