Dragon Age: Inquisition - sulky, uncommunicative companions investigated

I knew something was wrong! Multiple outlets are reporting that, if Inquisition seemed to have a lot less banter and charm than past Bioware games, that's a bug, not a change in tone.

That bit where Solas winds Sera up about her unexplored innate magical ability because she messed with his things? Mad bants - the kind some people are missing out on in Dragon Age: Inquisition because of a bug.

Some people have ploughed hours upon hours into the fantasy adventure only to be frustrated at the lack of chat between party members as they explore. There are pages of reports - on the EA Answers HQ support forum - of people only encountering a handful of occasions of banter in upwards of 10, 15, 20 hours of play, and longer.

BioWare has acknowledged the problem and is asking for 60+ hour game-saves, in which the player experienced the problem, for research purposes.

The causes aren't known but there's a workaround of sorts that has met some success.

Here's the partial workaround, courtesy of helpful user Maljester on the EA forums. Basically you mess with the audio settings until something resets. But it doesn't help in all areas -- Maljester reports that for him, Val Royeaux remains as bare of music and talk as ever.

Enchant_m3nt on the BSN Feedback thread had success with cycling/changing the audio settings to trigger banter and fix music/combat dialogue. I'd sadly had no luck with the mount/camp rest/teleport combo, and to my absolute astonishment - Houston, we have music and banter! (For those having trouble with the glitch, try the mount/dismount-rest, or trying the audio settings cycle to trigger banter/music.)

At first I ran around in the Hinterlands for awhile, trying out mount/rest. Dorian/Sera/Bull wouldn't talk, so I change from (Home Theatre - TV), get into combat, get combat noise, and 1min later, Dorian/Sera have a banter. Stumble into more combat with correct combat noise, 1 min later, get another banter between them. Run all the way to Redcliffe Village, Dorian makes an ambient comment (I have gotten ambient comments before, though), but then everyone stopped talking.

For those with the glitch, keep an ear out as you're playing for music and combat dialogue - if they're both working, there should be a higher probability you'll get banter to trigger, too.

More information.

I'm getting banter, but it's usually immediately following tough battles. It's kind of weird because, while the banter is voice-acted quite well, the topics of the conversations are all over the map, from plot points to just random bitching at each other. So… After a tough battle against 10 spiders and everyone's standing there splattered with blood and near-death, one companion will start talking about some random thing making the whole situation really bizarre and awkward.

It's like that scene from Truman Show when his wife, in the middle of an argument, starts trying to advertise products… "What the hell are you talking about??"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U4-KZSoe6g

A lot of the banter in previous DA games tended to occur near transition points or in camp. If the areas are much larger now, that would tend to make banter activation more unpredictable.

Originally Posted by ChaosTheory
I'm getting banter, but it's usually immediately following tough battles. It's kind of weird because, while the banter is voice-acted quite well, the topics of the conversations are all over the map, from plot points to just random bitching at each other. So… After a tough battle against 10 spiders and everyone's standing there splattered with blood and near-death, one companion will start talking about some random thing making the whole situation really bizarre and awkward.

It's like that scene from Truman Show when his wife, in the middle of an argument, starts trying to advertise products… "What the hell are you talking about??"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U4-KZSoe6g

That is AWESOME- thanks for the clip.
Well this is more fuel to the fire cult of "never buy anything for a year". And wait until it is done. Of course if this were early access. Everyone gets a pass! It is early access man!
So far one of the best games I have ever played, but even that cannot keep me from the Game ADD sale on Steam..
I went to buy The Last Remnant again, and yeah it is already in my backlog.
So if this voice things bugs anyone I am sure we can dig into the cornucopia of games our backlog and find a distraction
Speaking of Cornucopia, it is Thanksgiving in the states, and my Turkey Awaits…

Originally Posted by benetar
Well this is more fuel to the fire cult of "never buy anything for a year".

I'd be sorry if anything I posted here really discouraged someone from playing Inquisition. I never pay full price at launch, and I have no regrets about doing it in this case. Nitpicks aside, the game has "that feel" -- I'm having a blast.

You haven't discouraged me RSK I just think that I will be having an even bigger blast few months down the road. Patience is a virtue

Thanks for the info. Seems like I can enjoy my WL2 playthrough a little while longer.

It does wonder, doesn't it, how well polished this game was (or should it be were?) before release. People on the Bioware forums are also complaining that certain actions suddenly switches a female character's voice to a male voice and a male voice suddenly becomes a female voice.

I remember when game developers/publishers kept a full staff of paid beta testers… Nowadays it's much more profitable for them to let the beta testers pay them $60 for the privilege.

I think I'll let DA:I ripen on the shelf for a couple of months before I play it.

I've spent about 20 hours so far and have not found any bugs, (annoying) missing stuff or what so ever. Only had to find a workaround for locking up dialogues (with client freezes afterwards), but since that has been sorted I'm having a blast.

As RSK I never pay full price at release and I didn't do it this time, for my € 28 this is one very good gaming experience.

Waiting makes less bugs but some just aren't worth the effort to find & fix. Those live on forever.

Witcher 2 has been out a long time and had lots of updates. Yet I'm still hitting a few nasty bugs here and there. In one boss battle the boss had me just about dead before the game had completely switched from cut-scene-mode to playing-mode. In another fight that was supposed to end when the boss got to half health, I managed to shock the boss early on and bring him down to 0 health before he finished his chatting. The game didn't notice and the boss just kept fighting - there was nothing for it but to let him kill me and try again!

I have replayed Iorveth's path (and I'm in a process of playing Roche's one) and haven't encountered any bugs. Maybe yours were system rather than game based?

Originally Posted by zahratustra
I have replayed Iorveth's path (and I'm in a process of playing Roche's one) and haven't encountered any bugs. Maybe yours were system rather than game based?

They were game based, from what he said, based on scripting kicking in bad times. Those are the hardest to predict bugs (the player doing something in "the bad" moment). They are rare, requiring you to do a specific set of actions, that's why you (and most people) most probably didn't find them.

Sometimes a very old PC might exacerbate these issues, by taking too long to process a script and the player doing something in the meantime. For example, in AoD, when we create a character the game takes a bit of time to spawn it, and if we run a faster script that requires that character, the game might crash. We try to avoid these potential issues, but some might slip.

I have the 'gender' bug: playing a male character but the game is seeing me as female…leads to some odd dialogue (and of course, unexpected romantic propositions). So far I have had no major bugs aside from that one and some graphical glitches. I haven't played that much of the main quest though, mostly trying to finish off sub-quests - of which there are many (mostly fedex, but I hate incompleteness). Not sure if my companions are less chatty than normal?

Originally Posted by booboo
Not sure if my companions are less chatty than normal?

This is the thing with this bug. How would someone actually know if banter was missing from their game? One person's "I'm getting lots of banter" might be someone else's "This isn't the amount we normally get with DA".

I believe riding the horse also blocks out party members, so making the horse pretty much redundant for people that are primarily focused on the core game's historical appeal - all the amusing banter.

The bug is easy to spot when you have been walking around a map with the same 3 people for over 2 hours and have heard nothing from them, but you bring them to another map and gets none stop chatter in a 30 minutes spam that has nothing to do with quests or whatever.

Happened to me more often then not.

Originally Posted by aries100
People on the Bioware forums are also complaining that certain actions suddenly switches a female character's voice to a male voice and a male voice suddenly becomes a female voice.

Originally Posted by Vindicator
I think I'll let DA:I ripen on the shelf for a couple of months before I play it.

Luckily, we're not pathetic troll-o-rama Bioware forums and I think I've written on this very forum how to easily avoid that bug.

More on the matter:
http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26647
If you don't care for pics and read, turn on what I always want to be on by default and for whatever reason bloody developers (some) keep it off.
Subtitles!

And unlike (some) others' experience, there is more than enough of banter between partymembers, random townies and others in my game. If there wasn't, and if I didn't stop every time to hear it all, perhaps I should have finished the game ages ago.
Then again, I've avoided the gender bug so…