Dragon Age Inquisition is 2015’s GOTY

Adam and Sean recently both beat Dragon Age: Inquisition, and felt that a brief discussion of its combat and design were warranted. Overall, our thoughts are that DA: I offers great, real-time combat which takes the RPG genre in a positive direction, but wonder why the designers opted to clutter the final product with too much stuff.

Q1 – What did you think of the game’s combat? More specifically, having recently completed KOTOR, do you feel DA: I’s combat demonstrates any evolution in its underpinnings that may have been present in past Bioware games, but have been more fully realized here?

Adam: The main staying point with the combat in every Bioware game is how it is turn based; at least, it used to be. They have kept that strategic mold to the combat in recent years, but seemed to have moved towards a more action based, real-time combat system.

Having recently played KOTOR, I'm glad they moved away from the D20 approach to combat. I found every other attack I made on an enemy was a miss and it led to me being frustrated because I couldn't hit anything. In DA: I, you never miss an attack because of an unforeseen force; rather, if you miss it's because you physically are out of range. The lack of potions never really bothered me and I never even increased my limit as I played.

The added emphasis on buffs and shields/armour was an interesting turn and I think it worked for the most part. I can't speak for the second DA, but I don't remember that armour system being a part of the original game. Enemies really abuse it, and it's annoying as all hell! It's like you have to do 2-3 times more damage just to kill someone. Now I don't know if there is some easy way to deal with an enemy's armour with like an ability or something—if there is, I sure as hell never found it—but for me, fighting the dragon during the last boss fight was harder than fighting the end boss all together, and that's all just because of the armour. I have no complaints about the armour on my own character as it does help keep me alive (what with the lack of potions) but my armour does not build up as fast as an enemy's does.

Sean: To your point Adam, you actually can dispel barriers with a mage’s titular skill and rend armour using one of several skills if you are a warrior.

Similarly to yourself, I felt the move from the D20 to the live-action and the greater emphasis on buffs to be to the game’s benefit. Character classes felt leaner and more focused than in the previous games in the series, which combined to make combat feel all around more direct and visceral. My only complaint is that the AI gambit system (wherein you provided your AI teammates with specific logical commands, such as heal ally A when their health falls to B%) has been largely made moot by its over-simplicity, and that the by consequence, all of your allies behave the exact same way in combat: Once a skirmish is activated, all members crowd around your target of choice, and attempt to maul them.

Sadly, this invasive tactic is rendered useless on the Hard difficulty setting for all but warriors who have swords and shields as weapons. In other words, my three mages would usually run into close-combat range and use their staffs to hurl projectiles at enemies standing no more than 2 feet in front of them. Once I discovered the ability to manually make each party member hold their position for the entirety of a fight however, this detracting point became moot.

All in all, the game in its entirety was absolutely amazing, but its combat system was stellar. It reminded me of Kindgoms of Amalur, but more methodical. The lack of a more robust AI gambit system (present in DA: Origins and DA II) would have made the game’s combat near perfect, but as it stands, its every bit as good as many more action-oriented titles.

Q2 – Whether it's the inventory, the map or the War Table, DA:I is filled with clutter; every Bioware game is. With each game progressively getting larger and larger, so does the amount of clutter. What do you think Bioware can do in the future to help curb this un-appealing trend?

Sean: I wrote about the issue of maximalism in video games a few weeks back, specifically tying the trend into DA: I’s own design philosophy. Games don’t inherently need to become cluttered as they get bigger, although I feel strongly that Bioware (and indeed, many Western RPGs) often fail to readily convey relevant information to the player.

As an example, I still have no idea how to determine what a party member’s approval is of my Inquisitor. Surely there is a way of finding out this information, but I certainly have no idea where it’s hidden. Not that this is important, sure. But the argument is that information should be made more readily available to players, or be stored in logical places for them to find.

Personally, I find the use of infographics to be one effective way of displaying large amounts of information to the player rapidly. Take the map in DA: I for instance. It may have been bulging with too much information, but at least the information appeared sorted in a logical way.

Similarly, I think that the Disgaea series handles the organization of its maximalism well, despite being filled to the brink with what I feel is clutter to the point of being distracting. Take for example the item world, a core mechanic in the series. In order to access the item world, the player needs to speak with an NPC, who requests the player choose which item to enter. Beyond a core tutorial which introduces this feature, the player may forget about and largely ignore this gatekeeper and thus this element of the game. Therefore, the game’s maximalism is carefully tucked away, allowing those who choose to invest time into the item world to do so, while also allowing players who wish to remain stalwart and focused on the story to do with minimal distraction.

Adam: So it's a problem with feedback then? I also don't know how much any one member of my party feels towards my inquisitor, and that's a problem. You make choices that affect these people (and it shows you straight up if they approve or not) but then it never has a nice little area to display their totals. They might as well have removed this feature entirely because I don't know what it affected even after completing the game.

But we're getting away from the question. Yes proper feedback would make game mechanics actually relevant, but how do you deal with clutter? Back in the day when they made KOTOR, they were limited with memory and size. It kept the scope a lot smaller. I'm pretty sure there are more quests in the Hinterlands than there is in all of KOTOR. Maybe they have to instill a cap on themselves?

Considering how far technology has come, you have nearly no limit to what you can do and add. But if you can do something, should you? The designers should take it upon themselves to craft a more focused experience. Yes side quests matter, but what did they do before? They still had them, but just not an obscene amount of them. Maybe they feel like they have to compete with other open world games. GTA V for instance had tons of stuff to do, but I still felt like it was incredibly focused. In DA:I, I felt like I had to force myself to ignore a lot of the side attractions in an attempt to actually progress in the game.

I think it all comes down to the designers. Even if the game was gutted by 50%, there would still be a ton of content. On top of all the random stuff you can do, there were still very meaningful side-quests you can do for every member of your party. That doesn't feel like filler. Having to go collect a bunch of dead bodies at the bottom of a drowned town on the other hand is just filler. People can mentally restrain themselves from doing a lot of things, so why can't developers do it too?