It’s rare that I actually get a chance to write about games
as they’re emerging, rarer still that I have occasion to pre-order and play
through titles as they exist in the public consciousness as “things,” fetish
objects that people are collectively processing during the first cycle of the
effervescent cultural existence of video games.
That Dragon Age: Inquisition
occupies such a space in my life is, in and of itself, a ringing endorsement:
this is a game that has managed to disrupt my work schedule during one of the
busiest times of my year, a game that I go to sleep dreaming of, a game that
I’ve stopped playing over night not out of exhaustion, but to give myself time
to mull over especially difficult or challenging choices that I knew would
fundamentally alter the game world. I’ve
been so concerned with the choices I'm making that I've established a series of
nested save files to account for potential decision points and to double check
the outcomes of vaguely executed-upon quest variables that I encounter. I’ve been so taken with Dragon Age: Inquisition’s circuitous and many-fractured plots, with
the multitude of characters it introduces, that just now, after I wrote the
beginning of this essay, I actually paused in mid-writing to access a wiki and double
check that a character I had saved and then lost track of was actually alright,
despite an apparent disappearance following my tenuous rescue attempt.
As I play through DA:I,
I find myself thinking not just of the playthrough I’m engaging with now, but
of the future playthroughs that I will be engaging with, the variables I’ll be
tweaking, the histories I’ll be altering and enacting to see how the plot will
twist to adapt. There’s a glorious
elasticity to DA:I’s plot, a very
real sense that the decisions you’ve made or are making, minor or major, are
reshaping the story in a fundamental way that actually supersedes the epic, if
a bit pat and straightforward, plotline unfolding
before me. That makes discussing the
narrative of DA:I difficult for me.
The game I’m playing isn’t the game entire, and while the Tolkien-inspired musical
breaks, cinematic imagery, and reactive plotlines are all coming together in a
wonderful way, I don’t think that’s the most important thing that’s happening
here. Bioware is firing on all cylinders, from their micro-manage-y inventories,
to their conversant, nuanced companions who can be talked into darn near
anything, given enough time, to the epic scope of each area I find myself
exploring. This is what Bioware does:
they make buggy, ambitious games that echo the best defining characteristics of
Western RPGs, games that take over a hundred hours to play in their entirety,
games that warrant multiple playthroughs to fully realize. While Bioware’s
successes are evident, and the lessons they learned from previous iterations
proudly displayed as well: Dragon Age II’s
clumsy combat system and decidedly non-epic scope is not on display here. There’s none of the baffling ground-level
refugee dallying that made DA2
special, and made so many people hate it; this is raw, uncut epic game, a
confection of consequence fired and taken out of the oven too early so that its
doughy fleshy can be cut and re-cut.
But this is just talk of concept, conceit, and heritage: the
narrative of DA:I skitters at the
edge of all of this, and it certainly deserves to be spoken of. The threading of each decision is maddeningly
complicated, a facet readily represented by the first major decision I’ve hit
so far. My choice hinged on one major
decision, but that was in turn shaped by five or six other, smaller decisions,
many of them possessed of several variables in their own right. The number of permutations possible therein
is profound; how the fuck does one assess narrative efficacy under
circumstances like that? To say that Dragon
Age: Inquisition has a plot at all is a misstatement. It has many plots, and you, as a player, have
an active hand in discerning just what that plot will be, far more than you did
in any of Bioware’s other epics. Mass Effect 3 doesn’t have shit on these
plot decisions. The best I’ll be able to
do, when all is done, is reflect on the seams (or seamlessness) of those
decisions as I see them fitting together and shaping the story. I just can’t do that right now. But thirty plus hours in, and barely into the
story proper, how can I comment on something with this epic a scope to it?
By discussing its most limited portion, its smallest and
most ephemeral aspects: its alarmingly robust multiplayer addition.
The idea of a “multiplayer Dragon Age game” should sound like bunk, and it would have to me if
I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Story
is, as I just spent too much time discussing, such a major feature of the
series and its play that multiplayer, a format which conventionally defies such
things as “consequential choices” and “enduring progress,” is antithetical to
the very notion of, particularly when we're looking at the kind of world
shattering choices that populate Dragon
Age: Inquisition's world. Epic scope
in multiplayer games seems to be better reserved for 4X games, games like Civilization and Sins of a Solar Empire, where battles can burn over multiple hours
or even days, and play can be readily saved and taken back up again as
needed. Dragon Age can’t do that shit – Dragon
Age is a series about leaping into combat and coming out, covered with
gore, to have a long conversation with your sweetie-to-be about your childhood
in the Free Marches. So how do you make
a multiplayer game out of Dragon Age?
You remove the sweetie schmoozing.
Much like Mass Effect
3’s multiplayer, Dragon Age:
Inquisition’s multiplayer is essentially a distillation of the raw,
visceral combat portion of the core game, minus the strategic overlay that
allays the chaos of Dragon Age:
Inquisition’s clusterfucky combat mishmash to a limited extent. There is, much like Mass Effect 3, a constantly expanding shared weapon array, and
several character archetypes, all of them limited rehashings of DA:I’s more expansive single player
classes shaped into more linear, focused trees.
You progress along each character tree individually, acquiring
experience for whatever class you’re playing, randomly assigned gear for
completing challenges, and money that you can spend on gear drops in place of
real world money (a tactic ripped straight out of ME3’s bitter, gnarled hands, a tactic I’d be fascinated to hear of
the effectiveness of). It’s essentially
a distillation of the combat-loot-response mechanism of the game itself, a
representation of DA:I’s grind made
manifest. If you don’t like DA:I’s second-by-second play, if you’re
mostly there for the conversation and the awkward CGI sex scenes, multiplayer
isn’t for you, but if you like the “leap-stab-loot” pattern the game provides,
it’s essentially a concentrated form of that. The parallels with Mass Effect 3’s system are readily
apparent, minus the finnicky impact on the “galactic combat readiness map” that
ME3 used to force people to “pay or
play” if they wanted to get “the best” ending.
DA:I ditches that
bull hooey, in favor of a nice, neat streamlined kind of “fuck around” play –
it’s not about killing things in the service of some greater good, it’s just
about the joy of murder. It also
dramatically improves the internal and external character progression system
that Mass Effect 3 featured. ME3
forced players to buy boxes for a chance at unlocking a new character. There was no other way to do it – you just
had to roll the dice and hope for the best. You received a handful of default characters,
but the rest all had to be unlocked through a combination of luck and
perseverance. DA:I does something similar, but it also utilizes a secondary
progress structure, parallel to the “buying loot boxes” one, that allows
players to steadily advance towards unlocking targeted characters by
interacting with a progression system disguised as a crafting system.
See, the bulk of the loot you find while playing DA:I’s multiplayer is garbage, little
better than vendor trash. Once in a blue
moon you’ll find an especially good item, but the relative infrequency of those
items, paired with the fact that all characters share equipment in a fashion
that only necessitates having one “good” weapon of each type, means your inventory
will rapidly fill up with white-text low quality weapons that you’ll never
use. Instead of selling those items to
vendors, DA:I's multiplayer lets you
break them down into crafting resources, similar to the ones you collect in DA:I’s single player. These resources can be used to produce a
variety of mods, or to craft armor, the component part in unlocking characters.
That means every worthless piece of loot can be turned into a handy-dandy asset
that you can, in turn, use to progress towards completing a new piece of
sweet-ass armor that either dramatically improves an existing character class,
or unlocks a whole new one. With only
three classes initially available to players, this is a big deal; if you want
to play a character who is even somewhat exotic, like a dual-weapon rogue or a
two-weapon fighter, you’ll probably have to craft some gear. And you’re going to want to play those
classes, because while the starting classes are fine and dandy, those secondary
classes are a shitload of fun to play.
This movement, while somewhat randomized, is still rooted in
kind of objective oriented system that forms the core deviation from Mass Effect 3’s model. While ME3
had the “distilling combat and leveling up” thing down to a science, the game
itself was a mess of passive play tropes: every level was essentially a
survival level with randomized “necessary objectives,” and there was no control
whatsoever over character unlocks. Players who unlocked characters could even
find themselves unlocking the same character again, gaining experience points
in place of a new toy, a dubiously useful prospect, and only assigned to that
already unlocked character, making their applicability especially
questionable. DA:I abandons all this: levels are centered around clearing out areas
and accomplishing objectives. All
optional objectives are highly optional, and while progress is gated by random
drops, all of those random drops can be turned towards some kind of overarching
progress given enough time and consideration.
DA:I lets you set a goal,
whether it’s completing a single mission top to bottom or unlocking a certain
character, and actually attain that goal in a reasonable time frame, without
curtailing or limiting the raw scope of overarching progress available to
players. I’ve already set a personal goal (unlocking the Assassin character)
and achieved it. Now I’m working towards
unlocking every single character in the catalog, playing around with each of
them, and maxing out the armor of my favorites.
I’m always moving towards those goals, and I’m always tapping back into DA:I’s RPG feedback loop of
kill-loot-level. Arranging skill points
and swapping out knives, rings, belts, and necklaces is a heady reward for a
foe well killed, and its placement in the overarching tapestry of DA:I’s gameplay is superlative. DA:I’s single player might be too vast
to even effectively discuss, but its multiplayer is simultaneously perfectly
bite sized and consumable, and so overwhelming large in scope that I can’t see
myself ever finishing with it, even as I’m constantly progressing within its
frames, unlocking new toys and achieving the myriad goals presented to me along
the way.
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