DA:I vs. DD:DA: A Write-up With Too Much Punctuation (Part 1)

DA:I's Evelyn Trevelyan

This was going to be a not-so-unbiased analysis of Dragon Age: Inquisition which I'm on record as not having liked very much. Instead we're going to compare and contrast Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen in an epic battle of punctuation-bearing titles! Whereas I'm a lot more qualified to talk about gameplay and that sort of thing, don't think for a moment that I won't talk about writing here too.

DD:DA's Arissa

I like the Dragon Age series on the whole but don't like the trend it's on as we get further into EA's, errr, EA-ification of Bioware. Be advised that there will be many spoilers here for both games so proceed at your own risk.

Since I've written far too much about the subject over the last half year it took me to complete this thing, I've split this non-review into more-easily-digsted-chunks in an attempt to preserve our respective sanities and boost my post count. You can thank me later.

Movement
Anyone who plays action-y games will tell you that movement is a big deal. Can I tell where my character is? Can I avoid falling to my death skirting around the edge of a cliff to get a shiny? Can I complete jumping puzzles without Hulk-Smashing(TM) my hardware in frustration. MMOs tend to do a very good job with this as do FPSes. In RPGs it's more up in the air, errr...pun intended. Wouldn't you know it; we have a case in point right here!

Movement in DA:I felt floaty and disconnected to me. Most recent Bioware games have this flaw, Mass Effect included. I wasn't ever entirely sure where my character stood which made things like the aforementioned cliff work and jumping puzzles extremely frustrating. I had many a-plummet down what I thought was a scale-able piece of postcard-worthy terrain to an early demise. I would jump more in hope than in expectation. It always felt wrong to me in my hundred or so hours in game such that just about every precise movement attempt ended in profanity.  It plain did not work.

Why, yes, I would like a side of IK.

In contrast, DD:DA never left me wanting for control. Rather than being locked to jumping for vertical movement, characters in Dragon's Dogma can climb various objects and terrain features much like they climb monsters (but we're not ready to talk about that yet). Think of it as a fantasy parkour simulator if you like. As an added bonus, you get a bark and an animation if you get too close to an edge rather than falling to your doom. Nice. Character's positions are very tight and minus some issues picking up very small objects on the ground, I never had any difficulty judging where I could climb or moving around. My hatred of jumping puzzles is well documented at this point but in DD:DA I found myself climbing all over the goddamn scenery (and monsters) on a regular basis. Movement is precise and forgiving but way more important than that, it's predictable which makes movement based exploration very rewarding.

Unfortunately, neither game gave good mounts so that's a wash. DA:I's mounts are terrible making the already poor movement feel even more ponderous. You're saddled (sorry) with lengthy mount and dismount animations to go slightly faster confounding any attempts at picking flowers or rocks. DD:DA doesn't have mounts at all though Angry Joe's issues with fast travel are somewhat remedied by an eternal ferrystone granted in the PC port. Unfortunately, I didn't understand how useful they were until I'd seen most of the game once. The result was that on my first playthrough I spent a ridiculously long time watching my Arisen jog through the same scenery over, and over, and over again.

Presence
How much does your character feel like a part of the world? This is a big piece of immersion so getting it right is kind of a big deal. DA:I did a middling job of this. On top of having a very tenuous grip on the forces of gravity and friction, NPCs will mostly ignore you unless you get to a scripted cutscene area or something like that. Monsters are terrifically myopic with eyesight that doesn't reach as far as you could throw a large rock. The exceptions are pretty few and far between limited to scripted things like dragons and a couple really sneaky-seeming Varghests who seemed to be hunting me but were actually just moving relatively quickly about long patrol paths. Maybe Bioware's legendary dialog can save us.

While it's true that important characters like your companions and advisors (and whatnot) will engage in some well-VOed banter, it's typically at very obvious and well-scripted times with very few surprises. Said banter will change over time and inclination, some of which is very, very good. Furthermore, the composition and density of NPCs changes accordingly as time goes on and Skyhold goes from a ragtag group of refugees to a world power. Unfortunately, other than having more bodies about, it doesn't feel any more populated because you can't really interact with any of them--they're mostly a part of the scenery. Despite the fact that you've got somewhat of a divine aura and the supreme leader of this little operation, only the scripted ones pay you any heed. Not great.

DD:DA somewhat surprisingly does much better in this regard, probably because it seems to be less ambitious. Townsfolk will greet you as you're jogging by and each pawn you interact with will issue a pleasantry. It is the same pleasantry every time, but it is a pleasantry. If you run too close by non-pawns, they'll jump out of the way and issue a bark. Nice touch. As in DA:I, dialog will change as the plot points progress which makes those worlds feel more alive than they would otherwise seem. Caxton's lines did get old after a while, though. It was also a little weird during the endgame seeing shopkeepers feet away from a yawning abyss in the middle of the town rather cheerily going about their business.

DD:DA throws us an interesting curve ball. Attacking NPCs in the capital or otherwise causing trouble will promptly get you arrested and thrown into the dungeon sans most of your stuff. It even goes so far as swapping out your armor for something more appropriate given the venue. An interesting twist on the dungeon mechanic is that you're supposed to stay put for an in-game day (30 minutes). If waiting isn't your thing any more than it is mine, you can bribe a guard if he's nearby. Alternatively, if you have a skeleton key in your inventory you can use that one item to make an escape.

Doesn't look so tough.

The dungeon mechanic would be interesting in its own right but how it's used in the game is even more fascinating. There's a pretty straightforward quest involving a wrongly-accused gardener who's been throw in the slammer that you're supposed to bust out but that's not why we're here. At one point the duchess has you flogged and thrown into the dungeon to cover up for some, err, extra-curricular activities. Damage done, she'll deliver you a skeleton key to get out opening up a new quest and area. In a similar way, a "villain" once defeated (and rezzed) will end up in the dungeon which isn't really a place that most people frequent intentionally. In one of the few places in the game overflowing with exposition, he'll tell you why he did bad stuff and why he felt like he should turn himself in. He'll even give you his magick shield. I can't tell you which came first, the dungeon as a quest location or being thrown in there for being a nuisance, but both together are perfectly logical and helped me feel more rooted in the world.

Burnination in potentia

Bads also seem to be much more alive than in DA:I. Goblins will taunt you from afar if they see or hear you. There are traps set that will alert them to your presence sometimes resulting in ambushes. Big bads will spot you from afar and charge into you with the quest "Ambush!" popping up. Nothing prepares you for the first time you see a Chimera charging your position from halfway across the freakin' forest. In the much more boring daytime, you can generally spot them from a ways off, potentially preventing disaster. In the far more entertaining night time, you generally won't see the dragon until it's RightOnTopOfMeOhGodTheBurnination!

Gathering and Crafting
Folks have noted that both games suffer from MMO-itis when it comes to their crafting and gathering systems. For those unaware, MMO-itis is where single player parts of games tack on grindy things to keep people playing for whatever reason. In an MMO where there's a sub involved, this makes sense or at the very least we're accustomed to it. In single player games I'm not as sold. Both games have surprisingly expansive gathering and crafting systems so let's take a look.

DA:I's gathering system was clunky. If you weren't sharp eyed enough to see a few off-colored pixels in the corner in the distance you leaned, like I did, on the search key. The search key sent out a radar-like wave from your character and send back a ping if there was something interesting nearby. This was overloaded for hidden quest objects for which you'd get a different ping until you centered on it at which point it would start drawing that object.

I had lots of problems with this system. Crap was freakin' everywhere and my OCD has a really hard time not picking every flower, grabbing every stone, chopping down every tree, and killing All The Things(TM) to gather the bits they dropped. This means that I never wanted to use my mount because mounting/dismounting was such a hassle and goddamn it, I need that flower. This was doubly bad because at every camp in the field there's a requisitions officer offering you a quest that requires those same mob bits and rocks in bulk. Turn enough mob bits and rocks in to complete the quest and you get a couple points of power and the opportunity to do it again. I had no idea what power was for but it sounded real good so early in the game I'd scour the countryside for even more bad-bits and rocks for not a lot of utility.  Great.

The crafting in DA:I was similarly questionable. Whatever spare rocks and animal bits you kept around could be used to build things but only if you had the right schematic. These seem to have mostly been hidden in places I didn't look and the ones I did find were usually already obsolete. Some schematics made whole new weapons and armor but most of them built an upgrade like a hilt or haft or something to make an existing piece better. I ended up with a gajillion upgrades that I couldn't really tell apart and the UI for managing inventory was so clunky I didn't really want to mess with it. Furthermore, the handful of things I did craft were rapidly overshadowed by random crap I picked up in the next dungeon. Tedium + clunky interface == less fun than it sounds.

But lo, it gets worse! All those flowers can be used in alchemy which lets you improve or make new potions. Some potions you get an infinite supply of but others you need to manually craft. I got super excited when I upgraded my basic health potion right up until I realized that I didn't have enough of the T2 material to mass produce them. This led to much swearing and many deaths for the next two zones until I could find enough of the right flower for it to be a non-issue. A heads-up would have been nice.

So how did DD:DA do? We've got basically the same system here:  you travel around the country side picking up rocks and flowers and animal bits and use them for fun and profit--you know the drill. Most of the flowers can be used as is for a boost of health or stamina or whatever. For a nice bonus, many of these can be combined with other random bits to get a bigger boost to health or stamina or whatever. As a final twist, many of these curatives will improve if left in your inventory to age but only for a short while until they rot. Some bads will even rob you of your perishable curatives by making them rot with special attacks so that you can't boost your health or stamina or whatever. Neat.

On the gear side we lose the ability to make new gear (aw) but retain the ability to improve gear (yay!). In some cases, the total improvement is massive but requiring some rare bits from the toughest bads or flowers from the deepest dungeons conveniently located near the toughest bads, naturally. You can only upgrade equipment at specific vendors so it's typically the case that the old sword I've had and upgraded for the last 20 levels is still better than the shiny new one that hasn't been upgraded. If I survive long enough to get back to an appropriate vendor and have the right bits to upgrade, then it will be better than the thing I got right now.

No one said that dragonforging
would be easy!

This is already pretty good but it gets better. If you've defeated a dragonkin of some kind there's a nonzero chance that one or more of your items will be dragonforged. This change increases with the difficulty of the dragonkin in question (typically) and with the level of upgrade of the weapon. Once dragonforged the weapon gets even more powerful and unlocks a new set of very expensive upgrades. In this way, you don't have to give up your Sword +2 of Overkill--it'll dragonforge to a Sword +3 of Overkill if you're lucky!

I like this approach to gear because it encourages you to make investments carefully and increases the utility of those investments. Weapon-wise if you want to crank out the maximum amount of killage you are stuck with a very particular set of weapons which are non-trivial to get but there are still reasons to keep around certain older varieties too in order to put specific debuffs on the uglies you're killing. Armor-wise, the sky is the limit! With enough player skill, most obstacles are not gear-driven which leads to the game's somewhat unfortunate nickname: Fashion's Dogma.

Combat and Mechanics
Combat is a big deal since it's a lot of what you're doing. This is even more true if you believe that in games, much like porn, the story is only there to tie the action-y bits together.

In DA:I I picked a two handed warrior. This may have been what I played in DA2 but honestly, I can't remember. It seemed like a reasonable choice, really. Run up to bads and clonk them upside the head with a giant piece of weaponized metal and then take their lunch money. In retrospect this was a very poor choice and not just because the Inquisitor loses an arm. Two warrior parties in DA:I do not work. You split the most expensive armor across two characters and can't build enough guard without a shield to keep out of trouble anywhere it would make a difference. Thus, I couldn't take the hits to drop a sword and board companion and I couldn't keep up with a rogue or offensively specced mage. By the time I realized my mistake I was 40 hours in and too far along to be able to re-spec expediently. This is a classic mistake in RPGs and one that Bioware of all people should understand--don't force players to make the most important choice in the game before they have enough information to do so.

Combat just about always felt bad to me in DA:I. Since movement was so clunky and imprecise, I had no end of trouble standing in the right place. This was especially aggravating when winding up a long animation action and then having my companions knock the bad out of range. As a result, I never really felt like I had all that much control over the outcome, speccing issues notwithstanding. There was a very short span when I had a high powered weapon and was fighting lower level bads where I'd charge up and either Mighty Blow or Pommel Strike them into eating sand. The rest of the game was not as fun. Nearing the end of my time in the game I would actively avoid combat because it felt so tedious.

I was especially disappointed with DA:I's encounter design. Maybe it's because I'd done another tour with Wildstar but all the combat felt really dull. None of the mobs were really all that interesting and large mobs didn't move very well and weren't very engaging. Dragons were pretty much carbon copies of each other requiring fairly micromanaged control over your party to defeat cleanly. I stopped fighting them when I realized they were all more or less the same.

In stark contrast, combat in DD:DA feels vibrant and alive. Striders fly all over the battle field carving up bads like turkeys while Warriors wind up mega blows to knock down bus-sized uglies. Spellcasters are also very rewarding making the ground explode or summoning pillars of ice to climb on to get a higher vantage point.  Want more?  A fighter pawn with a shield or a greatsword can launch your character into the air to grapple with a flying bad or maybe a really tall one. Pawns can also hold a baddie down so that you can get a coup de grace. And don't think that casters are left out: two sorcerers can spell sync to halve the time it takes to rain fire down from the heavens.

That's just the beginning. Dagger users get a dodge roll with a set of i-frames to keep out of trouble while shield users can block to keep out of danger. Better yet, if you have good timing and can watch the actions of your opponent, you can execute a perfect block which will stagger your enemy and potentially do a mess of damage to them. How good does your timing need to be? One of the augments you can get will increase the window by five frames. That's right kids, five frames which is ~83ms as the game generally runs at 60fps and those five frames feel really significant when you're trying to perfect your timing. Assassins and fighters have a similar counter with similar windows--high risk and high reward. Nice.

As for the typical trope of choosing your RPG character's class when you have the least amount of information, DD:DA is way ahead of the curve. When the game starts you pick one of three base vocations by choosing a weapon (staff, sword/shield, bow/daggers). Advanced vocations show up at level 10 and you can switch at any point after that at any place you can rest so you're never really locked into a bad decision. The game even goes out of its way to make experimentation with other vocations a big chunk of the fun. Your hired pawns don't gain levels so you'll be replacing them regularly which means you'll see a wide swath of different gear and builds some of which will undoubtedly teach an observant player how different bits of it work.

At least there's only one.

And now we're on to the good part. If you've ever noted that you spend most of your time in most RPGs hacking at a big ugly's insole and wondered what would happen if you could, I dunno, climb up behind them and hack at their eyes or squidgy bits instead, then boy do I have a deal for you. Every bad has its critical spots and the larger the bad, the more critical spots it generally has. Applying damage to critical spots, naturally, does a pile of damage which is easy enough as long as those critical spots aren't somewhere inconvenient like beady eyes or the bottom of a foot or something. So if you have short but ever-so-pointy daggers, you really want to be climbing that ugly to put pointy-bit to squidgy-bit. The bads, also naturally, would prefer your pointy-bits not be applied to their squidgy bits and will bat, throw, grab, drop, burn, and otherwise try to throw you off. I can talk about this all day but you really need to see it in action to get the full effect. Go ahead, I'll wait. DD:DA's implementation isn't without its flaws but it is a cool idea that I wish we saw more often. Why do most games keep us hacking at big bads' insoles, anyway?

The beast part, though, is that in DD:DA, skilled play trumps stats just about every time. Stats do count--they make the margins a lot wider, but they aren't the be-all end-all that we see in most RPGs. Extremely skilled players can perform feats of daring-do with under-powered and under-geared characters making for some very entertaining highlight reels. I don't know that I've ever played an RPG with combat quite as enjoyable as DD:DA. For that matter, most MMOs don't achieve this level of awesome. For all of the game's other shortcomings, the combat is engaging and is why I spent so long with it.

Places To Go And Things To Do
In RPGs you pick up a lot of stuff. I think that's a rule of RPGs. One of the many annoyances I had with DA:I was that the interface is hella-clunky. Why can't I compare gear when selling the piles of cutlery and fashion I've accumulated? Why is comparing items so inconvenient in the first place? Why can't I vacuum loot in an area instead of interacting and watching yet another animation of my Inquistor bending down with my companions looking on awkwardly? Other games do these kinds of things, why not this one?

DD:DA splits up armor by location which makes generally usable lists but not weapons. Those get dumped into a single pile sometimes screening for things usable by your vocation. Similarly, your giant stash of consumables, rocks, and animal bits is neither sorted nor searchable. Good luck finding your eye of newt in there. Not much better, really, and if you play the game as much as I did, you end up with a huge pile of loot. Not the best, but moving on...

I feel like I spent a tidy chunk of my time in DA:I, say 15% which would be just over 15 hours of my life I'll never get back, waiting for things to happen. Not plot things or dialog, but transitions between things. It took freakin' forever to get into and out of the war table. We're in and out of the goddamn war table all the goddamn time. Are they hiding some terribad loading code? I played on SSD--no excuses. Just running around to talk to people at Skyhold took a really long time because the place was huge and apparently designed by a masochist. Cullen apparently had some pretty awesome dialog that I never heard because I couldn't freakin' find him! Mounting and dismounting which should have been a value add sucked because it took way too long but I've already ranted about that.

Flashback time:  DA:O had a pretty good balance of places you could go and a few things to explore. DA2 did a lousier job of this and went to a very linear map progression in a way that made the world feel very small and very disjoint. As if trying to correct for its predecessor, DA:I has some absolutely giant maps where it isn't immediately clear how to get where you need to or even what things are important. It's as if someone had just played Skyrim and really wanted to get some of that open world sandboxy goodness in a game that is neither open world nor sandboxy. This turned DA:I into a lot of tedium trying to figure out where crap was. Bleh.

In this respect, DD:DA fares only slightly better. It's both open world and sandboxy so it benefits from very large areas. Unfortunately since it's super easy to not understand how port crystals and ferrystones work it seems like you spend an awful lot of time watching your character run from place to place. Not great. This is not helped by the fact that mobs will spawn at the same point between just about every time you pass through the same locale. At least they switch up to harder bads as the story progresses. I'm probably in the minority here but I was mostly OK with fighting the same bads at the same points because the combat loop never really got old.

Adding to the difficulties in DA:I, quests tended to be very tedious and there were far too many of them. Every dungeon had at least one scavenger hunt. These ranged from trivial to ridiculous often revolving around collecting dungeon themed tchotchkes. Collect 15 soul shards. Collect 7 idols. Find 12 ancient glyphs of boringness. Sometimes these things were required to move on. It's like a Doom key quest puzzle but often less sensical. Why do I need 9 mummified bat wings to convince the Elvish-magically-sealed door to open? Are they peckish after their thousand year sleep? The game was not better for the majority of these and the dungeon does not need to be made "more interesting"--it's a dungeon; it's already interesting.

DD:DA does slightly better. While there are piles of quests, mostly of the kill variety, they aren't necessary though sometimes the rewards are useful. It's also mostly true that you don't generally need to go out of your way to complete them--they happen very organically while you're off gallivanting across the countryside or traipsing through the main quest line.

Moving on to encounter design we see another large discrepancy. DA:I's encounters were largely uninspired. Maybe it's because I'd played so much Wildstar; maybe it's because they were freaking boring. Dragon encounters in particular have my disdain as being mostly carbon copies of each other and not especially interesting or well thought-out. This is doubly true for the random packs of mobs scattered across the world. With a few exceptions, they're spaced out very regularly across the countryside without much consideration of what they might be doing there. MMOs do this for a variety of reasons none of which apply to a single player game.

This is how dragons should look.

DD:DA's encounters on the other hand are a lot more dynamic. Fight a flying dragon by shooting out its eye to drop it on the ground? Check. Jump off the scenery to grab onto its tail as it goes aloft. Yep. Grab onto its head and go to town on its sensory bits before it grabs you and slams you to the ground? Yes, please. It gets better! Fight too near a ledge and tumble to your doom? Yup. Convince an ugly to charge you near that same ledge and dodge out of the way so it can plummet to its doom? You betcha. Now shake it all up for various other vocations each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and strategies? It's as if they know my kryptonite.

Flip the Record Over and We'll Continue on the Other Side

I sometimes wish that blogger had a word count but right after that thought I become very frightened--I don't think mankind is ready for that kind of power! As such we're going to end this one right here on this particularly happy note. Sanities are being preserved right now, people.