Resumen en castellano: Muy bien todo.
Yo intenté con varios roles diferentes y llegaba a un punto que me era imposible continuar por la dificultad.
:
: WTF?! :: :: ¿Que trasfondo escogiste???!! Pero si Mass Effect, en comparación con el trasfondo de la elfa de ciudad de DA1, parece un episodio de Barrio Sésamo! ::
Elfo de ciudad, ladron. Que algo intente ser dramatico no significa que lo consiga. En general las tramas me parecieron bastante planas y carentes de interes...les falta gancho. Hay tramas en mass effect mas adultas y que implican un razonamiento mas alla del "oh que bueno soy" o el "oh que malo soy".:
Hombre, todo son opiniones, a mí me atrajo más la idea de empezar como un absoluto mindundi que no es nadie (como son el caso de los elfos de ciudad y del acondroplásico sin casta, es más, en el primer caso tienes prácticamente a todo el mundo en tu contra) y tener que sobrevivir como se pueda, frente a ser... Rambo (Shepard empieza el ME 1 siendo un N7, que no es moco de pavo, Anderson también fue uno, por cierto) y tener ya desde el principio a tu tripulación, ser candidato a espectro, e incluso prácticamente a tu nave también (te la dan al poco de empezar, vaya). Además (ya lo he comentado antes), la historia de mi elfa de ciudad (mi primer DA lo jugué con un mago) es en plan Lázaro de Tormes:Elfo de ciudad, ladron. Que algo intente ser dramatico no significa que lo consiga. En general las tramas me parecieron bastante planas y carentes de interes...les falta gancho. Hay tramas en mass effect mas adultas y que implican un razonamiento mas alla del "oh que bueno soy" o el "oh que malo soy".
Todo es subjetivo
Dragon Age 3 year-delay enabled multiple playable races • News • Eurogamer.net
Dragon Age 3 year-delay enabled multiple playable races
"Because we moved the date we were able to bring it back."
By Robert Purchese Published Thursday, 15 August 2013
Delaying Dragon Age 3 by a year meant multiple playable races could be reinstated to the series, BioWare has revealed.
"Because we moved the date we were able to bring it back," executive producer Mark Darrah told GameInformer. "We basically just had the time necessary to bring it back."
The delay - or rather the new release date of autumn 2014 - was announced at E3 alongside a new trailer, amowing an elongated period of silence surrounding the game.
Series creative director Mike Laidlaw said reinstating races was a decision "100 per cent based on fan feedback", plus a bit of internal desire, and was made "well before E3".
"Why didn't we bring it up?" he prompted. "We wanted to make sure it was locked down; we wanted to make sure our homework was done so we could commit to it and people could, with absolute enthusiasm, get ready for elf or dwarf or whatever."
Elves and dwarves were the only new playable races mentioned - and shown in renders - during the GameInformer video. Humans, elves and dwarves were the three races available in Dragon Age 1, each with two racial variations to choose from.
In Dragon Age 3, as in Dragon Age 1, your choice of race affects your character's background. Elves are the spat-on servants of the world and some dwarves the outcasts of their own society. Both are less than trusted.
Choosing either elf or dwarf will miccionan the world reacts differently to you. In some cases this will have a "huge" impact, such as when dealing with significant racial factions or even elven servants.
The other story-significant character creation choice you can make besides race will be whether you're a mage or not. The backdrop of Dragon Age 3, remember, is a war between the churchy templars and the mages.
Incidentally, if you look closely, there's a short clip of someone playing Dragon Age 3 in the background in the GameInformer video.
Dragon Age 3 - Inquisition as it's known - is due on current and next-gen consoles, as well as PC, next autumn.
¿Puedo tener un nug? :8:Dragon Age Inquisition allows you to tailor your historical world state
Via new cloud-based service Dragon Age Keep.
By Jeffrey Matulef Published Wednesday, 28 August 2013
BioWare fans may recall that Mass Effect 3 allowed new players to answer a few questions about their previous exploits, so it could arrange this third chapter to their specifications. It was a nice idea that allowed those who lost their save files along the way to maintain most of their original choices, but it wasn't very comprehensive and failed to let players say that they rescued Wrex, for example. The studio has learned from this, though, and will be offering further options in its upcoming Dragon Age Inquisition via a new service called Dragon Age Keep.
In addition to The Keep, Dragon Age Inquisition will also antiestéticature one of these. It's called a nug.
"Within the Dragon Age Keep, you'll be able to customise a Dragon Age historical world state to your exact specifications drawn from Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 story decisions," explained BioWare in its FAQ for this new program. "These include hero attributes, companion details, quest results, and more. Customise as much or as little as you wish... For new players, the Keep will serve as a great way to understand the people, places, and events that shaped the world leading up to Dragon Age Inquisition."
Since Inquisition will be available on next-gen consoles, BioWare needed to move save state data into the cloud, which is precisely what the Keep does. "You can fully explore what-if scenarios, and become aware of events and consequences in our past games that you may not have known were possible. You can then fire up the previous games and go exploring for those moments," explained executive producer Mark Darrah in The Keep's announcement. "Even if you don't go back and re-play the previous games, you can still establish that scenario as part of your world state, and import it at the start of a new Dragon Age Inquisition game to see the consequences of your actions."
There will be some form of save importing in addition to The Keep, though BioWare said it will detail that later. In the meantime, players can sign up for The Keep's beta, which will launch in early 2014.
That might seem like a long time to wait, but BioWare wants to be sure its numerous choices and consequences don't interfere with one another - something that's been a problem in the past. "An import from Dragon Age Origins to Dragon Age 2 brought across something in the order of 600 different data points, most requiring complex logic solving to answer correctly the question of 'how did the player settle this choice at the end of the game?'" explained Darrah. "As a result, some current save imports are buggy, which is our fault, and something we're committed to fixing. Permanently."
Dragon Age Keep is slated to launch a few months before Inquisition in 2014.
Dragon Age: Inquisition preview shows combat and consequences | Ars Technica
Dragon Age: Inquisition's secret base camp replacement will make you "freak out" • News • Eurogamer.netDragon Age: Inquisition preview shows combat and consequences
Bioware's next fantasy epic focuses on dilemmas and weightier battles.
by Kyle Orland - Sep 1, 2013 2:00 am UTC
If there's one thing that comes through in the first public demonstration of BioWare's Dragon Age: Inquisition, it's that the company is eager to get back on track after the somewhat ill-received changes found in 2011's Dragon Age II. The new title, set for release late next year, is all about being a force for change in an expansive world that's churning around you, leaving behind a more insular focus on the internal dynamics of a few characters.
"We're trying to stay true to one of the original goals of the franchise, which is to be about a place, about a time," the creators said. "It's not about a single story, it's not about a single character."
That place and time in Inquisition are what the creators are calling a "world out of balance," where a cataclysmic event has opened giant rifts between dimensions, brought the dead back to life, and generally caused too much chaos to be just a coincidence. Both the mages and the Templars have the power to fix this problem, but they're too focused on a hopelessly deadlocked war to settle their differences and address the larger problem.
That's where the Inquisition, an ancient institution dedicated to rooting out corruption from outside of any church or established order, comes in. The new game is as much about building up this now-resurgent organization as it is about building up your characters, the creators said, gaining the trust of the people and the ability to wield more organizational power as you go.
The key to this system of influence is a series of keeps placed throughout the world, each of which lets you extend your control over the nearby area. You can capture them indirectly—say by poisoning the water supply or using signal fires to draw out the keeps' forces—or through direct attacks. Once you have control, you can tailor the keeps to a few different styles, deciding whether to focus on espionage, military strength, or commerce, for instance. You'll also be able to send out inquisition agents, who can unlock new projects and abilities in the area.
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/DAI-Inquisitor-and-amowers.jpg
A game of dilemmas
These are actually some of the less important choices that the creators are trying to make the focus of Inquisition. "What we're trying to bring back for Dragon Age: Inquisition is the concept of dilemma... when you're faced with a choice, it means you know what's going to happen, you understand the consequences, but the differences between those consequences make it hard to pick between those choices."
These kinds of choices are reserved for massive, epic-level events. You might have to decide whether to allow a king to die when his rival is offering you more power, for instance. "It's a place where people make bad decisions for good reasons. We don't have mustache-twirling villains. … while you might not agree with the reasons someone does something, you should at least understand."
It all sounds a bit more advanced than the simple paragon/renegade type of dichotomy found in most Bioware games. The familiar wheel-shaped dialogue choice system has been modified this time around, as well, to provide a direct hint as to precisely what will happen if you choose a certain response. That change makes sure that "you never pick 'To heck with you!' and end up slaughtering the guy's entire village," for instance. While this antiestéticature can be turned off, even when it's on the creators stress that the game will only warn you about your direct actions, and not their potential unforeseen consequences.
And those consequences can be dire. Not only will decisions you make in Inquisition sometimes unlock new content and quests, but choosing certain options can actually cut off certain lines of content, making them inaccessible in the future. If you choose not to defend a keep that's under attack, for instance, you may come back to it later to find the stronghold burned to the ground, along with all the content it would have contained at that point.
The ways you project this kind of influence on the world will often be less explicit than it has been in previous Dragon Age games as well, the creators say. For instance, if you come across an abandoned boat controlled by the Inquisition's enemies, you're free to set it on fire (provided you have the appropriate potion or magic spell). But the game isn't going to just pop up with a prompt suggesting that you take up some beneficial pyromancy. "The idea of pressing A to do everything is something we're trying to avoid."
Bye bye health regeneration
Any changes to the story and consequence systems seem minor compared to the alterations Bioware is making to combat in Inquisition. This time around, your characters' health will no longer recover automatically after every fight, which means you'll have to plan ahead for an entire adventure's worth of battles at a time, and make much more careful use of your limited potion space than in previous games. "Getting away [from a battle] with one guy with a sliver of health is not going to leave you in a very good place," the creators said.
Enemies in Inquisition no longer automatically level up alongside your character, either. That means if and when you come back to an earlier area, you'll find the foes there will be much easier to defeat than they were the first time through. It also means, however, that you might run in to pockets of enemies in certain spots that you are just ill-equipped to handle at that point in time, forcing you to hold off until you've improved your party a bit.
Luckily, combat doesn't start as soon as you're spotted, giving you a bit of time to prepare for fight or flight. It also gives you time to pause the action and switch into an overhead tactical view (which will now be in all versions of the game, not just the PC edition). Here you can issue orders and position your party for maximum effect, rather than relying on your real-time reflexes. It's now a bit easier to stay in this view as you issue your orders and let them play out, as well.
Of course, the creators are emphasizing the ability to play battles out in a number of ways. Depending on your party's strengths, you can go in strong with armor busting force, or play more tactically, cutting the opposing forces in half with a wall of ice, for instance. In one particularly thrilling battle demonstration, a mage froze two guards, allowing a warrior to run past them and slice away at a weak brig support, bringing down the two troublesome archers perched atop the structure.
For all the tweaks and changes to the formula shown during the demo, the overall feeling I got was of a company trying to recapture to the melding of an epic, branching story with the tight, tactical combat that made the first Dragon Age game so refreshing. Inquisition is set to hit PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 late next year.
No-One Expects A 30 Minute Video Of Dragon Age Inquisition
By Alec Meer on November 12th, 2013 at 3:00 pm.
Quick, quick, before it’s pulled!
Unless of course this is a clever marketing ruse, wherein giving the impression that this half-hour of in-game Dragon Age 3-ing is somehow illicitly-obtained makes everyone frantically watch every second of it. WE ARE BEING TRICKED DON’T WATCH THIS VIDEO WHATEVER YOU DO
[YOUTUBE]f8xJMWRI-cA[/YOUTUBE]
This footage was captured at Finnish games expo, or so the story goes. We know the truth – it’s Mike Laidlaw wildly waving his iPhone at his own monitor while someone runs a large and noisy fan in the background to simulate crowd noise.
Shaky cam funtimes means it probably doesn’t afford a decent look at the graphics, but hopefully it’s more helpful in terms of understanding how combat works.
HERE IS A SUGGESTION WHICH WILL NOT BEAR FRUIT: why not comment on what you think of Dragon Age Inquisition, rather than how you felt about Dragon Age 2? Honestly, everything’s been said about that already.
Alistair not a party member in Dragon Age: Inquisition
Plus: Morrigan character design released.
By Robert Purchese Published Tuesday, 4 February 2014
Alistair, a key part of Dragon Age: Origins, will not be a party member in Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Series executive producer Mark Darrah revealed this on Twitter moments ago. Whether Alistair will appear in the upcoming RPG at all we'll "have to wait and see", Darrah said.
BioWare also announced a new initiative to support fan artists and cosplayers that will see the developer release "detailed, descriptive, high-resolution character designs before the game is released".
The first of witch is Morrigan in a ball gown. Morrigan, another pivotal party member in Dragon Age: Origins, will also not be a party member in Dragon Age: Inquisition, although she'll still play a significant role in the story.
Nobody Expects A Dragon Age – Inquisition In-Game Video
By Adam Smith on April 22nd, 2014 at 6:00 pm.
Extreme Last Supper: Inquisition Edition
I remember when Dragon Age trailers were all Marilyn Manson, blood, guts and witchy sex. How things have changed. Or perhaps not. The latest trailer for Dragon Age: Inquisition shows some in-game footage, including a moment of dodge-rolling that made me hanker for Dark Souls II even more than I already am, but it’s mostly bombastic music and high-falutin’ voiceovers. In fact, watch the Origins trailer and this one back to back, switch out ‘Blight’ for ‘Breach’ whenever one or the other occurs, and it doesn’t look all that different. Prettier though. And with less blood and sex.
[YOUTUBE]uO2h4qUNJ60[/YOUTUBE]
I may risk offending the fandom by saying this, but I presume the smarmy ‘raining demons’ chap is a returning character? The close up and the fact that he interrupts the trailer’s Serious Fantasy Business make him stand out like a proper actor doing an ill-advised cameo in a Uwe Boll movie. Dragon Age is very confusing to me. I did play Origins for a while but then I realised it was about eighty hours longer than I’d expected so I stopped.
No witchy sex for me.
¿El Dragon Age: Inquisition sale en Noviembre?
ienso: pensé que era para el 2015...
Dragon Age: InquisitionDragon Age: Inquisition review
Tevinter is coming.
By Richard Cobbett Published 11/11/2014 Version tested PC
There's a definite end of an era feel to much of Dragon Age: Inquisition, whether or not BioWare has a fourth in the pipeline. This is what everything's been leading towards; all those choices, all the adventure, all the drama, and all the epic battles so far - of good vs. evil, of mages vs. templars and, of course, of RPG fans everywhere vs. Dragon Age 2.
Love or loathe that game, Inquisition feels like an open attempt to atone for its sins - a comeback play from a company that knows that still being one of the genre's heaviest hitters doesn't miccionan its reputation isn't on the line. Luckily, lessons have been learned. No longer does one cave try to pass for ten, or has streamlining taken all the choice out of adventuring. This is still firmly a modern BioWare RPG rather than a return to Origins' long abandoned old-school aspirations, but one bursting in ambition and scale.
That scale isn't just in its maps, though those are the first hint of it, and the difference between them and what came before is night and day. Finally, Thedas feels like a world rather than a series of glorified corridors - one open for exploration. It's not fully open, a la Skyrim; each major area is neatly packed in its own box, linked by a map as before. Those boxes however now stretch out as far as the eye can see, across valleys and mountains, with waves smashing the coast, villages, enemy camps, caves, swamps and temples all littering the landscape... along with a number of smaller maps for specific stories and major interiors... and both a horse and fast travel needed to zip around on your many jobs. How beautiful does everything look turned up to full? Enough that I put this review on hold for a day so that I could get a GeForce 970 to replace my old 660. It was clear it deserved nothing less.
This is a glorious looking game… aside from many characters' painfully plastic hair and hilarious joke shop beards and moustaches.
Once the shine had worn off though, disappointment began setting in. Inquisition zips quickly through its set-up, in which you're a survivor of a mysterious breach in the sky that's spitting out demon spawning tears, but not quickly enough to hide that you're an amnesiac hero, the threat is basically Oblivion's gates recoloured green, and that the villain of the piece is referred to as "The Elder One", as if the entire writing team had just thrown their hands up in defeat. The role-playing too, pretty as it is, didn't feel like BioWare. There are straight up MMO style quests, like collecting 10 bits of meat, which at least make sense in context - that you're helping refugees and refugees need food. Others, however, are thrown in with no finesse whatsoever. You find a letter that says, in about as many words, "Girls really dig people who can kill bears!" and then ping, your Quest Journal suddenly thinks you're interested in bear-hunting. The first hour of a game is a bad, bad time for it to be resorting to this crap.
The reason for the sack of activities where normally there'd be more involved quests is that Inquisition takes as many cues from the likes of Assassin's Creed as other RPGs, with its maps a sack of quests, collectibles, secret bits and general things to do. These in turn provide levels and gives the Inquisition the power to take on bigger problems in more traditional quests, like preventing the assassination of the Empress of Orlais, home of some of the dodgiest accents this side of 'Allo 'Allo. The further you get, the more of that good stuff there is to do, including spin-offs from the main quest like your companions' personal quests. Early on though, it's just busy-work. The big threat is boring, and it's hard to take everyone seriously when they rattle on about its urgency but still have time to make fancy Inquisition banners and armour, and the basic solution is openly "Just get some mages to help zap the green swirly thing."
Thankfully, a fifth or so of the way in the villain finally tips their hand, and amateur hour ends. Now you're officially in charge of the Inquisition instead of simply the only person in it able to get anything done, the stakes become meaningful and dramatic, the mysteries become interesting. Most importantly, there's a beautiful sense of actually having power, of sitting in judgement over defeated foes, of dispatching spies and soldiers around Thedas to do your bidding, of conquering forts that fill with your people instead of just setting up campsites, of going from this small heretical organisation to a major power that decides the outcome of elections and gets called up by the King for favours, and seeing your home base go from a ruined, desolate castle into the salvation of the land. At least, if all goes well.
As the only one in Thedas capable of closing Rifts to the Fade, you've no choice but to lead from the front. Dull as dealing with them gets.
None of this is remotely deep or strategic. When asked if a situation calls for diplomacy, spies or military strength, any of them will work and few require any more effort on your part than actively not declaring "Zhu Li, do the thing!" at an unlistening monitor. There's enough of it to compensate for that though, and more than enough wrapping to sell the illusion, while still justifying why you're always in the field instead of consigned to a desk. Most stories and decisions just provide trinkets or Dragon Age's equivalent of Mass Effect 3's War Assets, though others can unlock their own stories and decisions further down the story. Somewhat oddly they have timers of the kind you'd expect to see in an F2P mobile game, but those don't get in the way. Actual story quests are clearly labelled, and the flavour ones optional.
Much of the time though, the only way to get things done is to head out with swords, shields, staffs and spells and crack some skulls. Inquisition changes up the combat dramatically, with the biggest difference being that there are now no healers or out-of-combat health recharges. Instead you have camps where you can heal up and replenish your stock of healing potions, with more opening up as you push through each map. Regular potions are free, and all I ever used. You can discover better and different ones though, which require ingredients to make, as well as upgrade the ones you've got, providing a good middle ground between Dragon Age's constant herb farming and automatic healing. This is also much how the whole game works when it comes to aspects like crafting custom gear, upgrading weapons and ticking off all the quests on each map. You can if you like, but at least on Normal difficulty, you never actually have to if you just want to plug on with the story.
Combat tries to offer a similar compromise, though it's not entirely successful. By default fights are much like Dragon Age 2's pausable action, with other party members controlled by basic scripts. By default, for instance, they'll glug potions until you're down to two, so that you can choose who gets the last couple yourself. It's also possible to zoom out to a tactical view as in Origins and play from afar. In practice though, everyone moves around far too much and too quickly, with mages especially just spamming endless pyrotechnic attacks limited only by a slight cooldown. There were many exciting battles on the main story, but none I could say were tactically very interesting, and none of them against one of the oddly unimaginative damage-sponge bosses, with Rift clean-up detail especially wearing out its welcome. Like the equally boring Oblivion gates, every one is basically the same - deal with a couple of demon waves, don't stand on exploding ground, close rift. Yawn. At least there are meatier bonus challenges elsewhere, not least taking on the huge dragons around the world.
While that side provides most of the raw action though, it's the adventure and political parts of the game that make Inquisition work - its understanding that a party in Orlais, where the Great Game is played for the highest stakes, should be just as dangerous as anything that happens in a dungeon. After two games of controlling a ragtag bunch of misfits, it's also interesting to be in a position of genuine power for once; to be the one who directly makes and lives with calls on controversies like whether mages deserve their freedom.
At times though, it can still be oddly... not bland as such, but definitely flatter than it should be, with an odd reluctance to amow through on anything that might create a sense of vulnerability or ambiguity. Case in point: the Inquisition is constantly sold as being controversial and deeply mistrusted, but in practice just about everyone except all-out evil factions tend to be reasonably happy to see you, and often desperate to sign up. Your first proper enemy meanwhile literally introduces himself by punching a nun in the face.
This is all especially notable because the whole concept, and your position at its head, feels like it was invented specifically to offer interesting moral choices and difficult decisions. Very rarely though are you given a choice whether the best option isn't obvious, and I can't think of a single one that rebounded in an interesting way later on. There's nothing wrong with classic heroic fantasy and do-gooding of course, but here the shades of grey are notable by their absence rather than their intrigue, especially in the wake of other recent offerings like The Witcher 2 and Game of Thrones, where decisions constantly have huge implications. Here, everything remains insular, confined to its own bit of the story rather than being intertwined and paying off when you least expect it. At least, unless I was just unlucky.
It doesn't help that the cast is ridiculously big for a group of people that you're meant to forge connections with. In BioWare tradition, new party members come thick and fast, but here you also have a team of up to four advisors with their own storylines, a castle full of people, a big board of operations and all kinds of distractions. It's just too much at once, with the inevitable result being that most of the team just ends up standing around waiting to be called on.
Easily my favourite of the ones I used was Dorian, the amusingly moustached Tevinter mage and the Inquisition's designated snarker (also BioWare's first lgtb party member, though that only really comes up in his personal quest - a somewhat on-the-nose PSA with experience points), who tended to be partnered with the slowly defrosting Cassandra from the last game and a Qunari warrior called Iron Bull. The rest of the team run the gamut from a childlike elf to a mysterious spirit, but having no particular need of them, I had to go out of my way to even say hello. I'd have made an exception and brought Varric along on quests even though I didn't need a rogue, but he and Leliana (now your spymistress rather than a party member) have gone through the same thing as Anders, with much of their humour surgically removed between sequels. Leliana in particular is barely recognisable as the bard who was once up for a foursome with Isabella the pirate queen, and the ambient dialogue in general never got close to the zip of Dragon Age 2's banter or the squabbling between Morrigan and Alistair. BioWare games usually do a great job of making your group feel like family. Here, they were assets.
Despite this and its shaky start though, Inquisition does come together into a very worthy Dragon Age sequel that never stopped being compelling once it had the chance to build up its momentum. To some extent the quieter moments throughout even help to amplify the bigger quests and more dramatic plot points, while the free choice of where to spend your attention afterwards makes for a refreshingly open RPG that's still focused on the story it's telling - one that goes from strength to strength as the stakes ramp up and the war for Thedas begins.
Its not-so-fatal flaw is that in offering so much, both in terms of player choice and in going for peak-BioWare in every aspect of the game, those individual moments, characters, activities and plot beats often don't benefit from the focus and importance needed to unlock their full potential. Still, that's hardly a crime, and one more than made up for by the many high points that I can't name directly for antiestéticar of spoilers, the hours and hours both adventuring in Thedas as it was always meant to be, and sitting at the highest levels of its politics. The true power of the Inquisition may be illusory, but that doesn't stop it being satisfying to wield while it lasts.
8 / 10
Dragon Age: Inquisition—Let’s spend some time together
Review: BioWare’s massive, sprawling world is held together by its core relationships.
by Steven Strom Nov 11, 2014 4:20 pm UTC
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 amow 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 amowing 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.
A question of character
Of the nine playable characters in your Inquisition party (not counting your custom Inquisitor), Varric is the only familiar face from previous games. Other familiar characters show up only in advisory roles or cameos. Among the newcomers, the sex-positive Qunari mercenary/spy who goes by the title The Iron Bull is a particular favorite. The seven-foot-tall, horned-eye-patch aficionado is a devout amower of his motherland's super-communist manifesto. Engage him in conversation and he'll tell you all about its exotic, often seemingly despicable workings while admitting it's not for everyone. If things move to romance, however, you'll discover his proclivities for BDSM—presented as consensual and healing, rather than for laughs or "shock value."
Even the less interesting members of the party have their surprising, personal, relationship-based character moments, though. There's Vivienne, the deeply conservative mage who happens to engage in royal politics. She couldn't be any more different from Sera and her gleeful, violent Robin Hood antics. Every single party member can seem like a cliché at first, but conversation reveals them to be much more.
As it so often does, BioWare uses the diverse cast to explore a whole new swath of social commentary through fantasy metaphor. Thedas has always been a fairly approving place—women and men are generally treated equally, race (as in the color of one's skin) isn't a discriminatory issue, and the existence of homo/bisexuality is never really remarked upon. That's absolutely fine. This is a fantasy, after all, and there's nothing wrong with a fantasy reflecting a happier, safer, better version of reality (ignoring the dragons and subterranean monsters, of course).
But that doesn’t miccionan the game is subtle about casting a lens on real-world social issues. Without navigating into spoilers, suffice it to say that two characters in particular face challenges when roaming in areas of Thedas that are less accepting of challenges to the norms of gender identity and sexuality. On the one hand, it's nice to see BioWare’s boldness in using the game to discuss issues that have resonance outside the game's fantasy world. On the other hand, this wider focus illuminates a major problem with the game's conversation structure.
The Iron Bull's views on physical intimacy aren't obvious from the start, for instance. Instead, they’re revealed slowly over time as the characters unravel themselves to you through shared experience and player choices. This kind of slow character revelation is the best part of most BioWare games, Inquisition included, but as BioWare charts more delicate waters with its characters, maneuvering through those character-building choices comes off as a little clumsy this time around.
The intentionally vague nature of the conversation wheel is less appropriate when every nuance of a character’s tone is important. A chosen line like "Well, that was interesting" could come out as a tension-breaking quip or an insult at Varric's continued antics, and it's the game that decides which one gets presented. Without knowing exactly what a character is going to say or how they'll say it, you can't be sure any decision reflects intent. It's a testament to the quality of voice acting and how much you'll care about the cast of characters that the delivery of dialogue can weigh so heavily on a player's psyche.
Get ready to dive deep
Between considering your choice of words with allies and enemies, you'll spend a lot of time traversing the fields, forests, swamps, and deserts of Fereldan (read: fantasy England) and Orlais (read: fantasy France). A lot of time. Even dashing straight through the main story alone will take most players between 50 and 60 hours, and that’s without running off to seal every stray breach into the spirit world or righting every middling wrong you encounter.
The game will keep you occupied for much longer than that if you choose to really delve into its open world. The game is technically split into several sprawling regions that can be accessed from a world map, and each area is massive enough to be an entire game world in and of itself (though some are more massive than others).
What these multifaceted areas lack in the structural and population density of, say, Assassin's Creed, they make up for in bespoke content. Dozens of completely inconsequential NPCs are fully voiced with dialogue trees and backgrounds to investigate. Quests and activities chain together constantly—you might solve a trio of constellation puzzles that lead you to a dungeon that's home to another side quest, for instance. Completing that quest, in turn, earns a new agent for the Inquisition that expedites operations back at the organization's home base. Completing that operation might open up a new area, and the cycle continues.
Whatever you choose to do, it will almost certainly end in conflict. Demons, crazy mages, mutant soldiers: there are plenty of angry things to immolate, electrocute, batter, or freeze (usually all of the above). If that's what you're looking for, the combat is rooted in the same kind of cooldown-based abilities and standard attacks established in the first two Dragon Age games.
There's a tactical mode that lets more strategic players freeze the action rather than battling in real time, but you'll likely only need it on the higher difficulties. Inquisition can be challenging, but it's a challenge that comes more from the attrition of non-regenerating health between fights than the moment-to-moment encounters. Just make sure to restock your potions and you’ll be fine.
The biggest issue with the open world loop is getting around. A game like Assassin's Creed might not have the same breadth of unique activities to take part in, but that series often makes getting place to place a reward all its own. It's just the opposite in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Movement over flat surfaces is fine, if a bit dull, but scaling mountaintops for collectibles feels like trying to break the game's geometry just right, so that the Inquisitor's undignified bunny hops carry them high enough to reach the next ledge. Oftentimes, it's not even clear if you're meant to be able to get from one spot to another, or if the developers had another, highly specific route in mind.
Horses are an absolute godsend for traveling long, flat distances, and because they're seemingly indestructible, a good horse makes it a breeze to get down from the mountain you spent five minutes zigzagging your way up. That said, controlling these sluggish, easily turned-around mounts is an exercise in frustration. Not long after unlocking my first, I realized it was less of a hassle to just hoof it alone in 90 percent of the regions.
Taking the time to travel on foot has several advantages. You can stop to collect crafting materials for use back at Skyhold—the Inquisition's base of operations—and party members banter with each other, exposing some of the most endearing lines in the game.
Walking around, you can also take the time to appreciate how good the world of Dragon Age looks in DICE's latest Frostbite engine. It may lack a certain photorealism, but Inquisition is still a sight to behold at times. Snow-covered trees bend in the wind, green portals throw off excited particle effects, and dragons fight impressive battles against 30-foot giants on a rainy coast. The basic beauty of the surroundings provides a very nice reminder of why your band of misfits is fighting to protect the world from some vague obliteration.
Despite its shortcomings, Inquisition and its wide-open world is a great improvement over the clipped, small-scale experiment of Dragon Age 2. Though the familiar conversation wheel is starting to show its age this time around, the game has just enough thoughtful character moments and meaningful choices to draw you back into the fantasy for at least one more outing.
The Good
* This game is long but not bloated. It's a slow, character-driven burn that earns its length.
* A full, beautiful open world makes the sluggishness of exploration worthwhile.
* Once again, BioWare delivers characters worth getting to know over 100 hours worth of exploration—geographical and personal.
The Bad
* Exploration may be rewarding, but it's also clumsy.
* The vagueness of the conversation wheel is starting to outlive its usefulness.
The Ugly
* A horse, crumpling under its own weight after a 300-foot drop and standing back up again, is terrifying.
Verdict: If you're looking for a long-term video game relationship, Dragon Age: Inquisition is exactly that—including the compromises that entails.
