Dragon Age: Inquisition – Jaws of Hakkon DLC Interview, Reviews

Yesterday’s release of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s first DLC, Jaws of Hakkon, came as a bit of a surprise given that the DLC had just been announced the day before, but there are already some press impressions available online that should help us get an idea of the scope and depth of this DLC.

Eurogamer, scoreless, is mostly positive on it.

It’s impressive to see how well the new area fits into the main game, going beyond the expected smattering of new weapons, armour and materials by looping new missions into old quest chains, adding fresh War Table operations and providing new customisation options for Skyhold. There’s also a major new ability for your Inquisitor, a Rift-powered shield bubble that blocks all incoming projectiles and which can itself be upgraded further.

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Returning to Skyhold after playing the DLC I feel like it was an adventure worth taking, if not one that has particularly changed my Dragon Age experience in any meaningful way. And I think that this is perhaps the biggest problem – and maybe what fans saying this is simply “more of the same” might really mean. Beyond the moaning about collectibles, there is a desire to see Inquisition’s world and story moved on in a memorable way. It’s difficult to do that with any content that could still be played and set pre-finale (and difficult to talk about why that is until you’ve played it), but here’s hoping that whatever DLC BioWare is working on next serves up a more meaningful mouthful of story.

GameInformer doesn’t go for a full review (at least for now), but mostly echoes Eurogamer’s impressions.

Jaws of Hakkon is a decent piece of content, but it is also completely nonessential. For $15, it doesn’t add much to the gameplay, deepen your connection with the world, or develop the characters. Yes, Frostback Basin zone is cool, but it also feels familiar. (More of the same) isn’t necessarily bad, but one of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s greatest strengths at launch was its staggering amount of content; another zone just feels like a drop in the bucket, and a missed opportunity to do something more interesting with the fantastic cast and the concept of the Inquisition’s growing influence.

Finally, you might also want to read this PC Gamer’s interview with BioWare producer Chris Pickford, who explains BioWare’s design goals with this piece of downloadable content:

Given that you started this project before the game was released, how much were you able to respond to feedback in this DLC and how much of it has to go into whatever comes next?

That’s a fair question. In actual fact, the game was released in November and one of the things we heard loud and clear from the fans was that they really enjoyed the depth of the story that’s what they were paying for. They wanted to see more lore, more interesting characters, more people to interact with. That’s one of the focuses for this DLC was to push how that kind of content can exist in a large space. Something that is interesting to maneuvre over and that, when you get to the key plot points, has the high-end parts of Dragon Age: Inquisition as well.

What you’ll find here is that the Avvar the barbarian characters we’ve gone deep on them. You’re gonna see them doing things as well as you’re told about them doing things. You’ll see characters that are interacting a lot more with the world and the environment in response to your presence. Instead of putting things in a cutscene, we want to put you as the player character into the events that are happening.

It’s something that we’ve wanted to do a lot more in the past, but for this DLC it was something that we’ve been able to build from the ground up.