I’ve been trying to replay Dragon Age: Origins for my “book” club. Most of the time, I can play it. A lot of the time, it will crash sometime after I’ve launched the game. I’ve figured out some work-arounds, thanks to old forum posts, good old trial-and-error problem solving, and a bit of intuition from my years of testing and working in the software world, but they really only delay the inevitable crash. Sure, I can usually see it coming now and restart my game myself, picking a more opportune time to restart rather than just being randomly kicked out of the game by it crashing on me, but it still feels incredibly frustrating to be limping through this game rather than actually enjoying it. I mean, sure, I’ve figured out the reason for one crash and how to fix work around it, but I’m not sure that it works consistently and, as a result, am still spending all my time quicksaving to make sure that I don’t lose much if the game winds up crashing on me anyway. It’s exhausting to be on guard all the time against the game I’m playing in a way that is definitely negatively impacting my experience of the game, which doesn’t even mention how my gameplay experience is impacted by my workarounds and having to play on the lowest graphics settings just so my game doesn’t crash every fifteen minutes (or instantly in some places).

Considering all that, I can’t get over how perturbing it is that I can buy these games on multiple different platforms and almost all of them will encounter these horrible gameplay ending bugs. I mean, with my crash, I can’t even load a save once it crashes unless I turn the graphics all the way down, no matter where I’m at or what I’m doing. I can turn the graphics back up once I’m in the game, but it’s still better to play as much of the game as I can stand on the low settings just to avoid the crash happening too quickly. And ANYONE can buy into this horrible gaming experience without any kind of warnings from the game platform selling it! It feels more like theft than most of the bullshit game companies pull around digital rights ownership and that’s saying a lot since some of them can just shut down and prevent you from using the thing you bought from them.

I’ve followed a lot of people online who think, talk, and write about digital preservation, digital archives, and the maintenance of digital archives (which I separate out because I’ve followed people who only talk about one of the set rather than any combination of them). I’ve learned a lot of interesting stuff about how to preserve data and just how quickly and permanently things can disappear off the internet despite the common wisdom being that things last forever once they’re on the internet. Personally, aside from a huge number of PC games thanks to the ease of use that comes with using Steam, I try to make sure I get a physical copy of every important game or bit of media. We’ve had a lot of reasons to support that kind of physical preservation, what with how HBO (or MAX or whatever the hell it’s called nowadays) tried to delete so much of its past programming from existence, but not a whole lot of this broader public attention has been directed towards video games. Every so often, someone will bring up the statistics that most video games that have been made are no longer in existence outside of rare or lost hard copies, thanks to how many of them were made by companies that went under or that just weren’t saved as those companies grew and changed. In more recent years (the last decade and a half or so), as games have gotten increasingly digital (to the point where now many games only exist as digital code, prompted to download by a disc you put in your console or computer), people have begun to expect games to still be available for purchase even as technology grows and changes.

Skyrim is a really good example of that. It has been ported forward so many times that Bethesda (the company that made Skyrim), has even created a “fake” trailer lampooning how widely they’ve adapted it. It’s on everything. I’m pretty sure I can play it on my phone if I were interested. But all of that porting is work. Bethesda has had to do work to keep the game running, to keep the game relevant (by doing this like not releasing the sequel), and to allow the game to continue to run on modern gaming platforms. There was a new version of it a few years back that was updated specifically to allow it to continue to run on modern computers and so that modern game modders could continue working on it. Bethesda, for good or for ill, has committed to keeping the game in shape, even if they don’t really fix much of anything nowadays and just let the game be fixed by the community of modders if something is bothering them enough to put in the work.

Dragon Age: Origins has had no work done on it by Bioware. There’s plenty of mods out there, some of which suggest that they fix bugs and make the game run better, but it is telling that one of the most suggested fixes for the game crashing is to open your Task Manager and set the game up so it only uses one of the cores in your modern processor. This fifteen-year-old game can’t handle modern computer hardware and seems to crash based on that alone, once you get far enough into the game. To fix something like that would take actual development time and effort from Bioware, which doesn’t seem to be a thing they’re willing to invest right now. I can’t blame them too much after Anthem flopped and they realized they needed to do a massive course correction on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but it just feels hostile to their potential customers that the games they’ve put out so long ago would still be available and would be largely unplayable without heavy modification or a bunch of active effort to continue playing. I mean, sure, it’s not a huge thing to spend five to ten minutes per hour of gameplay to keep things running (a number that will probably go down if my current set of workarounds continues to perform well), but the amount of frustration it causes has left me much less willing to continue playing. Which they probably don’t care about now, since they got their money from me long ago and only really care about getting more money from me in the future, when Veilguard is available for purchase. I just wish I could keep playing this game and that it wouldn’t be so difficult to save this source of joy from my college years.