Dragon Age: Inquisition

Dragon Age : Inquisition : 2014
...
The Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid V : 2015

And the technical gaps between those is enormous. How could a game in 2014 be so poorly achieved? DA:I is really awful. I just can't pass the first hour of playing it, it's really too bad visually, in the animations, and in the gameplay.
When you play W3 or MGSV just released a year later and see and feel the difference, it's crazy.

Despite a considerable step up in production values, to me this is a bigger misfire than Dragon Age 2, which at least had the good sense to not bore you for 150 hours.

If you take your time to explore and do side content, it is a big, long game, but at the same time incredibly thin, undercooked, and underdeveloped. It feels like the environment artists just worked independently for a few years while everyone else at Bioware had zero idea what to put in the game's numerous pseudo-open-world areas. And they never really figured it out, because these places are, by and large, blandly pretty but uninteresting. A few areas, like the vast, gray, dull desert region, miss even that mark, and become downright trials of patience. Most of the proper main story stuff happens in its own set-piece quests, and there's very minimal narrative tying the open areas together. What's left is tedious resource gathering, repetitive puzzles, generic "go-here-and-kill-a-bunch-of-dudes" sidequests, and absolutely nothing memorable. The game's pacing is both slow and awkward - you could exhaust the interesting skill trees, party member storylines, etc, well before you reach even the halfway point of the game's playtime.

The writing is, as is the case with the other Dragon Age games, the game's strongest point, but that's not saying a great deal, because there's just very little here. If you omit all the filler, the main story path would maybe make a 10 hour game, so in a 150 hour game, it feels very thin and diluted. Same goes for the party members and their stories. Minor dribs and drabs of story are conveyed via missions you can send your minions out to do which take real time to complete, which again feels like half-baked filler that's there to suck up a few minutes of your time every game session. In a better game, maybe these assorted blurbs of flavor text would have been fleshed out into proper quests in the actual game world. Your character is also fully voiced, but unlike Dragon Age 2 giving you some room to give your Hawke a personality, here you are a wooden plank regardless of how you choose to play it. I did enjoy some of the appearances from characters of Dragon Ages past, others feel pointlessly shoehorned. The DLCs, with the exception of Trespasser, do little to flesh anything out, other than pulling the story into even more aimless directions and making you way over-leveled for what's left of the base game.

The combat system, like everything else here, does not feel fully thought out and is not particularly deep or enjoyable. An attempt was made at presumably servicing the fans of DAO and the Infinity engine games by adding a tactical mode, but it controls so poorly as to be basically unusable, so I didn't use it. On the other hand it's kept gamepad-friendly by restricting the number of abilities you can have equipped at any time to what fits on a d-pad, so unless you want to constantly fiddle with your skill loadout, you'll probably just restrict yourself to spamming a few abilities in every encounter. And of course, you will run out of interesting skills for your character well before you run out of game, so it all gets quite repetitive and tiresome. The user interface is kind of a pain, and sorting out which gear I wanted to keep from the giant pile of garbage I collected during my travels took up way too much of my time.

There's a lot of hints of potentially good ideas here and there, but nothing is developed enough to even be worth remarking on. For example, you get a home base and are given reason to believe that upgrading it and personalizing it along your chosen path may be a significant part of this part of the game, but no, the upgrades are few and almost laughably insignificant.

On a technical level, it's a good-looking game, but the very lengthy loading screens are a persistent annoyance even on a modern high-end PC, so I can't imagine playing this on a PS4.

A major disappointment.

Inquisition is a follow-up to Dragon Age II. Mages and Templars rendezvous at the Temple Of Sacred Ashes to form a truce. However, an explosion occurs which kills all apart from your character. Divine Justinia was among the casualties, and people suspect you are behind the atrocities. You don't recall what happened, but you have a glowing hand that appears to have the power to close Rifts which unleash Demons into the world.

You can choose to be male or female human, dwarf, elf, or Qunari, and choose between Warrior, Mage or Rogue. After you close your first Rift, you slowly begin to earn the trust of the people. With the many races at conflict, and Rifts unleashing Demons in the world, your party forms the Inquisition, who aim to unite the races and oppose the evil.

You have a homebase which allows you to talk to your party members, and has areas where you can purchase or upgrade your equipment. You can choose missions at the War Table, which also has timed rewards in a similar style to Assassin's Creed Black Flag. You select a mission, and after the specified real world time has passed; you then get a reward; coins/materials/equipment/extra missions.

Once you have unlocked a new area, you can quick travel there using your map (or War Table). Some of these areas are huge, with an insane amount of tasks in each. There's plants and materials throughout, landmarks and caves to discover, side missions to complete, and camp-sites to set up. Once you have set up a camp-site, this acts as a quick-travel point and restores your health and potions. Most of these actions give you a Power point which you need to unlock the story missions. This means you are required to do a certain amount of the side-quests rather than them being completely optional.

Most of the side-quests are the usual busy-work. Go here, kill/find thing, sometimes having to travel back to the quest-giver for a reward.

The combat has a similar feel to old RPG's like Baldur's Gate. In this game you can take control of a specific character (not just your main character), and can control them freely. You can also switch to the tactical camera and dish out instructions that way too. But the combat is mainly moving a character into position, holding the attack button, then using special skills as the cooldown timer completes; rinse and repeat. I was disappointed there wasn't more interactions than this. I had a character with a sword and shield, but the shield just adds a defensive bonus, rather than being able to explicitly block.

When you level up, your stats increase. You can spend a point in your ability skill-tree to customise your character. It would be nice to have been able to spend your stat points too. You can craft equipment if you have the schematic and materials to create it. You can use loads of different materials you have found in the world which will give different effects when used.

Aside from a revive spell, there's no healing spells. You have a stock of 8 standard healing potions which are replenished at camps when resting. Other types of potions have to be discovered, then restored by collecting plants for their ingredients. I didn't discover many potions, but I did enjoy unleashing a Jar of Bees at groups of enemies.

There's quite a few characters to obtain throughout the game. You can take 3 characters out with you, and although you can select who you want, you are encouraged to take a Mage and Rogue with you since Mages can break magical barriers, and Rogue's can unlock locked doors. There's quite a few characters returning from previous games, although I only recognised a few of them.

The way the game is structured seems very much like Mass Effect Andromeda. The main story is weak, but there's an insane amount of dialogue, backstory and lore. It definitely feels like a lived-in world with a massive history between each of the races. Certain dialogue options can have an emotion associated with them, but for the most part, it didn't seem as well done as it is in Andomeda. I found my character was delivering her lines in an inconsistent tone at certain points. I initially decided my character would be quite bitter and snarky, but the game mainly uses standard responses. The standard responses seemed quite caring, so I got used to that personality instead. Then when I chose a standard option and she was negative; I was disappointed.

The game is huge and is one of those games where it is easy to play for long stretches of time. It's a very long game, but would have been better if it was more focussed with fewer side missions and more story missions. The story partially relies on you knowing the events and characters of the first two games, and I couldn't recall enough about them.

Dragon Age Inquisition was a disappointment.

Let me preface that statement with the fact that I love modern BioWare games. Mass Effect was my favorite new IP of the generation and I loved both Dragon Age: Origins and, yes, Dragon Age II. So when I say DA:I was a disappointment, I didn't necessarily hate the game. I actually quite enjoyed it, I just had a very high bar set for it and the game fell flat on its face. Why? Because they forgot to put in an actual game. By that I mean they focused on their "open world" levels and, while they looked great, there was nothing entertaining about them. The side quests were largely boring, usually of the fetch quest or "kill this" variety. Outside of that you will have plenty of fade rifts to repetitively close, base camps to establish and ore/herbs to collect. Normally these sorts of things are optional fluff in RPGs, but here, you need to do them to acquire "power", which is spent on continuing the story. So if you want to actually play the game part of the game, you have to tediously grind through boring things that the developers scattered around just to get you to explore their pretty maps. Some areas are particularly great looking, but that doesn't really matter when you're spending roughly 10 hours of gameplay total just doing the same tasks over and over just trying to get the story moving along. Combat is also more simplistic and you can play on normal without ever having to control any other character, which may be a positive or negative, depending if you want to play strategically or if you just want to blow people up with fireballs.

What I like about Bioware games is moving through the story and doing it alongside my companions. Helping them on their companion quests is fun and will get you some power, but it isn't nearly enough. You need to put up with tedious grinding for power and that is not fun. If it weren't for the story missions and the companion missions, I wouldn't even be able to recommend this game. Those missions alone hold up what feels like a single player MMO half of the time. Open world games are pretty much my favorite type of game and this game just does not feel "open world". They are broken up into "levels" and there is nothing to truly explore. There are no complex dungeons to come across. There are no intricate quests to go through. It is just a map with some stuff to collect. I know the next Mass Effect is going for the "open exploration" route as well, and that is a good thing, I just hope they handle it a hell of a lot better than DA:I did and don't make setting up camp sites the focus of the game instead of the companions and the story.