Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Entering into The Jaws of Hakkon!

When I saw that Dragon Age: Inquisition had some DLC up for sale, I was skeptical at first.  I've been burned before by Bioware's DLC.  Dragon Age and Dragon Age 2 both featured exhaustive DLC packages that emerged long after their titles dropped and I finished trolling through them, packages that asked me to replay games I'd long since finished.  Mass Effect 3 did the same, but bracketed it with some steep pricing, considering the amount of gameplay provided: "From Ashes" featured a single new mission, clocking in at maybe an hour or two, at most, and a new character, who the game was actually built around the absence of, at a price point of $10 (relatively reasonable for by Bioware's standards).  That was the easiest of Bioware's DLCs to purchase for ME3: the others were couched behind pay-gates, and would have still required me to play through the entire game again in order to experience new or expanded content.  I'd not only be spending money, I'd be essentially queuing up a new chore, forcing myself to replay a game I'd finished if I wanted to experience new or expanded content.

So when I say it took me a while to come around to buying "Jaws of Hakkon" DLC for DAI, I hope you understand that when I finally did do so, it was less the product of a long form marketing campaign and more an act of faith in a team that had already done so many things right.  Bioware has dropped the ball, at least for me, a number of times over the course of the Dragon Age franchise, but DAI was an unqualified victory, a return to form, to Bioware's heyday of exhausting, wonderfully immersive RPGs with lots of moving parts, most of which worked, some of which failed spectacularly, all of which pushed narrative forward towards some kind of iterative story.

I did my best to suspend expectations, but I was intrigued on two fronts: how did Bioware plan to justify the cost of their expansion, and how did they plan to integrate it into a game that I had already completed?  DAI took me months to finish, and I had no desire to start a new playthrough for the sake of DLC as finals began to ramp up at work.  A big part of why I bought "Jaws of Hakkon" was because the expansion could actually be played after the game proper had been completed, something Bioware had done previously with some of Dragon Age: Origins content.  But unlike DAO's endgame content, which was packaged through EA's then-emergent third party vendor system and essentially presented new narratives after the fact, DAI's DLC presented itself through existent game frameworks: after finishing DAI's central plot, the Inquisition's various inquisitorial duties remained, and you, as the Inquisitor, were imbued with authority to pursue those aims.  The DLC formed itself as one of those aims, as another area, another "module," to use a tabletop term, that you could engage with.

And therein lies the strength of DAI's DLC model: by making a unit of DLC that effectively works as a new area, Bioware actually alloyed most of my misgivings by letting me know what I'd be engaging with, in a real sense.  Unlike previous Dragon Age expansions, which either added iterative side-quests contained in the course of the game-proper (in Dragon Age 2) or added new sub-game types to the game after the main story is finished (in Dragon Age: Origin), DAI's DLC added new areas for me to explore that, more or less, followed the same pattern as all of the other areas I'd previously explored.  There was little to no guess work to be had as I made my purchase: I understood the price of what I was buying, and I understood what I'd be getting.  I was spending $15 for a new area, not unlike The Exalted Plains or The Fallow Mire.  What's more, I understood what this meant in the context of Dragon Age: Inquisition.  And this is where things get brilliant.

See, Dragon Age: Inquisition's non-essential areas, the areas that don't need to be exhaustively explored to propel the main story forward, all serve two central purposes.  They give players access to new equipment and, at times, special abilities, and they give players access to new aspects of story, lore, or history that would otherwise go unseen.  The first purpose is pretty well traversed territory for most RPGs: if you do side-quests, you get cool new gear.  It's a concept as old as RPG play itself.  Investigate that kid's dead brother, and you'll get a cool new sword that prevents your ranger from getting snared by spiders.  Help the town guard out, and you'll get a new breastplate to commemorate your friendship and stop arrows from piercing your heart.  It's the latter purpose that DAI explores to its fullest extent.

Because while any sort of exploration recontextualizes or expands existing storytelling tropes within any given game's context, DAI's gameplay focuses heavily on expanding the character's (and by extension the player's) understanding of the world around them and its history.  Each optional area, each "gameplay module," essentially constitutes a new chapter in that history and, just as often, in the lives of the characters exploring said area.  One area might explore Dwarven history, and bringing Varric along while you check that area out might provide you with new and exciting insight into just what it meant to be a surface dwarf way way back in the day.  Another area might explore the history of the Dalish in exile, and their relationship with the Fade in ancient times.  Bring Solas with you while you scope those areas out and you might get a few new tidbits of information out of him, and maybe some brownie-points while you're at it.  Given how much of DAI's central plot involves developing a more thorough understanding of the history of the world of Thedas, and how fundamentally that history is reshaped by your explorations, which literally reach back millennia at times, at one point tracing all the way back to the First Blight, these new chunks of story actually represent a pretty significant incentive for some players.  DAI's story is rich, and its attempt to build a new concept of what it means to inhabit a world is revolutionary.  I've haven't seen a game work so hard to earn my narrative respect, or do so much with it once they have it, since the first Bioshock.

And that's where the real strength of "Jaws of Hakkon" lies.  Not in its gameplay, which is more or less exactly the same as all the other gameplay you've seen to date.  "Hakkon" is an exercise in repetition on that front, just like all of DAI's other side-quest areas.  No, "Hakkon's" real selling point is that it explores a culture largely marginalized and maligned in previous Dragon Age games, a culture that is actually integral to the history of Thedas and its peoples, a culture with a rich understanding of the forces that DAI's story orients itself around so centrally: the Avvar.  A weird collective of barbarians, vaguely reminiscent of the Nords, with a good amount of Celt mixed in there for measure, the Avvar have served as Stormtrooper-style enemy cannon-fodder in previous Dragon Age games, and act as a faction of minor antagonists in some other sections of DAI.  They get some minor face time, and serve up some great visual jokes after you first arrive at Skyhold.  It isn't until "Hakkon" that their cultural topography begins to come into focus and, through that cultural topography, an understanding of the Fade begins to present itself as well.

See, the Avvar are barbarians.  But they're barbarians with a highly enlightened stance on magic.  The Avvar fundamentally understand the nature of the Fade, and treat it as another aspect of the natural world around them, in a way that confirms much of what Solas says throughout DAI.  But unlike Solas' moderately deceptive and cagey revelations on the Fade, the Avvar, in their discussion of the mutability and communicability of Fade spirits, are consistently forthright: the spirits of the Fade are there to help and, in the event that things go especially wrong, they need to be put down.  This permissive attitude speaks to a number of underlying themes revealed in DAI's central plot, reflects back on a number of existing revelations and expanded my understanding of the cosmology of Thedas considerably.  The story I got out of this particular module of DAI was well worth the money spent, even before I finished the central plot.  My only regret, spoiler alert, was that I couldn't bring Solas with me while I explored this area.  His departure at the end of the game, and the revelation that accompanies it, had already occurred and, as such, he wasn't available, but it would be interesting to see just what one of the oldest and most venerated (and feared) Fade spirits would have to say about a culture attenuated to dealing with beings like him on a daily basis. 

And that's the driving force behind my engagement with "Hakkon."  That's what actually makes me excited about any other DLC that DAI throws my way.  If they make all their DLC packages cute little iterative story expansions, in the tradition of Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3, I am thoroughly on board for the ride.  DAI's narrative is already head and shoulders above the other entries in the series, and its slow-burning world expansion reminds me of the best qualities of other old-school RPGs.  Between Pillars of Eternity and "Hakkon," I'm up to my ear-holes in story, and I could not be happier.