Every Dragon Age player has their closest friends – the companions they bonded with most. Maybe you just really enjoyed going camping with Alistair. Perhaps you had the best contact with the Iron Bull because you were both Qunari. Maybe you just enjoyed helping Isabela rip off men’s money.
With whoever you felt closest to you for whatever reason, friendship is a natural bond to develop in role play. You build your character’s personality through conversations and story choices, and only someone with the most boring personality ever would want each of their eight or so companions equally.
So why does Dragon Age never let you formalize this relationship? Friendships in Dragon Age may feel dynamic, but they’re missing one last step. The methods have changed slightly over the course of the three games, but the current system is really just for developing friendships through two systems: an approval meter and periodic side missions. This worked well for three games, but Dragon Age: Inquisition made it feel a bit stale.
The approval meter ensures that you have a few companions who disagree with you and a few who do, and it certainly shows in conversations with them. However, this rarely affects your access to their side missions. In Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, they are given to you all at once after completing an important story step. If you’re anything like me, you always complete all your important side missions before moving on. This superficial sense of improving your relationships is not a good start.
While these encounters can end positively or negatively, if you like that companion, they will likely be positive. The latter quest usually does something to strengthen your relationship with this companion as a close friend, assuming all went well. After that deep conversation with two or three or four different companions, it starts to feel canned.
Despite the fact that I just complained about it for a few paragraphs, I think Dragon Age generally manages to make your connections with the companions realistic and dynamic. I’d have a lot more to complain about if the side quests were more scripted or the approval bar didn’t have a negative scale. However, I do think it’s missing one piece of the puzzle that would take it to the next level: a “Best Friend” mechanic.
Choosing and having a best friend in the game would be a lot like choosing a love interest: your relationship would be exclusive, you could make your choice around mid to late game, and it would be your new cutscenes and dialogue. Similar to your love interest, it would include some form of intimate connection, just without the physical intimacy. It would also change all your conversations with them after that point, and like the love interest, it could be mimicked even in smaller ways by visiting them. Other characters can even comment on the friendship.
Adding a best friend to the game would be an easy way to provide what BioWare has been looking for for years: an extra level of role-playing, left entirely to the player’s choice.
Player choices already have more impact than the story beats unfolding right in front of you, but that’s a story for another article. As much as Dragon Age has tried to give the player that sense of choice, it’s not hard to see through the curtain. Your relationship is built at key moments, when the developers want it, with a certain number of quests, and the process is repeated for each partner. You choose to be friends with them, but you don’t really choose to be friends. You just do side quests. You can achieve maximum friendship with anyone if you try hard enough (and maybe do a little googling). If you only have to make one choice, everything can change.
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