Posted on 28 October 2024

Of the three Dragon Age games, Inquisition was the one I’d heard the most about. It was released in 2014, which is coincidentally the year I started using Twitter. I wasn’t involved in any gaming circles at the time, yet I still managed to hear about this guy named Solas, who was some kind of traitor and also bald.

Over the years, I heard plenty of other things – like the choice you make in Here Lies the Abyss and that Morrigan was in the game – but with little to no context. I also learned that Inquisition used a different engine, so things would be different from what I’d gotten used to in Origins and 2. That did not prepare me for just how different this game was.

This review is basically all criticism. While there are plenty of good things about this game (like the environments, which are gorgeous), the previous two games set up standards that Inquisition simply did not meet, in my opinion.

I had my first issue with the game as soon as I got out of the character creator and started playing. The controls themselves were different; the mouse buttons did the exact opposite of what I’d gotten used to in the previous two games. Keyboard shortcuts were also different. “Space” was now a jump button instead of pause. “V”, which had previously been used to turn off the HUD, was now a pulse that scanned the area for interactable items. In previous games, holding down “tab” highlighted objects. “Tab” now switches between enemies. Speaking of the HUD, there was no keyboard shortcut to easily turn that off. I had to go into the settings and do it manually.

All of this made me realize pretty early on that this was a console game ported to PC – and it wasn’t done that well, either. Maybe I’d have had a different experience if I’d played the game with a controller rather than mouse and keyboard, but I’m unable to use a controller for more than an hour without it triggering a massive amount of wrist/hand pain.

Inquisition is an open-world game. The maps are huge and there’s a lot to explore. There are crafting materials and upgrades to collect, people to recruit, rifts to close, and plenty of sidequests. There’s a lot to do, and plenty of it is optional.

That’s not obvious at first. While you gain power (used to unlock main missions through the War Table) though finishing sidequests, recruiting people, etc., there are dozens more opportunities to gain power than there are opportunities to use that power. I gave up on trying to finish 100% of the content in the game, and I still ended up with 100 more power than I needed by the end. I do appreciate there were so many different ways to gain power – so if you didn’t want to do one thing, you could do another and not miss out – but this was a little too much, in my opinion.

Actually, I think the entire game was too much, by around 30%. There were multiple maps (the Fallow Mire and Hissing Wastes, for example) that weren’t visited during any main story quests. And, due to how the story-relevant maps have tons of things to do on them, there’s no actual reason to go to the optional maps, unless you really want to go for completionism.

I have to wonder what Bioware was thinking with creating three (!) separate desert maps – the Western Approach, Hissing Wastes, and Forbidden Oasis. There’s no reason the important part of the Forbidden Oasis (Solasan) couldn’t have been integrated into the Western Approach. The Hissing Wastes could have been part of the Western Approach as well, since it’s got a large amount of nothing in it. Would it have been realistic to have a bunch of elven ruins, dwarven ruins, and Tevinter ruins in such close proximity to each other? No, but it would have been less frustrating to deal with.

I also think the Emerald Graves and Exalted Plains could have been merged into one area, but that’s mostly because the names are so similar that I keep getting them mixed up.

I played a mage in Dragon Age 2 and had so much fun that I thought I’d play a mage in Inquisition as well. Unfortunately, mage combat was a lot less fun here. I couldn’t hit people with my staff like Hawke did. Why, Bioware? Why?

Combat in general felt a little strange. Not just because of the reversed mouse buttons or the greatly reduced skills available, but because of how the game controlled in general, I think. Things felt very floaty, both in and out of combat – like the characters had no weight to them.

Related to this, NPC pathing was odd. Party members would follow you, but once you stopped walking, they wouldn’t stay still – they’d run around like they were trying to get to something and couldn’t. Sometimes this meant they’d jump on and off of the furniture in the environment.

I’ve heard that Inquisition, like Dragon Age 2, was originally designed to only have a human player character. It definitely shows. There were instances where my elf should have known something – like, you know, who Mythal is – and did not. Oddly, there’s also plenty of reactivity in other places (plenty of anti-elf racism, for example, and on a more positive note, Josephine greeting Lavellan in Elven), so I’m thinking this is a case of missing things due to rushed development.

What’s especially weird about this is how hard the game went on the elf lore. It is, as Sera would say, “too elfy”. I don’t think I would mind that so much if so much of the series so far hadn’t focused on elf lore. I’m feeling a little overexposed on it. I want to learn about the dwarves and qunari! The Descent helped scratch that itch a little, but it definitely wasn’t enough.

As an antagonist, Corypheus is kind of half-baked. He doesn’t actually do very much, and since you can take as long as you want between quests, he doesn’t feel like much of a threat. The game may have benefited from some time-critical missions like in Mass Effect 2 and 3, where there were pretty serious consequences if you didn’t complete certain missions in a certain timeframe. That would have made the stakes feel higher, especially if those consequences cut off access to certain areas or ended up with you losing some of the Inquisition’s forces.

The final mission and boss fight were underwhelming. It was much shorter than I expected it would be, and only the current party was involved. That wasn’t the case in Origins or 2; all of your party members were involved, even if they weren’t in your active party. But Inquisition’s final battle was so easy that more allies on your side would have ended the fight much quicker, so it might be for the best that everyone isn’t involved.

The DLC was much better than the base game. Jaws of Hakkon introduces an entirely new region, but there’s no actual filler in it. The sidequests are tied into the story and lore of the region. It’s also way harder than the base game. I was genuinely not prepared for the difficulty spike.

The Descent is much tighter and goes deep into dwarf lore, which I personally think is the most interesting part of the Dragon Age series. I’d say the only bad thing about it is the gear collection, but that’s entirely optional.

Trespasser is the last DLC. I’ve heard that there was some controversy when it was first released, as it’s the “real” ending to the game and shouldn’t have been unnecessarily cut out. I do agree with this; I’ve never liked cutting out companions and missions (Shale, Return to Ostagar, Sebastian, etc.) and selling them for more money. It’s really something that should be included in the base game, since it sets up The Veilguard. I think that someone who didn’t play Trespasser and then went right into Veilguard would be pretty confused as to why Solas is doing what he’s doing.

My main complaint with this game is that it’s an open-world game with all the faults of an open-world game. There was a time in my life when I would have loved an open-world game – when I was a teenager and would play one game for years at a time – but as I’ve aged, my tolerance for open-world games has gone down. A 100-hour game better have the content to fill 100 hours without resorting to filler or bloat, and that’s unfortunately what Inquisition does.

I do think there’s a good 40-50 hour game in here somewhere. I did like the game enough that I’d replay it again – with more quality-of-life mods – but only while skipping as much of the side content as possible.