Dragon Age has been a bizarre series for me. I consider myself a pretty big fan of the series, as I have always loved BioWare and anything springing forth from the studio tends to score highly with me. Dragon Age Origins was a game that certainly held my interest for the great story and (for the time) excellent visual design, but I found it hard to love at times. Then came Dragon Age II, and for all the hate it gets from series faithful, there were plenty of good ideas on display, and the game took a fair number of chances. Many of those ideas never really paid off, but I enjoyed the narrative, the new art style, and most of the characters. As fun as I found the second game, I honestly didn't think about the series much after that. I played through Origins once or twice to make different decisions, but beyond that I had largely moved to pastures new. When talk of another Dragon Age game started to make the rounds, I was intrigued, but not really chomping at the bit for it. Sadly, my gaming PC has gotten a bit long in the tooth, and as I am currently unemployed and on the hunt for a job in the storied world of public accounting, I found that I had some free time and a ton of console games I wanted to play. After forcing myself to play through Evil Within and the latter part of Assassin's Creed Unity, I was a bit weary and a bit ambivalent toward new releases, but for lack of a better option, I picked up Inquisition for my trusty Xbone and fired it up. Aside from sleeping, I have largely done little else since then, as the experience has- more or less- completely consumed my life. It's a breathtaking journey, a frighteningly complete gameplay experience on all fronts, and at times downright jaw-dropping in its presentation. Not a completely perfect experience, but damn is it a perfectly complete experience. What follows are my thoughts at 40 hours in. *********** You know the drill, classic fantasy setup. Thedas is a world with humans and elves and dwarves and a new race introduced in Dragon Age II called the Qunari (the big beefy dudes with horns). Not all is well in house Thedas, as the Chantry (the de facto main religion of Thedas that eerily mirrors Christianity) has called a summit to broker peace between the warring factions of the Apostate mages and their former wardens, the Templar order (ugh, don't make me remember Assassin's Creed right now). The leader of the Chantry, the Divine, and all in attendance at the most holy sight on earth are vaporized by a crazy green explosion. You, our stalwart hero, who were in attendance in one form or another depending on your character choice, emerge the sole survivor with a mysterious glowing green mark on your right hand. As it turns out, the green explosion caused a rift to form in the sky, and that rift spawns little baby rifts all over the world, and you learn really fast that the mark on your hand can disrupt and ultimately close these rifts. With the Chantry essentially leaderless and civil war between the Templars and mages underway, an Inquisition is called. Essentially, it falls to you to recruit aid and build up a sovereign, organized response to the terror that now grips the world of Thedas. You accomplish this through political intrigues, shows of military force, putting the right coin in the right pockets, and exploring the hell out of the world and solving problems, forging alliances, and suppressing enemies, both in person and through shrewd use of political and military assets. ************ Much like the rest of BioWare's games, the world is not one giant open one, but a series of "smaller," disparate areas that you can explore. I say smaller, but some of them are nightmarishly large. One of them took me about ten hours to get what I would call halfway done with the quests and fully explored. There is a mind-blowing amount of stuff to do when you are out adventuring. Essentially, you unlock new areas to explore in one of two ways: either the story demands that something be done in a particular area, or you gain access to it through some sort of intrigue. Maybe some soldiers disappeared there, maybe someone has called upon the Inquisition for help, maybe there is a lead about potential assets or recruits in the area. You can unlock the area and begin exploring as it suits your fancy. Once in one of the areas, you will find that your primary goal for being there is but one of many MANY things to do in any questing area. The one thing that comes of as most surprising by far is that the sheer amount of quests, while mind-boggling in itself, is not nearly as impressive as the sheer variety of quests. They're fabulously designed, each and every damn one of them. You can be out exploring some desert or forest or plains area looking for shards or closing rifts, and just when you think you've seen the entire zone, that last bit of unexplored area torments you, beckoning you to explore. And there's a good chance that it hides some two-hour side-quest about a rift frozen in time due to some old empire experiment or something else equally badass. The world begs to be explored, and then delights you again and again with new stuff to do. Some questing zones took me three hours, while others have taken me closer to six or seven before I felt comfortable leaving to do something else. Aside from just the questing and ass-kicking, you have tons of other activities to do too. You can strike up a romance with a variety of characters, for instance. For some reason, I have found my Dwarven spymaster Harding to be irresistibly cute and I have been aggressively and ham-fistedly attempting to romance her. You can sit on the throne of the inquisition and hand down judgment to people who have acted against the Inquisition. You can craft better weapons and armor, or engage in a variety of little character missions throughout the world, such as a heartfelt and hilarious one in which the stalwart warrior Cassandra admits to a guilty pleasure: an obsession with the trashy romance novels written by returning party member Varric. You can choose to expose her as a mega-fan to Varric- which he finds equally sad and amusing- or keep the secret. You can even ask Varric to pen the next book in the series to give to her as a gift. It's these moments where the characters come alive, because they don't feel as one-dimensionally motivated as protagonists in many other RPG's. Some of these moments are funny, some of them are legitimately sad, but they are always amazingly sincere. ********* On a gameplay level, there have been some changes to the formula, but I find almost all of them to be welcome. Combat controls are streamlined and simple, and abilities have a solid whack and punchy execution. Right trigger auto-attacks with your weapon, and you can trigger abilities on the fly with the face buttons. Pressing the back button ("view" button on Xbox One) will open the fabulous tactical camera view, which pauses combat. Here you can issue movement and ability orders to your party members. On lower difficulty settings, this view may not be required at all, but on the higher difficulty settings, you may need to jocky your ranged characters into proper position to adequately support your melee characters, and keep squishy mages out of the fray. There are some cool combo moves you can cook up that give you achievements and such, but combat essentially boils down to whacking things with all your dudes, keeping all your dudes alive, and combat ends when one side dies. Pretty simple, but a surprising amount of fun. When out questing, you'll invariably come upon rifts in the world that are caused by the big rift from the big green explosion. These act as little 2-wave horde quests, where you have to fight the demons that come out of the rift in order to close it. Every demon killed damages the rift itself. You can also disrupt the rift with your main character which will damage and stun all the demons in the area. Once all the demons are dead, you can close the rift. The fact that only the player-created character has the ability to sock the rifts is a genius touch, because it means you have to keep that character alive. My elvish rogue does have a bit of an advantage in this area, where I can pop a smoke bomb to de-agro all enemies in the area. While they choose new targets, I sit and disrupt the rift, then turn my attention on the weakened and stunned enemies. Every quest area has a half-dozen or so of these fade rifts, and they are a blast to play. It never ceases to amaze me how insanely large the questing areas are when you look at their sheer area, and how no two are remotely the same. The environmental design is out of control. ******** If the combat is great, then the rest of the gameplay is the equivalent of video game nirvana for someone like me. There are always a dizzying amount of things to do. You can upgrade your keep, interact with party members (some of these interactions range from legitimately hilarious to unbelievably heartbreaking), sit in judgment of those who have wronged the inquisition... on and on it goes. This is a meaty game from a sheer content standpoint. That the mo-cap and voice acting is so convincing makes the experience truly shine. There are some truly heartfelt moments here, and even though the body models in many conversations follow a small set of animations, the lip-sync work is solid, the faces are emotive and high-quality, and the environmental depth-of-field effects keep the experience largely cinematic the whole way through. It must be said that the ambient audio is an absolute triumph, the use of their audio piping software delivers some really dynamic ambient effects like reverb-queuing in indoor environments and great ambient water audio. I also need to speak for just a moment on the Dragon Age Keep. Maybe you're a series veteran, maybe you're new to the series. You can carry over all the choices you've made in all the games using a slick and unbelievably functional online tool called the Keep. Basically, if you have an EA account linked with Steam and Origin and PSN or Xbox Live, it will automatically import all your game saves into the system and display every single choice you have made with every character, and give you the opportunity to remake any one of them you like, and it will even tell you when some choices are incompatible or impossible to have made together. It's really interesting to see how many choices and outcomes there truly were. From romance options to who lived and who died, from the main games to DLC, you are in full control of the world's history up to your game of Inquisition. Once you've made all the choices you want, you simply hit a button that says "export" and it will log that world state in the servers for you. Next time you start a game of Inquisition from the start, you can choose which of your saved world states you want to use. For those who want to tell the story their way, this is an indispensable tool. ******** As great as all of this is, this paradise is not at all without its flaws, and some of them were surprisingly disappointing for me. At the outset of this section, I want to reiterate that I am a huge fan of BioWare's games. I think they've been on the cutting edge of nonlinear gameplay for well over a decade now. Knights of the Old Republic is one of my all time favorite games. When Dragon Age Origins came out, it was a red-letter day for non-linear Western RPG's. Part of what has made BioWare's games so solid is how human they make the characters in their worlds. From Mass Effect to Dragon Age, there has always been a warm human element to the characterization. The characters feel like real people because they aren't just archetypes or single defining traits. When BioWare gave us the ability to romance other characters, I began to feel attached to some of them in ways that some people may consider unhealthy (ha ha I am lonely.... shut up). As wonderful as Inquisition is, and the wonderful plethora of romantic options on display, it dangles some red herrings in front of your face in the romance department that legitimately upset me. For the first time in the series, there is a strong, independent, totally badass, and rather cute dwarven character named Scout Harding. The game constantly dangles the "romance" dialogue option in front of your head, and if you find her at Skyhold she even asks you out on a date. It's an adorable and humanizing moment. Our fearless dwarven scout, sitting there staring at the floor touching her forefingers together, nervously asking whether you really mean the sweet nothings you say to her out in the field. The look of legitimate excitement and trepidation on her face when I said I meant every word sticks out as one of the most memorable moments so far. From what I understand, that's where that romance ends. She's reduced to a flirt with a tiny side dialogue. Nevermind the fact that Dwarves have never had a romance option in the games. Nevermind that Scout Harding is actually more interesting in the short cutscenes she appears in than half the supporting characters in the game. I feel like Harding was a criminally missed opportunity. She isn't a member of the party, and she comes from humble beginnings to potentially fall in love with the Herald of Andraste, only to be essentially shoved to the side. As you can see, I am attached to my dwarven love interest, but perhaps it was not meant to be (damn you BioWare). That segues into my next point of contention with the game: the characters. There are MANY amazing characters in this game. Don't think for a moment that I don't like the characters. But know that I certainly don't like all of them. There is one character named Sera that I cannot stand. She speaks in an irritating faux-cockney accent that would be barely decipherable to an accomplished North British linguist, and she was clearly written by a room full of adults to be what 15 year olds would think is "totally random" and full of that "double-you-tee-eff" sensibility. When the war table displayed a suggestion from this atrocious character that the inquisition should train its solders to throw jars full of bees, and my war council actually put that damn idea on the war table, I dismissed Sera immediately and kicked her out of the game. I hate her and the game as a whole suffers from her inclusion. I would have had her executed if that was an option. Horrible horrible HORRIBLE character. Morrigan also makes her return (oh yeah, spoilers) and I never really got why people really liked her as a character. I like her a lot more in Inquisition than I did in Origins, but a bit of her charm has worn off because Alistair is no longer a party member (to my knowledge), and the best moments of the first game came from their disagreements. I feel like her inclusion was to appease fanboys, because her character really doesn't fit into the situation in which she is introduced in origins. She doesn't seem to fit the events, but her character has been refined and she functions as the sharp realist of the group. A few other characters make their return, but I won't spoil who. Some of them work, some of them don't. The party characters are okay, but the war council is way cooler. Leliana and Cullen really stand out as great characters for me, while Josephine feels a bit out of place, but that's my personal opinion. Besides the characters, there are a few technical hiccups every now and then. The AI can be dumb as a rock at times. Word to the wise, NEVER give an AI-controlled ranged rogue the backflip-shot ability. DO NOT DO IT. They will, at any given opportunity, backflip off a bridge or off a cliff, or something, effectively leaving you a man down for the entire fight. I have tried every conceivable way to try to get Varric to not use that ability, but anything short of staring at his life bar and reacting with a tactical pause every time that ability's name pops up, there doesn't seem to be a way to do it. Also, the system for customizing friendly AI is not nearly as robust in previous games, largely focusing on targeting behavior and whether or not they will automatically use potions. Without directly intervening and forcing a character to use an ability, some characters will plug away with auto-attacks for extended lengths of time and never trigger an ability, which can be maddening in some harder fights. The tactical pause and top-down strategic view is really slick, even with a controller on one of these mongrel consoles, but I feel like the AI takes movement commands as more of a suggestion than anything else. Sure, when you issue a movement command, they will move to that spot. But whether they will still be there in ten seconds is arbitrary at best. In some fights, battlefield control is key to victory, and knowing where your guys are can make all the difference. Telling your squishy mage to hang back only to see him die thirty seconds later because he was trying to block sword swings with his face right next to you is infuriating to deal with at times. ********* Despite a few AI issues, I have no problem giving this game a glowing recommendation. I started writing this review at about 40 hours, but I kept taking breaks to play, and now my game timer says 71. It's absorbing. It's expansive. It continues to enchant and amaze well after other games would start to grow stale. I've used this word a lot in this review, but after thinking long and hard about a single word that can sum up the experience, I think the true word here is "sincere." Everything this game does has a tint of sincerity that runs through it. BioWare believed in the game they were making. I know there are those who hate BioWare and EA, but I don't feel the typical market-research heavy hand of EA in this one. Oh I'm sure it's there somewhere, but this feels like a return to form for BioWare. I speak no hyperbole when I say this is easily their crowning achievement. Sincere truly is the world. The characters feel sincere. The world has a sincere realism that doesn't feel crafted by human hands, but formed over time. The game feels like a love letter to role playing enthusiasts everywhere, and the last line simply reads, "sincerely, BioWare."
Audio:The voice acting is not even close to being on par to previous games. The sound track is good but not great.Visuals:Very bland and basic environments. Plenty of annoying bugs and glitches too, Some of which can f... Read Full Review
Playing on Hard difficulty as a Qunari mage. About 60 hours in. Story line is good, if not mostly predictable. A couple of surprises were great. The side stories in some of the outdoor areas were more memorable than t... Read Full Review
