DA:I Dragon Age: Inquistion (GotY Edition) Review

The mages and their, shall we say, keepers the Templars have been fighting for years. Now they are meeting at the Temple of Sacred Ashes to talk peace with the Chantry’s Divine Justinia presiding. Everybody who is somebody is there to have their say. Then the whole thing blows up – and I don’t mean diplomatically. There’s a huge explosion and a hole rips open in the sky! Everyone in attendance is killed. Everyone but you. So guess who’s going to get blamed?

I just recently finished Dragon Age: Inquisition (game of the year edition) and enjoyed it a ton! However, if you come at this game expecting Dragon Age: Origins with a facelift, you’re going to be disappointed. The great battle system of DA:O (and really most Bioware games of the past) is gone. However, it’s been replaced by an excellent exploration system.

The combat system is much like Dragon Age 2’s, minus the ridiculous business of getting ambushed in practically every battle you fight. It’s still pause-on-space (well, pause-on-control now, you’ll need the space key to jump) but you won’t need to pause all that much. The difficulty seems somewhat easy, too, but that’s been true for all the Dragon Age games. It's actually easy to accurately cast spells and such right from ground level so I didn't notice the weak tactical view much - there was simply no need for it.

The exploration is really the main draw of the game for me. You’re given several areas to explore. The first area you go to, once you get past the tutorial’ish start and get a base established, is the Hinterland in the mountains south of Redcliffe. There’s enough area in that location alone to keep you exploring for dozens of hours and, once you finish with that, there are several more (if somewhat smaller) areas to explore. This game is easily on par with Skyrim in terms of exploration. If it weren’t for Skyrim’s Blackreach area, I would say DA:I has Skyrim beat.

Classes are pretty much what you would expect from Dragon Age. You start with a choice of three (warrior, mage, rogue), each of which has several small skill trees. After a time, you can pick one of three specializations which opens up another skill tree for that specialization. By an amazing coincidence, the 9 companions you pick up just so happen to cover all 9 possibilities so you’re going to have one of each class to play with plus whatever specialization your character picks.

One thing to watch about the game is how an area’s level is set. Once you step foot in an area, the level is set to your current level. If you leave the Hinterland then expect to come back and finish up some quests 10 levels later, don’t expect a challenge or good loot when you do. Dragons appear to be an exception to this rule. When I stumbled into my first dragon, it sent me running before it even landed. When I came back much later, it was still a major challenge.

The Good

• Graphics
  The Frostbite engine does a very good job from spectacular views to tessellated rocks on the ground. See the screenshot topic for lots of examples. Thank goodness the consoles finally got a new generation!
• Stories
  There are some “meh” stories but most are fairly good and a few are excellent. Given the sheer volume of content, you’ll find plenty of good stories to experience.
• Characters
  Bioware still has it when it comes to characters! At first, 9 characters felt pretty crowded but this is a big game so there was time to flesh them all out. All the characters are worth exploring. A pity that Sandal never really showed up.
• Acting
  Great acting as you would expect from a AAA game. Leliana’s acting seems much improved from her role back in Orgins.
• Crafting
  The crafting system works well eventually but, in the first half of the game, you should probably limit yourself to Varric’s crossbow. Better weapons & armor show up so often that it isn’t worth the bother, IMHO. Once you find yourself keeping weapons for several hours, though, it's worth your time to piece together something you'll like in the long term.
• Comparatively smart companions
  Past Bioware games’ companion AI has been… lacking. Back in the Infinity Engine and Neverwinter days it was often best to just turn the AI off to keep your companions from getting everyone killed. In DA:I they are smart enough to be left alone in battle.
• Some fairly important choices
  You’ve got some fairly important choices to make even early in the game.
• H U G E
  You’re getting a whole lot of bang for your buck here. It took me 150 hours to get through the whole thing including the three DLC adventures! Of course, the way I play there was very, very little area unexplored by the time I finished.
• Proper save system
  There’s no saving mid-battle but the game lets you save anytime you want outside of battle. PLUS it autosaves every five minutes or so. PLUS it autosaves just before certain big events. You can keep several, too. They could have used mini-screenshots attached to the saves and it would be nice to have the option to name the saves on PC but this system is still far better than a lot of modern games which go with one single autosave.

Bad

• Silly NPC dance
  While the NPCs learned how to fight, they seem to have forgotten how to stand still! Seriously! When you stand still, the NPCs tend to run around behind you. I think they are trying to get into a formation of some kind but keep getting in each other’s way.
• 8 power limit
  Passive powers aren’t a problem but you can have only 8 active (i.e. click on them to make something happen) powers at once. Around level 18 or so, you’ll have filled them all up for each character. You can still get additional powers and swap them around for special enemies (like swapping a fire spell for Blizzard when up against an ice dragon) but it still makes levelling up a lot less interesting. By the end of the game, I wasn’t even bothering to level up.
• Final battle too easy
  The final battle is set for levels 16-18. I was higher than that even before I started doing the DLC battles so, when I finished the game, it was more like pushing over a dead tree than a mighty battle. Luckily, Awakening’s final battle makes up for it.
• Not mod friendly
  Dragon Age: Origins was great for mods. DA2 was OK for a few of them. With this game, I didn’t even bother. All the talk about all the patches breaking so much DLC frightened me off. (Though there’s a mod to slow down XP gain that might have been worth the risk.)
• Characters get stuck sometimes
  Every once in a while, my character would get stuck in a battle. I would have to switch to a different character for a couple of seconds then switch back – after which time the AI would often burn through amazing amounts of mana – to get my feet working again. I thought at first this was some sort of paralyzation spell but now I’m pretty sure it was just an annoying bug.
• Stupid armor gore still there
  The fool armor gore is still there from Dragon Age: Origins, making my screenshots look bad. Even standing in crashing ocean waves doesn’t wash it off.
• Old Saves Kaput
  The worst offense to me was that my old saves were ignored. I heard some rumor about DA2 not properly importing DA1 saves but I’ve got my saves from both. Why can’t I use them? Instead I have to go through old screenshots and try to remember events from a game I played six years ago! This game makes great use of your choices from previous games and that should be in the Good section but the fact that I’m not sure if they really WERE my choices spoils it badly for me.
• The Keep
  Worse yet, the problems are likely to continue. I checked the new Keep that’s supposed track your progress and it was missing most of what I had done. It even got one wrong! I was able to fix the wrong one but the others remain locked, even though I finished the whole game plus the DLC.
• Unbalanced audioEven with the in-game volume at max, I often had to crank up my stereo to hear people talking to me.

Neutral

• The desire demons were conspicuous in their absence. Worried about selling the game in China?
• You can romance anyone – even scout Harding!? Do people like these things way more than I think?
• There seemed to be a lot of wasted work. The war table missions didn’t really add much in terms of reward or story. Upgrading your keep barely made a difference that I noticed. Unless you’re trying for a speed run, the whole power system seemed completely irrelevant. None of this hurt the game but it’s sad to see good development and testing hours wasted this way.
• The music was OK but nothing special.
• There’s multiplayer! I didn’t even bother to look at it.
  
  DLC
  
  Given the level limits of the final adventure of the main game, I would wait to play the DLC until after everything else is done. (You’ll have to do that with Trespasser.) Be warned that the DLC adventures are noticeably buggier than the main game.
  
  
  Descent​
  This one starts out pretty blah. You even get a couple of battles to remind you of the bad old days of Dragon Age 2 with waves of Darkspawn attacking. Once you get past them and take an elevator down to the depths below the Deep Roads, though, the DLC improves quite a bit. It’s quite linear which hurts the exploration but there’s some real beauty in the deep that made it worth the marathon battles above. Beware of enemies and even players getting stuck in walls or falling through the floor, though.
  
  
  Jaws of Hakkon​
  This is much like the main game only somewhat harder. You’ve got a new, big area to explore and new enemies to beat up on. There’s also quite a bit of lore regarding the first Inquisition and the early days of the Chantry. Bugginess is at a minimum on this one except for a rather pathetic one that causes ocean waves to show up far from the sea. Definitely worth playing. (P.S. I was getting over a nasty cough when I finished the DLC. So I stopped hakkin’ after defeating Hakkon!)
  
  
  Trespasser​
  Postlude to the main game. Two years after the events of the main game, the two nations you set your base up between are getting rather nervous about your powerful army sitting there with nothing better to do. All the old gang returns (assuming you didn’t scare them off) and naturally something better to do shows up! The story is a bit disjointed but it’s a good enough excuse to go to battle again and find out where everyone’s fate and set up a conflict for Dragon Age 4 to explore. Some silly weapons make an appearance, too.
  
  
  
  Ummm, what’s Soul Edge doing here?
  
  P.S. Make sure to listen to the credits at the end of Trespasser. Cassandra reads a book Varric wrote about the Inquisition that's a hoot!

Thanks for the review, I have the rest of Dec off for Christmas holidays so I might just give this a go.