It finally happened.
I finally finished Dragon Age:
Inquisition. And it was glorious.
It’s unusual to dig into a game franchise that manages to
act as a referendum on previous entries in a series. Often additional titles are just expansions
on a concept, and adjustments made to previous titles are more in the vein of
retcons than genuine narrative shifts.
Even a good game, with great sequels, like Bioshock and its ratty little step-children, Bioshock 2 and Bioshock
Infinite’s Burial at Sea
episodes, has trouble pulling this off.
The disconnect between Bioshock,
Bioshock 2, and Burial at Sea is readily visible. There are seams joining each title,
struggling to connect narratives that simultaneously intertwine and diverge
from previous chapters. Burial at Sea did its honest best to put
the threads together, but in doing so it lost Bioshock 2, and skewed the timeline of events for the first Bioshock significantly – essentially,
instead of building on what came before and shifting it subtly to wholly alter
a player’s perception of events, Burial
at Sea rewrote chapters of Bioshock, generating a “behind the scenes” sort
of narrative that, at times, significantly altered the original game’s timeline. I say this as someone who loved the narrative
behind the Bioshock games
tremendously, someone who started writing SNS, in large part, because of Bioshock. And I don’t think there’s
anything wrong with this. It’s how sequels usually unfold through the uncertain
mist of development cycles. Designers
can’t assume that they’ll get three games to tell a particular story in. They can’t plant seeds that will take seven
years to sprout. If you get an
opportunity to tell a new part of the story you started in another game, that’s
awesome, but you can’t build a title from the ground up on the presumption that
you’ll get another chance to build up your mythos over multiple titles.
Unless, apparently, you designed Dragon Age: Inquisition.
I’ll be avoiding spoilers as much as I can, which actually
isn’t that hard. In a real sense DAI
is insulated against spoilers. Many of the events that I’d be spoiling in my
game might not happen in yours at all, not just because of choices you made in
this game, but because of choices you made in the first or second game, choices
you have to exactingly enter into a lovingly designed spreadsheet online if you
want them to stick. You can make some
pretty intense adjustments to the narrative before the game even starts, and
that’s without even considering the impact of Dragon Age 2 and its various DLCs, which further cock up the broth. The strength of Inquisition isn’t that it finds ways to use these choices or engage
with them: it’s that it finds ways to make them critical to how the narrative
unfolds. The outcome of a sidequest from the first game changes the entire central
storyline of Inquisition, adding and
removing characters with a remarkable narrative flexibility. Major plot points from previous games are referenced
as well, and things like how you concluded Origins
have a major impact on how events play out, but that’s considerably less
impressive to me than generating a set of nested questlines that allow a side
character most people forgot from the first game to effectively cripple one of
the toughest foes you have to fight in what is effectively a series of optional
dialogues.
That’s the impressiveness that Dragon Age: Inquisition brings to bear: it doesn’t just make some
choices significant. It makes nearly
every choice significant in some sense.
Threads left dangling from previous games reconnect and resolve in new,
strange ways. Characters long since
departed pop up and shift the balance of power in a way that simultaneously
rewrites the story you’re telling, and iterates on all the things you’ve done
before. I’m deliberately avoiding specifics
here, but I will say that Dragon Age:
Inquisition accomplished the seemingly impossible feat of taking Dragon Age 2’s “outskirts of larger
events” plotlines and shaping them into something central to the overarching
stories criss-crossing Thedas. Blights,
or the idea of Blights, come into focus as the centerpiece of Dragon Age’s overarching narratives, and
are codified and reiterated on in Inquisition
in a way simultaneously honors the events of previous games and rewrites them, but
not by shifting what actually happened within them, the characters you guided
through them, or changing the tone or motive behind previous actions. DAI takes pain to even get the level of snark
you used in previous games to stick. Instead, it rewrites events by giving you new
context, not just on events you’ve seen transpire, but on the history that led
to those events.
Inquisition is, in
a real sense, a game about what came before.
If video games are fundamentally an artistic medium dedicated to letting
us inhabit worlds, then DAI is about
giving us an active hand in forging that world as we explore it. Because here’s the thing: all the choices you
make still matter. Barthes would cream
his jeans at this level of narrative malleability, about the simultaneous
construction and deconstruction not just of text, but of metatextual and
interpretive elements as well. Dragon Age’s narrative simultaneously
forms around you even as it reshapes and acknowledges what came before. For a dumb action game about fighting a man
covered in tumors with some nasty vocal fry, Dragon Age: Inquisition manages to be impressively smart. Even the smallest, least interactive choices
I made, things like deciding who would help guide a cart of turnips through the
Deep Roads, ended up having a major impact on events – I lost a potential ally
by sending diplomats on a journey I should’ve sent shifty scouts on, a woeful
turn of events and, as such, my Inquisition ended up with no allies from Orzammar.
The stress of those stakes made it emotionally exhausting to
play sometimes, to say the least. I spent nearly three weeks braced on the edge
of the last two story quests, waiting for an opening in my life to say goodbye
to all the choices I’d made and watch the world I’d built finish unfolding, and
a good portion of that time was spent waiting for seemingly minor quests to
play out on the War Table. But that wasn’t
a bad thing, not at all: after the dust settled and I finished watching the “Where
Are They Now” of my friends in Thedas, I immediately sat down and rolled up
three new characters, so I could play through the game again, and again, and
again, testing outcomes and watching the world unfold from new perspectives. I really want to see what will happen when my
Tal-Vashoth mage shows up at a dinner party with his Tevinter boyfriend, or how
the other Elves will respond to my hard-nosed Dalish warrior-peasant carving a
path through the world. I want to see
the world again and, more than I ever did previously, make new choices in it,
so I can see how those choices will play out.
I’m even thinking about replaying Dragon Age: Origins from the start, with all the DLC at long last,
to see how that will change things. I’d
need to create another character on my EA profile, play with a notebook in hand
taking notes on how quests resolve, and spend around 300 hours from start to
finish moving from Origins to DA2 to Inquisition (and I already wince at the thought of playing Dragon Age 2 again) but the thought of
seeing all of these narratives unfold again excites me.
Inquisition is, in
a very real sense, what Bioware wanted Mass
Effect 3 to be: it’s a game about the sum of one’s choices coming home to
roost. But Dragon Age has always been the richer series, the more malleable environment,
filled not just with choices, but with the context and consequences of those
choices. Perhaps it’s a product of how
we, as “readers,” are used to engaging with fantasy: we like to sit down and
drink in worlds, absorb fine details and nuance, and see how things play
out. Even the most ham-fisted piece of
franchise fantasy has always had the power to bring a world to life, something
even the most artful science fiction often struggles with.
Perhaps I’m being reductive; this goes well beyond genre. Inquisition
trumps Mass Effect 3 not because it
has better written codex entries (though it does) or because it has better
gameplay (I’m not sure it does). It’s
not that Mass Effect 3’s world felt
small, or insignificant, or half-formed.
It’s that the choices you made felt strangely compartmentalized and
binary, like tick boxes on a form for saving the galaxy. Dragon
Age, as a series, has never been about that easy binary. It lives in the gray, in the human aspect of
how story emerges. It’s always played
with the idea that it’s tough, nearly impossible, to please everyone, or to
know what the right decision in a given moment is. But it’s also rewarded players for investing
themselves in that environment, not just with a gripping narrative that ripples
out of the game into some of the better written Codex and Journal entries I’ve
seen in a title to date. It rewards them
by really making players feel like they’re part of telling a story, their
story, concealing variables beneath deft writing and naturalistic dialogue,
permitting players to explore options and fully understand the decisions they’re
going to make, and, in the end, actually delivering on the promise of
multi-chapter storytelling by making a final scene that casts the entire series
in a new light without dishonoring any of the choices that have brought you to
that point.
That’s no mean feat.
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