Every RPG has its times where the illusion of a living, breathing world stumbles — times that are alternately funny and sad. Sometimes it’s caused by a simple oversight. Sometimes it’s a bug that was never patched. And sometimes whole games are set up to be founts of immersion-shattering hilarity.
Here are some moments and cases where RPG devs could have done more for immersion but didn’t (or couldn’t).
Poetic Justice Fail — Dragon Age: Origins
We’ve all done it at some point — gotten so attached to a trinket in an RPG that we held on to it for the rest of the game. Maybe it’d be used or referenced later, right? As the youngest scion of the noble Cousland family in Dragon Age: Origins, though, you have much more than a trinket to hold on to. You have the family sword, which can be salvaged before you flee in the game’s intro.
Flee your home, that is. While a traitorous family friend overruns it with his army and murders your parents.
There’s no tool more fitting to deliver your vengeance with. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t recognize the poetry of that act — bringing the blade to the eventual showdown with Arl Howe and sticking him with it yields no special dialogue or reward. Sure would’ve been nice to see the traitor recognize the weapon that ended him and choke on rage as well as blood.
Revenge Served Undercooked — Shadowrun: Hong Kong
Among the diverse mercenary lineup Shadowrun: Hong Kong offers to beef up your team of elite criminals, El Duce stands out for his vendetta against the Shiawase Corporation, who murdered his family. He’s so bent on revenge, he’ll join any operation against Shiawase free of charge — no small consideration in a game that keeps you perpetually short of cash.
If that sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is. The base game doesn’t have a single op against Shiawase to take up Duce’s offer on. It’s not until the Shadows of Hong Kong DLC that such an opportunity arises, and bringing him on that op gets you only a line or two of “I knew they were behind this!”-style throwaway dialogue.
You don’t get to help Duce find closure or even guide him to the next step of his vendetta. The whole thing feels like wasted potential that could have easily been avoided with a few more lines of dialogue.
Selective Amnesia — Wasteland 2
El Duce isn’t the only case of wasted character backstories in an RPG. Enter Wasteland 2’s La Loca, a feisty young Ranger who was expelled from her hometown (and earned her name, too) for chucking bags of poop at a rival chief. Nasty. Imagine if she went back there …
Actually, you don’t have to imagine. Loca’s erstwhile home is a town you’ll have to visit partway through the game. You can take her along, back into the presence of the chieftain she tried to paint brown, and witness — you guessed it. A whole lot of nothing.
It’s understandable. La Loca is but one of the barebones companions the game offers as last resorts for players who can’t keep their Rangers alive early on. But still, a backstory as colorful as hers deserves some acknowledgment in-game.
Persona non Grata — Fallout: New Vegas
In a DLC, it’s usually not difficult to insert acknowledgments of player actions in the base game. Not so much the other way around — and one good case of this is how Fallout: New Vegas treats the relationship between Caesar and Joshua Graham.
Given the storied history between the two, it feels a tad jarring that, while Graham has commentary if you killed Caesar beforehand, there is no option to inform Caesar that you met or even killed his legendary former deputy during the Honest Hearts DLC. The devs have given good reasons for this: Caesar’s voice actor was unavailable, and tinkering with the base game to make it acknowledge DLC events can be dicey business. But all the same, it’s a lost opportunity.
A Fair-Weather Friend — Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader
News sure travels fast in games. It’s pretty common to encounter cases where the entire game world knows about something you did somewhere, the second you do it. Which is why it can be unintentionally funny when a character doesn’t, such as in Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader.
That character is Quinn, a merchant in the game’s first act, who is secretly a friend of the fugitive mages known as the Wielders. He’s also the guy vetting potential new Wielders and granting access to the group’s hideout, which you can visit. And after that, you can choose to join the mage-hunting Inquisition instead, who will task you with locating and exposing said hideout.
Aside from being the easiest promotion ever, this creates an amusing situation where Quinn still does business as usual with you after you sold all his friends out to the authorities. Just in case you think he’s saving his own skin, he still calls you “friend of the Wielders” — and no, you can’t sic the Inquisitors on him either! Clearly a dev oversight, and a blemish on the immersion of what is otherwise an engaging first act.
