Dragon Age(d): the Inquisition

So after finishing Dragon Age 2 in the last post, we're now up to 2014. In fact, the last DLC for Inquisition came out only three and a half years ago - not old enough for us to be diving back to recontextualise the game but also not new enough for this to be a stock review. And yet, if we're evaluating the Dragon Age series in 2019, this is the biggest entry and probably the foundations on which the teased Dragon Age 4 builds (quite clearly narratively but also probably mechanically - whatever that ultimately means for a game rebooted under new directors at a studio imploding under mismanagement & crunch and possibly pivoting to connected "live" experiences built directly on the Anthem code base).

Dragon Age initially went from an attempt to recapture the old BioWare WRPG spark (before crowdfunded revivals offered players a lot of choice there) to a more console-focused character-driven affair on a limited budget. But for the fourth campaign in the setting (and third standalone game), EA couldn't keep ignoring the siren call of Skyrim.

When this series was first in development, Oblivion was already showing where console-friendly RPGs could land commercially. The previous Dragon Age games each did well enough (into the several millions sold) but they didn't manage to compete with Oblivion's incredible long tail and certainly couldn't stand in the same pantheon as a break-out hit like Skyrim (now well beyond 30 million sales thanks to another huge tail and many ports to new platforms). Open worlds were not just for big budget action games that took a few elements of RPGs, and so BioWare chose to take a stab at the big money.

Technically speaking

Moving to a modern engine, it's immediately clear that a GTX1070 can't run close to 4K native or max-settings with MSAA (or higher than native with downsampling) and expect locked v-sync (unlike earlier games). What's worse, the mild shader aliasing that supersampling fixed in previous games becomes terrible shimmer here with more advanced material shaders, an HDR pipeline, and bokeh-simulating depth of field (enlarging any shimmering overbright pixel into a fat blob that would almost look like glimmer if it wasn't so clearly strobing at the frequency of an aliasing artefact). MSAA is still an option but it's not going to do anything about shader aliasing (also you probably don't have the GPU headroom to turn it on at high resolutions anyway - especially as on PC you can and should force a 60Hz mode everywhere) and the post-AA is typically somewhat inconsistent. A modern temporal AA solution is sorely missed here, even if it's no worse than many contemporary titles from this dark era for temporal stability.

The game's technical issues were never fully patched and I had more than a few DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG crashes early on (which seemed to get nailed down to some resource management issues that became less prevalent with patches after release but clearly never got completely defeated). Early on I also encountered animation stuttering (especially in cutscenes where they should be playing back at a perfect 30Hz but clearly don't, with some scene elements updating correctly while other stalled for several frames) before deciding that 60Hz SimRate couldn't be worse. Despite being officially unsupported, it seemed much better than the default and provided pretty consistent frame pacing.

Dark (default) indoor

Metals in shadow

Imagine the DoF glints strobing

Also holy clipped brightness values! How was the monitor configured on which this tone-mapping was agreed upon? A few blown highlights outdoors and, far more significantly, severely crushed shadows inside; you're often entirely reliant on the phantom light your protagonist often emits onto the nearby dungeon walls. I ended up pushing the brightness up a few notches, although there is no proper gamma setting in-game so any slight improvement in the blacks also makes blown highlights more common - I could find no satisfactory setting and literally the only screenshot with the default brightness is the one immediately above from the very first dungeon.

There are other areas of taking a visual step forward only for it to lead to inconsistent results. The rather mechanical facial animation of the earlier games are gone and we enter the era of modern BioWare. Not as bad as Andromeda's "automated animation while management failed to schedule any time to hand-tweak the output" but the higher fidelity certainly pushes towards uncanny in a way the previous games didn't. There may also be an element of so many returning characters, with their previous visual representation so fresh in my mind. Playing the games back to back, it's striking - initially I almost wanted to look away to enjoy the vocal performances without the distraction (before getting mostly used to it and then missing seeing face close-ups at all in the many dialogue scenes where the camera doesn't even zoom in).

DAI "default" Hawke

My attempt at a custom job

My near-default Hawke in DA2

The technical chops of the new engine are clear (at the cost of GPU requirements per pixel rendered) and despite the tone-mapping issues, the lighting and material system does a great job of bringing the scenery up to where other Forstbite Engine games can reach. But the move to more realistic skin shaders is possibly going away from where I think BioWare have traditionally done so well - the painted portraits in Baldur's Gate right up to Dragon Age 2's very stylish designs (going as far as to lock the party visuals and heavily push the default look for Hawke, same as had been done for Shepard in Mass Effect). This series playthrough, I'd gone with a basically stock Hawke (modding in the option to tweak a few things but generally sticking to that iconic face you got from selecting the default) and then seeing what BioWare put in Inquisition as the default Hawke: that's really not an aged version of the previous protagonist's facial features. Thinking more closely about how I couldn't really make a custom character that looked like Hawke, it's not just the lacking options - you simply can't create a more cartoonish face from Dragon Age 2 in Inquisition's more realistic rendering palette.

It's worth remembering that this title spanned the console generations (also releasing on PS360) so was always going to straddle the visual expectations of both and Frostbite is a lot fancier today - yet more reasons for a full trilogy remaster for the upcoming consoles. The stories here are worth another stab at; the voice performances may need to be augmented (especially if Dragon Age 2 is to be expanded to a full-length middle chapter in the saga) but are still extremely good; and there's the kernel of some extremely good visual flair here (especially if slightly reworked towards a cohesive, less realistic, style that spanned the series).

When 'all things to all players' fails

Dragon Age 2 felt like it streamlined the RPG mechanics and removed busy-work; Inquisition adds extra busy-work like the "ping" button to reveal resources/loot while removing strategic choices like manually assigning character base attributes to customise a build. Ability trees have been simplified to fit the limit of only being able to hotkey eight active abilities for any character (including an 'ultimate' ability), similar to how some MMOs have streamlined their abilities in recent years and removing the need for large hotbars to play some of the most interesting classes.

A cavalcade of secondary systems have been added (expanded crafting, exploration goals, a million different progress bars, etc) so a desire to cut back on old systems makes sense. Players only have so much mental bandwidth to consider each system and their potential interactions. You can see where every decision comes from, but when put together it often feels like it doesn't lead to a great final experience and certainly doesn't flow from the previous games.

The tactical view returns, the PC UI does not. But it's not the Origins tactical view that allows playing the game as if it was an Infinity Engine game and it barely feels like it fits the more action-oriented combat modelled on Dragon Age 2. As a continued progression into only adding the merest facade of PC niceties, the ability tooltips now fail to actually provide details of what anything does (hover over the toolbar to get the name of an ability and literally nothing more). On such a large project, creating a PC UI seems like it would have been a reasonable task.

When you're using a mouse, so many of the menus require you to drill down into a new layer to edit something rather than having edit buttons to switch stuff at the level of a list of items. I spent quite a while getting comfortable with both keyboard and controller support. Unfortunately you have to exit to the main menu to change between them so hotswapping is out of the question - I feel like a lot of us who played Battlefield from the early PC days got good at quickly migrating from on-foot keyboard to a stick or pad for vehicles and, despite the technical challenges to providing the correct UI, more games should expect people to dynamically move between them.

Inquisition is clearly built primarily for controllers (even with the 8 "face button" actions not being as nice a fit as most action games manage). The movement with WASD feels clunky (once you rebind the comically outdated keyboard turning default); the auto-attack from Dragon Age 2 feels severely scaled back and no longer automatically deals with facing/collision/movement as elegantly; the menus are actually slower without keyboard shortcut keys that are bound on a pad to a quick press while a menu is open; and on and on. But what eventually got me to stick to keyboard was the (patched in after release) Unsheathe button - if you're exploiting unlimited fast stealth* then you need your weapons out. Normally you'd ping or jump quite often to ensure the cooldown never detects you're out of combat, otherwise you're stuck having to hunt a new mob to initiate infinite stealth off. Not so on keyboard, where you can return to a combat stance without swinging an attack (which breaks stealth and so ends you unlimited stealth). Without this, I might say gamepad is the better option on PC but, as with so many things in this game, it feels like you're always being denied the best solution.

An open world filled with stuff

I was almost 25 hours into my playthrough of Inquisition when I gave up on the slow mount speed (with inability to pick up crafting materials or ping for points of interest) and exploited being able to get unlimited stealth* with a speed-boost dagger to make running faster than mounted travel. It's a symptom of the world being too large and the traversal options feeling too limited. The only real downside is the mount system despawns your party while sprinting means they regularly teleport in front of you as you sprint around.

* A rogue's Skirmisher upgraded Flank Attack, when it connects, puts you into a stealth mode that's not got a duration timer as long as you don't attack afterwards; Lost in the Shadows upgrade means even running through enemies doesn't reveal you. Mages can beeline for the Ring of Doubt to get stealth. Stealth means creeping to get the mats for the crafting of a 1.75x speed-boosting Masterwork weapon. Warriors on PC may want to replicate this combat speed (that is possible with the unmodded game for two classes so is bordering on not even a cheat) via mods or just switch to a party member of a different class for traversal.

This is an impressively huge world (even cut into many zones), especially coming directly from the very restrained Dragon Age 2. But sometimes impressing and being readable are at odds with each other. It's impressive to not know where the edge of a player-explorable area is - a potentially infinite world - but that lack of readability makes it hard to efficiently explore. Earlier games showed you on the map that you'd reached the edge of the traversable area; Inquisition puts cliffs (looking just like the ones you can climb) or some rare invisible walls in the way rather than letting you understand the space as a floorplan. The corridor linearity of those zones and dungeons in previous games gave the feeling of a space without the navigational hurdle of actually working out how to get between any two locations on what looks to be a huge open expanse.

When you're constructing an RPG out of a more open world design, you start to hit those pain points that the previous Dragon Age campaigns had rarely encountered. "Here's a big huge Dwarven door that I've previously found another of unlocked on this map by collecting the draw-the-star puzzles. I'm level 4ish as this is one of the areas you can unlock very early on. Nothing in the game indicates why this doorway (marked as if it is a cave and currently showing there are things for a quest I'm currently on inside) is something I should ignore and come back to later." The quest markers are accurate, the quest objectives are absolutely inside but you need to be level 16, far later in the game, to unlock a different quest that unlocks this particular doorway. You need to look that up on a wiki or forum, thankfully now filled with hints from players who've already done everything.

We can go back to some of the early impressions of the game, where completionists (used to the previous campaigns and doing all the quests in a zone) just burned out on the very first large zone unlocked and the endless minor quests with little to not flavour. One of the things a chatty party offers designers is the option to add barks to suggest heading back to base (and trigger some more plot development). Huge open worlds require a lot more careful planning of how they introduce and guide the player to everything. There are a lot of points where the previous games had offered a clear map of the dungeon with which to navigate while the open spaces in Inquisition lead to a completely different way to parse traversal and it's hard to not pine for the old ways when you're trying to work out how to jump up a cliff to get to the collectable thing that's probably in reach.

The rewards at the end of the new collectathons also leave a sour taste. "I can't wait for Solas to have a big speech back at base about all those shards we collected and the Pride demon we took down once the final door unlocked in the zone that's basically just there to give you doors to feed the collected items into that gets introduced as important at the very start of the game." There is no follow-up dialogue or quest; no narrative reward for finding all the shards. An achievement pings when you cross the final door. The same total lack of fanfare occurred when I helped Solas with 10 stabilising widgets and got given a location of a standard (high level) rift closure that was "special" & "worth investigating" in the mission text but not in any real dialogue or narrative conclusion; not even an achievement dinged for that companion quest. I'm left wondering if this is still a BioWare RPG with so much less signature BioWare narrative tied to progression. Worse, I wonder if there is actually less good stuff or I just feel like that because it's watered down by so much more filler? Looking at hours played, Inquisition would need at least as many character moments and narrative developments as all three of the previous campaigns I'd played through to compare, simply due to just how many hours it takes to complete all the quests here.

Developers can say "just don't engage with it" about the less strongly-narrative content but the game design doesn't flag that there will be no payoff to the narrative setup they wrote to start the quest lines so how do you know what to ignore? Also how often have BioWare killed off a character if players failed to engage with their optional quests in the last decade so it's not exactly unreasonable that players have been trained to exhaust the quests and even dialogue trees (even asking borderline transphobic questions just in case it's vital to some progression that Krem gets asked something that shows you've got no clue) to try and avoid missing some critical but optional path. Dragon Age is a series where the fan parlance discusses "hardened" and "softened" characters over the arc of the entire narrative to track potential changes to character attitudes and what that means for where the story can go. In 2019, we know a new Dragon Age is coming and will almost certainly import the world state from the Dragon Age Keep (the online world state checker/editor).

The real killer I felt on this playthrough, during which I used a mod to turn the real-time waitathon mechanics off (instantly finishing quests on the "war table"), was how the large open spaces and walking round to chat were broken up by so many trips to trigger a text-dump "mission" on a glorified map you can only access by running to an area (with no fast-travel point just outside) in your base area. Timers making sure you don't play through the main missions or unlock new areas too quickly (even though there is already a currency that gates unlocking missions behind doing the less narrative content). And when you remove those blocks then the true absurdity becomes apparent: running from a companion spot to trigger a cut-scene and back to the map to start a "mission" you don't actually play that does what they suggested then immediately back to their location to trigger the continuation of the cut-scene.

Going forward

We're approaching the end of this series on a bit of a downer there. To be clear, I very much enjoy Dragon Age as a series and Inquisition as a bit-too-Skyrim-y big-budget entry in that series. If I didn't care about the characters (new and old) then I wouldn't be so invested in wanting more character moments. The technical issues (some of which we might generously call "era appropriate real-time rendering limitations") and stylistic choices along with the zone readability and collectathon issues stand to hinder some truly lovely spaces that could be filled with excellent gameplay and stories. It's the gap to greatness that makes me feel like Dragon Age should get another chance - just like Mass Effect 1 just needs the combat and inventory stuff reworked or Mass Effect 2 deserved a better ending. All of this modern BioWare era feels like it's so close to something not just extremely special but timeless. Nothing is perfect but some things stand out, even ten years later.

The first two big Inquisition DLCs - a dungeon and new zone - are very similar to the base game and if there's something this game wasn't desperate for it's even more content (providing more lore that BioWare will have to assume many players don't know about in the next game). The capstone Trespasser DLC however: a lot of my concerns with Inquisition actually felt like they were improved significantly, so the team were already moving in a good direction. We now know the next project from that team got cancelled or rebooted with the loss of the project lead so the future is less certain. One thing the teaser (which was for the new project) did make clear is that the narrative hooks at the end of Inquisition are definitely the jumping off point for the next game.

It seems likely that next game will arrive at some point on a new generation of consoles. So we still have some time to wait. Luckily there are four campaigns here that are very worth playing through.


Plug: why not help me justify spending over 200 hours replaying old games recently and writing up my thoughts by *jangling tip jar* becoming a patron.

Dragon Age(d): 10 Years Later

A decade after the first Mass Effect was released, I went back to the series to see how it held up. In the same vein, it's been almost 10 years since we first got to step into the Dragon Age setting (yes, Thedas) and I've just completed a full (all available quests in a single run) end-to-end replay of each major campaign in the series (Origins, Awakening, 2, Inquisition). Two months well spent.

Extremely broadly, Origins [~45 hours] and the full expansion Awakening [~20 hours] brought BioWare back towards their Infinity Engine early prime, right down to the interface on PC (which allows for an overhead camera for tactical decisions) and real-time with pause combat, all while retaining the more modern cinematic presentation and focus on character relationships (the prototypes for which started in Baldur's Gate and have become increasingly prominent in the more recent BioWare oeuvre).

The rushed full sequel, Dragon Age 2 [~35 hours], completely drops the tactical perspective (and PC-only interface) while retaining most of the mechanics and narrative focus. It doesn't feel great to click through 720p console UIs on a 4K PC and the budget constraints are everywhere, but it's a reasonably tight RPG due to the limited scope (not as compact as Awakening but also not feeling like an expansion) - the updated engine may be the same tech under the hood but the new UI does give it a clean feel, as does the forced closer camera and renderer tweaks. DA2 introduced many quality of life tweaks (a button to run to & auto-collect loot is huge) that make going back to Origins and Awakening a bit of an ask, much like going back to Mass Effect 1, but also it's hard to not applaud how much the first game got extremely right.

Finally, Inquisition [over 100 hours] went big (budget) and tried to please everyone: constructing the largest campaign by some margin (and unfortunately unlocking a lot of the MMO-y fetch quests early on, which turned off some completionist players); a tactical view returns while moving towards more of an action combat style (somewhat negating the value of the perspective, which also can no longer be used to play the rest of the game); generally more MMO-y sensibilities for side quests and map layout abound; gearing all party members came back (missing in DA2); but goodbye spending attribute points when levelling up. The new rendering engine (Frostbite) was also a radical departure and in 2019, I can't say I'm totally convinced the massively higher requirements (per pixel rendered) justifies the visual upgrade (clearly a more modern approach to materials and shaders, but plagued with aliasing issues you can't brute-force around yet at 4K & the new tech had teething issues with animations, which you can also see striking Andromeda several years later).

Start at the beginning...

Jumping into Dragon Age Origins, it's not doing badly for a game from 2009 (that probably only had a mid-tier budget for EA at the time - especially as a game that started out development before the BioWare acquisition). No one was trying to make this within a crowd-funded budget, even if CRPGs aren't known for bleeding edge visuals. The one thing that you do have to live with is that the PC interface was never intended for 4K screens, certainly not for beyond-4K internal resolutions which clean up any light shader aliasing.

The classic Infinity Engine games it harkens back to have all had their re-releases in more recent years that have basically fixed up their interfaces to work at higher resolutions but Origins is new enough to not get that work and also didn't have the best modding options so it doesn't have the fan-made UI overhaul of a Bethesda game. There is a mod to change the font sizes, which also boosts some of the UI boxes to take up the full screen and basically makes it something you can live with but it's not the best experience. Like Mass Effect 1, it feels ripe for a remake (Resident Evil 2 style) that retains the character and progression while rethinking some design decisions and updating the narrative details towards modern expectations.

It initially felt strange to play a "modernised" attempt at "Baldur's Gate, but without the D&D license", now we've had so many teams making explicitly retro RPGs (eg Pillars of Eternity) that are takes on those Infinity Engine games. There have always been other WRPG series, like (Divine) Divinity, that never totally left the classic mould, but Origins feels like it comes from a less certain time where BioWare knew they wanted to modernise a classic design but weren't quite sure what that meant. 2009 was before a consensus formed on what modern audiences wanted from their retro-compatible WRPG while in 2019 you can't throw a stone without hitting a crowdfunded RPG directly evoking those classic games.

Despite offering the classic perspective that removes the roof and offers great tactical control in battle, I quickly locked to the closer 3rd person view to enjoy the skyboxes and character details anywhere outside the most hectic of battles. It's not the up close shooter that Mass Effect always was, but there is the extra layer of immersion when the camera gets down towards character eye level. The basic programmable team AI, ranking abilities and setting preconditions to activate, actually did just enough to allow me to mainly play my character and let them get on with it (again, reducing reliance on the overhead view that I'd originally used to play the entire game). One of the more amusing defaults (which sticks throughout the series) is keyboard turning - WASD doesn't include strafe options unless you rebind it. For a series that increasingly aimed for fluidity with a controller, it feels extremely dated to default to the old MMO standard that was widely derided even back when WoW launched in 2004.

But outside of the perspective, everything feels just like the classic BioWare WRPGs from a previous era. Yes, cynically this can be viewed as trying to make a new D&D setting without the license (the same way Mass Effect builds a sci-fi setting without the Star Wars license) but the world is rich enough to support it. You travel an overworld map engaging in random battles between the detailed (fake magical middle ages) rural & urban quest hubs and the more combat heavy dungeons. As you play, you collect companions and, in the modern style, decide who to party with and eventually do affinity quests with. Banter is on tap no matter who you bring along and sometimes new dialogue options unlock due to who you bring along on a quest. The scale is epic and nations may rise or fall based on your decisions while most of the actual quests retain a very human scale (even surrounded by demons and the rest of the fantasy accoutrements).

I really appreciated how much was added with a whole new cast of companions within the shorter Awakening campaign - fleshing out concepts and themes from the main campaign while still being a meaty narrative itself. After Origins concludes with the definitive defeat of the Big Bad, there could have been a hole in the expansion but it's filled well; even if BioWare then completely drops the ball and have to plagiarise their own work during DA2's DLC to set up a new main antagonist for Inquisition (it's not like BioWare don't resurrect characters you can optionally kill elsewhere in the series). The other Origins DLC chapters are far more slight, adding [companion] backstory (some with heavy location reuse) and an ultimately disposable capping story in 1 to 2 hour micro-campaign chunks. Even these least satisfying blocks were something I enjoyed though - at no point does the storytelling feel like it lands totally flat.

However, replaying it now, the Person of Mass Destruction trope feels so so tired; not helped by it being a core theme for the entire series. It was always tired, but it's not getting any better with age (mine or the game's). We can do better than a marginalised and brutalised subgroup who are actually as dangerous as the dominant group claims and so it's morally gray if they really do have to be exterminated (or lobotomised) the second they become "too dangerous". Considering the real world oppression of people considered sub-human with super-human strength etc "justifying" violence then we should expect more from these stories - this was a brand new setting, it could have been about anything. And Dragon Age loves to play within this trope, often being pretty inconsistent on how it plays things like Blood Mages in what seems like an attempt to let the player character choose a morality but often it just leads to NPC dialogue and choices that paint a deeply inconsistent tone and characterisation (even when the player tries to pick a consistent stance).

I'm not expecting Dragon Age 4 to come out and completely deconstruct the trope but it would be nice to step a bit away from the Templars vs Mages focus that is never far from the core of the series. In spots Origins and Awakening are probably actually the best the series is on this front, often because of how self-contained many of the chapters feel and how you play part of an outsider cult. I started out as a mage for this playthrough (one of the several opening origin acts that give the subtitle) and was pleasantly surprised whenever it got referenced back through the main campaign. Clearly that's a lot of work, making many playable origin stories and then hooking them all into the main narrative, but it's possibly less work than is required in the sequels to hook in player choice events in the previous games. Throughout those origins and the wider game, there's some very smart reuse of locations; which brings us on to...

Travelling to Kirkwall (not in Orkney)

Of all the Dragon Age campaigns, this feels like the one most in need of a critical reappraisal in 2019. Although by no means panned on release, DA2 did not get the same gushing praise that met the rest of the series and so is remembered as the weak middle chapter. There was a player backlash (to the production values? to the total focus on characters? to devs talking "diversity" in interviews?) and corresponding oscillation of DA2 super-fans pushing back but my recollection of 2011 was mainly of a muted reception and jokes about how the entire game took place in a single location with one (cave) dungeon because it was developed behind EA's back (in case it's unclear, part of the joke is how ridiculous that would be).

Coming directly from Origins and Awakening (we'll consider that long enough to be its own thing rather than "DLC" - much longer than the hour or so for each of the Origins DLC offerings and maybe half the length of Dragon Age 2) then it's extremely apparent that DA2 was pushed out the door not much more than a year after production started (that one isn't a joke). As I've commented on Mass Effect, BioWare can sometimes do a touch too much copy & paste with distinctive (and theoretically unique in the fiction of the game world) art assets but the constraints for making DA2 really push that into a whole new realm. As the devs have since said in interviews, asset reuse isn't the problem, it's the lack of smart reuse that quickly becomes apparent as you get deeper into DA2.

Reuse is meant to clone meshes or props, not lock a player into repeatedly walking the same 20m loop and telling them they're on an epic journey - if you don't look carefully then lots of trees do kinda look the same but near-exact reuse at a floorplan scale is immediately uncanny to most players. It's an area where procgen or tileable block construction in the tools pipeline (eg Sucker Punch using hex tiles to rapidly assemble the inFamous map) can quickly help you bake variety into your floorplans (even without going full rogue-like procgen and randomising the elements for each user - just a tool for rapidly creating many similar but distinct floorplans); the absence of it is immediately obvious and disappointing. When you're going through cave after cave between narrative payloads then a varied skybox or surroundings helps offer something beyond the mechanics of combat to the player (just ask Bungie).

The use of a single city with day/night and several acts (progressing various things over several years, not unlike how some of the Origins areas are reused, especially showing partially destroyed variants) is great; I have always been a fan of attempting Warren Spector's idea of a One City Block RPG. But when the story calls for dozens of different caves and other areas, if you've only built two very distinctive cave layouts that have a few doorways that can be closed off to change the walking lines, it's too distinctive to work. Reuse happens everywhere else too, creating additional floors to areas that just copy floorplans which wouldn't layer on top of each other at all. There are probably fewer dungeon maps in the entire of DA2 than there are just random encounter maps in Origins, which is an easy thing to ding the game for and many reviewers did. Going back, I'm less annoyed by it (expectations are everything, I knew it was coming for a replay) but it's such an unforced and obvious error (of budget or planning).

The three acts tie DA2 together better than Origins, which generally lacked the feeling of structure that even Mass Effect achieved (around a similar broadly linear narrative structure with a meaty central chunk where several locations could be handled in any order + side-quests for flavour which also created the feeling of non-linear choice). Once again, the production schedule unfortunately robs some of the feeling that this was a choice rather than just not being able to get any more done to make it feel sprawling. Things like the random side-quest drops that have no narrative hook and generic "thanks for returning this" barks when handed in feel like they could and should have been expanded to a proper dialogue or cut as busywork. I'm not convinced by the acquisition of invisible armour perks for the single item of clothing every companion wears (with a couple of new outfit unlocks for plot progression) in a game that's still very much about checking the loot that drops from combat and finding chests. Especially as this time through I knew I should just grab the armour sets for Hawke, so there was absolutely no dressing up or finding cute clothing combinations to be had.

The back-to-back nature of my playthrough meant I moved from not really liking Anders but enjoying Justice in Awakening to just straight up not really caring for new Anders. It's a shame that I still don't really appreciate the arc of such a core character to this story but there will always be a companion or two whose motives and arc isn't all you want of it. I think there are better ways of doing the righteous terrorist/freedom fighter but I'm not sure I could do better while still weighed down with the Person of Mass Destruction trope. My joy at being propelled through the events of the story with most of the characters outweighed what reservations I had around certain plot devices or tropes, which isn't to say I never cringed at a scene or few.

Some of the writing around romances feels of an era we're trying to escape (especially setting up a binary of either completely naive or very promiscuous). Ultimately it gets immature-attempting-maturity in spots, much like when the Mass Effect writing falls down. A lack of outfit changes doesn't help when characters go into melee combat with little more armour than a Dead or Alive character. The entire "hardened" romance chains, gifts to buy affection, etc (which continue here barely changed from Origins) comes over as from an era before serious criticism had really pushed progressive teams to try to tighten up their attempts at what that messages to players. Some choices are still up in the air: should all romanceable characters be implicitly bisexual (DA2) or risk the Mass Effect 2 issue (where the Paramour romance options demanded a straight protagonist) by defining sexualities more concretely for party members (and having limited bandwidth to write full romance dialogue chains). I can't say I preferred where Inquisition went the other way, but I would like at least some range of queer representation and for all characters who are attracted to either Hawke to be more clearly bisexual during a single playthrough. There sure are a lot of bisexual men in this series who give little indication of that unless you play two complete playthrough with different genders.

I don't actually remember liking DA2 back in 2011 nearly as much as I did on this replay. Maybe that's playing Origins and Awakening with the closer camera so not being a shocking change or about better expectations for what DA2 was trying to do with a smaller scope than Origins. But it's real good. My issues with Mass Effect 2 around forgetting the impending universe-ending events and doing a smaller character piece are less of an issue here (that said, both ending are still kinda a mess in spots). Thanks to how Origins resolved, there's space for a new protagonist to have a more reactive story based around a cast of characters over time in a single city state (where the Mass Effect series didn't have that change with a single protagonist for the original trilogy despite being just as happy to actually kill off the protagonist!) and DA2 really pulls that off in 2019. It's not unparalleled storytelling but it's pretty good where I found it.

After 3000 words, we're going to take a break before wrapping this up. In part two of this blog series, it's time to dive into by far the longest Dragon Age campaign to date. The Inquisition, teased throughout the framing of DA2's story, takes centre stage...


Finally, if you've been enjoying this blog for a while, why not help me justify spending over 200 hours replaying old games recently and writing up my thoughts by *jangling tip jar* becoming a patron.

Good Enough Meets Extremely Fast

I've been playing a lot of games in the last month that are getting on for a decade old. Some of that is for a longer post (series of posts? my notes, not yet having finished the final Dragon Age game, are 3500 words) but I wanted to do something shorter about how these games (that exported their artist assets expecting most users to play them at 720p) stand up rather well on modern systems. There may be a touch of riffing on this recent blog post too.

Almost exactly a year ago I was asking similar questions to that linked post, but about the asset fidelity arms race and the last decade of progress measured in pure asset comparisons (that is, taking eg a 2011 game and comparing it to today by rendering both assets with roughly equivalent to today's real-time renderers). Playing through this series of games from 2008 to 2011 in quick succession was a great visualisation of how those old assets hold up in 2019 with 4K60 output.

None of the screenshots that I'm embedding here are doing anything fancy like injecting alternative shaders or swapping out the stock assets with higher poly community mods or more detailed textures. Dragon Age 2 has the "High Resolution Texture Pack" (advertised as for GPUs with a massive 1GB of VRAM) which is an optional official download on Origin but I'm pretty sure that was released on the same day at the base game (and is official anyway). Everything was captured looking for a ~60fps experience so it's not a DeadEndThrills approach of turning everything up to 11 even if it broke the framerate and then capturing and downsampling purely for the photography. These are faithful captures of the internal framebuffer for the game as played.

If you click through to the screenshots in this post, you'll notice some unusual resolutions involved because today DSR/VSR (super-sampling at the driver level - exposing fake higher resolutions to any game and then downsampling for output to the actual screen) is an absolutely stock technique. Something like a modern GTX1070 (my card will turn 3 years old next quarter - so not even that modern) has more than enough power to turn on any existing AA technique (MSAA hadn't totally died to deferred renderers in this era; FXAA etc had started to be imported from the consoles) and then also boost beyond 4K to help control some of the shader aliasing. The shaders aren't that complex so there is plenty of performance to play with and often no one is getting fancy with HDR to really explode everything (compared to games around 2015, which seem like they're going to be a dark period of high shader complexity but not great management of artefacts & defects in edge cases; not to mention not having good enough temporal anti-aliasing yet while most everyone had migrated to deferred where MSAA isn't viable).

Despite expecting most users to see these decade-old games on much lower resolution screens, the push around this era was for good enough textures for up-close inspection. What you get when the textures are good enough up close is that you've now got some decently detailed textures even for 4K output at medium-distance. I'm not going to say all of these games are perfect, as you do clearly get some muddy visuals even in the mid-ground in some places (especially stuff like a large flat repeating floor texture etc). But it holds up surprisingly well and even the primitive dynamic shadows are often so primitive as to be easy enough to ignore (if you can't brute force it via poking at config files and demanding the GPU just throws a GB at huge shadow maps). The several years of continued development from where Half-Life 2 (including Episode 2 refresh) had left us in terms of getting a reasonably coherent result while juggling multiple different systems (this is before a unified PBR push) is often impressive. You can nitpick the results, just as you can often point to comically low polygon density you'd not see today (outside of maybe indie games and even those often push their polygon budget quite well), but it's only a few spots rather than the entire scene looking out of place on a modern system.

While clearly miles from photo-realism, there is enough detail to know what everything is meant to be and for things like a poster or sign to get close to being the actual poster or sign without lashes of artefacts or having to use a special rendering technique to achieve it (here I'm thinking of how well Doom 3 did the in-world UI stuff back in 2004 being the exception even today). There is nowhere near the level of detritus you would see in a real world, but there is enough to make it look lived in. Those props look close enough to what they're meant to represent that we're not in the situation of years previous where it was a muddy texture and often a mess of polygons that you had to work at to understand once looking at them at a far higher resolution than was originally intended. There are enough assets that there is cruft on a desk rather than only the props required for the interactions and one fake bottle to avoid the artifice totally collapsing once interactable objects started to get glowing highlights or arrows above them.

Also the lack of PBR in this era for things like human(oid) characters means the artists seemed to be more free to push the more cartoon-y stylish approach (before you defaulted to starting out with a skin shader with sub-surface scattering and worked from there) which certainly helps avoiding the uncanny valley. Some of the animation systems from this era are clearly reaching towards a fluidity the tech did not make easy and the animators were not given the budget to hand-tweak them to perfection from whatever performance capture they may have started with. I'd say it does show an "emotive gap" from looking at the puppetry onscreen trying to convey subtle emotions via expressions but often not quite getting there - but even today this doesn't seem like a totally solved issue and I find the difference from studio to studio is far more significant than simply looking at the progression of technology. Around this era of games then we've got stand-out stuff from Naughty Dog showing you could do that stuff really well with the technology back then.

I am still energised by rendering questions. The introduction of real-time ray tracing is such an exciting time to be thinking about the next generation of engine designs (and even just what the new console generation will bring in terms of a baseline performance we can expect many many millions of users to have reasonably affordable access to). Even the more invisible things like a continuing focus on code quality and reliability engineering, with several studios talking about how they're looking at using Rust to really enforce higher coding standards (banning some patterns of design as too risky, which the Rust borrow checker enforces at compile time) in their work.

How do I feel going back a decade and enjoying all these games that still look good enough today (thanks to the extremely fast GPUs we've got)? Well it makes me think about what we're working on today and the hardware we'll be able to use to replay it in another decade. What slight visual deficiencies we'll be able to brute force around; just how detailed things might look on 8K TV panels with amazing contrast/brightness options (and maybe some of that Deep Learning algorithms tweaking the game output to enhance it without the horrible results from previous generations of "TV enhancements" to the input signal) or with VR headsets that sit us inside recreated 3D spaces and give us effectively even higher pixel counts (via head movements allowing us to be truly surrounded in a scene and 4K VR panels).

Games have longer shelf lives than ever before and can continue to grow even long after we've stopped actively working to develop them. We should probably think about making sure all our sliders can be unlocked to go up to 12 so that players in ten years can continue to poke the settings up as they get the hardware to run it.

Updating Rust Nightly

So Rust has a pretty usable nightly build. Actually it has an extremely usable nightly build that also keeps a huge set of powerful features siloed off from the stable branch (behind feature gates so you can turn on just the stuff you want to play with rather than being dumped into a thousand things that have been deemed to not actually be ready for prime-time yet). That attracts a lot of users to keep on nightly rather than stable (or the beta that is one update ahead of stable but also lacks nightly's features and so is the mid-ground no one uses unless they really believe in helping test the next stable for the public good). However, nightly isn't perfect(ly stable) and right now is a great example of where the update tools feel like they come up short vs the usability that is visible everywhere else for the Rust language ecosystem.

>rustup update

"error: some components unavailable for download: 'clippy', 'rls', 'rustfmt'".

As primarily a user of VSCode for Rust (also sometimes a JetBrains IDE, although the Community Edition plugin lacks any debugging feature so I'll revert to VSCode to debug) then the RLS isn't really optional. It is good that the updater tells me after finding that some of the components I have installed in the toolchain I asked to update are missing from last night's build. However, it does not then go on to give me any information about how I can get from however old my last installed version was to the last good nightly build.

As best I can work out, I have to browse to a site tracking the nightly builds by component and then tell rustup to update to the date last shown to have built correctly. But that's not actually the end of this story (which would be a bit of lack of useful info but not totally weird to not get that added info directly on the command line).

The behaviour of rustup update <dated nightly version> is not to update the nightly toolchain install already on your system but to install a second toolchain (the help does make it clear that you are effectively just running rustup toolchain install when you provide a toolchain argument). So now I've got a second toolchain installed with the last dated good build I took from that tracking site, except it's a default install so those optional components that I needed and weren't available in last night's nightly? Those didn't automatically get added to my new toolchain install (and for my use, they are not optional - if I could live without them then I could just force the update and it would wipe over the old stuff with the partially working current nightly). So now I have to go through the process of requesting those components be added.

None of this is the end of the world. Many other toolchain ecosystems are no better (and some are worse) when it comes to updating. But there is clearly room for improvement here and this is one of those pain points where a new Rust dev who is not used to any of this may not even really understand what's going on (after someone told them nightly was totally fine and just install that). Either they can't update or, worse, they end up with a VSCode IDE that has no RLS (and no way to get a corresponding RLS as that part of the nightly build is broken right now) which means it's not behaving like they expect it to.

A typical dev who is asking to update their nightly build probably wants to get the latest nightly that has all the components working that they have installed. That seems like a safe default to assume, maybe with a Y/N prompt after the error message rather than silently updating (if we are to be cautious). Leaving them with a potentially weeks or months old nightly (where they're potentially behind stable - not that hard for sporadic Rust users with the 6 week cadence of new stable versions and reasons to prefer nightly) because last night's build didn't work (and no easy way to update without just starting to install a totally new toolchain from scratch) does not seem like a suitable behaviour.

Shooting into February 2019

There sure are a lot of AAA shooter titles landing this month. Many of them have had a very long and public development process with much of their team's (or even entire studio's) future being weighed on if they find success. Quite a few public betas have been going on, because almost everything (even the solo-able experience) is a multiplayer co-operative game today. And then EA went and made it even more of a month of riches by not only announcing Respawn's Battle Royale entry but also releasing it onto PCs and console the same day they announced it.

I'm actually going to start be rewinding into the final days of last month for the first game getting some quick commentary. Resident Evil 2 was a project that could have fallen apart extremely easily. Remaking a 21 year old title in a genre whose popularity has been up and down, bringing back most of the story beats and even design decisions while completely remaking the visuals and how the game controls (goodbye fixed cameras). And yet, what has arrived is both a great recollection of what has always worked for horror games along with enough new to feel modern and accessible. This should end up in classrooms as an example of how to refresh old games while retaining their identity.

The big title from EA, the one you'd actually expect them to make space for and not throw out an online competitive shooter merely weeks before launch, is Anthem. BioWare have been having a hard time recently, with various teams being given their branding and releasing things of questionable quality (and some extremely short deadlines seemingly responsible for those quality control issues - the way so many PC RPG studios have died before) but this is the big hope: a brand new IP that carves a living world around the upward swing to how shooting felt in the most recent Mass Effect games.

Unfortunately, if the demos are anything to go by, that shooting doesn't feel any more inspired here than it has done in those RPGs (where the narrative was the main point of playing). A light affair, lacking in feedback from the bullet sponge enemies or in terms of interface reactivity; I found almost nothing to keep me engaged in the combat scenarios (which seem to be stock wave-based exercises just as each of the weapons feels like well-worn archetypes). The visuals show off Frostbite but also leave you wondering how much world there is to explore, as does the lack of narrative content on display. It feels like this could easily be forgotten in a month, not even managing to equal something like a Destiny (2) in keeping players engaged through a diverse selection of skyboxes as the campaign story gave a reason to enjoy the excellent feeling shooting. That comparison feels like an area where Anthem could end up coming up short in every way.

And loading up EA's Origin right now, there is a much better feeling shooter they just released. Respawn's Apex Legends is doing just about enough new for Battle Royale games, while keeping it F2P to avoid there being a barrier to entry. It's great timing for anyone falling off Call of Duty's mode but unwilling to jump to the construction combat of the market leader. It's fun, bright, feels good to aim and shoot, and hopefully will slowly expand over time as long as the players continue to engage with it. That Titanfall heritage is clearly there, even without the wall-running mobility.

Jumping forward in time, The Division 2 is not releasing until March but that means the Ubisoft betas are all over this month. One of the things that the move to DC in the summer makes clear is that Manhattan under a ton of snow really made the last game. This has every sign of being more of the same, only with some slightly rearranged progression that better leads into an end-game situation (rather than keeping a treadmill for the campaign and falling off the end outside of PvP in the Dark Zones). I've found myself having a hard time going back three years later and the always-connected stuff will probably keep me away (as a server disconnect wipes out half an hour of progress and dumps my avatar at the entry lobby to a mission rather than saving any of the checkpoints I'd progressed through). There's just so much else I could be doing for putting up with stuff like this in 2019. One final aside: remember when Massive Entertainment were pulled off supporting that first game and put onto a James Cameron's Avatar project? I wonder if that went sideways because it sure feels like it's been a while.

Before The Division 2 comes out, Ubisoft are also throwing out Far Cry: New Dawn. I can't say that reskinning the Far Cry 5 map for a post apocalyptic cash-in is getting me in any way excited for even more Far Cry. Everything about the branding for this makes me think it'll be completely forgotten in a few months when Rage 2 comes out, even if that game doesn't turn out particularly well. I wonder who asked for this, or if it was just a pivot when Far Cry 5 didn't do that well for the team that was planning on making DLC.

Returning to games which have gone through extremely long and public development cycles, Crackdown 3 is coming soon. Yes, "cloud physics" multiplayer and all. My expectations are in the gutter at this point so time to wait for reviews on this one.

Finally for this compilation of thoughts, Metro Exodus is yet another shooter coming this month and everything they've put out about that more open world makes me think this'll be where I find something special this month. It's interesting that it's courted more controversy for the PC digital store it's on (Epic Store, after being pre-sold on Steam for a while - where it will apparently get distributed to those customers) than the contents of the actual game. As a solo game without a constant server connection, I'm not sure where you get it from really matters that much (as long as the CDN server continues to exist to serve the download files at high speed in the future). A more open game world with light survival elements and a lot of nods to HL2-style storytelling? I think I just accidentally described about half of this list of games to various degrees.

What a lot of shooters!

A New Console Generation

So I've engaged in mild speculation on new console specs in the past. We're getting to the point where there should be some new consoles coming. It lines up pretty well with (large chip) mass production 7nm in the coming year or two so everyone will be ready to offer powerful SoCs with high power efficiency for console enclosures. A 2020 release is 7 years on from the current high fidelity consoles - very normal for the console upgrade cadence. Even the half-generation updates would be getting on by the end of 2020: four years after the PS4 Pro was released.

Phil Spencer was at CES talking up their continuing partnership with AMD, which certainly sounds like an ongoing use of their IP (makes a lot of sense - AMD have all the IP under one roof and a track record; Jaguar cores are going to get a substantial update with a Zen derivative; and the MCP design AMD are working with could be a good match for a console that will live through at least a couple of die shrinks while uncertain about how much of a monolithic SoC would benefit from that). Vega (and even lower end Polaris) are not leading the power efficiency war but at this point everyone is experienced in making GCN work well and there are still a few bad memories around nVidia. Everyone hopes that the next Vega is going to bring that power efficiency to where nVidia are at on 12nm (if they can't when a generation ahead at 7nm and not wasting any transistors on speculative features, something will be going very wrong). There is also the deep in development Navi so even without turning it around next month, the future may be bright. The only wildcard would be Intel trying to sell their 2020 GPU design to Sony or MS (or even offering an AMD GPU: did not see that coming a year ago) - very long odds in my book but worth mentioning as Intel make a big move to compete on high end GPUs to avoid seeing server farms filled with expensive nVidia chips (getting a foot in the door with Tensor etc specialised silicon to expand their use cases). [Those with a long memory will remember that nVidia were paid by Intel to relinquish any claim to be able to provide x86 chips and so can't offer a complete package that would enable a rolling window of compatibility.]

I'm going to say that odds are good for something like a CCX cluster (4 Zen cores) or two with a pretty large Navi GPU block. What I'm curious about: what if the next Xbox is two new Xboxes? Rather than releasing one console then doing a major redesign when the power requirements are lower, what if there is a constant pair of consoles, like we have now. The next Xbox as a high end system with at least 8 Zen cores and a big Navi block. $500 at the end of 2020 with enough fast RAM to avoid the issues that plagued the original XB1 [forced to waste die space on extra cache to make up for slow RAM] and hopefully at least a PCI-E SSD cache (128GB? 256GB? Big SSD premium SKU?) to avoid the loading times getting even worse (even if most downloads and game installs would live on a large platter drive for cost reasons, even with NAND getting cheaper - 500GB is floating around $100 right now so maybe prices can drop to make an SSD-only next gen happen with support for archiving to external storage via USB).

But the XB1X isn't that old and isn't a terrible target for an entry-level spec for games going forward from 2020. There would probably be a way to make a reasonably good approximation of that system using a smaller Zen cluster and much smaller Navi block (cheaper/less RAM and no SSD cache). Something that would run existing games just like an XB1X, with minimal shims to catch edge cases (in the low level API calls). Something that would effectively be sold as both the cheap entry to the next generation and the "Slim" edition of the XB1X. Something to ensure developers continue to make sure their new games work for existing XB1X customers (with whatever compromises were required for performance) while dropping support for new games on the anaemic XB1/XB1S system. The fact that the XB1S isn't identical to the original XB1 shows that the ecosystem is already built around supporting two low end specs that are only approximately the same.

When the next high end Xbox is ready for a slim-down, it might be time to look at another step forward (an "XB2X") and which devices get guaranteed access to 100% of new releases going forward (and which platforms are something a developer could optionally support in a "cross-buy" style system). Have two or three models always "current" that cycle out every three to five years until they can no longer continue to offer the right shims to ensure compatibility with their API choices. It would certainly be something not totally out of step with the current MS talk of slowly expanding their cloud gaming offerings (on TVs, tablets, and laptops) and making games work anywhere (Windows PCs and Xbox devices). It's the realisation of much of the "what if more like annual tablet/phone updates" talk from about five years ago.