Dragon Age Inquisition Review draft 2

      Dragon Age Inquisition

Dragon Age Inquisition is a Role Playing Game (or RPG) developed by Bioware and Published by EA. It was released on 8th of November 2014. It is the third game in the Dragon Age series which also includes books, comics and movies.

The game takes place in the fantasy land of Thedas. After Dragon Age 2 and the novel “Asunder” the Templars and Mages are at war. The empire of Orlais is also engaged in a civil war as seen in the novel “The Masked Empire” by Patrick Weekes. At the start of the game at peace talks between the Mages and the Templars at the temple of sacred ashes a massive explosion destroys the temple, kills the peace delegates and tears a massive rift in the sky into the fade, the land of dreams, spits and demons. The player character is the only survivor of the explosion. The player designs this character and they can be male or female and one of four races. The player gets to choose what dialogue this character says through-out the story.  The massive rift, called the breach, begins spitting out a horde of demons. In the midst of this chaos the inquisition is formed. The player character must lead this organisation to restore order to Thedas.

 The game is very large. A robust play through can take over a 100 hours. During this time the player will fight a large variety of enemies and bosses. The player controls a party of four including the player character and any three of the nine available companions. Each character is one of the three classes (Warrior, rouge and mage). Each of these classes is subdivided down into three specializations. The player uses standard attacks as well a special abilities unlocked by levelling up. The max level is 27. The player gets one point to spend on a ability or upgrade in any skill tree they can accesses (Four separate ones per class as well as an additional one for their specialization). The combat is a slow paced tactical affair, as the player tries to figure out which abilities to use, but the combat can become a slow drag at times except for the beautifully rendered dragons which are always a joyfully tough to fight.

 The game, over all, is quite beautiful. The rolling hills, derelict castles and empty deserts are simply breath-taking. Because my tastes in paintings are quite boring my favourite paintings are landscape paintings. Inquisition is like a landscape painting in motion.

 The true draw of dragon age is its story, more specifically its characters. There are nine companions and three advisers for you to get to know. Some are returning characters such as Varric is a companion in dragon age 2 and has appeared in the comics. Cassandra is a NPC dragon age 2 and the main character in the movie dawn of the seeker. Leliana, your spymaster, is a companion from dragon age origins as well as having a cameo in two novels. Cullen, your commander, is a minor character from both previous games. There are several others as well.

 In fact the story hinges on an intimate understanding of the lore of dragon age to get the most out of it. Though most of it is explained in the wonderfully written codex entries, newcomers can still feel pretty overwhelmed by it all. Many of the major lore revelations, exiting for series veterans such as myself, may be lost on newcomers. It feels like Bioware overcompensated for their previous release, Mass Effect 3, often criticized for spending too much time explaining things already known to fans of the series for the benefit of newcomers. The size of the environments feels like another area where Bioware over compensated. Inquisition's predecessor, Dragon Age 2, was often criticized for its small, cramped and often flat out reused environments. The result is a game with very large, very pretty environments that have nothing but busy work to do in them. Since it would be very expensive to include dozens of fully voiced intricate side quests almost all of the side activities to boring fetch quests initiated by either a short conversation or, more often, finding a note. A few of these can be interesting such as the quest where you must crawl through a haunted estate trying to piece together what happened from scattered notes while occasionally getting attacked by undead but most are a boring slog with little story.

 The main story missions are by far the best part of the game. The soundtrack composed by Trevor Morris is also excellent. Though the game is in my opinion better then Dragon Age 2 I think it falls short of the quality of Dragon Age Origins. That said, It is an excellent game that had me exited, awed, laughing and on the verge of tears.