Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Getting Social with Dragon Age: Inquisition!

As loath as I am to write another piece about Dragon Age: Inquisition, I can’t help myself.  As work forces me to meander through the game at a snail’s pace, and illness and anxiety slow my progress dramatically as well, I find myself examining the granularity contained within each sweeping story mission, otherwise relegated to a rapid “one and done” of drunken play in days of old, now a drawn out week-long experience as I tease out sessions of play between typing up responses to student work and flattening my ass out on Nyquil to try to shake my latest unfortunate ailment.  The latest issuance: a mission whose primary orientation is social interaction, a mission whose primary risks all involve social interaction, and whose achievements rely heavily on getting me, as a player, to break the patterns of exploration and interaction I’ve previously conditioned myself to engage in.

I’m talking about the somewhat infamously buggy Orlesian ball sequence from the main plot. Conceptually, it’s a fascinating gesture to the mechanics of Dragon Age: Inquisition: what if, instead of making combat and exploration the primary mechanics through which a player progresses in an area or through a story arc, players were asked to, first and foremost, engage in social activities.  What if exploration, usually a laconic pleasure in DAI’s sweeping, gorgeous landscapes, had a ticking clock set alongside it, demanding that you quit pressing V and get back to the party?  What if combat occurred roughly as often as conversation normally does in this configuration?

Would Dragon Age still be Dragon Age?  Would it still be fun?

The answer to the first part of that question is an undeniable “yes.”  The feel  of DAI’s world persists in and out of combat, and generating a framework wherein your primary mechanism for interacting with the world is social rather than, let’s politely say, kinetic doesn't change that.  Quite the contrary: sometimes the layering of detail that presents itself in DAI's frenetic bouts is lost in the fray.  By mounting the delivery systems for world building outside of that interaction developers give players an opportunity to test their understanding of lore, and invest themselves in that understanding of lore as a mechanism for success, you're giving them more an opportunity to drink in the rich texture of the world you've created, which is an unequivocal "good" thing, and far from alloying the sense of place that makes Dragon Age: Inquisition a Dragon Age game, it gives them a heretofore unheard of opportunity to soak in that world without necessarily having to spend hours upon hours in the codex.  The answer to the second question is more complicated.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is, at its heart, a descendent of Halo, in the way that every game that followed Halo drew from its infamous design ethos: present players with fifteen seconds of fun, and present them with repeated opportunities to find said 15 seconds of fun, and your game will be a rousing success.  The brutal efficiency of that mindset has given us some wonderful games, some terrible games, and overall industry focus on moment to moment experience, rather than overarching qualities like atmosphere, pacing, or the kind of grand "experiential" gameplay that many classic games of the gaming silver-age built themselves on.  This isn't a hard fast rule, and many titles have combined serious world-building with ever-grander Halo-style gameplay oriented design: Dragon Age and Mass Effect are both wonderful examples, as well as shooters like Bioshock and Left4Dead, that take the high octane cycling that Halo introduced and add rich, textured level design to tell complex stories that unfold gradually as players engage with that 15-seconds-of-fun mechanism.  It is simply impossible to say that Dragon Age: Inquisition doesn't compose itself under this ethos: the gameplay moves quickly, with engagements resolving themselves in a minute or two, at most, and often unfolding in an enjoyably repetitive fashion.  What's more, DAI is actually quite good at managing its fun in these quick little battle chunks: the game plays reliably, and when unexpected things happen (like bugs) the outcome is usually enjoyable: a hitboxing error might make an enemy impossible to hit, prompting players to use new tactics to eliminate him, or a physics glitch might hurl a giant into the stratosphere before making him crash to the ground.  In cases like this, there's no real long-term negative impact on one's enjoyment of the game, even if the conditions are baffling or, in the moment, frustrating.  The focus on development, and the focus of the game, is on that combat mechanism.

When it's removed, you begin to see just how slipshod much of the surrounding material is.  The Orlesian court sequence relies heavily on two things: the dynamic population system that DAI uses to integrate sprites into an occupied map working correctly, and DAI's locative script system firing correctly so that player location and action map appropriately to the game's expectation, and direct and clear feedback on those fronts can be given to players.  DAI's dynamic population system has been a problem for me since day one: literally, the first day I powered up and started the game, immediately after finishing the tutorial, I walked through the streets of Haven and tried to schmooze with my old friend made new Varric, only to find that he wasn't at the position marked with his face: his sprite had failed to load.  I walked around for a bit until he spawned, but the end result was infuriating.  The Orlesian court sequence has the same issue, doubly exacerbated by sections that rely on a kind of "ticking clock" system, and a density of events that makes it nearly impossible for a player to track what's going right or wrong without a checklist of intended variables in hand.  I spent half an hour trying to get an NPC to spawn so I could interact with him briefly to elevate my court influence.  One twenty second conversation took up a vast amount of effort, not because it was a challenging event, but because NPCs seem to spawn almost randomly for me in DAI.  This isn't a new problem, but the Orlesian court sequence really showcases just how problematic it can be, and how thoroughly it can curtain a "socially minded" gameplay event.

And then there's the scripting: while Bioware has certainly gotten better, the scripting in DAI is still fairly buggy by the standards of other developers.  It's not as bad as, say, Baldur's Gate 2, where I taught myself hex so I could modify variables to try to complete Jaheira's romance, but it's still fairly bad.  When I go into side areas, events seem to trigger almost randomly: sometimes there's a bell system that gives me an opportunity to gain or lose influence, sometimes there isn't.  Sometimes a basement area in the library stops the clock on my influence decaying as I spend time away from the party, but sometimes it doesn't.  There's no reliability which, for all its occasional glitchiness, the combat system manages quite nicely, and so I feel less like I have my fate in my own hands, and more like I'm enduring the caprices of an unseen robotic overlord imbued with emotion, which has made it intensely irrational as it adjust to the sensation of "feeling."

Of course, all this bullshit doesn't keep me from enjoying the conceit of the Orlesian court, and the social interactions, when they work, are actually a lot of fun.  Using my character's trademark snark to deflect the questions of scheming nobles instead of piss off uptight party members is fun, and it makes me feel like the personality I've chosen has a real impact on the game.  I'm interested in playing a blunt character now, just to see how her coarseness will effect interactions in Orlais.  And the fact that so many interesting bits of lore, and interesting characters from the world of Dragon Age, are populating this space adds a great deal to the experience.

So, is this "social gameplay" experiment perfect?  No.  All of the problems with Dragon Age: Inquisiton are, if anything, amplified in this new setting.  Is it worth playing?  Thoroughly, though a lack of transparency and the utter unreliability of the game system you're interacting with make for some intensely frustrating experiences, upon occasion.