Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Immersion in Thedas!

As my outstretched palm glows green I pull it back towards myself, making a fist. The air screams around me as the rift collapses with a deafening wub.  I wipe my daggers clean on my already soiled digs, look to Cassandra, whose scarred face is unphased and unflapped as always, and nod.  We’re done here, at last. Emprise du Lion is cleansed of Fade activity, Templars, ancient mysteries, dragons, and giant snow-nugs.  I bring up the World Map and fast travel back to Skyhold.  I’ve just finished mopping up every quest line in an entire area, and I can’t wait to do it again, to get back in the mix.  I ponder checking in with Cassandra, to make sure she’s okay and see if she’s ready to give intimacy a try, but it feels too soon, and the Exalted Planes loom at the War Table. I’ve cleared so many side quest areas, explored so much of the world. Pausing, even for love, feels conspicuous, like a gesture towards wasted time.

Usually this is the point where I’d begin to feel sidequest fatigue, where I’d want to get back on track and see what the “main story” has in store for me. But Dragon Age: Inquisition front loads so much into its least consequential areas, making even the most chore-heavy, dead and unpeopled places into bastions of narrative firmament.

Some credit is owed to the superlative writing, of which there’s an absurd amount. Dragon Age: Inquisition has thousands upon thousands of words, the bulk of them quite good.  For every line that Solas feeds me that sounds like it’s ripped straight from a fantasy novel, there’s a bit of banter between Sera and Cassandra or Varric and Dorian or whoever that just sings of originality and life and humanity, living each and every day in a truly fantastic world where things like magic and monsters are as normal as traffic.  Naturalistic dialogue that builds character, dialogue that creates stakes out of nothing, the way good dialogue does in any story, the way dialogue functions in life, is hard to come by in video games, but Dragon Age: Inquisition has it in spades.  And I haven’t even mentioned the Codex or discovered writing, the written part, where Bioware often sees fit to dramatically retcon their properties, or self-aggrandize over too many pages. Here there are certainly missives dedicated to overt exposition, missives that make me want to scroll down and click through every bit as much as the most servicey of terms, but those bits of exposition are paired with clever turns of phrase and revealing historic twists, hints at events within events, sometimes quite wittily conveyed. There are also tiny bits of “found” writing – journals about what befell some of the corpses that populate Thedas’ brutal firmament, segments and selections from novels and plays and speeches that reveal the world I’m inhabiting in greater detail, and journalistic considerations of terrible events that give nigh-illiterate gravity to events that, as I come to see them, are often little more than chaotic mashes populated by the same enemy, who I’m forced to murder again, and again, and again. All this comes together to make an intense world, one where I feel like I’m constantly a guest in someone else’s home, one I’m always drawn back into visiting.

There’s also quite a bit to be said for the design of each area.  Dragon Age: Inquisition occurs inside a series of modules, each one simultaneously interlocking with its cohorts and functioning independently.  Each of those modules is distinct, in every way that Dragon Age 2’s modules were not.  Even areas that, on their face, should be repetitive, like the many deserts of DA:I (I count three so far), each have their own sense of purpose, their own history and personality. Each of these areas possesses their own story, rich with twists and turns, betrayals and aspirations, love and loss.  And each of those narratives ties into the larger narrative of Dragon Age: Inquisition itself.  Sometimes it’s a minor, tangential joining: the Tevinter Imperium is doing some Tevinty stuff in some Dwarven ruins, and derailing them lets you acquire their spoils for your own ends.  There’s a larger faction that these Tevinter are a part of, and you’re undermining them by fighting these gents, but it’s no big in terms of the greater story when you look at it as part of a bigger picture.  Other areas have far reaching consequences: by exploring one area, you begin the process of systematically dismantling the leadership of one of the largest and most dangerous factions in the game.  I imagine the impact on future interactions will be quite drastic, but I actually have no idea how the plot would unfold if I didn’t explore the leads I’m uncovering. They’re so engrossing, and the stakes of moving ahead seem so high, that I don’t know if I could bring myself to let these zones pass me by.

And then there’s the art!  The design of each of these areas is flat out gorgeous, with twists and turns that make them visually distinct, beyond the personality that terrain doodads imply.  Fauna and things like hill formation and the paths that quests unfold along collaborate to bring these areas to life, beyond their implied and specific narratives.  It’s not just that DA:I’s art is beautiful; it’s that that beauty is all in the service of building a world, a real place, or set of places, that feels distinct. In previous Dragon Age games, plants were little more than ground cover that glowed at opportune moments.  In DA:I, the plants I find tell me a lot about the world I’m moving around in, and they all look and feel distinct.  As I move through the world, I’m taken in by how hardy Dragontorn looks, how gnarly and cruel Felandris’ tendrils seem, and how ubiquitous Elfroot is. It’s all so pretty, so unique, and so telling, that I don’t want it to stop.

Sidequest fatigue, then, has been replaced by progress anxiety: I don’t want to push ahead and lose access to areas I haven’t finished exploring yet.  I just found out that I’ve already done so, and I’m kicking myself for missing out on an area I didn’t even know existed before I visited the “codex entries you missed” shop.  Even that anxiety is quite tame: I’m not anxious about the coming plot, I’m just invested.  I’m invested in every experience I have in DA:I, despite gameplay that is pretty cut and dry, if enjoyable. What keeps me coming back to this work of art are the artiest parts, the parts that you can peel off, point to, and say: this is art however you slice it.  This is a pretty image, this is a well crafted sentence, this is an artfully told story.  In light of this, it’s easy to construe Dragon Age: Inquisition’s overwhelmingly positive critical response as more than just recognition of a well crafted product.  Dragon Age: Inquisition is a game where the least important part of the gaming experience is the game itself. DA:I’s success isn’t just success for the franchise, or success for Bioware, or for RPGs as a genre. It’s success for games that exist, first and foremost, as art surrounding a central narrative.  It’s a rallying beacon that art has entered the mainstream, and it’s done so without attracting much attention from any of the usual suspects who all too often weigh in on the matter.

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Rebuilding a Knowledge Base!

It's tempting to craft any number of phone in template essays under the present circumstances.  My students have just turned in their work, prompting me to sift through the largest number of portfolios I've ever had to deal with since I started teaching, there are a number of holiday sales and events that bring to mind thoughts of how seasonal events are, in a real sense, absolute bullshit, and also thoroughly wonderful things when well executed.  The good people at Overkill Games recently introduced an update to PAYDAY 2's feat system that deftly addresses the concerns I brought up a week ago.  But those bullshit topics take a back seat, in my mind, to a more prominent, more pressing bullshit topic: the strange high stakes game that emerges every time I replace a piece of hardware on my system.

It's a struggle I forget between bouts, but each time it happens the threat, the consequence, and the rush of success are all very real.  The most recent culprit was a video card, as it often is.  After installing the card, I had to spend about an hour uninstalling driver sets and restarting my system to get Windows to even notice that a graphics card had been installed.  When I was finished, I got to wait a little longer and reboot my system one last time, crossing my fingers that something, anything would change in terms of how problem games would perform.

In the end, the difference was minimal.  Mechwarrior: Online, the bane of my hardware existence, runs slightly better, but less because of my new card, and more because I finally read about how to effectively force hardware integration out of Pirahna's cobbled together software package.  But as I went through the motions of reestablishing a stable build for playing games, I remembered why I loved building systems.  It goes beyond just cobbling together moving parts, or making games run smoother.  Sure, those are both components of it, both satisfying in their own right, but the real motivation behind my hardware lust comes from a learning-process oriented feedback loop.

Usually learning-process oriented feedback loops are abstracted: we don't notice we're learning until after we've learned, and even then we only notice when we're forced to compare previous performance to updated performance.  But when you're messing around with hardware configurations, the risk and reward components are so stark and immediate in their response times that it's difficult not to experience an almost immediate bit of response feedback each time a piece of hardware works especially well, or a piece absolutely shits itself, potentially bricking an entire system, or prompting a quick case rewire to insure that all the 8-pins are in the right places.

So in the end, as I look at Dragon Age: Inquisition and see it running wonderfully, look at Mechwarrior: Online and see it running more or less the same, and look at the low-end games I spend a great deal of my time playing and wonder why I even need a dedicated GPU sometimes, I just have to smile.  Even if performance doesn't dramatically uptick, at least I learned something from the single largest one-item purchase of the last year of my life.

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Respecialization Blues!

Respecialization, or respeccing as the youth call it, is a commonplace affair in most RPGs, or RPG analogs.  It’s a simple concept: the RPG structure hinges on the gradual expansion of an available pool of skills, often through the application of a point-buy system (in its most direct and straightforward formulations).  This system usually revolves around a set of unfolding paths: you navigate that network of paths based on cumulative choices you make, with some choices working to ease the challenge of certain aspects of play, and some choices working to facilitate interesting gameplay developments.  But these choices are made in the fog of war, as the systems of the game are still unfolding, and after the dust of progress has settled, after players have become more acquainted with the gameplay systems that they’re navigating, they’ll often regret the decisions they’ve made along the way.  Perhaps that skill that increased the rate of fire on submachine guns turned out to harm more than help, or that plus-one to damage with axes doesn’t see a lot of use since your dope ultimate primary weapon is actually a sword.  Player tastes can change and shift over time, players can come to better understand poorly articulated gameplay systems, or the needs of a player in a particular situation can change.

There are two ways to address this. 

The old school, unforgiving way, as illustrated by its presence in such laudable bastions of tradition as Wasteland 2 and Fallout: New Vegas, is to just tell players to suck a proverbial dick and start up a new play-through if they don’t like how they developed their skills.  It’s an especially effective methodology in games that encourage multiple playthroughs, since it permits players to reflect on the experiences they’ve had, and test out new choices as they navigate familiar narrative spaces. 

The new way is to allow players to adjust their skills, for a nominal fee.

This mechanic has its roots in World of Warcraft, wherein shifting feat trees with conditionally applications dominated the game, and respecialization to fit a specific role for fellow players, or to adapt to adjustments made by a patch, became necessary.  Shadow Spec was a must for a PvP focused priest, but in an early UBRS run or, worse, an undergeared MC run?  That built was suicide!  You had to respec that shit!  WoW featured a sliding scale fee system, wherein players who respecced frequently paid increasingly large sums of in-game currency until their payments capped out.  This framework, revolutionary in the shifting magma plains of the early 2000s, is now pretty common.  Most MMOs have adopted some version of it, and many non-MMO games have done the same.  Dragon Age: Inquisition even features a “respec” item, one that allows you to dramatically restructure your character as you unlock new features and game areas – Dragon Age: Inquisition, the most old-school main-stream hit of the last half decade!  And that infiltration is minimal compared to the manner in which specialization and re-specialization have become features in the FPS genre, prominently manifesting themselves in titles like Far Cry 3 and PAYDAY 2.

PAYDAY 2 features a set of especially elaborate and specific skill trees, skill trees that fundamentally recompose the manner in which the game plays.  A Mastermind, a Ghost, an Enforcer, and a Technician will all have very, very different experiences heist-to-heist.  It’s not just that certain trees can do certain jobs better; certain trees are the only ones capable of doing certain things.  Want to crack safes by hand?  You’ll need to get up to the penultimate tier of the Ghost tree.  Want to blast the hinges off that armored car? You’ll be putting your points into Technician.  Puzzle solutions, special abilities, and stat-tweaks alike all emerge from PAYDAY 2’s immersive skill-trees, and players who want to test out certain specializations will often have to respecialize some or all of their skill trees in order to unlock new game-changing abilities.  PAYDAY 2 isn’t so unforgiving – it doesn’t charge you to reset your skill points, and it even gives you some of the money you spent back (around 60%), but it does make you pay for each new allocation you make after the fact, adding a de-facto cost to the decision to respec.

This is an odd thing for an FPS to do.  While Role Playing Games are normally oriented around occupying a narrative space and generating a character who can inhabit that space in parallel with an unfolding narrative, First Person Shooters are usually more concerned with notions of “play.”  As such, the idea of “playing a role” usually takes a back seat to unlocking new toys, especially in a game like PAYDAY 2, where the variety of heists present you with a perpetually shifting set of potential solutions that fit the challenges you’ll be encountering.  But this skill system, with all its associated costs, actively discourages that kind of experimentation by encouraging dedicated specializations in most trees; the most useful abilities on the Ghost and Technician trees, the ones I mentioned earlier, are buried so deep that they require abandoning most other skill trees completely, at least until you near the level cap.  And making any changes to your skill tree, whether you make them for the sake of experimentation or for the sake of correcting a mistake you made somewhere along the way, represent a considerable commitment of resources.  The respec is a nuclear option in PAYDAY 2, the same way it is in most games: it completely eradicates all the work you’ve done in a particular tree, and requires you to spend all the money you’ve earned to reallocate your freshly liberated points.  That means one errantly spent skill point, selected early in your career, will haunt you forever unless you’re effectively willing to pay a nominal fee.

It’s a counter-intuitive frame, one that most games have become acclimated to at this point.  We’re so used to the idea that respeccing is an expensive and inconvenient process that theoretical skill point arrays have become a feature of many games.  Borderlands 2 went so far as to release a first party feat-specialization simulator, to keep players from having to waste their hard earned Borderbucks on respecializing mid-game.  But the whole point of these specialization trees, at their best at least, is to open up new avenues of play, to give players new and engaging tools to solve problems with.  By gating this behind a fee structure, which, even at its most merciful in games like PAYDAY 2 requires a substantial reinvestment of time, developers discourage experimentation.  Players are effectively pulled in two directions at once: they’re being shown all these neat toys they can play with, but they’re being told they’ll need to put in extra time and effort if they want to test out these different ways to play, and that they’ll have to spend time and money to get their current set of hard earned skills back, an especially infuriating experience if they discover that they don’t enjoy the new skill set that they’ve selected.

Removing this fee structure, however, still isn’t ideal: player mistakes should have consequences, and most progression frameworks work best when they reward specialization.  That’s what adds weight to these choices; even in the olden days, Blizzard knew that they needed to make priests pay to switch between PvP and PvE specialized branches, lest they bandy about, willy-nilly, shifting their specializations daily, not just for the obtuse sake of balance, but for the sake of adding weight to each player selection. By making it difficult to change paths, those decisions become meaningful.  That’s an important part of making choices rewarding: it isn’t enough to give us nice toys, we have to understand that our ability to effectively use those toys is impacted by our ability to make responsible choices, and our ability to act with foresight.  Adding consequence and cost to those frameworks insures that players carefully measure each choice they make, lest they waste their precious time and effort.

But even that is an imperfect system.  Ideally players would be able to test out play styles before making decisions, but such firmaments can easily promote metagaming.  Instead we’re left with a kind of queer, accidental compromise that emerges every once in a great while: the noble “forced respecialization.”  While this almost always follows a full-game overhaul of some sort, it carries with it an invitation to explore, to reinvent oneself in-game and try out new approaches that you might not have considered before.  Unexpected, sure, and often in service of reinvigorating player interest by allowing easy experimentation with new toys and tools, these events can initiate referendums on approaches to play.

Ideally.

PAYDAY 2 recent had two massive gameplay shifts, within weeks of one another, each of which came with a forced respecialization, a full point refund.  I rebuilt my skill tree, brick for brick, each time. I didn’t want to put myself outside my own comfort zone.  After all, why bother heisting at all if you can’t blow the hinges off a safe?

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Penetrating the Mists of Dragon Age: Inquisition's Play!

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.