A hundred hours into the game, it is still possible to get lost while walking around your own seat of government – confusing the door to your quarters with the one to the war room, for example, or the stair to the great hall balcony with the one to your aviary. The perks of lording it over Skyhold aren’t a huge departure from commanding the Normandy in the Mass Effect series, but Inquisition drags out the distances and piles on the pomp. If you want to acquire new armour before setting out on a mission, you’ll need to dismiss your advisors and slog back down the hall to the undercroft, then call another meeting at your war table. There is, perhaps, an object lesson here about the narcissism of tyranny, about being engulfed by the trappings of megalomania.

A blank slate, a world of possibilities 

Next to the imposing scale and liveliness of this space, with its laden banquet tables and multitude of cobwebbed, candle-lit nooks and crannies, the Inquisitor her or himself is quite the non-entity. This is often true of BioWare’s ‘blank tablet’ protagonists, each stretched thin by the demands of morality gauges and multiple-choice dialogue systems, and in this case, there’s a little more method to the blandness. Your character is appointed Inquisitor, an ancient role invoked during times of crisis, following a cataclysm which at once helpfully kills off the realm’s previous spiritual head, wipes your memory and endows you with a unique mark that can be used to seal portals to the Fade, Dragon Age’s parallel magical dimension. As far as Chosen One CVs go they don’t come much more by the numbers, but Inquisition turns this anodyne framework into a strength by, in essence, making you the mirror for an entire society.

It’s ‘story and character focused’ and contains ‘live’ elements

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Rulers exist to an extent in the eye of the beholder, and in Dragon Age’s complex multiracial universe, the Inquisitor is an inspiration to some and a blight to others – a tyrant, a bulwark, a money-making opportunity, a heretic, a sex object and countless things besides. The thrill of exploring this world, with its oddly Francophone courts, oppressed mage circles, paranoid knightly orders and brutalised elven enclaves, is in drawing out its many different interpretations of who you are. Or at least, should be.

The Mass Effect series conjures up a similar play of your preconceptions, but Inquisition’s universe has a rather more involved history, its conversations arising from a thick mulch of ballads, scripture, family trees, race mythologies and clashing accounts of certain famous events, including those of previous games. All this endows even minor cosmetic choices, such as deciding which nation’s drapes to hang in the throne room, with unexpected dramatic force, and stops you from losing interest as you tour environments that occasionally threaten to devolve into mountains of busywork.

Similar things can be said of Inquisition’s main questline, which sees you racing to stop a demon warlord re-entering the Fade and so bringing about the end of the world. As with much of BioWare’s output, this banal tale’s redeeming virtue is that it creates a charged atmosphere in which smaller and more evocative incidents can play out – companion character arcs, the resolution of long-held grievances between factions such as mages and templars, the discovery of lost loved ones and the revelation of forgotten disasters.

Adventure time!

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It also benefits from the maturation of BioWare’s dialogue writing, which is less reliant here on intrusive clarificatory measures like emoticons or colour-coding. Inquisition represents a developer that has grown confident enough in the delicacy of its phrasing (though possibly not its often hilarious character animations) to do without such crutches – or, at least, to ambiguate them. Companions do register their opinions as ‘approval’ or ‘disapproval’ captions, but there are no loyalty bars to fall back on, so you must work out where precisely you stand from the wording alone. The old dialogue wheel returns, with kindly, neutral or careless and aggressive responses arranged from top to bottom, but for every conversation that pans out along one of those familiar axes, there’s a chat that escapes easy categorisation.

Your companions themselves are among BioWare’s most intelligent, and difficult, creations – perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay the writing team is that some of them get away with being actively unlikeable. The warrior cleric Cassandra is one of the easiest to read, all flinty righteousness and obstinacy in the face of death and small talk alike, a persona that supports a combat style built around tanking and rallying allies, and which predictably has its softer side. Derbyshire-accented Sera comes across as the usual oddball, mildly sociopathic, raunchy elven rogue, but there is a peculiar agitation at the core of the character, a barely restrained hatred of all hint of status or political manoeuvring. She’s often among the most carefree companions, but as a member of the ruling caste, you’re never quite sure of her feelings.

People power 

Likewise Solas, an alternately pleasant and forbidding scholar who responds well to an inquiring mind, and who slowly completes a mural of your feats at Skyhold as the adventure unfolds. Perhaps the strangest of all is Cole, a troubled, gifted soul who is acutely conscious of traumas others keep hidden yet often at a loss to make sense of what they do or say. Each personality also sheds light on the others: changing up party in the field is, strictly speaking, unnecessary, as characters gain XP when not in use, but worth doing for the sake of the jokes, philosophical discussions and slanging matches you’ll overhear when odd bedfellows are thrown together.

If these characters mesmerise in conversation, they don’t always chime in other respects. Inquisition offers a broad range of class skill trees, but characters slop together a little dissatisfyingly. You will have at least two rogues, three mages and three melee damage-dealers or tanks to choose from, and it can be a headache to distinguish their contributions, at least until you unlock each companion’s unique skill tree. The combat itself continues the theme, with a camera that doesn’t pull out far enough for easy party management, and a cursor that hitches annoyingly on the scenery. The pathfinding is also patchy, especially when moving around larger opponents, though this is made up for by the ability to freeze time in order to lay down waypoints, and select which abilities your allies should favour or avoid in advance.

While light on transformative mechanics, Inquisition’s lavish spellbook includes some feisty terrain control options. Delve into the Reaver skilltree and you can generate a ring of pain around your character, inflaming the ire of your enemies while boosting the damage you do to them. Opt for storm magic and you can summon a thundercloud which paralyses any foe that leaves its area of effect.

BioWare has a reputation for engaging with discussions about representation, race, gender and sexual orientation in its games, and Inquisition is an especially searching example. There is the opportunity to ask a character about his gender identity, a conversation that is all the more powerful for the game’s allowing you to say things that are truly crass. There is a quest that explores the horrible subject of homosexual ‘conversion therapy’, disguised as a more plodding RPG conceit about reuniting estranged family members. These moments of insight are, alas, matched with moments of great clumsiness: the treatment of elves as a catch-all motif for the oppressed and stateless, for instance, and the resurgence of Semitic stereotypes in the characterisation of dwarves as artisans and merchants.

The question, right now, is when that journey will continue. The commercial failure of Mass Effect: Andromeda, a game that is broadly Inquisition in space with half the charm, appears to have wrought a change of priorities at BioWare and EA. A fourth Dragon Age is underway, but the departure of veteran writer David Gaider and Inquisition’s creative director Mike Laidlaw suggests that EA is taking the series and Mass Effect back to formula. 

Much of the blame for these reversals can be pinned on Andromeda’s muddled writing, tepid world and astonishing quantity of bugs, but the larger problem may simply be that projects as titanic and dense as this are too fiddly to engineer for too modest a return. That said, senior BioWare staff have at least recently stated that the next Dragon Age, whatever shape it takes, will be “story and character focused”, previously referenced “live” elements referring to continued story additions after the main campaign,

The elephant in the room is BioWare’s new IP Anthem, an online service shooter that plainly covets the mantle of Bungie’s Destiny. Inquisition launched with an online PvE mode, albeit a forgettable one, and you could argue that a world as storied as this would shine with a social space, where fans of the lore could untangle backstory threads together. 

This hardly seems essential, however, when you consider how much the game achieves with age-old concepts, and how much remains to be done in terms of both the writing and the combat. If this does prove to be among the last of BioWare’s traditional single-player epics, it represents a castle left unfinished.

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But that kind of enthrallment can only be possible when the game and the player both commit to the suspension of disbelief. You need to invest yourself into the experience via your only form of input – dialogue choices – picking the selections that match your gut instinct (or the person you wish you were). And your enjoyment is derived from the game’s output: believable responses, ideally in audible form. Given that most games in the genre are made in Japan, it’s unlikely that an English-speaking fan would be able to understand their virtual sweetheart without subtitles, but HuniePop is a rarity that defies dating sim convention. Born from Kickstarter, developed by a small western studio, and driven by match-3 puzzle gameplay, it also just so happens to feature dialogue fully voiced in English.

Granted, this is a game that opens with a magical love fairy named Kyu pledging to help you amp up your swagger (be you a guy or a girl). You can date up to 12 different women simultaneously (including hidden companions like an alien and a catgirl), with no consequences or hurt feelings for sleeping around. The dialogue can be comically crass, in line with the game’s self-described “abrasive western writing style”. HuniePop is not overly concerned with realism, if the anime visuals weren’t an instant giveaway. Yet it’s important that each line be delivered with just the right amount of conversational candor, because the voicework is the fuel for the player’s engine of suspended disbelief. For the voice actors depicting HuniePop’s virtual girlfriends, the role is taken as seriously as any other.

“I think one of the challenges when you’re recording this type of stuff is not making it sound cheesy or over-the-top,” says Kira Buckland, who plays HuniePop’s amicable flight attendant Lola Rembrite. In a genre meant to replicate the art of conversation, exaggerated voicework and cartoonish enunciations can tarnish the entire experience. “With these kinds of games, it’s really easy to be like [switching to a sultry voice] ‘Oooh, you got me something? Oh, how sweet!’ or whatever,” says Buckland. “But, y’know, people don’t really talk like that. [Even if] this is creating an experience where the player can be removed from reality, and have all these beautiful women lining up to go on dates, you still want the experience to feel real or grounded in some sense.”

The tricky part is making those responses resonate with a wildly diverse playerbase; as with any successful gameplay mechanic, they need to feel ‘just right’ no matter who’s at the controls. “The player can be anybody,” says Buckland. “I think the stereotype of people who play dating sims is the lonely otaku in his parent’s basement, who’s like [in a nerdy voice] ‘I need a 2D waifu ’cause I can’t get a real girl!’ But there are people who just play because they like the characters, or story. Women play them too; I have a friend who’s a lesbian who did a playthrough of it. I feel a good amount of the HuniePop fans I’ve met are female.”

In the case of HuniePop, getting your freak on with these women is the ultimate goal. And though there’s no actual intercourse depicted during the still-image sex scenes, you’d be amazed at how effectively the audio – orgasmic moans, breathy sighs, and elated squeals – can carry the eroticism, no excessively explicit visuals needed. Sure, it’s a little awkward for the voice actors, but not inescapably so. “After that first time, it turns into ‘this doesn’t faze me anymore’,” says Amber Lee Connors, who voices HuniePop’s soft-spoken, spiritual yoga instructor Beli Lapran. “I honestly worry more about my deliveries than being made uncomfortable by whatever dialogue or sounds that are needed. Besides, you’d be surprised by how sexual normal sounds like gasps can come off without a visual! You become desensitized pretty quickly.”

Keeping the really naughty stuff relegated to noises also helps put some voice actors at ease – and if you’re comfortable, you’re bound to give a better performance. “I wouldn’t do anything with animated or explicit sexual content,” says Brittany Lauda, who does the voice of Audrey Belrose, a bratty party girl who’s a fan favorite thanks in part to a particular scene (opens in new tab). “I try not to do too much NSFW stuff, so I probably would’ve had an adverse reaction if there were more detailed, sexual situations,” says Lauda. “Like, I wouldn’t voice a character in a hentai [sexually explicit anime] even though I’ve been given the chance. It just isn’t me. I don’t mind voicing potty-mouths though, it’s all just acting. I just have a comfort issue with overly sexual content.”

For all the fantasy fulfillment in video games, intimacy is still one of the hardest things to fake. Every player experiences human interaction to some degree, enough to know whether onscreen lovers have convincing chemistry, or if their relationship feels forced. Established characters like The Witcher’s Geralt or your Inquisitor in Dragon Age serve as stand-ins during romance scenes; you’re selecting their dialogue and responses, but you still act as an outside observer looking in on a budding romance. But dating sims typically take place from the first-person perspective, and your in-game love interest is addressing you directly. Ultimately, the success of any dating sim hinges on emotional connections that feel real, even if it’s only for a moment. Convincing voicework can be the key to making that illusion of intimacy possible.

Thanks again to the voice actors! You can find them online here:
Kira Buckland: Website (opens in new tab) / Facebook (opens in new tab) / Twitter (opens in new tab)
Amber Lee Connors: Website (opens in new tab) / Facebook (opens in new tab) / Twitter (opens in new tab)
Brittany Lauda: Website (opens in new tab) / Facebook (opens in new tab) / Twitter (opens in new tab)

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