DAI: Where the stats are made up and the choices don't matter

[Note: midway through writing this entry, I turned to Bill and said, “This post isn’t funny. I have too many feelings about this series to be funny.

Note 2: I started writing this two months ago… and literally, I had so many things to say that I gave up. I’ll see how many I can remember now that it’s not so fresh in my memory.

Note 3: It is now 2016. I kept writing stuff and Bill stopped. It's all his fault.]

So here we are, in 2015, almost two months after the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition, the game that both prompted and ruined this 271 Games challenge, which both of us finished yesterday. I (Dani) put in a good ninety hours, and did everything. Almost literally, everything that it was possible to do. Bill skipped a bit more than me and completed it in a bit under seventy.

The question is, exactly how many of those hours were well-used, as opposed to wasted?

Look, I really don’t want to be a contrarian. I don’t want to be that person who hates everything that gets 10/10 and only likes the ones with bad reviews because ‘they just didn’t get it’. And I don’t think I am. Yes, I find Final Fantasy X kind of dull except for the Blitzball and badly written, and I think the Elders Scrolls games have no personality, I found Bladerunner ham-fisted and rapey (and yes, the director’s cut version), and I don’t think George RR Martin can write women or children well. But by the same token, I think Breaking Bad is amazing, as is Shawshank Redemption, as is Heath Ledger’s Joker (not saying anything about Dark Knight Rises, though). I don’t think I consciously or subconsciously hate things just because other people love them.

I just… want things to be perfect. And if they’re not, I get angry when people say they are.
Now, I know that Dragon Age: Origins isn’t perfect. But as I sit here trying to think of examples of why it’s not perfect, I’m actually struggling. Seriously. There’s one kid who’s got a terribly scripted line early on in the story, but he only exists for that one line and you don’t even have to talk to him. All the characters wear identical underpants, which is a little weird but it’s not like you have to see them often. The combat is slower than the sequels and there are some skills that I never get because I’m pretty sure they’re useless. These are the only problems I can come up with, and I’ve been thinking about it for like twenty minutes now. It is an amazing game, and the first big RPG I really played, and it took all of three seconds of dialogue to make me fall in love with it.

Inquisition… not so much.

After Dragon Age 2 I only had a reserved excitement for Inquisition, but to be contrarian again, I don’t hate DA2. I mean, I was totally dissatisfied with the story and pissed off that I couldn’t form meaningful relationships with my party members and bored with the tiny, repetitive exploration area, but on my second playthrough I appreciated it more. And on the third, even more. Now, in its own way, I really like that game as well. So I figured that maybe I wouldn’t be crazy about Inquisition the first time but I could give it a couple more goes later and it would grow on me.

That… might happen, I guess, but it’s going to take me a while to work up the energy to try. Every part of this game was so exhausting and unfulfilling that I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it through the first plot point. And since I completed every single possible mission it had to offer, is there really any point spending that many hours doing it again?

Okay, let’s talk specifics. I was going to go through everything chronologically, but instead I think I’m going to split this into good/bad lists. The ‘good’ list may be a little shorter than the ‘bad’, but let me be clear: I didn’t hate this game. It just had an awful lot of ‘bad’.

THE GOOD

• I think I had a pretty good amount of choice in the character creation screen.

• Some of the locations were really pretty. For some reason I particularly loved the Emerald Graves area, so green and full of giants, and an abandoned palace full of undead to eradicate. That was cool.

• Killing dragons felt like an awesome accomplishment. You spend the first half of the game running from them as they kill your companions in two hits, but then you return and engage in a long, drawn-out hackfest that ends with you going, ‘Ha ha! Fuck you, dragon, I’m taking your skull as a keepsake!”
• 
  
• Some of the main missions were excellent! Two in particular: the first being time travel. Time travel is so amazing that it’s hard to really get it wrong – though I hear the latest Sonic game tried its best – and Inquisition did a wonderful job of showing a completely broken future. I was actually really hoping I wouldn’t be allowed back to my own time and I’d actually have to stay and fix the horrible future myself rather than go back to the present and just prevent it. How good would that have been? Not only is it a cool, dynamic shift in the setting, but you’d get to see the consequences of all the choices you made in the past come to life in front of you! 

• The second great mission is when you get stuck in the Fade (because it wouldn’t be Dragon Age without getting stuck in the Fade). In Origins you get trapped by a Sloth Demon, in Awakenings it’s a Pride Demon, in DA2 you fight both a Desire and Pride Demon, and in Inquisition it’s a brand-new type: a Fear Demon. And he is fucking awesome. You wander through the weird landscape while his beautiful baritone voice taunts you by revealing your companions’ greatest fears. I tried to look up the voice actor but had great difficulty as everyone was just listed as ‘additional voices’. From a bit of Youtube stalking, though, I suspect it was either Kieran Bew or James Faulkner. Whoever it was, good on him. Anyway, in this Fade you recover your own fearful memories and stumble through a graveyard where all the headstones list your teammates and what they’re scared of most. And at the end, you actually get to let a character die, in a decision that I hear is actually really difficult if you used your own custom origin story.

• There was one aspect of combat that sounds tiny but really impressed me: the shield. You’re fighting Templars a lot, and very often they are shield-and-sword warriors, and they’re meant to be great at fighting Mages. I was a Mage, and my magic attacks actually bounced off their shields when I tried to hit them from the front. That was amazing, it fit the theme and really made me have to consider moving around and flanking instead of standing still for an entire fight.

• The War Council was a novel idea and solving heaps of problems in real time was kind of cool, especially since you got to choose who spearheaded the missions – should the evil nobleman be addressed diplomatically by your ambassador, sneakily by your spymaster, or confrontationally by your army general? Incidentally, Josephine the ambassador promised to be possibly the most boring NPC to exist, but as the game progressed  I totally loved her.

• Some of the new enemies were quite impressive. I’m mainly thinking of the dragon-like ones, the varghests and the phoenixes. Varghests were essentially big, angry pangolins and phoenixes were like a perfect snapshot of the evolutionary stage between bird and dinosaur. Many demons also got a revamp that was cool, like the aforementioned Fear Demon, who resembles a creepy floating spidery humanoid alien. And by ‘resembles’, I mean ‘is’. There really isn’t any other way to describe it. There’s also a new big, lanky green demon who can travel through the ground to knock you over wherever you’re standing. Annoying, but fun to work around once you can see it coming.

• Val Royeaux, the main city in Orlais, looked lovely. This game is the first one in which you get to visit Orlais, and all you know is that it’s ostentatious and full of rich, pretentious French people. And I think they capture that feeling really well, using bright colours and people wearing masquerade masks in the street and mocking you for being uncultured.

• In fact, a lot of Orlais was cool. The big masquerade ball! I can’t believe I forgot to include that in the good main missions point! Now that was a novel idea. It got rid of combat and replaced it with a crazy etiquette game where you go around eavesdropping on rich people, sneaking into the Empress’s office to go through her mail, dancing with noblewomen to mask the fact that you’re discussing murder plots with them.

• And I think that’s it. Now for the bad. What’s the best way to order this? Chronologically based on when in the game they occurred? Biggest problem to smallest? Smallest to biggest? Quest by quest? I guess we’ll see.

THE BAD

• Yikes, what’s going on with the text size? I’m playing this on a 55-inch TV and I can barely read them. My eyes still hurt.

• The opening. You have a funny dream-like vision, then find yourself in prison. Cassandra, a minor DA2 character, yells at you that you killed a bunch of people in a magical explosion while you say tearfully that you have no idea what she’s talking about. Then… she takes you for a walk to the nearby temple full of demons. Okay? Not sure why she thinks that’s a good idea considering she believes you’re a magical mass murderer, but whatever. And sure, she gets a little pissed off when you grab a weapon for yourself, but from that moment on she defers to you for all decisions from here on out. Because even though you’re her prisoner, you just have that natural air of a leader about you.

• To add to this, you now get two more companions right away, without any personal dialogue or any real idea who they are. I mean, one of them is a main character in DA2, but that doesn’t tell me why he’s suddenly become my fighting buddy. In Origins your first companion is usually your best friend, your parent or your dog, and in DA2 it’s your sibling. True, in Awakenings your first partner is a random stranger lady, but she dies quickly so it doesn’t matter. But the three companions you now have in Inquisition – Cassandra, Varric and Solas – can be your party for the entire rest of the game if you want. You don’t have to convince them to help you or scrutinise them to figure out if you’re on the same side. Nah. The game just throws them at you and tells you to go play.

• As for going and playing, why did the designers decide that every button needed to change? They changed the goddamn attack button. Seriously, you’ve made three games in this series with the same controls, why the hell would you change them?!

• Oh wait, I know why. It’s because this game has no fucking clue what genre it wants to be. It still calls itself an RPG because that’s what everyone expects it to be, but just because it’s in a fantasy setting and has dialogue does not make it an RPG. For one thing, if you can’t make any decisions about your character’s personality, I’m sceptical that you can call it role-playing. Plenty of people are describing it as an MMO, and that was definitely the impression I got.

• Also, realistically, I know they changed the attack button because it was ‘A’ and they wanted to include a jump button in this one. And jump is always ‘A’ as well. A could begrudgingly accept that, but you know what? I don’t think adding a jump option made the game better in any way. In fact, all it did was make it so that the designers could stick quest markers and items in really hard-to-reach places that you could only get to by awkwardly jumping around a pile of rocks for fifteen minutes feeling like you’re exploiting a bad jump mechanic. They tried to make the jumping necessary, but all they did was make it clunky.

• Speaking of clunky, for the most part they did the open world thing well. The large-ish maps were cool and instead of invisible walls they surrounded the explorable area with insurmountable mountains, sandstorms or huge bodies of water. Oh, and invisible walls, too. Yeah, they couldn’t quite surround every bit of the area with mountains and storms and water, so you still get stuck like that bit at the end of The Truman Show.

• So this intro prologue-y section gives you all the open worldness that you want. You can leave the path, go exploring, jump off cliffs to your heart’s content! Only, there’s nothing to do. Not even a herb to collect (and trust me, this game has a lot of herbs to collect). It’s just a big, blank, white mountain. Basically, if you want to play this like an open-world RPG, go for it, but could you just give them an hour of sticking to the path first? I know games like their rigid introductions, but then why give us the option? Why not let us be unable to leave the path until it matters, like in DA2? Or give us stuff to do off the path, like in Origins and Awakenings? It’d be like if Skyrim let you wander away from the executions to play in a river when the dragon turned up.

• Back to the plot. Your character was at the centre of the big explosion, yet has amnesia about what happened. And since this game doesn’t mention anything else about your character’s past, really, they might as well have complete memory loss about everything, and I for one am getting sick of protagonists with memory loss. It is so fucking lazy.

• But hey, at least the game lets you visit the Fear Demon’s domain and recover your lost memories. Y’know, if your only memories of the event are someone yelling, “Run!” and someone else yelling, “No, stop running! I’ll kill you!” I played ninety hours of this game and I still don’t understand what new information was meant to be offered here. It was like some big secret was hidden in the memories – which would be true in most games – but in this one, nope! No secret! At the start of the game, all you know is some demon-y dude traps and kills the leader of the Chantry in the Fade, then the explosion happens and you get spat out of it somehow, with a brand new magic power. At the end of the game, you know who the demon-y dude is (which was revealed to you long before recovering the memories), and you know that Grey Wardens were helping him (which was revealed to you long before recovering the memories), and you know that he caused the explosion with some elf artefact (which was revealed to you long before recovering the memories). So basically, they gave your character unnecessary memory loss, explained pretty much everything about it to you very early in the game, and then tried to make it a big reveal when you learn the truth. The truth that you already knew. Like, fifty hours ago.

• But you know what’s never explained? Well, a lot, but specifically? Why you were there at the explosion. It happens because the baddie is trying to open a hole in the world that will apparently give him godly powers, and for some reason you walked into the room and stopped it happening. It is never explained why you just walked into the bad guy’s lair. Great.

• Anyone you knew from previous games, like Varric and Leliana, have had complete personality transplants.

• You know who else had complete personality transplants? Apparently the entire Qunari race. This really, really pissed me off, actually. Everyone on the Internet seems kind of psyched about this Iron Bull character – is Freddie Prince Jr really still that popular? – but you realise they retconned an entire race to make him happen, right? Sure, DA2 gave them horns when they didn’t have them in Origins, and I wasn’t crazy about that either, but at least they still had the same confusing, cult-like hive mind going on. That’s the whole point of the Qunari! That they are basically human, but with a society so completely different to ours that they might as well be aliens! And now we’ve got this might-as-well-be-Texan Iron Bull telling us, “Naw, we’re an alright folk, just got a couple o’ fucked up rules, y’all. Wanna bang?” No. No, I do not want to bang, and you know why? Because Origins told me that having sex with a Qunari would kill me. Fuck you, Iron Bull. Fuck you.

• Glitches. I’ve grown more tolerant of glitches in huge games over the years – it irked me in Fallout, pissed me off in Skyrim, but by now I’m happy to laugh when random villagers hover and spin like demented yo-yos. But good god, there were a lot of quest-breakers. You’re meant to get an achievement when you kill all the dragons in the world, but apparently I didn’t deserve that honour. In the Fear Demon’s domain I had to go around picking up lost memories, but no matter how many times I clicked on it, I couldn’t pick one up and had to restart. A minor side quest, finding mysterious shards all over the countryside, just didn’t work at all in Bill’s game. And one that was actually just as hilarious as it was enraging, in Bill’s final boss battle, the boss just disappeared from the fight and left him unable to continue. I can’t decide if that’s better or worse than what I hear about being able to kill it in one shot with an arrow and breaking the ending.

• It wasn’t just controls that got completely changed to be less RPG-like: what about levelling up? In the earlier games, along with possibly every RPG in existence, levelling up means upgrading your stats. Basic, right? I mean, that’s just a basic tenet of the genre. Enter Inquisition, destroyer of worlds. Am I being too harsh on it? It does have stats, after all. But they determine nothing of significance and you don’t get to choose which ones you upgrade: the game just automatically assigns them to you when you learn a new ability. Let’s say I played a Mage – which I did – and let’s say I’m a weirdo who wanted to challenge myself by increasing my strength and dexterity but not my magic. I don’t think this game would let me. Just think about that. This is a goddamn Bioware game, a high fantasy, based-on-Dungeons-and-Dragons role play, and it has taken away my ability to screw up. It’s so incomprehensible that I’m almost lost for words.

• Now, I won’t say that the health system was terrible, because it wasn’t. It was actually quite interesting: you have very little health, but multiple barrier systems (Mages can cast shields, warriors develop armour that can leave you bizarrely invincible under certain circumstances). But again, WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO USE IT IN FAVOUR OF AN ALREADY FINE HEALTH SYSTEM? Why not use it for your next huge blockbuster? Why not leave anything, anything, the same as the previous games that were hugely successful and wonderful? Even the second one gets like an 8.5 on IGN! It’s like they did the reverse of the Hangover movies, which didn’t change anything at all, and risked every fantastic thing they had, sometimes getting it right but more often than not just becoming a confusing mess that leaves me screaming, “What was wrong with the old one?” I didn’t think this really had to be spelled out, but it’s totally okay to have the same health bar as your predecessor games. That’s not being lazy. It’s being normal.

• The inventory. Oh god, was the inventory unintuitive. Now I’ll admit, whenever I start a new game I get confused and angered by the menu system – I still don’t understand any Elder Scrolls or Fallout ones completely – so I patiently gave Inquisition a chance. A ninety-hour-long chance. And I still don’t like it. It’s slow and messy and you can’t swap between characters well and for some reason I couldn’t craft certain items even though I’m pretty sure I should have been allowed to. And even on my second playthrough, I’m still reluctant to go through my inventory unless I absolutely have to because it’s such a convoluted mess.

• Skyhold, your main fortress and essentially your home world, is a convoluted mess as well. It’s huge and insanely difficult to find anyone you need. Realistic? Maybe, but then I didn’t see any toilets so I guess realism wasn’t their ultimate goal there.

• You still have an approval/disapproval rating with your party members, but you can’t see it, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t actually do anything.

• Pretty much all minor characters from the earlier games have mysteriously disappeared. Oh, you’re going to Redcliffe? Um… the leader whom you know from Origins has… gone… somewhere far away. Yeah, that’ll do.

• Why did they change how money worked in this game compared to the earlier ones?? What was wrong with the fucking money?

• In the final battle, there’s a dragon fight. In my playthrough, the good dragon was Morrigan, one of your earliest companions from Origins. So, naturally, when she received a mortal wound in that fight, which prompted my character to yell that we needed to help her right away or she would die, I assumed I would have to go and help her. Ha! Why on earth should my emotional attachment and the game’s own suggestion mean anything? I didn’t help her. She was nowhere on my map. Instead I continued fighting the enemy dragon for about fifteen real-time minutes before casually stepping over its corpse to fight the main bad guy Corypheus. And after that battle, there’s the big, victorious cutscene in which Morrigan is walking around totally fine and cheering about how you’ve won.

• Incidentally, Corypheus? A pretty shitty villain. I’m not entirely convinced that Bioware knows how to do final bosses very well. Watch out, Corypheus has invaded! Nah, don’t worry, you can just run away for a while and he won’t ever come after you. Watch out, Corypheus has been gaining powerful servants! Nah, it’s cool, you can convince them that they were wrong to serve him and they should serve you instead. Watch out, Corypheus is going to an ancient temple to gain unforetold power! Nah, you can inexplicably beat him into the temple and take all the power for yourself! The poor bastard doesn’t get a break! He literally has no victory in the entire game, and it makes it less like you’re fighting a soon-to-be-unstoppable god and more like you’re kicking an ugly child when he says he’s going to grow up to be handsome.

Now, for my final negative point, which is so important that it deserves more than a mere dot point. It needs its own real paragraph, not to mention a couple of tiny paragraphs of build-up. Are you ready?

Yeah?

So, in this enormous RPG in which you have to make a variety of decisions…

Nothing you do matters.

Remember how annoyed everyone was at the ending of Mass Effect 3 because it didn’t really matter what you did, you always got the same ending? This is exactly the same. For ninety hours I was given the illusion of choice only to have it taken away when it really counted. Dragon Age 2 had a similar problem: you had a big choice about whose side to take in a fight, and in the end you had to kill both sides anyway, in exactly the same order, in exactly the same way, and then game over. In Inquisition, every choice is as fake as this.

You choose to send your ambassador out on a mission instead of your spymaster? Eh, you get 100 gold as a reward instead of 102. And then you can forget about it because it will never be brought up again.

You choose to travel a route that is more direct but will probably let some scouts die? Don’t worry, nobody cared about those scouts anyway, apparently, because nobody will mention it and you have no moral repercussions.

You stand in front of delegates of the church and announce that you don’t believe in their religion and everything they believe is false? They’ll shrug it off, never be bothered by you, and keep insisting that you’re a messenger from their god.

One that really bothered me was regarding my favourite character, Cole, who’s a spirit. He’s worried about possibly getting possessed by evil in the future, so you can either: emotionally mess him up but make him impossible to possess; or, be emotionally supportive but deal with the risk that he might still get possessed one day. I was being a bleeding heart nice person, so I chose to be supportive.

My fallout?

After the final battle, Cole said to me, “Hey, the bad guy tried to possess me and it didn’t work! I’m fine!”

What the fuck? Why did I even have a decision to make if he wasn’t going to get possessed anyway? I knew I’d made a bad choice; I was terrified that he was going to turn evil and I’d have to kill him! How did you not make that happen? That’s how you emotionally invest someone in their decisions! You don’t pussyfoot around hurting your characters to make every option as happy as it can be. They already showed they were willing to kill off characters by doing it a grand total of once throughout the story, so why didn’t they follow through with any other daunting possibilities?

Again, the only conclusion I can draw is that Bioware saw Skyrim and a couple of MMOs and decided that they were the best things ever, so they might as well mash them together and throw in a few words like ‘Andraste’ and ‘Qunari’ so that we’d still know this was set in Thedas. But that meant it was no longer really an RPG, and all the elements that made this series great have been squashed so hard that they’re barely visible. Again, Inquisition is not a bad game in and of itself, but it represents so many terrible decisions that it baffles me how it ever came into existence.

The spirit of Origins is apparently long dead. And that sucks, because I fell in love with that game. I don’t know how anyone could fall in love with Inquisition.