Bioware's Friendship System: Magic or Math?

july 21 2023

Recently, I started replaying the Mass Effect trilogy. I replay the Dragon Age series almost every year, but Mass Effect never really captivated me the way Dragon Age did. I liked Mass Effect, sure, but I had a certain amount of nostalgia for the Dragon Age games, which were some of the first games I seriously got into. Mass Effect was just a little too old for me, a year or so before my time. But ever since buying the Mass Effect legendary edition, I've gone back to the games more and more, mostly because of the sheer convenience. I had to learn how to mod the legendary edition, first— when I first played Mass Effect, I was a dumb fifteen year old who played mostly on Xbox and thought modding games was hard and scary. Now I'm an adult, and I want unlimited sprint and gay romances with Tali and Jack, and I'll get them, damnit! Many thanks and my unlimited gratitude to the modders who make all of that possible.

As I was playing the game, having an argument with Tali about the way the quarians treated the geth, I started to get a strange feeling. I couldn't put my finger on it in the moment, but later, it clicked— ME1 had no relationship point system, like the Dragon Age games I replay more often. I was having a discussion with Tali, a discussion in which she disagreed with me, but I could argue with her, try to change her opinion, and not worry that the game would hit me with the dreaded "Tali Greatly Disapproves." Mass Effect is kind of notoriously confusing for not having visual markers for which dialogue options are flirty and which are platonic (a problem Dragon Age: Origins shares... I wasn't able to romance Leliana because I didn't compliment her shoes?), and unlike the Dragon Age games it has no strict friendship approval points system.

In Dragon Age: Inquisition, if you argue with a character or make a major plot decision they don't agree with, a little text pops up on your screen: "X character disapproves." In DA:I, you have to kind of guess what your overall friendship "score" is, based on how the character greets you, but in DA:2 and DA:O, you can always see your place on the friendship "slider," and actions that make the character approve or disapprove will always tell you by how much. For example, if you do something Morrigan really likes (or give her a special gift, if you're a lazy cheater like me), it'll show "Morrigan approves (+15)." Once your friendship score is high enough, you can experience a special cutscene, and with some characters (depending on your species and gender) initiate a romance.

The Mass Effect games don't have this. Instead, pursuing romances with squadmates mostly comes down to consistently choosing one or two overly friendly dialogue choices, with a "lock-in" option happening at a certain line. The game doesn't tell you when you've hit this point of no return— it just happens. And when it does, that's it. If you've accidentally romanced this character and are actually purposefully flirting with another character, eventually you will hit that character's lock-in point, and there will be a verbal confrontation where you have to choose between the two characters. Whichever romance route you don't choose you will be locked out of for the rest of the game.

Friendships are even more vague. Instead of having a dedicated friendship "slider," where doing things the character agrees with or saying nice things to them is recorded in their memory and makes them gradually act nicer to you (or vice versa, with a low approval rating causing them to ditch your character entirely), friendships mostly go on a line-by-line basis. If you say something they like, they will say something friendly. If you say something they don't like, they'll verbalize their displeasure. If you do something really bad, they might leave your squad, but mostly they'll just share their opinions with you and react to things you say and do.

Ironically, this lack of a codified friendship system makes the Mass Effect characters feel more like real people, and more like real life friends. I love the Dragon Age characters, but it can be very easy to get sucked into "gameifying" their friendships. Instead of just making gameplay decisions because of my own opinions or because I'm roleplaying a character's opinions, I get sucked into making decisions that will maximize the amount of friendship points I can get from all my favorite characters. This kind of strategizing is made worse by the fact that in the later Dragon Age games, dialogue choices can be incredibly simplistic, and conversations even more so. If a character says something you don't agree with? The only two options are to lie and agree with them, or call them a stupid piece of shit and have them hate you forever. There's no option to nicely disagree with them or try (and succeed) to change their mind.

Worse, there is no disincentive to simply lie to every character in order to maximize the points you receive. Characters don't track lies. If you tell Vivienne in one conversation that you love the Circles and tell Solas in another that you hate them, neither character calls you out on lying and there is no punishment for doing so. The only time where you're forced to not be a people pleaser is when you make polarizing decisions at the ends of big quests, where inevitably some of the cast will disagree with your choice. This led to me playing the game like a chess match, stockpiling approval points via conversations and solo missions before big quests, so that I could "afford" to take the approval hit when I made a non-negotiable decision.

There's a strange sense of victory that comes when you end the game as friends with someone the game clearly does not want you to be friends with. The writing of Vivienne in particular is especially aggravating. They load all the unpopular opinions on a "privileged" Black woman character and afford you no opportunities to try to change her mind or even agree to disagree. The writing and the fandom are both pretty cruel to her. While most personal companion quests are meant to make you more sympathetic to the character and lend them more depth and complexity to their characters, Vivienne's is all about trying to trick you into thinking she's an evil witch and then going, "Aha! I got you! She's actually a good person! Aren't you shocked?" Like... no, I wasn't? I like Vivienne and don't think she's a bad person?

Playing the game on nightmare difficulty? If you want a real challenge, try playing the game as an Elf mage and pursuing a friendship with Vivienne!

It all leads to a sense of alienation and distance from the character. Real friendships aren't like this! Real friendships are more like the ones in Mass Effect, where there isn't always a glaring "right answer" to a conversation and where friends can disagree on topics and still be friends. Ironically, the simpler friendship system in Mass Effect leads to deeper and more complex friendships. Perhaps it can be argued that these more complex relationships aren't purposeful or reflected in the "text," but they certainly live in the brain of the player. Instead of a system where your only two options are hate or love, friendship or rivalry, approval or disapproval, the lack of any real system at all leads to more complex and less easily definable relationships.

But at the end of the day, systems like BioWare's friendship slider work. They captivate players by turning relationships into a numbers game, and that can be satisfying and rewarding. It is a video game, after all— people want to play the game. Can you capture all the points? BioWare likes these systems, and will keep implementing them, because of their massive success. And purely from a development standpoint, it's probably simpler to turn relationships into a series of yes/no, hate/love, approve/disapprove equations. One thing everyone loves about BioWare is their characters, so clearly this simplicity doesn't ruin the experience for the vast majority of players. But I can't help but wonder what I would think of the characters in Dragon Age: Inquisition if I wasn't tied down to having to play them like a game of chess, unable to simply immerse myself in the game and the relationships it's trying to sell me.