You know whatDragon Age: The VeilguardandLike a Dragon: Infinite Wealthhave in common? They both have the word dragon in their names. They’re both games following theseries: subtitle naming convention. Also, most importantly, the closer you get to your companions, the more skilled they become. Of course, this mechanic wasn’t invented by these games, but they’re the two most recent examples I have, and the dragon thing was too good to pass up.
Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth Wants You To Make Friends
In Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the newest instalment in one of my favourite game series ever, racking up Bond Points with your friends makes them fight better in combat. Why? I don’t know, but it’s fun, and it’sveryeffective at incentivising you to get to know these characters better. At higher Bond Levels, party members learn how to do follow-up attacks in fights, perform Tag Team attacks, can equip more Jobs, and have more Skill Inheritance slots for customising builds.
How do you get Bond Points? By hanging out. It’s really that simple. While wandering Honolulu City andfighting roving groups of bizarrely dressed people, you’ll occasionally be able to trigger Party Chats with your friends, who will refer to places and things around you while talking about themselves, their preferences, or their hobbies. Walk And Talks, marked with pink icons on the map, are character specific and associated with a Bond Bingo square. Each square you fill after a conversation gives you points, and getting a bingo on that sheet gives you a massive boost to their bond.
Combo Mealsin restaurants also trigger group conversations and reward you with Bond Points, if you pick the right foods and have the right characters in your party. Even if you mess that up, you get points just for eating. Minigames like Karaoke and darts boost Bond Points, as does giving your pals gifts. Seriously, it’s mostly hanging out and talking, and it’s great. Every character feels distinct and hilarious in different ways, and it’s worth getting to know them, even without the points acting as an incentive.
Of course, this mechanic isn’t new to the series. A similar system was implemented in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, the first game to feature the series’ new main protagonist Kasuga Ichiban.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard Is Similar, Sans Bingo Card
Okay, I doubt that Dragon Age: The Veilguard will let you make your party members stronger by stopping into a fast food restaurant and scarfing down a ridiculously big cheeseburger. But it seems that, just like Infinite Wealth and its confusingly named predecessor, The Veilguard will incentivise you to make friends with your companionsby including a ‘Relationship Level’ mechanic. As your relationships with them deepen, they’ll receive skill points you can use to unlock new abilities for that companion. This can be achieved through helping them work through their issues, solving their problems, or completing their personal quests.
This is a little bit of a callback toDragon Age: Origins, which I’ve been playing for the first time – companions gained buffs to certain attributes if their approval of you reached specific levels. There’s a similar aspect in Dragon Age 2, where maxing out friendship or rival meters with your companions would give you unique abilities.
Are Relationship Levels A Good Thing For Dragon Age: The Veilguard?
It’s not clear if this is going to be the only way to level up your companions. If thatisthe case, this mechanic actually concerns me a little. Like a lot of players, I’m prone to putting only
characters I think are cool and interesting in my party, which means I’d be getting close to a very specific set of characters I already like.
As the game goes on and they get more powerful, I’ll be further incentivised to keep them in my party instead of rotating them out for other characters, and there are only two slots with seven characters vying for them. Sure, I could make a conscious effort to rotate them out, and I do make it a point to complete personal quests for all my companions, but it adds a little unnecessary friction.
Infinite Wealth manages to work around this by introducing new characters slowly, and by keeping some of them locked in separate locations, to separate protagonists, or till the end of the game. New companions are brought in near the start, long before any familiar faces can be made long-term party members, giving players time to start caring about them before they’re given the option to go back to companions that are familiar and comfortable. If The Veilguard manages to pace the addition of companions well, and give the player enough incentive to care about all of them, it could reduce some of this fiction.
If there are other ways to make companions stronger, this becomes a non-issue, and is just more of an incentive to really sink into The Veilguard’s character writing and story. I like to believe that BioWare has already recognised the potential issues this mechanic could introduce and tried to mitigate them, but we’ll only know when the game is actually launched. At best, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has compelling reasons to spend time with all its many companions – at worst, I hang out with only two characters the whole game, and have to replay it multiple times to see what happens with all the people I left out the first time.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
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Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the long-awaited fourth game in the fantasy RPG series from BioWare formerly known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. A direct sequel to Inquisition, it focuses on red lyrium and Solas, the aforementioned Dread Wolf.
