Dragon Age: Inquisition - You seem to have gotten some MMO in my Dragon Age....

*I had a very hectic January, so I apologize for not getting this review out sooner.*

So I have to say, I am actually kind of surprised that this release ever came out. Bioware showed a massive amount of success with the Mass Effect games. And after taking a bit of a beating for a very cut and pasted rush job in Dragon Age 2, and then the whole DLC debacle in Mass Effect 3 followed by the dissatisfaction of the ME3's ending, it was obvious that Bioware was going to take a moment to lick at its wounds. 

Aside from a handful of Star Wars: Old Republic dlc expansions, Bioware really took some time to knuckle down and really rebuild the experience for this series. After a 1 year turn around for Dragon Age 2, this installment took a number of years to see the light of day. Was the wait worth it? Time to take a trip back to Ferelden and see in....

DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION

The title screen opens up with a shot of Temple of Sacred Ashes sitting upon a snowy mountaintop. Two lines march single file towards it, on one side walk the Mages, and across from them are the Templars. When you select new game, a neon green explosion rips the sky and the blast blows back both of the lines.

We cut to a figure rousing into consciousness (where you create your character), and they arise to find themselves in the fade. Spiders surround them and give chase, but a glowing green figure calls out them as they climb after it, upon reaching the glowing outstretched hand, the player is dropped out of the fade and subdued by soldiers, your hand glowing the green of the fade and of the hand you took. 

Now imprisoned, we are interrogated by a Seeker named Cassandra, and Leliana from the previous two titles. They inform you that the fade has ripped a whole into the sky, and you were the only one found at the site of the explosion. Unfortunately, a large number of the Chantry officials, including the Chantry's divine priestess were lost in the explosion and people are looking for someone to blame, namely you. 

The Left and Right hands of the Divine. Cassandra may seem stoic, but
if you actually follow her substories, she's a fantastic character.

However, during a regrouping on the way to camp, we learn that the glowing mark on your hand allows you to close the rifts in the fade, thus preventing demons from continuing to enter the world. Cassandra and Leliana decide this is the best chance to close the giant rift, but the Chantry refuses as they see you as the cause. Cassandra invokes the right to reform the Inquisition, thus branding all of you as heretics in the eyes of the church and begins assembling an army to try to close the rift in the sky and bring stability to the world, with you at the forefront. 

As per my usual story line descriptions, I had to gloss over a good deal because Bioware tends to get pretty story heavy. While it certainly helps to have an understanding of the first two games, ultimately this is a brand new story with generally new characters. There are only two major holdovers from Origins, and two or three holdovers from Dragon Age 2. The rest are a brand new sect of dounkburgers. I'm not surprised, but I have to say I was hoping for this one to kind of tie the games together.

Actually, before I get to much farther, they sort of tried to address that to a degree. Prior to the release of Inquisition, they released something to Origin called Dragon Age Keep. What this was was essentially a mural that allowed you to tap into your uploaded saves and load up the characters and decisions you've made in previous titles to shape the world of Inquisition. The problem is I've played through Dragon Age: Origins with nearly every path possible, and practically none of my games were there. Which royally, ROYALLY sucks.

No matter, you can still go through and manually select all the outcomes of all the of the major events. Handy, but its very time consuming, and difficult to remember what decisions I made in a game I played nearly five years ago. Half of them I didn't remember who the people were in the event being discussed. Still, it was a cool feature (shame I forgot to import it to my game before I started).

Trying to remember choices I made years ago was harder than the game was.

The first thing I noticed is that it kept with the faster paced, more action oriented style of fighting you saw in Dragon Age 2. That's not to say it was active battle or action styled, there is still a great deal of RPG control. Generally you just move around the battle as needed, holding down a trigger to attack, The buttons on your pad can be mapped to your various abilities. The combat tends to play faster and more chaotically than I remember it.

The level of skill though really kinda hinges on what class you are playing as or building towards. My first playthrough of the game I started as a mage, and basically hung back and fired spells as my tanks took care of business up front. It was simple and easy to play, but then I upgraded to Knight-Enchanter which essentially puts your mage in the front line. It's low damage, but makes you very hard to bring down as each strike fills your barrier. Playing as a mage had challenges, but it wasn't difficult.

Standard View

I switched to a dagger rouge my 2nd time through, and I'm noticing a significantly increased challenge. My character is doing a lot more pure damage than my mage ever did, but she also can't take a beating as well as before, so I've needed to carefully map which skills would most be useful to get me through tougher fights with harder monsters. So this clearly isn't an RPG where you can basically metagame everything into taking care of it self, you do need to stay focused.

They did add a tactical mode which makes the game feel a bit more like Origins in regards to control. In this mode you can flip to character and have them use specific abilities one specific targets, and the action only moves when you allow it to, so you can oversee the whole battle and make adjustments where necessary. It almost gives the game somewhat of a JRPG/RTS feel to it with how it changes the feel of battle. I've been told for harder difficulties this is nearly mandatory, but outside of one or two battles or the need to revive a character, I barely used it.

Tactical View

The game starts off with a bit more character customization than Dragon Age 2 did. Get to choose from the 3 big fantasy races (Human, Elf, and Dwarf) and the Qunari. Get to pick your gender, pick your character class, then as I mentioned, you get to use the character creator. I have to say for the most art, its pretty good. Instead of sliders it gives me a grid kinda thing and I can easily see whats being moved around and how it looks. I liked that a lot. What I didn't like is the surprisingly limited number of hair options. Why would you go through all the trouble of full facial bone structure customization but not give us more than 10 hair options?

What liked even less is that everything you do in the created means exactly shit, because the moment you leave the awkward lighting of the creator, your beautiful elven mage will look like a roadkill disaster. No matter what setting you chose, no matter what color, or shade of gloss you pick, every single character you create in this game will look like they were just caught eating the contents of a colored glo-stick. The PC modders have probably worked around it, but I was kind stuck with it.

Its amazing how the creator can be vastly improved and incredibly limiting at the same time

So one of the biggest complaints about Dragon Age 2 is that it was tightly contained in the same town and used a lot of the same maps over and over again. It was rehashed, repetitive, and lacking a great deal of creativity. The game as a whole suffered for it, and people hated it. Dragon Age: Inquisition however basically meshed the map system of the first game, and environments that are incredibly expansive. I won't say they are as big as Skyrim in scope, but certainly bigger than the areas of Final Fantasy XIII-3.

You activate main quests from your base camp's war room, once you do so you can travel the necessary area where one of your scouts briefs you on the main reason you are there. But as you travel through the expanse, you will find a number of side quests to do as well. Doing so allows you to build the Inquisitions notoriety and therefore power. You use power to continue to unlock more quests, so its a good idea to keep a number of them open because you need them to progress in the game.

The problem is, some of the areas are too expansive and they have too much shit too. Way too much. So much so that both gaming sites such as Kotaku, and even Bioware themselves basically had to tell players "Hey! Leave the Hinterlands! We know there are a lot of quests in that first area, but there is so much cool stuff to see! You will be less bored if you actually play the game!!" Once I read that, I too needed to force myself to leave that area because I got caught up in trying to do everything I could in that area, and I won't lie I was getting bored doing it. 

Bioware took the complaints from DA2 and gave us some beautiful environments this time

And you will get caught up in side quests. MAN will you. This is one of those games that will straight up tell you "Yeah I don't care that you are 33 and working full time. You are not finishing this game in 5 hours. We worked hard on it, so have to as well." And its a pretty good change of pace. As much as I love a game I can rip through and enjoy the story, I also enjoy a game that is going to last and give me my monies worth, and on that front Dragon Age: Inquisition delivers.

This is a game for people who like to explore and while I found it a little to easy to get sidetracked from the main quests, I think that the game is better off for it. It gives the overall adventure a feeling of expansive bigness to it, and gives me the feeling of genuinely adventuring and exploring. Sometimes the game suffers from having crappy MMO sidequests like collect 10 of said plant, but sometimes you go out to slay some bandits or find a hidden treasure or cave. There is some puzzle solving in the game as well so it broadens the pallet out somewhat.

I guess if I was to say anything about that, is if that I wished main story missions were better indicated on the map, it would have let me know much easier what I had to head to if I wasn't in the mood for question. In games like this I hit a point where I just have to put it down, and if I didn't finish the story, I might never. Thankfully, I didn't in this one.

Considering I was looking forward to seeing the Origins characters again, it took a little bit of warming up to me but I have decided that I really like this cast. I might go as far as to say I like this cast the most of the three Dragon Age games. Origins had a mix of characters I liked and some I didn't (you were the worst, Sten), Dragon Age 2 had more characters I didn't much care about to ones I did. But Inquisition has a pretty strong and diverse cast through and through from varied genders, races, political stances, and faiths.

Blackwall fills the role of the honorable knight, Cassandra is the gruff crusader with a softer hidden side (and totally won me over), Sera is the wise cracking prankster, Vivienne plays the regal noble, Varric reprises his role as the cunning and dashing rogue, Iron Bull the rough and tumble thug with a heart of gold, and I could go on. Even the characters I didn't love still played their parts to compile a very interesting ensemble to give a well rounded team to cater to all tastes.

Which really is what made the decision making in this game so much more difficult. You have always had to make decisions in Dragon Age but this is a game where I've really felt the weight of the choices I've had to make. You will never, EVER, make a choice that will make the whole team happy. Because of the very nature of the story (IE: The ongoing hostilities between mages and the rest of the world) its very design means you can't please everyone. This doesn't just mean every little token decision you have to make, some of them have some very serious consequences.

Around midway through the game when the Inquisition is in full swing, you sort of take the role of judge, jury, and executioner to the villains you've fought, or people who you have apprehended via various missions or decisions as you play. Your adviser Josephine will explain to you their crime, give you something of a recommendation. You hear the defendant make their case, and you decide their fate. These decisions will have repercussions among your team and while some of them can be downright silly, a lot of them pose some very difficult choice where someone has to lose on the deal.

Most specifically are the choices near the end of the story. There is a final dungeon where you are forced to make some decisions about how to proceed, but then there is an incredibly difficult one near the end which would shake out the last few chapters of the game. Because of how I built my character it put me at a real crossroads, so much so that at 3am I was staring at my screen agonizing over the decision for 20 minutes, considering waking up my roommate to ask what he did. There was no black and white, good and evil. Just different shades of gray and those are the decisions that really make a game like this powerful.

Of all the characters, Sera is probably the only "Must Use" in my book. She is an
absolute trouble maker, talks in circles, and somehow still innocent. She sometimes
Can come off as dumb but has some complex workings about her. You just kinda have to love her.

There is a multiplayer mode to this game as well, I opened it like, once. I suppose it can turn the game into a Gauntlet-esq dungeon crawler but honestly, After one level I haven't played it since, and probably never will. I understand they want to shoehorn multiplayer into everything, but this is a place where it really didn't need to be.

I really don't know what else I can say about Dragon Age: Inquisition that hasn't already been said by paid reviewers who actually got their thoughts out when the game came out. The first game came out and it was good, the second game came out and they took a beating. So they hung back, licked their wounds, actually learned from their mistakes, and produced a very worthy successor to the Dragon Age linage that satisfied all my desires as a RPG gamer.

I think that Dragon Age: Inquisition only won game of the year honors because it was the hot new game around the time the year ended. But deserving or no, Inquisition was an absolutely stellar experience that I highly recommend to anyone who loves a good long RPG or is a fan of the classic fantasy genre.

Fuck You, Druffy. It was an accident.