Dragon Age: Inquisition

Full disclosure: I've not played much of Dragon Age Inqisition yet. I think my current play time is still under 20 hours, I've got at least two other party members to recruit, and the Inquisition's fortress of Skyhold hasn't even been mentioned once in my time with it.

Still, I think it's enough time to know two things: one, I'm going to get a hell of a lot more hours under my belt; and two, it has some problems.


Inquisition is very much a BioWare RPG. If you've played the previous Dragon Age games, the Mass Effect trilogy, or KotOR, you'll recognise or even expect the staples: lots of numbers, lots of gear, and lots of strangely-static conversations full of tough decisions and flirting, all interspersed with combat encounters that seem to run a little too long.

I love all that.

(Hell, I even loved the much-berated Dragon Age II, despite its failings - I'm typing this while wearing a DA2 Kirkwall hoodie. I thought it was a bold thing to try and spread the hero's origin story over the whole game, rather than just the first half-hour. It was interesting and different to spend time learning a single place and the politics of that city, rather than just galumphing off over the horizon on Yet Another World-Saving Adventure; it's more Game of Thrones than Lord of the Rings.)

So, Dragon Age Inquisition is about an adventure to save the world. This time, there's a giant glowing green hole in the sky, and you're the last hope to close it. Along the way you'll meet a motley collection of mages, rogues, and warriors who'll join forces with you, but only up to three at a time.

For this venture into Thedas, I'm the female dwarf rogue at the top of this post, and, being the lore-nerd that I am, this meant I didn't really have much choice of vocal performance - Dwarves have American accents, so I have an American accent. It was oddly jarring at first (which is doubly strange in that I never blinked an eyelid at the Dwarven or City Elf NPCs speaking in that accent), but I've settled in now, and she just sounds like my Inquisitor.

Across the board, vocal performances are typically solid, with only the occasional error in delivery or intonation serving to betray the fact that these lines are all recorded in isolation over the course of several months. The writing is slightly more variable, with some lines seeming more stilted than one would expect coming from a slightly more rough-around-the-edges character like a Carta dwarf, but that's to be expected with multiple potential characters (your backstory is set, but depends on your chosen race) delivering the lines.

Strangely, my biggest bugbear is nothing to do with the gameplay, or the characters, the graphics - it's the menus. Dragon Age II had, for my money, the best menus out of almost any RPG I've played. They were clear, you could see everything you needed to, and (as in Origins), the items your character had equipped were at the top of the list. Inquisition's approach is to have the items for any given slot (weapons, armor, accessories) appear in, as near as I can tell, no order at all, with your characters' current equipment just... somewhere in the jumble, denoted only by a thin border.

Worse, when cycling between characters, the list will reorganise itself as the previous character's equipment vanishes from the list to be replaced by the new one. Often, this will mean that an entirely different item will be highlighted, so comparing a single item that could suit multiple characters involves a wondrous combination of d-pad, analogue stick, square-button, and occasionally even R2.

It's ultimately a minor issue, I suppose, and far from a deal-breaker - but given the amount of stuff you'll accumulate in short order, the ability to quickly sift through and identify what's wheat and what's chaff is a baffling thing to overlook.

The world of Thedas as presented in Inquisition is almost uniformly gorgeous; it's got some of the most real-feeling environments I've explored, its major "open-world" zones variously full of caves, buildings, forests, narrow passages through rock, open fields, rushing waterfalls, endless dunes, rain-swept coastline... and I've only been to half of them so far. There's even the opportunity to revisit a few locations from Origins - I've been back to the villages of Haven (the site of Andraste's Ashes, and the starting point for Inquisition) and Redcliffe, but both are, somewhat distractingly, entirely different from their previous incarnations. A rebuild is to be expected, I suppose, but

I've only really dipped my toe so far, but in spite of a few minor but irritating issues, Inquisition seems to be the most polished BioWare RPG to date - whether that's good or bad ultimately rests on how much you got out of their back catalogue. For me, it's pretty great.