shelidonAugust 23, 2015Leave a Comment

Well, I wasn’t pleased with the previous DLC but overall it was palatable: it provided a whole new area with its own quests, its own local tribe, its own requisition, its own environment and its own lore. Hell, it even provided you with its own dragon. And, if you are a “lore” kind of player, it provided you with some insight on the previous Inquisitor’s story. Though it wasn’t mind-blowing, and certainly it was a tad too expensive for all that it provided, Jaws of Hakkon wasn’t bad.

I certainly can’t say the same about The Descent.

New and old characters: how to build up cliches and not to develop what you have

Jaws of Hakkon choose to use Scout Harding. A lot. Even if it didn’t make much sense her being involved so much this time while she has never been involved in your explorations before.
It was a gift to all those Harding lovers out there, but still it made sense. Alongside, it gave much more vividness to the scholar, a character who was just one stone’s throw away from being shallow and already seen. Alongside them, we had the previous Inquisitor himself, and his lover Telana: the echoes of their memories alone was enough to make their characters interesting. That is, of course, until you actually meet them. The hype is well built, even through those annoying “catch the floating memory” quests. In fact, their story and their involvement in the Blight, leading straight to the Exalted March and the current situation of elves, was much more interesting than Hakkon himself.

On the contrary, The Descent leaves all known characters on the surface (except of course for your choosen party, who will have little or no interaction anyway) and chooses to introduce two new characters who will accompany you: Shaper Valta, from Orzammar’s Shaperate and Liutenant Renn, from the infamous Legion of the Dead (voiced by no less than Metal Gear Solid’s own Snake, David Hayter). Valta is a scholar, and believes in some crazy theory about why we are there. Renn is a soldier who doesn’t believe in anything until he sees it. They have some unexplicit flirt thing going on. And that’s pretty much all there is to know about them. It will be very difficoult to love them, since you scarcely talk to them. Valta will be the one to introduce you to all the lore you will find during your cathabasis into the Deep Roads, so you will probably find her mostly annoying by the end of the game. And it’s a pity, since Jaws of Hakkon had found such a smart way of throwing lore at you without resulting in information dumping.

And what about your companions? Well, all you will get are some one-liner from your random partners. No significant interactons from Blackwall, even if you bring him down there before all that Grey Warden revelation. No significant interaction from Varric either, except some puns about Renn’s storytelling and some gloomy moral about the Deep Roads. And that certainly was disappointing, considering how clever Bioware has been in DA-2 DLCs Legacy (where you got significant addition in content if traveling with Anders and Varric).

Creatures and bosses: the all-new old darkspawn, cybernetic dwarves and other stuff

Being set in the Deep Roads, the very first enemies you will encounter are darkspawn. They are the kind of Darkspawn you already saw in DA-2 (all the characters and creatures are still going in that direction): those huge armoured genlocks, the jumping discipled, hurlock-alphas and Bethany-killing ogres. Killing one of those ogres will earn you your first achiement, Giant Slayer. Not that you have much choice. But more on that later.

Some other creatures you will meet are some sort of cybernetic dwarves, the Sha-Brytol (literally “Revered Defenders”) who drank lyrium, had their armours melted into their flesh, live under the Deep Roads and will basically beat you senseless. Fights can get very hard and this most definitely isn’t a post-eding DLC: your level will be so high that you will sweat through it and will get no Xp for it. While, again, Jaws of Hakkon is the place where you will finally be able to gain some Xp again after weeks of nothingness, The Descent most definitely isn’t. So consider yourself warned.

The most interesting creature in this DLC should be the Titan, but you don’t get to see one (more spoilers on that later). In spite of him, you have to take down his Guardian, a creature quite similar to that Ancient Rock Wraith you had to fight during DA-2 in order to get out of the Deep Roads, except that his IA and fight mode is a mix between Corypheus in Legacy and the Kayran in The Witcher 2. You basically have to avoid his stone tentacles and keep moving in order not to find yourself over one of his explosive glyphs when it blows up. And of course you have to be careful not to fall over the platform: you’ll be teleported on top with low health just to fall again, over and over.

New and old scenarios: The Deep Roads and what’s beneath them

As already hinted, The Descent is about entering the Deep Roads again. So the first part of your journey will take place in a scenario very similar to the “pimped” Deep Roads we saw in Dragon Age 2. And, just to be clear, I see absolutely nothing wrong with that: I liked the Deep Roads, I like what they did to the scenarios in DA-2 and I didn’t mind A Paragon of Her Kind so much. So that’s probably why I wasn’t disturbed at the news that this DLC would take place down there.

Still, the maps are a disappointing labyrinth, as if they took the Forbidden Oasis and put it underground. Therefore, don’t expect your map to be of much use. To quote Merlin, for every up there is a down, for every high there is a low: you’ll circle around like a madman (or madelf, or madwarf, depending on your own Inquisitor) before you get the hang of it.

Below the Deep Roads, the Uncharted Void awaits. We saw a glimpse of it during Origins, where Caradin kept his Anvil, and it wasn’t much different than your average Deep Road. Here it’s different, and for a very good reason since it turns out we are actully inside a Titan’s belly. And the scenario is awesome, though there’s so much humidity that we probably are in the Titan’s lower intestine (and, now that I think of it, that would make the Sha-Brytols his escherichia coli. One is only left to wonder what is his heart doing all the way down there.

Puzzles: the lyrium-addled mind strikes again

If the Temple of Mythal in the main game was a delight for all those puzzle-lovers out there, don’t expect anything like that in The Descent. All you get is Atari in its purest form, and one great line from the Inquisitor after solving the puzzle and unlocking a chest of equipment.

“Only a lyrium-addled mind would hide secrets behind such madness”

Words of wisdom.

Story and interaction with the main plot

The Inquisitor is called to investigate strange earthquakes, for no other reason aside from apparently being a friend of Orzammar. So you fight your way down, you fight your boss and then you go back up. The DLC starts as a side mission and ends up as one: no main interation is shown between those “earthquakes” and the Breach aside from some vague line on behalf of Valta, who says that apparently the Titan causing earthquakes was “disturbed by the Breach but is calm now”. No Corypheus subplot. No additional army gained for your final fight to save the world. No Skyhold content. The DLC actually encourages you not to go back to Skyhold: it provides you with your camp, your local wartable with local operations, your merchant, your weapon-making and weapon-enhancing machinery. You won’t even get to talk about it with Dagna, when you get back to Skyhold.

Achievements

There’s four of them: 3 of them are strictly related to the story, while the fourth one is optional and is gained through completing one operation on a special version of the War Table that gets installed in your main camp as soon as you get down to the Deep Roads. As in the main game, I have the feeling these achievements totally lack of imagination. You don’t get achievements for doing crazy stuff, the only challenge they present is boredome (see the infamous “Botanist” achiement that I still don’t have). They merely mark your progression through the story and rarely they record a specific choice you made (“On Burning Wings”). What happened to jewels like “Deep Roads Safari” or “That Thing Has Legs”? Why can’t we have fun achievements anymore? Achievements that are both fun to read and to play, possibly? Pretty please?

As a matter of fact, the “pretty please” applies to everything. This is certainly the kind of DLC that doesn’t make sense in Inquisition, where everything should be built upon on a sense of urgency, of doom upon the world. Hawke could have a Deep Roads Safari, if she wanted. The Inquisitor certainly shouldn’t. Not while there’s Corypheus to fight. And certainly not while there’s still a Dread Wolf to hunt. And one is left to wonder if we are ever going to get some post-ending content after all.