*I apologize in advance for any changes in font size. Half a dozen edits have done nothing for my mastery of it.
And yes, there will be significant spoilers.*
Dragon Age: Inquisition is the long-awaited third installment in the Dragon Age series from BioWare and has been subject to as much hate and disappointment as it has been to excitement and fangasm.
What I think has happened, is that a lot of the people who played and loved Dragon Age: Origins, were expecting a game closer to Origins than Dragon Age 2 and so were super disappointed, while all the people who loved Dragon Age 2 basically got a newer, better version of that game. And then of course there's the people who haven't played either of the first installments in the series and thus have nothing to compare it to and think the game is just fine.
Which it is. Fine. Not great, not amazing, but fine.
So where better to start this review than with the reflection of those feelings:
The Score:
I rate the game at a solid 7/10
And I hate that score. With a passion. See, in my opinion, this game could've been an easy 9. But it's not. And that really, really bothers me. There's a multitude of things that bother me about the game. Things that doesn't make sense and things that just aren't very well thought out. And those are mostly the things I'll be commenting on.
Keep in mind that's I've actually completed the game and sunk about 100 hours into my first playthrough alone. It surprises me that I have to write this, but apparently people no longer think that it's a requirement to complete a game before you review it. A lot of the reviews out there were written by people after they had played 8-14 hours and thought they needed to share their 2 cents to add to the confusion. There's even an IGN Review Discussion on YouTube with around 65.000 views, where 2 out of the 3 on the panel haven't played Dragon Age: Origins while being only halfway through Inquisition. Seriously-- What's up with that?
Anyway. The rest, in no particular order:
Fighting:
For those of you who've played both of the previous games I regret to inform you that it's closer to DA2 than Origins without really being as good as either of them. Don't let yourself be fooled by the Tactical Camera mode that they re-introduced and that some reviewers are trying real hard to praise. It's shit. But more on that later.
I started the game on the Hard difficulty out of principal and because I consider myself a somewhat seasoned gamer. I figured this would provide me with a proper challenge, so that each battle wouldn't end up being a nuisance instead of the exhilarating encounter it's supposed to be. This plan did not work.
The class you choose has a minor impact on the overall difficulty of the game. As a Rogue Archer, the game is not very difficult, ever. A lot of the battles, if not most, are you keeping your finger on "R" (That's auto-attack), occasionally moving it up to click a numbered button once before moving back down to "R" as you wait for your stamina to replenish or your abilities to finish their cooldown. From time to time you'll also click "Y" to get your party to focus down your target, which is about as tactical as it gets. This is the case for all the classes, but at least as an archer I was able to freely move around ever so slowly while attacking so I could fool myself into feeling more tactical as I covered my flanks by standing next to trees or gained the high ground by standing on top of a rock. Archer is the only class who can move while attacking btw. You might not think these are valid point of criticism since it, to some extent, was like this in both the previous games. But I think it is so I'll just briefly explain why:
In Origins, you spend of lot of time occupied by actual tactical decision. Friendly fire was enabled by default meaning you had to move your party out of the way before telling your mage to grill a group of enemies. Using skills that had any sort of AoE effect generally required a reasonable attention to placement and enemy troop movements in order to guarantee a decent damage output. Executing cross-class combos could often mean the difference between winning and losing a battle. Staying alive was fairly difficult since enemies were pretty hard and you had to manually apply the healing poultices to your party members. And so the list goes on. In other words: You had stuff to do so it didn't feel as boring as it sounds.
In DA2, the animations were faster, abilities were flashier, and you were drawn in by the fast-paced feeling of the fights. Some abilities actually teleported you around the battlefield. It was more intense and you felt more all-over-the-place so to speak. Proper placement of skills was actually pretty important here too.
None of these things are happening in Inquisition. Your companions automatically heal themselves at close to instant speed so staying alive isn't an issue, their usage of skills is acceptable so there's no real reason to control them yourself, and the overall difficulty of the fights is just way lower. So when you slow the fighting animations back down to a realistic standard; you suddenly have time to feel how mind-numbingly uninvolving the fights actually are. Especially so if you're a ranged character.
Every tactical aspect of combat has effectively been scraped. This also means that the by now well-known tactic slots no longer exist. Gone is "When enemy uses X type attack do Y" and "When surrounded by at least X enemies do Y" along with all the other intelligent, tactical decisions you could (attempt to) get your party members to do. I have no way of getting my mage(s) to not use projectile type spells against the dude approaching with a huge shield held at an angle except by manually controlling him/her. Instead you're left with 3 options per skill:
Use skill
Don't use skill
Prefer use of this skill
And the third option doesn't even work very well. Aside from that, you can decide the health threshold for potion chugging along with how many potions you want them to save for you. That's pretty much it. This isn't even just my opinion on the matter or just the things I figured I could be bothered to use. Those are literally your only tactical options. So from a tactical perspective, BioWare has actually downgraded from DA2, making Inquisition the least tactical game in the series so far. Shocking, I know.
The Tactical *cough* Camera is bordering to being completely useless. It's a hassle to maneuver, it'll occasionally lodge itself into weird positions, you can't queue any orders and you can't zoom out far enough for it to matter, so you'll most often always be able to see less of the battlefield than you could in your OTS view. It's a glorified pause mode with next to no actual functionality. Nothing more.
Hunting dragons is supposedly the pinnacle of fighting in this game. There are 10 dragons which aren't related to the story and pitching your small team of seasoned warriors against them is not as exciting as some people try to make it out to be. The variation of their skills are decent, the animations are absolutely amazing, but the actual fighting is nothing to write home about. They are however, the only fights where you'll feel that you might be able to squeeze in a victory when you shouldn't otherwise be able to. What usually kills you are unfortunate circumstances, piss-poor placement, or a complete lack of judgement of their power compared to your own. There certainly won't be any amazed outburst of "Are you serious? How?!" from your friends if you call them and say you just defeated the Fereldan Frostback Dragon of The Hinterlands. And it certainly doesn't take you back to when you were 12 years old and defeated Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts. That left you feeling accomplished. This doesn't.
Leveling and Exploring:
The skill tree is the same as DA2 and that's okay. The tree itself was an upgrade from what we had in Origins so sticking with it is perfectly reasonable. I would've liked to see a larger variation in skills though, but I suppose that's a preferential thing. You can only use 8 at a time anyway.
You get your skill points one at a time and distribute them as you see fit. What you no longer get though, is attribute points. Not that attributes doesn't exist. There's a nicely sorted list of all your stats in the Character Records. It just doesn't tell you anything! Sure, you can hover over dexterity to see that it increases "The characters Agility, Reflexes and Coordination" and that each point "Increases Attack (Rogues only) and Critical Damage Bonus" but only the Maker knows by how much. Willpower seemingly increases Attack as well without being tied to a specific class, so how I supposed to make a decision between two pommel upgrades to a sword which increases either of those attributes by 7? Is 7 even much? I started with 10 dexterity so does 17 mean I'm 70% stronger than before? What on earth are we supposed to do with those numbers?
In any case. Here you are. Finally through the somewhat lengthy, not so informative, but overall pretty enjoyable prologue of the game. You've gone around Haven and is ready to go on your first proper mission to The Hinterlands. Yes sir! The actual story-progressing mission is easy: Reach and talk to Revered Mother Giselle. You can get to her almost without fighting in something like 5 minutes. Well, that didn't take long. Now what? Back to Haven? I THINK NOT! As it turns out, they've thrown you into a fully explorable area, larger than all of Origins put together, and I'll be damned if I don't do some exploration in this breathtakingly beautiful and refreshingly snow-free area.
Uh! What's this? A skull which shows small thingies on the map which I probably need to collect? Queue the fucking Pokémon theme 'cause I will find them! An ancient to-treasure-leading astronomical puzzle which shows the way to other puzzles in the opposite end of the the map that has been littered with crafting materials which I'll undoubtedly need to create dashing armour and deadly toxins? Buckle the **** up 'cause it's adventure time!
If you aren't careful you'll have explored everything except for the area with the flying sack of hellfire, commonly referred to as a dragon, and you've ended up at level 8 or higher only to discover that the next intended story area has level 4-7 written in the description. And there weren't really any signs along the way trying to nudge you into stopping the exploraganza.
And as it turns out, enemies are leveled according to the area, not based on your level. Alright, so there's some variation of the enemy levels in each area, but it's just not good enough. And it's a legitimate problem if you enjoy exploring. You can either fully explore everything from now on, which'll keeps you a fair bit above the intended area levels, or you can hold yourself back from exploring these awe-inspiring and absolutely beautiful areas, all of which are begging (and were created) to be explored. Whether you explore now or come back much later, you'll end up traversing the game being a fair bit stronger than the developers intended which in turn lowers the difficulty of the already not very challenging battles.
What they should have done, is use an approach similar to Bethesda's in the Elder Scrolls.
"Oh you've grinded your way to level 43 before you first main mission? Here, try this glass-axe-wielding, mithril plated Minotaur of imminent death and punishment"
I'm not saying that The Hinterlands eventually should have been plastered with Behemoths and Red Lyrium Giants if you grinded for long enough, just that they should have tweaked the level of the enemies you encountered according to that of the player. It would've done much for the overall experience. So in that regard, DA2's very forced and linear story actually worked better, if only because there wasn't much to explore and no unintended grinding.
When all is said and done though, the areas are nothing short of amazing. As opposed to the horror that was DA2, nothing noteworthy has been recycled and the design and layout of the maps and smaller areas are brilliant and believable. Y'Know that feeling when you play a game and wonder if you can reach that mountain far off in the distance? Well you can, and there'll still be explorable areas beyond it. It is, in my opinion, the second best part of the game, only trumped by the characters. And it really shouldn't be. I'm not saying I'd want less. The beauty and size of the maps just outshine the other, arguably more important, aspects of the game. The only flaw about all these areas is the fact that they're completely static. There are no elements of surprise and quite frankly not enough life to justify their size. And that's a damn shame. You can stand on any road for hours and you won't see anything travel down it. Enemies are locked into very specific, not very large or varied, patrol patterns meaning you can stand somewhere forever without any risk of being attacked. Changing these things would've helped tremendously with making the world seem alive and real.
Crafting:
With the very, very limited difficulty of battles, crafting is barely worth it. Yes, the weapons you craft will often be much better than the gear you find, but the difficulty of the game doesn't really call for it. It's not really something you have to think about unless you're playing on Nightmare difficulty which, ludicrous as it may seem, is the difficulty I'd recommend you start on if you've played the previous games or is at all familiar with the genre.
You can just as easily defeat enemies on Hard with looted gear as you can with crafted gear. And there's tons of gear to be found, so you might as well just find that if you're gonna go look for enough materials to craft for your entire entourage.
Another thing which is a little retarded is the sheer abundance of these materials.
There are a few "healers huts" where you find notes saying they've run out of Elfroot while they would have been able to pick said Elfroot by leaning out the window. There's a side-mission in Redcliffe Village where a healer has a list of materials that she's missing, all of which are located in abundance within 20 meters of her hut. There's no threat of Darkspawn attack or Bandits preventing her from gathering these materials. She could literally pick 3 times the amount of resources written on her list within the safety of the (rather small) city.
Approval:
Approval is a thing. Kinda. The notifications are a thing. And it probably is a thing, you just don't have any way of checking. There's no progress bar or any other indication of your standing with your party members. It might be able to make a party member leave you for good, but it doesn't seem like there's enough ways to inadvertently piss them off for that to be a concern.
It might influence the success of your flirting but it's hard to tell and seeing as you can romance characters that doesn't even have an approval meter I somehow doubt that is the case.
UI:
The UI is a horrible. Particularly so if you're playing it on a PC since it suffers heavily from console-port-itis. The Codex doesn't have a hotkey which results in a funny little tool tip bug asking you to press [ConceptMenuAlt] to read new entries. Journal tabs can't be toggled between permanent states of show more/less. Equipping stuff is cluncky unless you drag and drop it. From time to time it'll open something other than what you clicked on and no part of the UI has a right mouse-click functionality. It seems so natural and intuitive for it to have a "Back" function that I actually sat dumbfounded for a few seconds when I realised it didn't. The Junk tab of your inventory has ingeniously been renamed Valuables but contains both junk, research materials and materials needed to fulfill requisitions.
You'll also feel frustrated by the lack of information available at times. You can't compare things if one of the items aren't worn. If you craft something it might not have any upgrade slots but you couldn't see that when you made it.
To top it all off: Any interface generally works better if you use the keyboard instead of the mouse which means no effort has gone into making it work as nicely for PC as it does for consoles (which have other problems than the listed ones)
The dialogue wheel applies numbers to your dialogue options most of the time, meaning you can use the keyboard hotkeys to talk. But for reasons unbeknowst to me, this isn't always the case. There seems to be no logic to when or why, but a lot of the time your options simply aren't numbered and you're forced back to using the mouse.
These points aren't game-breaking in any way, some just doesn't make any sense, but whenever you encounter anything which makes you go "Ugh" it subtracts from the overall experience.
Missions:
The missions are pretty generic. It feels very single-player MMOish a lot of the time. Fetch this, return that, kill those, claim these. However, l am a little inclined to excuse some of this on BioWare's behalf since there is a lot of small side-missions so making each and every one of them interesting and memorable would've been quite the challenge.
But that isn't the only reason why they aren't great. They just don't have any impact. Not on you and not on the story. I don't expect the mother whom I brought medicine back in The Hinterlands to suddenly make a return later in the game and have a major impact on the story, but I would like to see that some of the mission mattered. If I tell the cult in the hills to help the refugees at the Crossroads, I'd like to feel that they actually do it instead of just the verbal confirmation from the leader that my orders are being carried out.
If I don't close all the Fade Rifts I'd like to hear about the horrible consequences and deaths of the people I could've saved.
We get none of that. The Fade Rifts aren't even active before you approach them. Not once do you stumble upon a village militia trying to stave off the unrelenting onslaught of demons that are coming through a rift to lay waste to their town. As it is, you can leave every Fade Rift that isn't directly tied to the main story and nothing will be different.
Another thing that never happens is a mission being more than what it seemed. The wedding ring you just returned wasn't in fact a strong magical artifact which you just returned to a power-hungry, revenge-driven dalish mage who wants revenge for the slaughter of her clan. This particular example would've been very clichéd but the fact that every single mission can be taken at face value remains. This is probably more of an afterthought since you don't necessarily think about it while playing the game, but in my opinion the feelings you're left with after completing a game is part of the experience and thus a valid target for criticism.
And those were examples of missions you actively take part in. The War Table has other missions which are completed by the agents of your advisors. The fact that you can take three different approaches to the completion of these missions is great and helps to make you feel that you're changing things. The outcome even varies depending on your choice, but it doesn't take that many missions to spot the actual lack of importance to these task. The rewards are often a complete joke regardless of who completed the mission which leads to a more meh-let's-just-send-whoever-on-this-one approach to a fair share of the missions unless you force your mentality back into RPG mode.
And then there's the unnerving amount of pointless collectibles you can find. Shards, bottles, mosaic pieces, landmarks and quarries and whatnot. None of which are important to the story in any way, shape or form and altogether seem to be there mostly to encourage in-depth exploration of the areas. Who runs around collecting bottles while leading an organization that's trying to restore peace and order to the world? And these items aren't really interesting enough by themselves to warrant further gameplay after completion of the story.
Power:
In order to progress the main storyline you need to spend Power to unlock new areas and missions. This is acquired through side missions and the like. This seems like a good idea at first, but it's not executed very well since everything gives you Power. If the game had idle animations, those would probably award power too. I ended the first playhtrough with 270 excess Power. 270! That's a ridiculous amount! It is, in fact, roughly twice the amount I've used throughout the course of the game. And I could've easily gotten much, much more. It's no doubt nice that I'm not forced into a specific selection of side quest in order to progress the main story, but this is just out of proportion when you aren't presented with anything else to spend the Power on.
Story:
The story should have been the best part of the game, and with this being the third game in an already very well-established universe, there really isn't any excuse for it not to be. Sadly, this is not the case in my opinion.
The story, while decent, is not great. As I've previously mentioned, none of the things you do actually matter, and the illusion that they matter isn't very well enforced. In spite of this, the story large revolves around you (The Inquisition that is) trying to gather enough support and allies to battle the armies of the arguably strongest enemy in the series. This story is pretty bland and seen before but I'll let that slip because that isn't really the problem with it. The problem is the way you meet this story and how it ends. I'll be comparing it to Origins since that had the best story so far:
In Origins, you're a Grey Warden who's been recruited just before the fifth blight reveals itself in Ferelden. The game is a desperate battle against time as you try to gather allies and stop the nobility from killing each other so they can stand united against this greater evil which, slowly but surely, spreads across the land. More or less like we see in Inquisition.
In the end you're outmanoeuvred by the Archdemon who launches its attack on the capital of Ferelden before you're ready, so you gather whatever allies you've got and march in an attempt to save the besieged city of Denerim and kill this ancient evil who commands the Darkspawn troops. This is brilliantly executed as you travel through the burning piles of rubble that now is Denerim, a place you've already visited earlier in the game, to reach the top of the tower where the Archdemon dwells after having been injured by a fellow Warden.
The fact that you've been in Denerim before, and can see the devastation caused by the enemy, really helps to make this final battle seem even bigger as you fight your way through the by-no-means-small number of Darkspawn troops. During the travel to, and while fighting, the Archdemon you can deploy groups of allies to assist you. These are a direct reflection of the alliances you've made throughout the game and really make it seem like it was worth it. The fact that a steady stream of battle-hardened dwarves from the Legions of the Dead come rushing out from the stairway to help fight the Archdemon and its allies also help to cement the strength of the enemy. You're left with a feeling that you really wouldn't have been able to take down this ancient powerhouse without your friends and allies.
Compare this to the non-existent fight against the armies of Corypheus which takes place in a lush, green and practically undisturbed jungle, amongst overgrown ruins where you see maybe 3 allied troops at a time fighting against a handful of his troops. And this is while both parties are being attacked by elven guardians of the ancient ruins you're running through. The game doesn't manage to properly convey a feeling of urgency nor indeed the feeling that there is a full-scale war going on, and there's 2 potion-refilling stations along the way to make sure you can't lose. You were told through dialogue and cinematics that you're in a great hurry to reach the artifact located in the heart of this temple before Corypheus lest certain doom awaits us. It doesn't feel very urgent as you play it though, and it feels even less urgent if you take the path which forces you to solve little puzzles to progress through these ruins. Yup. Puzzles amidst a war was the best BioWare could come up with at this crucial point in the story.
When entering the heart of the ruins, you're then presented with the option of a temporary alliance with the aforementioned elves, effectively making the journey even less perilous for your party. Ultimately, the enemy flees because you reach the artifact before him. He doesn't stay and obliterate the remainder of your armies in a fit of rage over once again having his plans foiled, no sir, he just packs his shit and runs away. "Victory" is yours.
The final battle, where you finally get to fight Corypheus, takes place back in the ruins of Haven, without the support of your armies since they can't make it there in time to stop whatever he's tryiing to do there. He cuts you off from whatever fighting is going on in the area by using his magic to lift the ruins of Haven into the sky, seemingly without effort. Millions of tons of rock defying gravity at his leisure. A truly excellent display of his power and certainly a feet that puts Luke Skywalkers efforts on Dagobah to shame.
When the fight actually begins though, not so much as a sliver of that power seem present.
Let me just point out that Corypheus is a 1000 year old darkspawn/magister hybrid from Tevinter in its glory days. One of the 9 magisters who, according to legend, entered and defiled the Golden City, seat of the Maker, effectively corrupting it by their mere presence, turning it black and unleashing the blights upon all of Thedas as a punishment for human greed. Not only that, he is in possession of an ancient elven artifact which makes him strong enough to tear apart the very fabric of reality. He is near immortal through his control over the powers of the blight itself AND HE COMMANDS A HIGHDRAGON!
The initial fighting is meh, with a lot of classic arch-nemesis rambling going on. Depending on your choices, Morrigan has shape-shifted into a dragon and is flying around battling his corrupted Highdragon while you fight Corypheus himself. She eventually gets what's coming to her and the dragon returns to protect its master. And what happens? Corypheus retreats as you battle against the dragon! Why? Why would he do this? Why not simply take advantage of this prime moment to destroy the 4 weaklings that came to kill him? To begin with he could at any time have released his magical grip on the ruins, effectively making you and a million tons of rock plummet towards the ground. None of this happens.
Anyway: After defeating it you then get to part two of fighting Corypheus which is almost exactly like part one. Nothing cements his power. Your merry band of 4 effectively defeats half a dragon and the single strongest individual mankind has seen for the past 1000 years. Calling the fight anti-climatic would be putting it mildly.
So yeah. I'm not satisfied by the story.
Skyhold:
This is the castle in the mountains which you get after your complete and utter defeat in Haven. It's a little ruined in the beginning, but as you progress through the story you're able to upgrade it and repairs are slowly completed. I say you upgrade it, but it's purely cosmetic. And one can only wonder why. In the Awakening DLC you spend time upgrading your keep too. All under the impression that it mattered, which it kinda did. Granted, it only changed stuff in the credits where it tells you that some survived because of the upgrades, but that was just a DLC. Why haven't they made it so it matters in Inquisition? The cosmetic upgrades aren't even very good. Upgrading the Main Watch Tower sounds boss right? But in spite of requiring stone from 3 separate quarries; there's still a gaping hole in the wall. Turns out all it did was add 4 banners and a number of bookshelves. Disappointed? I certainly was.
Misc:
I'm pretty much done. All that remains at this point are small bugs and other things I found to be annoying.
This includes the fact that barriers, which you're told needs to be attacked with a specific element, can be destroyed by auto-attacks from your mage regardless of which staff he or she wields.
The fact that using mounts doesn't feel fast enough to be worth it despite the cheesy speed-stripe trail of wind you generate at max speed.
It also includes the horror it is to enter character creation. To get from the main menu to picking a race, gender and class triggers a very short cinematic. Once you've picked those things, you have to go through a somewhat lengthy load screen and another slightly longer cinematic to actually start customizing your character. Rinse and repeat if you regret the race or gender for whatever reason or just want to see the alternatives before deciding. This is a major pain in the ass for immersive people who actually want to spend just a little time making a character.
Most of the other bugs aren't really anything that subtract from the game in my opinion. The fact that frame rate is locked at 30 fps during conversations isn't really a problem and it's not that noticeable unless you actively look for the signs.
All in all, I would still recommend the game though. Like I started out by saying: It's a fine game.
It just isn't as great as it could have been. I have no doubt you'll be enjoying it if you turn down your expectations just a little bit though.