Dragon Age: Inquisition—Let’s spend some time together

Back in 2009, Dragon Age: Origins was meant to be a throwback to role-playing games of the past. It was challenging and full of meaningful decisions that promised major impact both later in the game and in its coming sequels. It used the familiar to create something memorable while never pretending to reach for the widest possible audience. In short, it was a game that felt like it should have never been published by a monolithic mainstream publisher like Electronic Arts, which had purchased developer BioWare in late 2007.

In 2011, Dragon Age 2 was just the opposite—a tightly budgeted, sparse, and populist attempt at aping the RPG flavor of the week. It was Mass Effect with more swords and less soul. Rather than build on its predecessor, it opted for a fresh start that already felt stale before the game was even complete.

Now there’s Dragon Age: Inquisition. This time, BioWare has chosen to follow the trends set by another popular RPG, opening up the world in the style of Bethesda’s popular Elder Scrolls series. Unlike the merely serviceable Dragon Age 2, however, Inquisition actually might be worthy of its inspiration.

Back to basics

On the surface, not too much has been changed from Inquisition’s forebears. Combat is still based in the tradition of Knights of the Old Republic, with hotbar-ready spells and abilities to be used in strategic patterns that account for their built-in cooldown times. Dialogue, meanwhile, uses BioWare's now-signature conversation wheel to choose from several variations in tone (smarmy, stoic, angry, confused, etc.).

Right from the start, there is one welcome return to form following Dragon Age 2. Character customization, which was limited to class, gender, and appearance in the last outing, is now more in line with the wide range of options offered in Origins. Choosing a race between humans, dwarfs, elves, and the newly playable Qunari might not seem critical on its own, but in the highly politicized world of Thedas, it has a huge impact on the protagonist's relationships with other characters and the portrait that paints for the player.

It takes a great deal of time for that impact to become apparent, however. Dragon Age: Inquisition is the slowest of slow burns. The main story alone takes dozens of hours to complete, and it's not until roughly a third of the way through that conversations, quests, and relationships between the nine available party members are fully unlocked. Over those hours, a basic fantasy plot slowly unfolds, revolving around holes in the dream world (The Fade) which have opened and allowed demons and all manner of nastiness to leak through to reality. The player, as an Inquisitor, has the convenient ability to close the breaches and save the world.

It's a fairly standard fantasy setup, but the larger crisis really isn’t that important. Like the first two Dragon Age games, Inquisition sets itself apart by focusing less on the larger conflict and more on the intrigues of various factions and characters. The disaster that kicks off events also kills most of the world’s leading political figures, and the Inquisition steps in to fill the power vacuum. What form that power takes is determined by the player's actions, background, and working relationships with their "inner circle,” which is why the ability to customize characters is so important.

All that intrigue makes Inquisition a rough jumping on point for new players. There’s an in-game codex to explain minutiae like the Chantry, Circles of Magi, Blights, and the like as they appear in the game, but that stopgap solution provides the names and events with none of the context. You might as well read the Wikipedia summary of the first two Lord of the Rings novels before jumping into Return of the King.

BioWare has provided a choose-your-own-adventure-like puzzle, called Dragon Age Keep, to allow new players step through a set of major choices from the first two games for import into Inquisition. This can be useful for returning players, too—even after the hundreds of hours spent playing Origins and DA2, I completely forgot about certain elements of the first two games. Thankfully, the Keep offers a narrated recap of those stories that reflects your custom weave of choices. It's still not nearly the optimal way to approach Inquisition, but it is the best available alternative to dozens of hours of prep work in previous games and expansions.