Game review: Dragon Age: Inquisition for PS4

Most early reviews for Dragon Age: Inquistion came from a single playthrough clocking in at 80 to 85 hours. Pffft! Rank amateurs. I got the game on the first day it was available here in Europe (November 18) and have now completed a first run with a mage totaling a whopping 170 hours, started another run with a dual-blade rogue that clocked in 20 before I realized the easy mode was too easy, and another dual-blade rogue playthrough on normal mode that ran for 111 hours. While I still have other options as far as race and class go, I now feel confident in my ability to evaluate the game. A warning, though, this will be a long, long, long post, as I cannot sum up 300 hours in my usual 2,000 word limit.

You may be thinking that after putting in 300 hours on a game, I love it and will give it 5 stars. In truth, I feel extremely conflicted about this sequel. Dragon Age: Awakenings is one of my all-time favorite games, and this had a lot to live up to even before factoring in all the hype that surrounded it before release. A lot of my review will be comparing Inquisition to Awakenings, and ultimately, the sequel fails to deliver on some of the most important aspects of the original.

Let’s get the plot summary out of the way. An Ultimate Evil Bad Guy attacks a conclave set up by the head of the Chantry, Divine Justinia, and his plan to destroy everything ever is thwarted by the arrival of your character. This thwarting leads to an explosion that kills a few hundred magi, Templars, and Chantry clerics, and leaves the sky with a new gaping green asshole leading into the steamy bowels of demonland supreme, the fade, and so your character is first blamed for the whole mess. You set out with a small collection of ridiculously over-sized weapons to deal with the rift and gather a plucky and unlikely band of allies to Save The World, possibly along the way finding romance and a good bottle of hooch. Pretty standard fare for fantasy games, really.

Normally, I like to list all the things I loved, and then list the things that didn’t work for me. But this review will have a lot of buts because even the things I loved had some caveats. I’ll try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but there will be some mild spoilers here and there.

Lastly, even with all my complaints, it would be fair to say that I plan to play this game several more times. I have yet to sample several other classes and two races, and there are choices along the many hours of plot that I would like to take another option just to see what happens. So while this isn’t a perfect game, I do think it’s worth the money given the amount of hours that can be invested in it. If you prefer reviews to only be glowing or scathing, you might want to skip this. You can also skip it if you just wanted a fast impression before running off to buy your copy. Because this isn’t a short review. No, it’s almost a small novel. If you do read it all, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

To get started, the one thing that carries over mostly intact from the first game is one of the absolute joys of playing Dragon Age, the party chatter. Even on a second playthrough and being 100 hours in, I was still hearing new dialogue from my various party members. I compare that to hubby playing Skyrim, where every five minutes his companions were repeating the exact same two lines, and I can honestly say that Dragon Age comes out as the clear winner in the dialogue department. I might have pushed through and finished each game in under 80 hours, but I loved wandering around, waiting for someone in my current four member party to say something. Among the nine companions, the one I liked to have along most often was the elf archer Sera. It’s not just because her comments are the funniest, either. She can bring out the best comments from other party members, and their conversations are the most memorable. I even put together groups that didn’t make any tactical sense simply because I wanted to see what new conversations I could unlock.

One particularly memorable combination was teaming Varric with Sera. Sera comments about how Varric’s books are boring, and Varric says that to an adventurer, they would be, and that for her, escapist literature would involve knitting. To this Sera gushes, “Ooh, knitting’s brilliant! It’s stabby sewing!” Even after another 250 hours of game play, that joke still sticks with me as the funniest thing I’ve ever heard from a fantasy character.

That said, there was one character I absolutely could not stand, and on my second playthrough, I refused to take Vivienne the circle mage along. This is because on my first playthrough, she managed to be condescending to everyone in my party, myself included, and she has nothing good to say about anyone among my advisors. Ultimately, it comes out that the only reason she joined the Inquisition at all is that she could sense a chance to further her own agenda. When I make any decisions that run counter to her needs, she’s snide and irritating about venting her frustrations. Despite being a mage, she hates other magi. She hates everyone around her, and even her personal side quest reveals a greedy side only a few minutes after a heartwarming “d’aaww” moment. So yeah, the second time around, when she said, “I’m joining your Inquisition,” I said, “We don’t need you.” And we didn’t.

Which reveals a major problem with this game. In Awakenings, the end game involves creating an A team and a B team to take on the final baddie in two stages. Your choices of companions could end up coming back to haunt you if you didn’t recruit enough members to balance out both crews. But there is no need for the extra party members in Inquisition. You aren’t hampered by not having those extra people, and you could play the game with only the first three characters of Solas the apostate mage, Varric the crossbow wielding dwarf, and Cassandra the seeker (a form of Templar internal affairs). It’s true, you’d miss out on some great party chats by going this route, but that’s the only reason to have these people along for the trip. You don’t have to worry about making a big final assault with any of these people like in the first game, so there’s no pressure in the decision to take or leave a companion out of a campaign.

This leads to another major problem, the role play aspect of the game. Awakenings was to me the first true role play video game I’d played because my dialogue choices could lead to vastly different outcomes. But eight times out of ten in Inquisition, I could choose any answer and still get the exact same response from people. The times that were different, I usually got one added sentence of reaction before the other person went right back to the same scripts. And really, that’s a fucking tragedy because it removes that feeling that my decisions affect the story. It kills the role play feeling that the first game had, and it makes my decisions feel less important.

There are some exceptions to this. In particular, the dialogue decisions I made with Leliana in the first campaign led to her being a very dark character. On my second playthrough, I specifically looked for options to turn her around, and at a key point in the game when it became clear that I had convinced her to embrace her humanity, I let out a loud “WOOHOO.” (No, seriously, hubby even scolded me for being too loud in my celebrations.)

Problem is, this kind of arcing decision making doesn’t expand to the major plot. It only applies to a few characters among your advisors. Even the companions end up being kind of disappointing on this point because your answers don’t do much to change their perception of your character.

Another comparison from Awakenings is the system of approval, and here, Inquisition did away with one of the sillier aspects of that. If a companion was mad at you in the first game, you could just buy them some gifts to get their approval rating back up. Say something stupid? Well you can overcome it with cakes and trinkets. I’m glad to see that go, but I’m less happy that the approval indicator was removed. Throughout the campaign, I might see a list of names ranking my decisions like:

Cassandra approves

Solas disapproves

Varric greatly approves

Sera greatly disapproves

But there’s no way to tell where I stand with each companion on the character record, and if I go to talk to the party members after each major decision, they don’t seem to change their dialogue all that much regardless of whether I pleased or displeased them. Again, this strips out that role play element that made the first game so appealing.

I do like that the romance options are now more varied. In addition to the companions, the main character can court their advisors and even a field scout, an adorable dwarf with freckles that I have sworn one day to take more seriously for an elf/dwarf pairing. Not everyone is an option, though, as some companions are straight and will turn away flirting from a character of the same sex. Another companion is gay and will politely but playfully turn away a suitor of the opposite sex. On both my playthroughs, I ended up with the diplomat Josephine because I genuinely liked her personality. She’s smart, pretty, and exceedingly optimistic, something sorely needed to help balance out all the doom and gloom cast around by everyone else. On later attempts, I plan to do a Qunari warrior and will attempt a romance with Iron Bull, my Qunari companion, and then I’ll go back to my preferred race, elf, and try wooing Scout Harding. It doesn’t do much for the overall plot, but it does make the game more fun to balance end of the world drama with a bit of light-hearted romance.

You cannot, sadly, romance more than one character. But hey, baby steps. Maybe by Dragon Age 6, we’ll get a nice polyamorus romance option.

Let me get back to the plot, which can be summed up as “Okay, we humans are all dicks, but if you don’t save us, the world will end and we couldn’t keep being dicks!” I really wish I could say something nicer about this, but all of the little notes and journal entries I gathered on both playthroughs only serve to confirm that the humans deserve this karmic ass kicking, and by stepping in to save them, I’m basically allowing them to continue their mindless path of genocide, fratricide, and general fuckery.

This really rubs me the wrong way precisely because on my second playthrough, I went to dragonagekeep.com to import a custom world, only to discover that none of my more positive choices could be imported over. So I couldn’t remind the game that King Alistair gave the circle of magi in Ferelden independence from the Chantry. I couldn’t get an option for Alistair giving the Dalish elves a large chunk of land to call their own. There’s no mention of King Belhen abolishing the casteless system and beginning a new era for dwarves. All positive changes I made in the first game seem to have been ret-conned out to make this exceedingly cynical outcome where humans have perpetually defaulted to their worst possible traits.

And the plot is all humans all the time. In Awakenings, a major part of the plot was recruiting the other races to fight the bad guy. To do this, one had to travel to Orzammar, home of the dwarves, to resolve their royal woes, and then venture to the Kocari Wilds to help the Dalish work out a little werewolf problem. But this time around, the closest you’ll get to the Dalish involves a tiny traveling group whose fetch quests can all be done in under an hour. And the only time the dwarves come up at all, it’s as a set of THREE side missions on the war table. You never get to see anything of Orzammar, although the game is littered with caves that lead to older abandoned thaigs. The rest of the time, it’s all humans. And in most cases, the humans you’re saving are shitty people who deserve their circumstances.

Based on this interpretation of the world, I expect that by Dragon Age 6, there will be no other races, only humans, and those humans will have murdered off all the magi before turning on each other. The classes of character will be politician, royal douchebag, or filthy commoner, and all three classes of humans will briefly have to come together to prevent a disaster that they themselves set in motion, but will eventually find an outside source to blame rather than admit they’re all a great swinging bag of dicks.

I have to wonder if the reason we didn’t see any dwarves or elves is due to some forthcoming DLC packs to address these areas, but as it stands now, the game’s lack of diversity is a major sticking point for me. Yes, there are a lot of dwarves and elves in the story. Most are outcasts or slaves to the humans. And yes, the game does a much better job with respect to the racial diversity of humans. I remember early on in the first playthrough crowing “Woot! Black archer!” because of the brief on-screen cameo of one of Leliana’s agents, and I was happy to see people of olive and black skin colors in a larger ratio than the first game. I was also happy to see the inclusion of a trans character and a gay character. These are all positive advances, and I’m happy about that. But I still can’t get over the fact that the plot completely ignored the dwarves, elves, and qunari and mostly sticks to my need to save the humans from their own stupidity.

“Zoe, this is a real sticking point for you, isn’t it?” Yes, it really is. It may be because the exact same excuse is used over and over to explain why so many people are working for this ultimate evil. “What other choice did we have?” they all invariably exclaim when questioned, and that’s nothing short of pathetic. I have a dilemma, and I think my only option is to do the worst possible thing? “Well I’ve got this problem, so the only solution is to ally with a dude who wants to destroy the world.” This might not bug me if it was just one or two groups falling into this camp, but EVERY group going with the same excuse…man, it just stinks.

And once you rescue any of these groups, right afterwards, they go right back to the general fuckery. There’s still the big baddie to defeat, but with their own problems solved temporarily, fuck it, why not go back to the same petty infighting?

*Takes deep breath* I would be remiss not to talk about the war table. Here, you are given a host of tasks to assign to one of your three advisors, spymaster Leliana, diplomat Josephine, or massive superdick Cullen. In theory, this is a nifty idea because you can send out people to do your bidding while you head out to areas and handle the on the ground killing and looting. Each mission has a timer that counts down even when the games is off, and the time can vary from a few minutes up to a whole day. Missions can have several outcomes depending on who you send, and some can be disastrous. So it’s important to look at more that just who can get the job done in less time.

The problem here is, nothing that happens on that war table has much connection to the game. During my first playthrough, I ended up backing up a full 30 hours to an older save because a decision by Cullen had led to the death of my entire Dalish clan. Now the thing I want to point out is that I did not back up due to that decision or the outcome. I backed up because of the complete lack of reaction to that outcome. Let that sink in…my whole fucking clan was wiped out due to a tactical error by Cullen. I went to see him immediately thereafter, and he…invited me to play checkers. No apology, no, “I’m sorry your clan is dead.” And my own character is so happy she could possibly break out in a Thedas rendition of Zippidy Doo Dah. Her whole clan died, but so what? It doesn’t fucking matter. This pretty much describes every mission on the war table. It’s a good idea, but it’s attached so loosely to the main game that nothing you do there matters.

Okay, so that’s the plot, the side quests, and the companions covered, and I still haven’t got to the actual meat and potatoes of the game, which is the killing and pillaging. I’ve seen countless reviews praise the changes in the game play, and they’ve called the companion AI “serviceable.” To that I have to ask, “Are we even playing the same game?”

Now don’t get me wrong. After you’ve got a party into the level 12 to 20 range, a lot of the bigger issues fall away. Your companions are all dumb as fence posts, but with enough hit points and special abilities, they can overcome their blinding stupidity. But it’s impossible not to see this system as a downgrade from the first game, and the sheer lack of options in the tactics menu is a constant source of frustration for me.

Remember how I said I tried the dual-blade rogue on easy mode? I did that because my companion of the same class, Cole, was constantly dying even after being given better armor and a slew of new abilities. I incorrectly assumed that this must be the hardest class of all my options, and so I scaled back the challenge level. But what I instead discovered is that Cole’s AI methodology is almost the exact same tactics as a warrior. So he doesn’t try to flank that heavily armored baddie. No, he just stands right in front of this brute and lets said baddie bash his face in with a massive hammer. It’s no wonder he dies in a few hits. He’s too fucking stupid to live.

Armed with the exact same abilities, I became an unstoppable whirlwind of death. I thought perhaps this was due to my playing the easiest setting, so I started over. But no, even with the added challenge, a dual-dagger rogue can fuck up whole groups on their own. I got so cocky, I was using the grapple hook to lunge far ahead of my companions, and by the time they caught up, I’d have killed all but one or two baddies all by myself.

I wish I could say it was just Cole who was stupid, but no. Magi and ranged rogues will also try to stand toe to toe with their enemies. No one will run to make space unless I go into the tactics menu and tell them to run, and even then, they may just run right back to where they were. I can’t set up ambushes because Hold Position doesn’t mean what I think it does. I might tell my whole crew to hold positions, sneak into an enemy fort, and turn around to find those stupid bastards are right behind me. I might want my magi to cast barrier on my tank, but even telling them to defend her, they’ll cast barrier on me instead, leaving my warrior to die a messy death while I had no need for the barrier anyway.

And the biggest change that drives me bonkers is NO HEAL SPELL. Time and again, I see reviewers spewing bullshit like “It makes for a more aggressive play style.” NO. It makes the game’s early stages exceedingly fucking tedious, and it makes some of the later boss fights a major pain in the ass. It doesn’t help that the potions meant to replace heal spells are capped for all party members, or that your companions will suck down too many heal potions like they’re Gatorade on a hot summer day. Time and again, I’d get stuck at a certain point and find myself growling, “this wouldn’t be a problem if I just had a fucking heal spell!”

Let me outline the problem in more detail. I start out at a camp with 8 potions, and my goal is a dungeon not far too away. I step five feet out of the camp and am immediately set upon by two great bears, a regular bear, three mabari hounds, and a pair of bandit rogues. I deal with all of that and check my stocks, and oh shit, I’ve only got two heal potions left. Right, back to camp! So then I can step foot out of the camp and be assaulted all over again. I might get lucky and make it all the way to the dungeon using only a few potions, but halfway through, I’ll have to walk all the way back to the entrance, fast travel to the camp, resupply potions, and then walk all the way back to the dungeon. FUCKING TEDIOUS!

And I really have to harp on what a stupid fucking decision this is from a story standpoint as well, because it’s already been established that any mage from any class can use a heal spell. The NPC magi are still the healing class for everyone else. BUT MY MAGI DON’T KNOW HOW TO HEAL? WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK IS THIS GODDAMNED BULLSHIT! FUUUUUCK!

*Takes long, slow breath*

And then there’s the perks system, which I cannot understand the point of. In addition to experience points, accomplishing missions earns another kind of XP called influence. By leveling up influence, you can unlock certain perks. This may be unlocking an additional 4 healing potions (FUCK YOU VERY MUCH), added inventory space (Which isn’t all that useful), extra experience points for defeating enemies or unlocking codex entries, or allowing rogues to pick fucking locks. That’s right, the most basic skill a rogue should have in their skill set is now tied to a perk system that requires unlocking three other items before it becomes available. The whole point of even having a rogue in the party is picking locks, and they can’t even do it until they’re around level 10. WHY? DEAR SWEET LORD, WHY FUCKING BREAK WHAT WASN’T FUCKING BROKEN?

Let’s set all that aside.

Thedas, or the human controlled sections of it, are a large playground full of fetch quests and dungeon crawls for you to explore. You’ll have to seal demon rifts, route out bandits and rogue templars and magi, and find corpses. Because the vast majority of the time, when someone asks “can you look for ____ for me?” you can be sure they’re a crispy corpse now. The few times they aren’t it’s a massive relief to find them alive.

There is a lot of variety to the landscapes of these massive areas. You’ll see barren deserts, snowy mountain regions, lush forests, rocky coastlines, and all the time, you will stop and gaze in awe at how very beautiful it all is. I know I often just stopped moving to do slow pans and take in my surroundings because it’s all so breath taking and worthy of reflection.

It’s a shame, then, that your tools for exploring, the compass and map, are so fucking useless. The map might say an area is one long and continuous stretch of forest or desert, but you will quickly discover that there is in fact an obstacle preventing you from crossing from point A to point B without walking miles out of the way. The path to your objective may also involve a single choke point gap that’s hidden from view, requiring hours and hours of wandering in circles to find. And it will be this exact moment when your companions go mute, leaving you with nothing to do but wander, fuming at a map that won’t tell you where to go, and a compass that doesn’t show anything besides the checkpoints.

You might see a spot that looks like you can jump over it, because they do give you a nice new jump button. The incline doesn’t look too high or too steep, and you infer from the texture that it is safe to climb. But no, you’ll either slide right back down, or you’ll discover that this open world has a shit load of invisible walls forcing you to take only one path to your goal. Who thought this was a good idea?

The reason my first game clocked in so many hours is because I had to wander aimlessly for many, many hours in some areas, the whole time groaning “God, this is so fucking boring!” On my second playthrough, I knew where to go, generally speaking, so I didn’t have to do nearly as much aimless searching. But even then, several areas are made in such a ridiculously convoluted way that its easy to get lost.

And there’s pathways in the game that just don’t make sense. You might need a mage to “energize” boulders or planks to make a bridge, for instance. See this enough times and eventually the question comes up: “But if they can levitate two-ton boulders to build a bridge, why can’t they just levitate party members across the gap?” And the stupid doesn’t stop there. Warriors will be needed to bash open stone walls at various points, but a locked door on an abandoned shack will be too strong for them to get in. Guess that giant ax that can split stone is just no good for cutting dry, rotting wood, yeah?

And then there’s the shards. This is a game-long fetch quest which is accompanied by the most ridiculous and flimsy story possible. Ancient shards are hidden all over the world, some of them somehow being hidden in abodes which are less that a decade old. To find these shards, one must look through a glowing skull on a post with a gem in the eye socket, and another in the back of the head. VERY late in the game, you learn that it was the main bad guy’s magi who installed these skulls, but it never gives any explanation for why they didn’t use them or why nobody else noticed them and stole the gems. Finding enough shards eventually unlocks a new area to “study” the shards, leading you to a vault where the various shard pieces are used as keys to unlock a mausoleum. With each tomb you move into and pillage, you get a very slight bump in elemental resistance for fire, ice, and spirit. That’s it. All this ancient epicy bullshit leads to a piddling nothing of a reward.

But then, this is a recurring theme with the dungeons of the game. Each time, the story says, “The big baddie is hunting for a powerful weapon around this dungeon, and we must get it before they do!” So you go through all these various fights to reach the inner chamber, a room supposedly no one has been in for a hundred years or more, and what’s your reward? More of the same junk you can find in chests scattered around the surface. Like someone else raided the tomb, took all the epic good shit, and then left some shitty placeholder items. It’s the Thedas Indiana Jones, but instead of leaving behind a bag of sand when he takes the golden monkey, he left his dagger and armor.

In only two cases is the prize for a dungeon not more of the same junk, and in the first case, what you find is a scroll detailing the history of the massacre that led to the humans’ genocide and enslavement of the elves. This worked for me. Not the excuse the humans used for centuries of prejudice, but the idea that the item at the end is not a powerful weapon at all. It’s just a scroll with some old story in it. That said, why would these ancient people go to all this trouble building a maze for a library book?

The other exception leads to some epic loot, for once, but the puzzle to get there had me commenting, “And this is why the ancient elves were murdered by the humans. Instead of building defenses of their borders, they spent all their time making a stupid floor puzzle to unlock a church door.”

This is something I really can’t get away from, the sheer stupidity of most of the fetch quests. They don’t add anything to the plot, and with few exceptions, they all feel awkwardly shoehorned on. It’s like, “We can’t have a role-play game without optional fetch quests, so we have to force these into the game somehow.” And with relatively few exceptions, they do it badly.

What’s more interesting are the side quests given out by your companions and advisors. Many may not even require combat, but they help unravel some of the mysterious backgrounds of your friends. Only one of these was a disappointment (Vivienne, what a shock), one was quite shocking (no spoilers), and several were memorable because they helped make my companions feel truly alive. I could see doing these side quests every time I play, because they’re easily the most interesting sections of the story.

This is not to say I would mind playing through the rest even with my many, many complaints. Yes, the combat is finicky until you’re past level 12. Yes, most of the quests are kind of dumb and give disappointing equipment. But there are many times when in the midst of the battles, I find myself having a good time. It might come because one of my companions does something cool, or it might be a new combo that we do that feels satisfying.

So that’s the whole review, yeah? No.

I want to bring up the combat and leveling system because I had quite a few frustrations with it and with how little sense of progression I felt fighting the various enemies. Let’s say that for whatever reason, I stumbled into a fight with anything that’s maybe one or two levels above my party members. Well that will always end badly because the enemy attacks become instant death when they connect. But the same cannot be said for the opposite situation. Going back to take on lingering enemies, even those who are six and seven levels below my character required a significant fight to overcome. It’s true that their damage output didn’t have as much of an impact once I had more hit points, but none of my leveling or weapons upgrades ever gave me the kind of power that my enemies have.

In Awakenings, there’s an early encounter with an ogre that puts up a high level of challenge, but once your party levels up, an ogre becomes progressively weaker. At a certain point, they send you up against three and four ogres, even an alpha ogre, and you feel like a badass for being able to swat them down with your beefed up abilities.

That’s never the case with Inquisition, and it drove me nuts that I never felt like my increasing levels had much of an impact or a sense of progression. This also becomes frustrating when going back to old areas because not only do the fights feel just as tedious, but you don’t get any experience points for winning. The loot you’ll get is the same low-level crap, so there’s little satisfaction to fighting.

Then there’s the status effects of abilities that don’t seem to work. Fire spells are supposed to make the enemies panic, or horror is supposed to send them fleeing, but most of the time, they just keep attacking without any feeling of weight to your actions. If an enemy is smashing your characters in the face, you will stop your attack and recoil from the impact. But the same is not true with your attacks on the enemies. I can hack away at an archer with no armor besides cloth, and that fucker will calmly continue to fire arrows with no pause. He’ll do it even if he’s on fire, even if he’s had horror cast of him, and even as my character buries a dagger in his face.

And the rules of combat don’t make much sense. I frequently noted how a warrior wearing heavy armor and carrying a gigantic war hammer could move faster than my lightly armored rogues, so it wasn’t possible to outmaneuver an enemy even if the bastard should have been much slower.

Enemies can see through walls. This drove me nuts because I might lead an enemy away from a downed companion, go into stealth and return to revive my friend, and even with several walls between me and them, the fuckers ran right back to me the moment I slipped out of stealth.

Don’t even get me started on the larger enemies and their cheap tactics. The giants who can leap across the screen and hurl boulders from out of nowhere for 6000 points of damage, or the random druffalo and gurn who suddenly go aggressive without provocation and activate their ARMOR SPELL. But the worst cheap tactics come from the dragons. These guys can armor up, cast instant death spells, and heal from the most grievous injuries. You can attack their legs and make them drop for a few seconds, but they get up and turn nimble again despite you hacking their legs for half an hour. It’s a miracle!

The story says these dragons haven’t yet been able to breed, but several of them can screech to summon an unlimited supply of dragonlings, and that screech renders every party member stunned, leaving them open to attacks from both the dragonlings and the dragon. There is no way to handle these fights without exacting micromanagement of all party members, and even then, party members will ignore orders and rush under the dragon’s mouth, like they’re suicidal and crying, “Please roast me and eat me!”

Making a long story short, which I’ve failed to do, companions are dumb as dirt, and the enemies don’t play by the same set of rules. It is possible to play without keeping track of every party member much later in the game, but during the early levels, you can’t do anything without having to struggle to keep your people from committing suicide. And I have to say again, a lot of my frustrations would have been eliminated if I could have just given my magi a simple fucking heal spell. How is any of this an improvement on the previous system?

Let’s talk about the crafting system and the merchants. Putting it simply, most of the merchants are overpriced, and anything you craft will be infinitely better than anything they sell. For that matter, even the most epic loot you get from fighting bosses will pale in comparison to what you can craft. You’ll find schematics for armor and weapons in various ways, and while you might need to purchase a few plans to get the right combinations of armor legs and arms, the vast majority of the time, you’ll find the same items out in the field with a little patience and searching. The dragons you slay do have some fairly nice unique items, but from a stats-based standpoint, you can make better stuff. The only reason to use these items is that they look cool, and you cannot make them yourself. By the end of both games, all my crew had on armor and weapons that I crafted for them, and the bonuses they got from my stuff was WAY better than anything I’d find in the field.

Which then brings up the merchants again, because they will buy shit items for a lot more than your crafted items, regardless of the quality. A base armor with no arms and legs might get you 300 gold, while that totally badass armor with a billion stat bonuses will get you 5 gold. It’s fucking stupid. Really, really fucking stupid, and it makes no sense. I ended up dumping a ton of items for gold, and where I ended up spending most of it was on a vendor who sold contracts to boost my influence. The rest of the merchants don’t sell anything worth bothering with.

Herb crafting is not really crafting at all. It’s another form of currency. You need to find X amount of a certain herb to unlock better potions, and your optional potions, tonics, and grenades all require spending other herbs to keep in a good supply. So you spend a lot of time picking up plants just to make sure you can keep using your potions. You can’t buy the completed potions with gold, but you can buy the herbs with some vendors at ridiculously overpriced…prices. No, it’s really just better to pick the shit yourself than to spend 20 to 40 gold on herbs.

A lot of the design changes in this game were supposedly made to dumb down the decision making process and make it less daunting, thus opening up the game to a wider market of players. But despite this effort to make the game more accessible, the lore is handed out in a way that assumes one has played the other games, and many of the terms used are given no real explanation other than codex entries. Even then, without playing the first two games, you’d need to read a lot of external sources to get up to speed. The codex entries in game can be pretty fascinating, but you have to pause the game and go into the menu system to find them.

One of my minor gripes has to do with the level loading screens. See, for a few seconds, the game will put up three parts of the codex that you’ve unlocked. This will be just enough time to read a sentence or two, and then the screen will go black for an additional 20 to 30 seconds of nothing happening. So…why can’t they just leave up the codex entries instead of the black screen? At one point, hubby complained, “Hey I was still reading that,” and I replied, “Yeah, so was I, but the game doesn’t care.”

The codex itself is not very well organized. One of the many things you can unlock is a copy of a book written by Varric, Hard In Hightown. I made it a point to unlock all of the chapters before reading it, only to discover that the codex had all the chapters listed out of order. So it was a pain just to sort out what chapters I was still missing, and an even bigger pain moving around to read them all.

Another gripe has to do with the inventory system. There’s no place to store extra stuff that you might need later. This is really stupid because 20 hours into the game, you get this giant castle with a cavernous bedroom, and yet, there’s no wardrobe for storing extra outfits. This might not seem like a big deal, but let’s say you wanted to craft armors with specific elemental resistances for fighting the dragons. You can’t because you don’t have room to store it even after upgrading your inventory to the highest levels. It’s also a serious pain to get a badass weapon that’s level 13 when the character you want to give it to is level 8, because you’ll be carrying around all this stuff you can’t use, forcing you to sell or destroy lots of good useful equipment just to make room for more stuff. And here’s castle Skyhold, where you have a room dedicated to the boozes you can unlock but never drink, but you don’t have a single treasure chest to store extra loot in.

And lest I forget to mention it, almost none of the locations you visit feel like habitable cities or villages. Trips to Val Royeaux make this detail more glaring. Here’s this Orlesian city full of people, taking in the merchants or visiting the open cafe or what not, and then there’s everyone else, living in burned out ruins and flimsy shacks cobbled together over the ruins of previous stone buildings. You never see Orzammar in all its gloomy splendor, only ruins of old Thaigs. You rarely find any human settlement that isn’t a junk heap. Even after renovation work on Skyhold is supposedly done, you’ll still find whole sections of it in shambles with stones laying out on the floor in the same position as when you first arrived.

For that matter, this doesn’t feel like a world where anyone could live, regardless of their skill level. Setting aside the demons and dragons, even the local wildlife is so hostile that I doubt your average farmer could live more than a week. Even a battle hardened soldier might not make it a day or two longer than the farmers before something kills them. You find these huge encampments of refugees all complaining, “We can’t do anything for ourselves now that trouble’s broken out!” But looking around, I have to wonder how anyone could live in this world even in times of peace. The vast majority of the humans are pathetically weak, so how did these nobodies rise to power and slaughter the elves with all their super powers? How did they slay all those dragons when just one sends them scurrying for the hills? How can these pathetic people be related to the same race who supposedly conquered the world multiple times? These people don’t even seem to be capable of building basic huts in the middle of a forest, so how can I believe that in the past they were so mighty?

And lastly, why are the other races given such short shrift in this world? The Inquisition is supposed to be about accepting everyone into a new movement to change the world, but why is it only the humans who get to have a part in this story? Even the Grey Wardens, the heroes of the first game, are relegated to a few side missions on the war table, and if a custom game makes your first character available, all they really do is send a letter to the Inquisitor that reads “I’m off doing very important stuff and cannot be bothered to help you save the world from an ultimate evil. Toodles, The Hero of Ferelden.”

So where are the other Qunari? Where are the elves, both the alienage and Dalish varieties? Where are all the dwarves? How is it that a game can span twice the length of the first adventure and still be so myopic in its depiction of the various races?

So, what we have in conclusion is a game with a massive world to explore, and that frequently leaves me wanting more because these things were options in the previous installments. The larger plot involves a super-badass bad guy who’s constantly incompetent, and a lowly nobody rising to become the chosen one for four kingdoms worth of selfish ingrates. Even when you set the character to insist they’re not the chosen one, the game will never let anyone else accept this. You must be the chosen one, because if it’s all just random circumstance and there is no Maker, the world would be a scary place. Or scarier than it already is, really.

And what feels like the most glaring omission is that sense of weight to my decisions. I don’t feel like I’m playing a role play game when any answer I give leads to the exact same outcome. Okay, the story isn’t that bad, but when you go from Awakenings to Inquisition, it’s a major change from having every answer be important to only having a few answers carry any weight.

So, I hated the game, right? Well no, I didn’t. I felt hampered and frustrated constantly by several design choices, and I was underwhelmed by the lack of variety in the plot and the outcomes. But still, I’ve put in 300 hours on two campaigns, and I can see putting in more time to explore other classes, races and specializations. I can say it’s worth the money, and I can say that a lot of what I did was fun and entertaining.

But when it comes to a score, I just don’t know what to give Dragon Age: Inquisition. It doesn’t help that there were a LOT of bugs and glitches throughout both my campaigns. A patch came out at the start of the month that fixed some of the cut scene issues, and that was a major headache the first time through. Cut scenes might freeze up, requiring a restart, or forcing me to skip them entirely, meaning I had no clue what I was missing. Other times, they outright crashed the game. The patch did correct this, so the second campaign was slightly less buggy. But that still left a lot of random glitches and crashes, all of which left me growling and moody for a while. The autosave happens frequently enough that I never lost much progress from a crash, but it’s still something to keep in mind.

Again, it’s hard to give a numerical score for this. The graphics and sounds are fantastic. The side quests and companion chatter are still just as good as the first game, and it is possible to uncover new stuff I missed even after playing the same sections multiple times. I still have yet to explore all the options available, and I can honestly say that the story had enough twists that connect back to the previous games that I was frequently surprised in a good way.

I just…I wanted more. I wanted more elves and dwarves. I wanted more Qunari. I wanted more options in my dialogue, more options in controlling my party, and more impact from my growth in the game. This game is dumbed down in several ways, and I find myself wanting the same options I had in Awakenings.

BUT…but I did spend 300 hours playing this, most of that spent awake until 4 and 5 AM in the pursuit of “just one more quest.” I did spend a lot of time just gawking at the scenery. I spent even more time hanging around to listen to NPCs chatter to each other. I spent a lot of time in the pub listening to the bard sing, and even if it bugs me that she’s the same bard in every single pub location like some kind of singing time lord, I did enjoy listening to her. So even though I want to give this a 2 or 3 star rating based on the shortcomings, I’m going to give it 4 stars. It isn’t everything I wanted out of a sequel, but it’s still a massive world that invites exploration. Just be patient with it, because it will require a lot of patience to get properly invested in.