The Open Space and Hissing Wastes of Dragon Age: Inquisition

For this newspost I’ve chosen to highlight a Janine Hawkins’ piece for Paste Magazine that focuses on the level design of Dragon Age: Inquisition. Much praise is given to BioWare’s use of empty space, with the Hissing Wastes location used as an example. Here’s a snippet:

I recently dipped my toes into The Crew, a game I’d been looking forward to for the better part of 2014. Almost as soon as I was let out into the world, I was inundated with symbols I’d never seen before for activities I’d never been introduced to. Dozens upon dozens of indicators glared out from the map and the road and the periphery of my vision. Young children often have trouble grasping the concept of (too much), and this is never clearer than when they’re doing crafts. There’s no such thing as too much glitter, too much glue, too much paint, too many pipe cleaners and if one pom-pom is good, then 100 pom-poms must be better. Lately this is all I see when I look at the objective-saturated open-worlds that Ubisoft’s widely recognized for producing across various games. If one optional objective adds valuable content, then 100 optional objectives must add even more valuable content, right?

They don’t, though. The proof is in the punchline that this approach to content has become over the past few years. If these endless icons, markers and beacons represented actual value to the player, they wouldn’t be the low-hanging fruit of gaming humor. We would respect them.

Instead, these objectives mean nothing. They add nothing to the game experience, beyond having one more thing to do. At best they have the comparative value of a tick mark in a box; at worst, they’re clutter. There’s something very insecure about this kind of content saturation. Something desperate begging me never to stay in one place too long, nor to look too closely at the world I’m inhabiting. It’s the rambling, nervous chatter of someone who can feel an awkward silence coming and will do absolutely anything to delay it.

But the silence is only awkward when you don’t have anything else to say, or when you don’t realize that sitting in silence with a friend is a pleasurable experience in and of itself. Perhaps that’s why the (silence) in Dragon Age: Inquisition has yet to feel awkward to me. The relative emptiness always serves its purpose.

While the thesis of the piece is certainly intriguing, I’m ultimately not persuaded. Dragon Age: Inquisition includes some fantastic spaces to explore (the environmental art is some of the best BioWare has produced since the Infinity Engine days, in my humble opinion), but all too often seems scared of boring the player. The Hissing Wastes’ area is very much an exception (and not an entirely successful one, in my opinion: the Western Approach does a much better job at offering a visually interesting desert area) because, for the most part, Dragon Age: Inquisition fits Hawkins’ description of The Crew to a T.