Let me tell you about a little company called BioWare. BioWare are responsible for some of the absolute greatest games of all time: The RPG powerhouse that is Baldur's Gate 2. The galaxy-trotting blast of an adventure that is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The mind-blowing martial-arts RPG and under appreciated gem that is Jade Empire.
Unfortunately, in recent years, they've fallen on somewhat harder times, a period that I think of as "new BioWare". Whilst all of the Mass Effect trilogy was well received and are pretty solid, they lack the depth of previous BioWare games, and the later two suffer of a really weak storyline that's only held together by the quality of the characters. Dragon Age: Origins has a solid world and story, but I personally felt the actual gameplay was tediously slow and uninteresting, even if most of the internet seemed to disagree. Dragon Age II had a few good ideas, but was absolutely eviscerated by a very short development window which forced its story to feel unpolished and its gameplay to feel like sandpaper. To put the nail in the coffin, Star Wars: The Old Republic, whilst only mediocre, was a failure big enough to pretty much end the wave of MMOs trying to get World of Warcraft money.
There is a feel to new BioWare that I really dig. They've got a certain manner of creating stories and especially characters that feels very pleasant, it's just a shame that they've not really nailed it per say. The later Mass Effect games are probably the closest they've come, and they are two of my favorite games of all time, but even then they never felt quite right. There's just a stupidity to the plot that requires you to suspend your disbelief just a little bit too much, a couple great characters too few to feel completely satisfying. Every other new BioWare game has had those same issues in even bigger doses, with a few more piled up.
Dragon Age Inquisition is the game that I've wished every new BioWare game was.
After all the tension between the Circle of Mages and Templar Order carefully and effectively set up throughout both Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II, the Divine (read: Pope) Justinia of the Chantry (read: Church) calls a conclave, where all the big leaders of both of the factions are to sit down and talk through their differences, coached by Chantry bigwigs. Unfortunately, the conclave magically explodes, leaving only a single, unaffiliated, survivor and more importantly tearing a hole in the sky, nicknamed "The Breach" that spews demons from the Fade, as well as more, smaller holes called "Fade Rifts".
You are this survivor, and the mark that has mysteriously appeared on your hand is the only way to close these rifts. This is honestly my least favorite part of the game, the fact that you're set up as someone with clear exclusive ability to solve this situation. This diminishes the accomplishments that the game clearly wants you to feel are something you've done through sheer power of will. You're hailed as someone who's an inspiration, someone who's accomplished superhuman deeds, but this feels hollow when you know it's physically impossible for anyone else to have accomplished them.
At any rate, this mark causes people to rally around you, and makes you an important member of the Inquisition, a newly re-established order, separate from the Chantry, Templars, or Mages dedicated to fighting the threat of the Breach. As the game goes on, the Inquisition grows from a small movement everyone waves off as a bunch of lunatics trying to do impossible deeds to a power that the most powerful rulers of Thedas are wary of. Your missions evolve from making contact with the Revered Mother of a small village to navigating the Imperial Court of Orlais.
This is a fantastic next step from the previous two games. Where Dragon Age: Origins allowed you to become well acquainted with the nation of Ferelden, Dragon Age II gave you a really in-depth knowledge of the one city of Kirkwall. Dragon Age Inquisition spans the entirety of Southern Thedas, leading you everywhere from the stolid, western-Europe inspired Ferelden to the deceptive, pre-Revolutionary French inspired Orlais, and even, briefly to the much more nontraditional Free Marches. The Inquisition is a power that affects a continent, and it shows.
This allows the game to create a large amount of extremely interesting characters. You've got the return of Varric, the overly smart Dwarven Free Marcher from Dragon Age II. You've got Sera, a Fereldan Robin Hood, member of the vigilante organization Friends of Red Jenny. But you've also got characters from backgrounds we've never seen before, like the very Orlesian and manipulative Vivienne, the disgruntled but grandiose Dorian from the Tevinter Imperium, or the Nevarran Princess-made-Chantry-Seeker Cassandra.
One of the cooler things it that a few of the main "interactible" characters aren't actually party members. BioWare has dabbled in this before, with characters like Joker, Cortez or Traynor from the Mass Effect series, but they always felt more like side characters than proper "party-member level" people. Your advisers (Commander Cullen, Spymaster Leliana and Ambassador Josephine), feel like proper characters, with their own large quest chains, huge amounts of character development and character arcs. It adds a bit of credence to the idea that not every interesting person carries a sword and is willing to go out with you into the field to bash a dragon's head in.
I'm going to say this right now: This is the best cast of characters a BioWare game has ever had. Better than the beloved cast of the original Mass Effect, better even than the cast of Mass Effect 2, which was a game almost entirely dedicated to developing (and carried by) its cast. Aside from the most boring characters in the game, Solas the bland mage and the aforementioned Vivienne, any single character here is good enough to be my favorite if they were put in any of the Mass Effect games, only being possibly beat by Mordin. These guys have it all. They're funny, they're endearing, and most importantly, they're absolutely fascinating. All of these characters are interesting in one way or another, whether because of what they have to say about the world around them, how their upbringing affected them, how they see other characters... anything, really.
A few standouts are Sera, who is hilarious, and has one of the most touching romances in any BioWare game, as well as Josephine, who is endearing, likeable, and almost got me to ditch Sera for her. Warden Blackwall's personal quest made me make one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make in a videogame, and I loved seeing how torn Varric was between his loyalty to his friend Hawke and loyalty to the Inquisition's cause. The biggest standout, however, is probably the motherfucking Iron Bull, who is not only an extremely interesting window into one of the less represented cultures in the Dragon Age universe (the Qunari), but also hilarious, and just a really, really cool guy who I aspire to be like.
The biggest surprise came in my own character. You know that thing that BioWare was trying to do with Commander Shepard of Mass Effect fame, where he felt like a fully fleshed out character you gave your own spin to? You know how what ended up happening instead was he just ended up being a boring character who made it so you couldn't do exactly what you wanted because Shepard, and how the dialogue wheel often felt like it was constraining you from saying what you wanted? The Inquisitor is Commander Shepard done right, with the dialogue wheel done right. The Inquisitor is a character with certain character traits that you can't really change. They're brave, and wanting to do the right thing. They don't know that they're up to their position, and they fear failing the many people that are looking to them for help.
Everything else is up to you. The Inquisitor comes from wildly different backgrounds depending on your race-class combination, and this matters. Playing as an Elf Mage, I could bring up my ancestry a whole bunch, allowing me to express belief in a different religion from that of the Chantry, which caused issues when believers in the Chantry took umbrage to the Inquisition being led by a non-believer. My relationship with Sera almost crumbled over this, when she saw me as "too elfy". I was a victim of racism in the Orlesian court, having trouble carrying out my objectives and making the position of my political allies weaker just for the fact that they were bringing a "knife-ear" into court.
Similarly, the importance of my class in the Dragon Age lore was not overlooked, inviting an equally large of contextual events and conversation options. I don't know how much difference there is between being a Warrior and a Rogue however, since neither of them are as big a thing in the lore of the series. All of this results in your character feeling very unique, with who you are making a big difference in how you interact with the world.
Even discounting that, you're given plenty of interesting ways to play your character. There's a lot of things you can say that feel like they'd be outside the scope of the story, protests that you'd expect the writers would want you to ignore. Instead, you're allowed to put them out there, have them answered, and occasionally you're allowed to further continue questioning them, getting into real, genuine discussions. This means you're likely to be able to create, personality and belief-wise, the exact Inquisitor you want, to the point that there's several chooseable voices at the start of the game for this fully voiced protagonist. THAT IS AMAZING, especially in a game with so many hours of voiced dialogue for the main character. This isn't Saints Row, this is a BioWare game with stupid amounts of lines for your protagonist.
The storyline that you spend around all these amazing characters is, unfortunately, pretty cookie-cutter. There's a whole in the sky spewing demons, you are the one who can stop it, do the Inquisition, get your allies, fight the bad guy, win and blah blah blah. Fortunately, whilst the broad strokes are pretty predictable, the actual details offer plenty of twists and turns. Every single story mission after the tutorial has some sort of interesting or memorable twist, be it having to navigate a web of politics in the above oft-mentioned Orlais court, things going wrong in unpredictable ways, or other things that would be too spoilery to include here.
When things do hit a big crescendo, it works fantastically. The fact that your party members are all such fantastic character means it brings forth the main theme of the story brilliantly: that of togetherness despite difference, of uniting against a threat greater than a single ability, culture, or way of thinking could vanquish by itself. You've brought people from all across Thedas together, and you fight together, putting aside all your differences, fears, and prejudices to overcome this insurmountable obstacle.
That's why I hate the fact that you're marked as being the only one able to do this, by the way. It just kind of puts a damper on that whole thing as soon as you remember.
I absolutely love a lot of the political discussion in this thing. The conflict between Mages and Templars is at its peak, and as such the game has a lot to say about the responsibility that comes with power, as well as the responsibility that comes to someone who gives you their trust. It's got a lot to say, in general, since it uses the various aspects of the Dragon Age world fantastically as allegories, and it explores a lot of interesting issues beyond just the main obvious one, delving into everything from the politics of power to the value of redemption.
The final thing to mention is how brilliantly cameos from previous games are used. They feel fairly natural, and maintain fanwank to a minimum. Leliana is a main character again, but she's not there as a nostalgia fountain, but as a genuine character, with a whole new arc. Varric is there, and is frankly underutilized, but that's fine. There's a few other characters that feel like there's a genuine reason for them to be there, and like they've changed in significant but believable ways, far from Liara changing into a completely different character for no apparent reason between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.
So, if you've been reading very carefully, there's a possibility you might have gathered that I like the story and characters this game has to offer. But what about the game itself, the process of playing it, of kicking the assess of badies and punching dragons and setting zombies on fire?
That's alright, too.
Dragon Age Inquisition plays like a weird hybrid of the first Dragon Age with the second, with a little bit of World of Warcraft thrown in there for good measure. Its exploration feels very much like an MMO, with you running around big, open areas, seeking out quest givers that then send you to do a thing and you then return to the quest givers and they give you EXP and a thing. There's also about a million side activities and collectibles in each area: closing Fade Rifts, setting up Inquisition camps, collecting shards, claiming landmarks... It's important to mention right now how gorgeous all these areas look. They look lived in when they need to be, and wild and mysterious when that's called for. Characters also look fantastic, except for my player character. She looks a bit weird.
I'm not a particular fan of MMOs, so it's lucky that my principal complaint with them is solved: combat is actually fun, and not an exercise in tediously tacking turns to unsatisfyingly whack your opponent. This is the part that feels like a hybrid between Origins and DAII, landing somewhere between them in terms of tactical and slow and brainless and fast. The best thing is that it's up to you how you want to play.
You can play in real time, controlling one character from a behind-the-character camera, and firing off abilities whenever they're available. I found this fairly satisfying, as the animations are nice and meaty, and there's still a decent amount of strategy you can try to pull off, maximizing your DPS. You can also pause and go into tactical, overhead camera, where you choose between your characters and instruct them where to move and what to do, which they execute once you unpause. This is satisfying in a very different way, where overcoming a challenge by properly controlling the situation and reacting to changes in the correct way can feel really good.
That said, it's really a matter of difficulty. Playing in real time on Hard difficulty will result in a lot of going back to camp to heal, whilst playing in tactical mode on Normal will feel like you're wasting your time and effort, since even playing in real time is a breeze. This means you're pretty much committed to one playstyle on each difficulty setting, which is unfortunate: I was hoping Normal would allow me to play in real time for small encounters, but force me to play tactically against bosses and such. I ended up playing most of the game on Normal mode, but this was because I couldn't be bothered to switch too often, and I've not been a massive fan of the Dragon Age brand of tactical combat ever since Origins.
There's plenty of character customization as to how you'll whack your enemies. You get to choose from three classes at the beginning, Rogue, Warrior, and Mage, with Rogue and Warrior both having two different weapon types to choose from. Mages are instead stuck with just staffs, but they have several schools of magic to mix and match from, each with their own focus and playstyle.
When you level up, you gain an ability point, which you can put into an active or passive ability. These are all fairly powerful, and really do change the way you approach fights. This is good, because that's all you get from level ups: you never get to modify your stats directly, like in previous games. On the one hand, that's probably good, because you could create some really, really broken Rogue builds in Dragon Age II with very little effort (I created a Hawke with ridiculously high crit chance with two really fast weapons and an absurd crit modifier that meant every fight was over within 15 seconds on my first playthrough, with no guides), and your actual stats seem to work almost exactly the same way. On the other, this means that your leveling is even less in-depth than in the already too-simple-for-my-taste Dragon Age II. The fact that levels take ages to come in too doesn't really help.
A nice little bit of variety comes in around the midgame, when you unlock the ability to gain a specialization, an extra skill tree with generally more powerful abilities on it. These nicely shake up the way your character plays. For instance, whilst I'd centered my mage around weakening resistances and then setting up damage over time with the Storm and Fire schools of magic from a distance, I became a Knight-Enchanter, which gives you a powerful arcane blade to strike enemies up-close with that charges its own damage with damage from other spells, as well as a variety of buffs to barriers, short-term health buffs that mages can create. This meant that my playstyle shifted to one where I'd focus on charging my arcane blade, using a dash ability to get in the middle of a group, attack with my blade, and then having to decide whether to retreat and play defensively until my blade was charged again or set up a barrier and weather the storm close to my enemies.
There's plenty of little systems that you'd think would make the character customization quite deep. There's a whole crafting system, with the crafting of components from ingredients you find in the wild to modify your armor and weapons, as well as a whole mess of upgrades for your potions. These are... adequate. Finicky as these systems tend to be, but not particularly necessary. I almost ignored it on Normal, and did fine even for the few hours at a time I switched to Hard. Still, I can imagine on higher difficulties it could be quite helpful, and if one enjoys that kind of thing it may be worth your while on Normal (One of the few times I ventured into the system I managed to create an absolutely insane staff that did as much DPS as Warrior weapons. This means that with my really powerful mage abilities boosting my DPS considerably, I had stupidly high damage output).
There's also a whole alchemy system where you can upgrade your potions, find more, and so on. That did seem completely worthless, since my healing potions healed me completely without any upgrades, and all other potions were really powerful without any upgrades. I suspect if one bothered to craft fantastic weapons and get potions upgraded to the max, one might be able to create a build as broken as some of the Dragon Age II ones.
One little detail that does work is the Influence mechanic. As you do things you gain Influence, which levels up the Inquisition. Each level allows you to get an Inquisition perk, which are genuinely powerful and useful things, such as more inventory space, more dialogue options, or obtaining a collection of schematics. They feel like milestones, like you're growing your Inquisition, all the more so since they happen more rarely than your levels, and feel powerful in a different way.
The final big mechanic is one of the ones that held the most promise to me, and that I found the most disappointing: The War Table mechanic, which goes hand in hand with the Power mechanic. As you do things on the battlefield such as close Rifts or claim camps, you gain a resource called Power. You can then spend this Power to open up new areas or story missions.
That's kind of it. There's this whole War Table thing, where you're able to assign your advisers to carry out several tasks, with their approaches differing on the tasks. I got really excited about these two mechanics: The War Table would be where you'd go out to use the Power you gained to do things for the Inquisition, to improve Thedas, and steel against the demon menace. If you made bad decisions, you'd loose Power, which would mean you couldn't prevent disasters, and there'd be this whole cool thing...
Nope. You can only ever gain Power, unless you're using it to unlock a new thing. The War Table can never produce negative results. If you make a mistake, it's just a neutral result, with no rewards. The rewards you get are also really lame. You'll get a bit of Power, or a few dozen gold coins that you can use to not buy much. There's a few operations on the War Table that do produce significant results, but there's no way to foul these up, you'll always get the thing you want. This makes both of these mechanics feel really boring and lame. It's a shame, because there's a real power struggle in the story missions you go through, and I wish that was extended mechanically to some extent.
Verdict:
Presentation: 10/10
My second 10/10 in Presentation in a row. Am I getting soft, or is it just that both Banner Saga and Inquisition are absolutely fantastic? I'm pretty sure it's that second one. Inquisition is the game BioWare's been trying to make since EA bought them when it comes to presentation. Not only does it look gorgeous, but it's got a fantastic cast of characters, and a bunch of great story missions. It explores the world of Dragon Age fantastically, adding a bunch of depth to Southern Thedas. Some of the dynamics it explores, in particular the whole Mage/Templar thing are also really cool. There's just really very little to criticize. Inquisition did everything I wanted it to and more.
It also has the Iron Bull in it.
Gameplay: 8/10
Inquisition has a tonne to do, and you can do it in a variety of fun ways. The combat is satisfying, but a lot of the other systems aren't really relevant on Normal difficulty, though they're perfectly fine if you're interested in them. Exploration is satisfying, and scratches that MMO skinner box itch without the combat being dull as hell. Besides, these areas are really pretty, and their history is really cool.
Overall: 18/20
9/10
This is my favorite BioWare game since they were bought out by EA, and I love a lot of what they've done since then, more than most people seem to. The world just captured my imagination in a way nothing really has for a long time, and I absolutely loved the characters. I really want to spend more time with them. It's a fantastic follow up to both of its prequels. It genuinely feels like a good pay off to having Dragon Age II be such a specific small thing. I cannot express how happy I am at this being a proper BioWare game. It's one of those situations where I wish I was just grading on one of the two parameters above, because this is a game I wish I could give a 10/10 to, despite my system. It's this kind of stuff that makes me want to get rid of my system altogether.
I might just do that to give this and Persona 4 a 10.
Unfortunately, in recent years, they've fallen on somewhat harder times, a period that I think of as "new BioWare". Whilst all of the Mass Effect trilogy was well received and are pretty solid, they lack the depth of previous BioWare games, and the later two suffer of a really weak storyline that's only held together by the quality of the characters. Dragon Age: Origins has a solid world and story, but I personally felt the actual gameplay was tediously slow and uninteresting, even if most of the internet seemed to disagree. Dragon Age II had a few good ideas, but was absolutely eviscerated by a very short development window which forced its story to feel unpolished and its gameplay to feel like sandpaper. To put the nail in the coffin, Star Wars: The Old Republic, whilst only mediocre, was a failure big enough to pretty much end the wave of MMOs trying to get World of Warcraft money.
There is a feel to new BioWare that I really dig. They've got a certain manner of creating stories and especially characters that feels very pleasant, it's just a shame that they've not really nailed it per say. The later Mass Effect games are probably the closest they've come, and they are two of my favorite games of all time, but even then they never felt quite right. There's just a stupidity to the plot that requires you to suspend your disbelief just a little bit too much, a couple great characters too few to feel completely satisfying. Every other new BioWare game has had those same issues in even bigger doses, with a few more piled up.
Dragon Age Inquisition is the game that I've wished every new BioWare game was.
After all the tension between the Circle of Mages and Templar Order carefully and effectively set up throughout both Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II, the Divine (read: Pope) Justinia of the Chantry (read: Church) calls a conclave, where all the big leaders of both of the factions are to sit down and talk through their differences, coached by Chantry bigwigs. Unfortunately, the conclave magically explodes, leaving only a single, unaffiliated, survivor and more importantly tearing a hole in the sky, nicknamed "The Breach" that spews demons from the Fade, as well as more, smaller holes called "Fade Rifts".
You are this survivor, and the mark that has mysteriously appeared on your hand is the only way to close these rifts. This is honestly my least favorite part of the game, the fact that you're set up as someone with clear exclusive ability to solve this situation. This diminishes the accomplishments that the game clearly wants you to feel are something you've done through sheer power of will. You're hailed as someone who's an inspiration, someone who's accomplished superhuman deeds, but this feels hollow when you know it's physically impossible for anyone else to have accomplished them.
At any rate, this mark causes people to rally around you, and makes you an important member of the Inquisition, a newly re-established order, separate from the Chantry, Templars, or Mages dedicated to fighting the threat of the Breach. As the game goes on, the Inquisition grows from a small movement everyone waves off as a bunch of lunatics trying to do impossible deeds to a power that the most powerful rulers of Thedas are wary of. Your missions evolve from making contact with the Revered Mother of a small village to navigating the Imperial Court of Orlais.
This is a fantastic next step from the previous two games. Where Dragon Age: Origins allowed you to become well acquainted with the nation of Ferelden, Dragon Age II gave you a really in-depth knowledge of the one city of Kirkwall. Dragon Age Inquisition spans the entirety of Southern Thedas, leading you everywhere from the stolid, western-Europe inspired Ferelden to the deceptive, pre-Revolutionary French inspired Orlais, and even, briefly to the much more nontraditional Free Marches. The Inquisition is a power that affects a continent, and it shows.
This allows the game to create a large amount of extremely interesting characters. You've got the return of Varric, the overly smart Dwarven Free Marcher from Dragon Age II. You've got Sera, a Fereldan Robin Hood, member of the vigilante organization Friends of Red Jenny. But you've also got characters from backgrounds we've never seen before, like the very Orlesian and manipulative Vivienne, the disgruntled but grandiose Dorian from the Tevinter Imperium, or the Nevarran Princess-made-Chantry-Seeker Cassandra.
One of the cooler things it that a few of the main "interactible" characters aren't actually party members. BioWare has dabbled in this before, with characters like Joker, Cortez or Traynor from the Mass Effect series, but they always felt more like side characters than proper "party-member level" people. Your advisers (Commander Cullen, Spymaster Leliana and Ambassador Josephine), feel like proper characters, with their own large quest chains, huge amounts of character development and character arcs. It adds a bit of credence to the idea that not every interesting person carries a sword and is willing to go out with you into the field to bash a dragon's head in.
I'm going to say this right now: This is the best cast of characters a BioWare game has ever had. Better than the beloved cast of the original Mass Effect, better even than the cast of Mass Effect 2, which was a game almost entirely dedicated to developing (and carried by) its cast. Aside from the most boring characters in the game, Solas the bland mage and the aforementioned Vivienne, any single character here is good enough to be my favorite if they were put in any of the Mass Effect games, only being possibly beat by Mordin. These guys have it all. They're funny, they're endearing, and most importantly, they're absolutely fascinating. All of these characters are interesting in one way or another, whether because of what they have to say about the world around them, how their upbringing affected them, how they see other characters... anything, really.
A few standouts are Sera, who is hilarious, and has one of the most touching romances in any BioWare game, as well as Josephine, who is endearing, likeable, and almost got me to ditch Sera for her. Warden Blackwall's personal quest made me make one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make in a videogame, and I loved seeing how torn Varric was between his loyalty to his friend Hawke and loyalty to the Inquisition's cause. The biggest standout, however, is probably the motherfucking Iron Bull, who is not only an extremely interesting window into one of the less represented cultures in the Dragon Age universe (the Qunari), but also hilarious, and just a really, really cool guy who I aspire to be like.
The biggest surprise came in my own character. You know that thing that BioWare was trying to do with Commander Shepard of Mass Effect fame, where he felt like a fully fleshed out character you gave your own spin to? You know how what ended up happening instead was he just ended up being a boring character who made it so you couldn't do exactly what you wanted because Shepard, and how the dialogue wheel often felt like it was constraining you from saying what you wanted? The Inquisitor is Commander Shepard done right, with the dialogue wheel done right. The Inquisitor is a character with certain character traits that you can't really change. They're brave, and wanting to do the right thing. They don't know that they're up to their position, and they fear failing the many people that are looking to them for help.
Everything else is up to you. The Inquisitor comes from wildly different backgrounds depending on your race-class combination, and this matters. Playing as an Elf Mage, I could bring up my ancestry a whole bunch, allowing me to express belief in a different religion from that of the Chantry, which caused issues when believers in the Chantry took umbrage to the Inquisition being led by a non-believer. My relationship with Sera almost crumbled over this, when she saw me as "too elfy". I was a victim of racism in the Orlesian court, having trouble carrying out my objectives and making the position of my political allies weaker just for the fact that they were bringing a "knife-ear" into court.
Similarly, the importance of my class in the Dragon Age lore was not overlooked, inviting an equally large of contextual events and conversation options. I don't know how much difference there is between being a Warrior and a Rogue however, since neither of them are as big a thing in the lore of the series. All of this results in your character feeling very unique, with who you are making a big difference in how you interact with the world.
Even discounting that, you're given plenty of interesting ways to play your character. There's a lot of things you can say that feel like they'd be outside the scope of the story, protests that you'd expect the writers would want you to ignore. Instead, you're allowed to put them out there, have them answered, and occasionally you're allowed to further continue questioning them, getting into real, genuine discussions. This means you're likely to be able to create, personality and belief-wise, the exact Inquisitor you want, to the point that there's several chooseable voices at the start of the game for this fully voiced protagonist. THAT IS AMAZING, especially in a game with so many hours of voiced dialogue for the main character. This isn't Saints Row, this is a BioWare game with stupid amounts of lines for your protagonist.
The storyline that you spend around all these amazing characters is, unfortunately, pretty cookie-cutter. There's a whole in the sky spewing demons, you are the one who can stop it, do the Inquisition, get your allies, fight the bad guy, win and blah blah blah. Fortunately, whilst the broad strokes are pretty predictable, the actual details offer plenty of twists and turns. Every single story mission after the tutorial has some sort of interesting or memorable twist, be it having to navigate a web of politics in the above oft-mentioned Orlais court, things going wrong in unpredictable ways, or other things that would be too spoilery to include here.
When things do hit a big crescendo, it works fantastically. The fact that your party members are all such fantastic character means it brings forth the main theme of the story brilliantly: that of togetherness despite difference, of uniting against a threat greater than a single ability, culture, or way of thinking could vanquish by itself. You've brought people from all across Thedas together, and you fight together, putting aside all your differences, fears, and prejudices to overcome this insurmountable obstacle.
That's why I hate the fact that you're marked as being the only one able to do this, by the way. It just kind of puts a damper on that whole thing as soon as you remember.
I absolutely love a lot of the political discussion in this thing. The conflict between Mages and Templars is at its peak, and as such the game has a lot to say about the responsibility that comes with power, as well as the responsibility that comes to someone who gives you their trust. It's got a lot to say, in general, since it uses the various aspects of the Dragon Age world fantastically as allegories, and it explores a lot of interesting issues beyond just the main obvious one, delving into everything from the politics of power to the value of redemption.
The final thing to mention is how brilliantly cameos from previous games are used. They feel fairly natural, and maintain fanwank to a minimum. Leliana is a main character again, but she's not there as a nostalgia fountain, but as a genuine character, with a whole new arc. Varric is there, and is frankly underutilized, but that's fine. There's a few other characters that feel like there's a genuine reason for them to be there, and like they've changed in significant but believable ways, far from Liara changing into a completely different character for no apparent reason between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.
So, if you've been reading very carefully, there's a possibility you might have gathered that I like the story and characters this game has to offer. But what about the game itself, the process of playing it, of kicking the assess of badies and punching dragons and setting zombies on fire?
That's alright, too.
Dragon Age Inquisition plays like a weird hybrid of the first Dragon Age with the second, with a little bit of World of Warcraft thrown in there for good measure. Its exploration feels very much like an MMO, with you running around big, open areas, seeking out quest givers that then send you to do a thing and you then return to the quest givers and they give you EXP and a thing. There's also about a million side activities and collectibles in each area: closing Fade Rifts, setting up Inquisition camps, collecting shards, claiming landmarks... It's important to mention right now how gorgeous all these areas look. They look lived in when they need to be, and wild and mysterious when that's called for. Characters also look fantastic, except for my player character. She looks a bit weird.
I'm not a particular fan of MMOs, so it's lucky that my principal complaint with them is solved: combat is actually fun, and not an exercise in tediously tacking turns to unsatisfyingly whack your opponent. This is the part that feels like a hybrid between Origins and DAII, landing somewhere between them in terms of tactical and slow and brainless and fast. The best thing is that it's up to you how you want to play.
You can play in real time, controlling one character from a behind-the-character camera, and firing off abilities whenever they're available. I found this fairly satisfying, as the animations are nice and meaty, and there's still a decent amount of strategy you can try to pull off, maximizing your DPS. You can also pause and go into tactical, overhead camera, where you choose between your characters and instruct them where to move and what to do, which they execute once you unpause. This is satisfying in a very different way, where overcoming a challenge by properly controlling the situation and reacting to changes in the correct way can feel really good.
That said, it's really a matter of difficulty. Playing in real time on Hard difficulty will result in a lot of going back to camp to heal, whilst playing in tactical mode on Normal will feel like you're wasting your time and effort, since even playing in real time is a breeze. This means you're pretty much committed to one playstyle on each difficulty setting, which is unfortunate: I was hoping Normal would allow me to play in real time for small encounters, but force me to play tactically against bosses and such. I ended up playing most of the game on Normal mode, but this was because I couldn't be bothered to switch too often, and I've not been a massive fan of the Dragon Age brand of tactical combat ever since Origins.
There's plenty of character customization as to how you'll whack your enemies. You get to choose from three classes at the beginning, Rogue, Warrior, and Mage, with Rogue and Warrior both having two different weapon types to choose from. Mages are instead stuck with just staffs, but they have several schools of magic to mix and match from, each with their own focus and playstyle.
When you level up, you gain an ability point, which you can put into an active or passive ability. These are all fairly powerful, and really do change the way you approach fights. This is good, because that's all you get from level ups: you never get to modify your stats directly, like in previous games. On the one hand, that's probably good, because you could create some really, really broken Rogue builds in Dragon Age II with very little effort (I created a Hawke with ridiculously high crit chance with two really fast weapons and an absurd crit modifier that meant every fight was over within 15 seconds on my first playthrough, with no guides), and your actual stats seem to work almost exactly the same way. On the other, this means that your leveling is even less in-depth than in the already too-simple-for-my-taste Dragon Age II. The fact that levels take ages to come in too doesn't really help.
A nice little bit of variety comes in around the midgame, when you unlock the ability to gain a specialization, an extra skill tree with generally more powerful abilities on it. These nicely shake up the way your character plays. For instance, whilst I'd centered my mage around weakening resistances and then setting up damage over time with the Storm and Fire schools of magic from a distance, I became a Knight-Enchanter, which gives you a powerful arcane blade to strike enemies up-close with that charges its own damage with damage from other spells, as well as a variety of buffs to barriers, short-term health buffs that mages can create. This meant that my playstyle shifted to one where I'd focus on charging my arcane blade, using a dash ability to get in the middle of a group, attack with my blade, and then having to decide whether to retreat and play defensively until my blade was charged again or set up a barrier and weather the storm close to my enemies.
There's plenty of little systems that you'd think would make the character customization quite deep. There's a whole crafting system, with the crafting of components from ingredients you find in the wild to modify your armor and weapons, as well as a whole mess of upgrades for your potions. These are... adequate. Finicky as these systems tend to be, but not particularly necessary. I almost ignored it on Normal, and did fine even for the few hours at a time I switched to Hard. Still, I can imagine on higher difficulties it could be quite helpful, and if one enjoys that kind of thing it may be worth your while on Normal (One of the few times I ventured into the system I managed to create an absolutely insane staff that did as much DPS as Warrior weapons. This means that with my really powerful mage abilities boosting my DPS considerably, I had stupidly high damage output).
There's also a whole alchemy system where you can upgrade your potions, find more, and so on. That did seem completely worthless, since my healing potions healed me completely without any upgrades, and all other potions were really powerful without any upgrades. I suspect if one bothered to craft fantastic weapons and get potions upgraded to the max, one might be able to create a build as broken as some of the Dragon Age II ones.
One little detail that does work is the Influence mechanic. As you do things you gain Influence, which levels up the Inquisition. Each level allows you to get an Inquisition perk, which are genuinely powerful and useful things, such as more inventory space, more dialogue options, or obtaining a collection of schematics. They feel like milestones, like you're growing your Inquisition, all the more so since they happen more rarely than your levels, and feel powerful in a different way.
The final big mechanic is one of the ones that held the most promise to me, and that I found the most disappointing: The War Table mechanic, which goes hand in hand with the Power mechanic. As you do things on the battlefield such as close Rifts or claim camps, you gain a resource called Power. You can then spend this Power to open up new areas or story missions.
That's kind of it. There's this whole War Table thing, where you're able to assign your advisers to carry out several tasks, with their approaches differing on the tasks. I got really excited about these two mechanics: The War Table would be where you'd go out to use the Power you gained to do things for the Inquisition, to improve Thedas, and steel against the demon menace. If you made bad decisions, you'd loose Power, which would mean you couldn't prevent disasters, and there'd be this whole cool thing...
Nope. You can only ever gain Power, unless you're using it to unlock a new thing. The War Table can never produce negative results. If you make a mistake, it's just a neutral result, with no rewards. The rewards you get are also really lame. You'll get a bit of Power, or a few dozen gold coins that you can use to not buy much. There's a few operations on the War Table that do produce significant results, but there's no way to foul these up, you'll always get the thing you want. This makes both of these mechanics feel really boring and lame. It's a shame, because there's a real power struggle in the story missions you go through, and I wish that was extended mechanically to some extent.
Verdict:
Presentation: 10/10
My second 10/10 in Presentation in a row. Am I getting soft, or is it just that both Banner Saga and Inquisition are absolutely fantastic? I'm pretty sure it's that second one. Inquisition is the game BioWare's been trying to make since EA bought them when it comes to presentation. Not only does it look gorgeous, but it's got a fantastic cast of characters, and a bunch of great story missions. It explores the world of Dragon Age fantastically, adding a bunch of depth to Southern Thedas. Some of the dynamics it explores, in particular the whole Mage/Templar thing are also really cool. There's just really very little to criticize. Inquisition did everything I wanted it to and more.
It also has the Iron Bull in it.
Gameplay: 8/10
Inquisition has a tonne to do, and you can do it in a variety of fun ways. The combat is satisfying, but a lot of the other systems aren't really relevant on Normal difficulty, though they're perfectly fine if you're interested in them. Exploration is satisfying, and scratches that MMO skinner box itch without the combat being dull as hell. Besides, these areas are really pretty, and their history is really cool.
Overall: 18/20
9/10
This is my favorite BioWare game since they were bought out by EA, and I love a lot of what they've done since then, more than most people seem to. The world just captured my imagination in a way nothing really has for a long time, and I absolutely loved the characters. I really want to spend more time with them. It's a fantastic follow up to both of its prequels. It genuinely feels like a good pay off to having Dragon Age II be such a specific small thing. I cannot express how happy I am at this being a proper BioWare game. It's one of those situations where I wish I was just grading on one of the two parameters above, because this is a game I wish I could give a 10/10 to, despite my system. It's this kind of stuff that makes me want to get rid of my system altogether.
I might just do that to give this and Persona 4 a 10.
