A great RPG with hours of enjoyable content worth a purchase
I’ve previously completed Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening, and Dragon Age II. I really like the franchise and EA-Bioware’s focus on storytelling as well as enjoyable gameplay. Dragon Age: Inquisition is a return to a broader story.
Without spoiling anything, the initial Dragon Age game told the story of a hero crossing an entire country completing quests, gathering allies, and preparing to stop an ancient evil. Bioware changed the scope for Dragon Age II and instead of crossing geography, they allowed time to progress. Dragon Age II followed the protagonist as he rose to prominance in a single city and it’s surrounding areas over several years while stopping an ancient evil. Dragon Age: Inquisition goes back to the formula of a hero completing quests and gathering allies to stop an ancient evil but is broader than Dragon Age: Origins because instead of a single country, the protagonist now explores an entire continent.
In practice, this means a lot more gameplay. Dragon Age: Inquisition is the closest a Dragon Age game has gotten to being an open world game like the recent Elder Scrolls games. It combines classic Bioware decision-driven story missions with open world questing (collecting items, killing enemies, and hunting dragons). It mostly works. It is enjoyable if you have a couple of minutes to run a quick mission in a geographic location. If you have more time, it is great to dive into a longer story mission.
The campaign has a good story. It builds off the previous Dragon Age games but I think you can enjoy this game stand alone if you a willing to explore all the dialogue with characters. Most characters have dialogue that almost function as Dragon Age 101 for new players if you dive into it. Without story spoilers, I guess my only criticism of the overall plot is that it reuses some previous villains from earlier in the franchise history and sometimes I wanted to see something entirely new and fresh.
Some additional complaints (a little nitpicking) I have for my Xbox One play-through:
- Finding crafting materials out in the wilds requires you to use your “radar” like ability to ping your surroundings and find plants, stones, and animals you can use to build potions, weapons, and armor. The problem for me is that means you are constantly pinging as you walk and run around the world. I found it annoying. I would rather crafting items be shaded differently or differentiated passively from the environment without actively using radar. This became as annoying for me as how in Mass Effect 2 you needed to complete planet scanning and mining. Both were necessary if you wanted to upgrade items but both became very unenjoyable.
- Not enough ambient voice work. Now that you have a open world to explore with your party of Non-Playable Characters (NPC’s), you spend more time wandering around the world then previous Dragon Age games. However, I feel like there was less audio between NPC’s. Bioware finds great voice actors (some also known for mainstream television and movie work). However, sometimes I would be wandering around the world for an hour and only get a couple of seconds of banter. I wish they had just recorded hours of random chatter with these great actors. This could have been an Xbox bug. It just felt very sterile exploring a world with such subtle music and very little NPC dialogue.
- Tarot cards to represent companion / NPC loyalty. I didn’t like this. I just wanted a numerical score or bar chart like in earlier games. If I made a decision that increased or decreased a companion’s view of the protagonist, I could never find a way to understand how the impact the overall relationship. I might have missed something. The Tarot cards looked nice but communicated less information.
- Pathfinding / Exploring could be frustrating. This is a complaint of mine for all open world games so I don’t want to blame just Dragon Age. Sometimes you know exactly where you want to go on the map but you can’t find how to get there. There are forests of trees, mountains, or bodies of water that are impassable. Whether or not you feel spending time trying to find the single path to an objective (mission, resource, enemy) is just a natural part of an open-world game or is frustrating might depend on your personality and how long you have been looking for the single path. A couple of times I just cheated and looked to the internet for maps of the regions.
- The War Room can be sterile and boring. One of the interesting additions to Dragon Age: Inquisition is the ability to go to your War Room and launch missions that will be completed by other characters. You aren’t involved and you won’t see the mission being completed. It just starts a timer to the mission completion and when a mission is completed you receive feedback on the result and any reward (gear, resources, influence, and power). This is a great addition but I wanted it to be more interactive. It could feel sterile - like instead of a commander hearing battle results you were just playing an RPG game within an RPG game. I wish Bioware recorded additional audio content with voice actors for all or some of these war room missions. I would have loved it even more if some of these missions ended with in-game engine cut-scenes.
- Porting decisions from Dragon Age Keep didn't work for me. I played earlier Dragon Age games on my PC. I wanted to pay Dragon Age: Inquisition on my Xbox One. Due to the move between console generations, Bioware had already set-up a website (Dragon Age Keep) to make story choices from earlier games manually migrate to new games on the new consoles and PC's. I used Dragon Age Keep but none of these choices were represented in my Dragon Age: Inquisition. I think this might be some issues the first week on the technical side and if I complete a 2nd play through I’m going to try Dragon Age Keep again.
There is nothing like Dragon Age: Inquisition on the market. There are other open-world games on the market (Saints Row, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto, Infamous, Watch Dogs, etc.) Some of these open-world games have good stories too, some don’t. Only Dragon Age: Inquisition combines so much gameplay (questing, crafting, etc.) and story (side missions, character missions, decision-driven story missions) in one game for only $40-$50. It is worth a purchase if you enjoy RPG’s, any of the previous Dragon Age games, the Mass Effect franchise, or video games in general.
31 Achievements out of 50 Won | Played for 94 hrs 11 min upon first Campaign Completion on Casual
