THE PLOT:
The town of Haven, the site of Andraste's ashes, is chosen by the Divine Justinia for a conclave: specifically, peace talks between the Templars and the rebel mages. It is a last chance for both sides to put down their weapons and step back from the brink of total war.
A last chance that ends with a massive explosion, one that literally rends the sky and creates a hole in the Veil separating the world of Thedas from the world of demons known as "The Fade." A single survivor emerges from this Breach - and is promptly arrested for the act that created it, with the magic mark on the suspect's hand seemingly confirming guilt.
However, things are not so simple. The mark allows the prisoner to seal the spreading rips in the veil, which leads to people calling the prisoner "The Herald of Andraste." Coupled with the suspect's increasingly convincing protests of innocence, Seeker Cassandra to not only free this person, but to announce a new Inquisition, directed at sealing the spreading rifts in the sky while finding out exactly what happened to create this crisis.
It won't be an easy task. Neither the mages, nor the Templars, nor the Chantry, are willing to acknowledge the Inquisition. It will be up to the new Inquisitor - still believed by many to have caused the disaster in the first place - to negotiate alliances and build up influence. And when an ancient enemy shows its hand, it becomes clear that even that may not be enough...
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| The Inquisitor: Various backgrounds are available. Which one you choose makes annoyingly little difference. |
CHARACTERS:
Likely in response to complaints that players were "stuck" with one of three default personalities for Dragon Age II's Hawke, Bioware course corrected by giving the Inquisitor... basically no personality at all. Your Inquisitor is allowed to make quips here or there, but is never able to be as snarky as "humorous" Hawke. Nor as aggressive. Nor as angry. To make sure players are able to "read themselves" into the lead, Bioware has presented a Rorschach character: So emotionally neutral that you can see anything you want in the resulting ink blot. There are a few exceptions to this: an Orlesian ball, for instance, or an emotional confrontation in the final post-game DLC. For the most part, however, this is Bioware's blandest protagonist. Yes, I'm including Anthem in that.
Fortunately, the ensemble of party members and strategists helps to make up for that. Returning characters include: Dragon Age: Origins' Leliana, Morrigan, and Cullen, with potential appearances by either Alistair or Loghain; and Dragon Age II's Varric and Cassandra, with a substantial mid-game appearance by Hawke. All of them still work as well as in previous games, with Varric's responses to various situations remaining a highlight.
New characters are also good. Solas, an elven apostate, has knowledge of The Fade that makes him a valuable ally, though it's clear he hides secrets; Iron Bull, a Qunari mercenary, is the opposite of previous Qunari seen in the series, boasting a boisterous sense of humor and a healthy libido even as he not-so-secretly spies for the Qun; Tevinter mage Dorian joins out of worries for his mentor, whose personality has undergone a complete change; ambitious mage Vivienne wants to see a return to the Circles, and hopes to win power and influence through the current situation; and elven rogue Sera wants to ally with the Inquisition to turn the tables on all the nobles who have abused their power at the expense of the powerless. Each character has a strong personality, most of them have aspects of themselves they are hiding, and different choices can seal them as either fast friends or resentful rivals.
All of which - yes - leaves you stuck role playing as the least interesting person in the game!
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| Dragon battles provide a nice challenge, at least for a while. |
GAMEPLAY:
Combat is overall more like that of Dragon Age II than Dragon Age: Origins, but it has been refined and improved. Bioware wisely took on board criticisms of the mindless mobs from the previous game. Here, higher-level enemies will behave with reasonable intelligence during combat, and unseen reinforcements are largely restricted to dragon battles. Ally AI is also improved, making your companions less likely to simply hurl themselves to their own deaths during more difficult encounters.
Tactical elements remain, with the ability to pause combat to issue individual orders, then let those orders play out before pausing again to issue a new set of instructions. This can make challenging combats easier to survive, and is likely essential for higher difficulty settings. Playing on "Normal," I only used this feature when the party was near death; it just stretched out encounters too much to be enjoyable for regular usage.
Outside of combat, the game provides enormous environments for your characters to explore. This inludes your base of operations for the bulk of the game - a large fortress named Skyhold. There's the usual Bioware dialogue wheel, in which you make choices, struggle vainly to impose some form of personality onto your Inquisitor, and forge or wreck your relationships with companions.
There is also a War Table, in which you commit Inquisition forces to various operations. You can try to deal with each problem through force, diplomacy, or espionage. Initially, all will provided at least adequate outcomes; later, there will be missions in which only one of these will provide an optimal end.
Finally, the game allows you to sit in judgment on prisoners, in moments similar to the too-brief bit in Awakening when your Warden Commander actually acted as Arl. These judgments have minimal impact on the overall story (you gain or lose approval with various companions; you gain an extra agent or two, and maybe a War Table mission), but I still quite enjoyed these additions, particularly some of the humorous outcomes for certain choices.
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| Sealing a breach. You'll be doing a lot of this. |
THOUGHTS:
Dragon Age: Inquisition currently stands as the last completely successful release from Bioware. Despite a fraught production process, the game released to overwhelmingly positive reviews and strong sales, and ended up winning more than 100 Game of the Year awards for 2014. After the backlash to Dragon Age II, this title was considered to have righted the ship.
Even though it's still a relatively recent game, the intervening years have made its faults all too apparent in retrospect. Dragon Age: Inquisition is a good game, with a handful of breathtaking moments... but it's also just as flawed, in its way, as Dragon Age II was, and you can visibly see the seeds planted for the more disappointing Bioware titles that followed.
THE GOOD
Inquisition's prologue ranks among the best video game openings I've seen. Its opening hour combines: a series of dialogue options, which will earn the approval or disapproval of your party members; combat; and, when you reach the first Fade Rift, a quick tutorial in closing it. Not only does this sequence do an excellent job of grabbing attention up-front; it seamlessly offers up needed backstory, establishes the basic stakes, and introduces the major gameplay mechanics you'll be using over the 120+ hours that will follow.
While the bulk of the game follows variations of the prologue's pattern - fight enemies, find and close Fade Rifts, and choose from various dialogue options - there are chapters that provide variety. An extended sequence in the Fade focuses on the people you bring with you, offering up hints about their individual agendas. A mission in the Orlesian court sees you mingling with courtiers, gaining court approval for clever ripostes, all the while searching for information about an assassination attempt... an attempt that will succeed if you manage to lose enough approval to get kicked out of the ball.
Then there are the dragon battles. Ten high dragons are scattered across Thedas in the main game (the first DLC expansion adds one more), and these encounters are initially breathtaking. When you meet your first dragon, even if you are at a high enough level to successfully battle it, you will find it a tough experience that requires full use of the game's tactical options. As you whittle its health down, it will call for reinforcements in the form of comparatively weak baby dragons - and if you try to ignore these dragonlings, they will quickly overwhelm you through sheer numbers.
Like much of the rest, the dragon battles become routine over the course of the game. By the late game, you'll be over-leveled and over-geared, and will fell even the highest-level dragons without even having to open the tactical menu. Still, that very first dragon remains a gaming experience you'll be likely to remember.
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| Corypheus: The main bad guy, and among the least interersting villains in the series. |
THE BAD:
Dragon Age: Inquisition offers up a large number of vast and varied environments. This should be a good thing, except for one problem: too many of these are devoid of anything other than fetch quests, collectibles, and generic enemies. If you're just playing the main plot, there are entire regions you can safely skip. The Hissing Wastes adds nothing at all to the story; the Exalted Plains and Emprise du Lion are only relevant for a few individual quests. It's not that there's nothing of interest in these regions; it's just that if you decided to bypass them, the story would end up feeling every bit as complete.
Before the game's release, Bioware proudly trumpeted that the first main area of the game is larger than all of Dragon Age II. This is true. The first of the game's regions, The Hinterlands, is one of the largest areas of the game. I would argue that this is a misstep. When you first reach the Hinterlands, the game wants you to clear a few side quests to level up a bit, then travel back to Inquisition headquarters to get on with the plot. The game does a poor job of making this clear, however. The first time I played, back in 2014, I ended up going online to find out when (and how) to leave the Hinterlands. A quick Google search reveals that I was far from alone in my confusion, and I suspect many players became frustrated with the area and just gave up on the game.
Finally, there is the villain. Corypheus isn't quite the worst of the series' villains, because at least he isn't Knight Commander Meredith. But the portrayal of Corypheus repeats all of the same mistakes. His concept and backstory are interesting. He has been awakened into a world so unlike the society of his natural lifetime that to him, everything must seem chaotic and mad. There should be a sense that in his mind, his goal is just, that he wants a return to order - which would also explain why so many are eager to follow him.
Instead, he's a raspy-voiced megalomaniac who wants to make himself a god. An Eeeviill god, of course. It's just as dull as it sounds. Oh, and the final boss fight against him isn't remotely difficult, at least not on "Normal," nor does it require any tactics beyond those you've used on every trash mob up to this point. Given how satisfyingly creative the battle against him was in Dragon Age II's Legacy expansion, the simplicity of this game's final battle can't help but be a disappointment.
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| New allies pledge themselves to the Inquisition. |
OVERALL:
Dragon Age: Inquisition was released in 2014 to almost universal praise. In many ways, it's deserving of it. This is a huge game, stuffed with a variety of regions, characters, and content, much of which is excellent.
That said, I also think many of the problems seen in Bioware's later disappointments took root here. The open world format doesn't particularly suit the story being told, and the plot loses much of its urgency as you spend hours trekking around areas that offer little more than generic collectibles and bits of lore. I think it's telling that some of the best parts of the game - the section in The Fade, the Orlesian ball, the mage and/or templar quests when you choose which faction to ally with - are all ones that abandon the open world format in favor of a more linear design.
The best of Inqisiton remains terrific, and I was often swept away by it. Still, this is a 100+ hour game filled with "stuff" that would likely be much better if it were about half that length, with about half as much content. I'd ultimately rank it as a good game, but it's too unfocused to be a great one; and while I'll admit that it's probably a better game than Dragon Age II, I have to admit to finding it a lot less interesting.
Overall Rating: 7/10.
Dragon Age: Inquisition - DLC
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