#you're free to argue with me some of these are weaker than others

[catofadifferentcolor]

Dragon Age: Inquisition

"Truth is not the end, but a beginning."

With the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard upon us at last, I decided to do a full replay of Dragon Age: Inquisition from start to finish, all side quests and DLCs included.

It took me 70 hours. By the middle of the game I was so overpowered that it was not even funny and couldn't even gain XP in the last half of the main plot line at all. I finished at level 27, having hit level 23 sometime before the Winter Palace.

It took so long - the better part of 7 weeks - that towards the middle I had to stop and play something else simply because I'd lost interest. (Stray was an excellent palette cleanser and an excellent game overall. If you haven't, go play it now.)

But what can I say about DA:I that hasn't been said in the last ten years?

I still think it's a weaker story than DA2. DA2 went out of its way to show how no one was perfect, everyone was at fault, and no one person could stop the mages or templars from rebelling. I go into it at length during my review of that game, but it made for a powerful story. DA:I does not. There's only so many save the world plot lines a person can take. Is it better than DA:O? Yes, but that's not exactly a high bar.

The characters are not memorable. I only find about half of them worth the time on any given replay, and would easily not bother with most of them if I wasn't a completionist at heart. Dorian is probably my favorite character as he's funny and complex and offers a look at Tevinter we didn't get to see in the first two games, and I find Cullen's redemption arc surprisingly refreshing... but otherwise even Varric and Cassandra - who played off each other so well in DA2 - were uninteresting. Some of the banter was quality, but banter is a dime a dozen in video games. Quality characters - like AC's Ezio - are harder.

And don't get me started on the fan-favorite Solas. As I've ranted about at length to my one colleague who plays the game: I do not understand how people romanticize that romance. If someone treated me as condescendingly as Solas does the PC, I'd probably stab them. He is literally just Corypheus in a slightly more palatable coat. I suppose he should get some credit for being sad about wanting to destroy the world, but that doesn't make what he's doing good and noble. Guilt without attrition is meaningless. Trying to undo your actions because you can't live with him is childishly naive, no matter how much power you throw at the problem. If working with the Inquisition throughout DA:I wasn't enough to show him Thedas is worth saving, nothing is.

Corypheus himself has excellent dialogue, but is so easy to beat it's farcical. In the DA2 DLC it took real effort to kill him in his prison; here, with multiple armies at his beck and call, there was never any doubt the Inquisition would succeed. There was never anything like in Mass Effect 3 where despite all your successes, things were becoming worse - and you still failed from time to time.

And don't get me started on the utter lack of personality from the Inquisitor. They feel like a non-entity at best - which, some have argued, is the point; the dehumanization of worship, the isolation of godhood, &c - but that feels like justification after the fact. It took me looking through the wiki years after first playing the game to realize that the elven Inquisitor's clan could be destroyed - that war table operations could have failed results. I'd never bothered to read many of the reports and certainly they never reacted to their entire extended family being killed... It meant nothing and had no effect on anything, so I have no idea why it was included. I feel that way about a lot of the game.

Don't get me wrong - it's not a bad game. The mechanics are easy to get used to, even if the sandbox feels too big and free at times - especially when you're running around on your thousandth pointless side quest that a god-herald of Thedas should be able to assign to minion. The graphics aren't bad, especially when viewing scenery at a distance - from the balconies on Skyhold or the Trespasser DLC for instance - though fighting a hollow dragon gets old the third or fourth time you do it. There are also some spectacular glitches - in this play through my PC somehow ended up 100' above the map for five minutes before being dropped down in a location quite distant from where I was. And after defeating Saarath in the last five minutes of Trespasser, my PC's body was about 5' from his head and arms for a good 30s before resetting.

But I can't love the game. I've passed many (mostly enjoyable) hours playing it, but can some days can't even be said to like it. And it all comes back to the plot.

To roughly quote Stargate: SG-1: Saving the world shouldn't get old. And yet it does - perhaps because all the grey areas I love'd about DA2 are taken away. The Conclave was nominally about putting an end to the Mage-Templar War, yet the game's solution to that is just to kill off one side or the other. The complexities that led to that point are completely ignored. And this is repeated ad nauseam throughout the game.

Thedas is a complex world filled with complex problems. And all of that is wiped away to fight Corypheus, with only hints of their return appearing in the epilogues. And that is what I cannot stand about the game. They pushed off solving any of the issues DA2 brought to light for another game entirely. I can only hope DA:V delivers.

Other points of note: 1) The Dorian romance is probably my favorite, for the simple fact Dorian is the most interesting companion in the game for obvious reasons. I would kill to have him appear in DA:V in some regard. 2) I remain completely blind to why people adore the bald hobo so, and found his post-game reveal to be a complete WTF. Some plot twists are shocking but understandable in context; this one came so completely from no where it feels like a bad joke even a decade later. noverture's "In the face of your light" is the closest anyone's ever come to making me understand - and, indeed, is worth reading many times - but it shouldn't fall to a fanfic to explain a main plot point. 3) If you're going to give me 1000 side quests, at least 750 of them should have bearing on the plot. 4) I hunted down every single shard. At least this time I got the achievement for it. Still can't say it was worth it.

One last note: I checked my character stats at the start of Trespasser. I'd played a male, elven, two-handed warrior this go around (because a tiny elf flinging around a massive sword will never not be funny to me) and having competed everything that could be completed to that point... I had a strength of 75, and cunning, willpower, and constitution all in the 30s. Dexterity was 12. The fact that this is even possible baffles the mind.

All that said, I'll probably end up replaying the game. (And I sincerely hope DA:V doesn't use the asinine Dragon Age Keep, which hasn't allowed me to log in for years at this point, because I wish to god I could import my DA2 world state which is on this Xbox.) But that doesn't make me blind to it's problems. It's solid, but leaves me wanting better, not more. 4 out of 5 stars.

[kaaramel]

thinking about CMWGE arc colors as narrative frameworks because it’s a useful concept that took me awhile to get, and slotting in some existing pieces of media, examples are nice to have

i’ll probably try and find another four to complete the set, especially if these are useful analogies for people (ETA: and here they are)

[morlock-holmes]

Right but what is cause and what is effect?

Did game companies just start publishing modules meant for a very different play style then the dominent one?

If so, why?

Because correlation could easily work the other way, with game group membership declining along with everything else and publishers simply reacting to a reduced demand for groups larger than eight.

I'll have to get the book back from the library but as I recall one of his sources for decline in social participation were self-report time journals, which I have to think would tend to indicate the growth of alternative group activities.

One thing that toxic family and church groups can do is more or less blackmail their membership, asking, for example, "Where else are you going to get free babysitting?"

It seems clear to me that if your local rpg group is six people that you have reduced resources to pool if, say, one of the members needs babysitting, and that since you're choosing from a smaller pool of people, your odds of finding a trustworthy supporter decrease.

And, of course, the small group can be recruited from the 20-man game; that's sort of part of what's meant by social capital.

This review reminds me that one of the metrics Putnam specifically looked into through self-reports was, "Time spent socializing with friends"

Which people, on average, spent less time doing in the 90s than the 60s.

What I'm saying is that I think that it's difficult, conceptually, to simultaneously argue that our ability to create a found family for support has increased in a country where we spend less time with fewer friends than the people of half a century ago.

And there's this incredibly strong insistence that things must have gotten better, and I just would really like to see the evidence.

Humans are social creatures; the kind of social capital Putnam talks about is basically gauranteed to exist to some extent until the species goes extinct or we encounter an extremely specific AI-pocalypse.

The fact that it hasn't disappeared isn't really an argument against his thesis, which is that it has gotten weaker and harder to find in the US over the last 60 years.

So many people complaining about anomie and atomized individualism while at the same time deliberately deciding to leave their families and not being enthusiastic about the idea of returning to them.

The alternative to this individualism is a world in which every part of your existence is subordinated and remade according to someone else’s wishes and your personal boundaries are erased.

Some of us still remember that world and have no love for it. 

I am, in fact, much happier when I have some control over my own life and am not treated like an object meant to please my family above myself.