Dragon Age: Inquisition

I was quite excited for Dragon Age Inquisition for a few months prior to it's North American release date of November 18th, 2014. It had a lot to live up to and a lot to make up for. Inquisition surpassed my expectations and it shook the shame of Dragon Age II.

The dialogue is written and delivered excellently. All of the voice- acting is fantastic. The writing--especially that of the party banter--is fantastic. I'd say that for every one line of dialogue that I thought sounded odd or wasn't written well, there were thousands that I thought were fantastic (if I recall correctly, a developer on DAI claimed that there are 80,000 lines of dialogue in the game).

The gameplay in Inquisition is great. I'd have preferred if BioWare would have returned to gameplay of the first Dragon Age title, Origins, but the combat system they used is fun and action-packed!

The game is not without it's flaws: there are many technical glitches and bugs; the story isn't great; some of the side quests are boring.

There are a few small things I'd like to praise the game for, as well: the soundtrack and tavern songs are beautiful; the lore is great, and the codex entries are worth reading; the game is beautiful; the game is long (some might consider this bad, but I don't agree in the slightest).

Dragon Age Inquisition is worth your time and money. If you have the opportunity to play it, then you should.

Talk about overcompensating. Fans rightly complained Dragon Age 2 was too short and small, so BioWare dishes out one of its biggest RPGs yet. Strongly inspired by Skyrim, Inquisition is overflowing with locations to visit and things to do... too much so. Quests are everywhere, sprouting from every conversation; however, many belong to the "collect 20 wolf pelts" MMO variety. One could argue those repetitive tasks are not strictly speaking mandatory, except they kind of are: you need at least SOME grinding to gain enough "power" points, which unlock the progression of the vastly more interesting main quest.

Overall, while not as good as Origins, Inquisition is a step forward from the second chapter of the series - it feels like DA2 done right, without cutting corners.

Companions are mostly well-developed, with solid voice acting. There are nine potential party members and also three advisors who can't follow you around but still get plenty of screentime and interactions. Lore is interesting, although the codex collecting it is poorly thought-out.

There are several good news in terms of gameplay. Exploration is back, so players can ride mounts, climb mountains, find secret locations. The world is fairly vast and sometimes large maps are used well, such as a fun treasure hunt in a desert. The main city in the game is a joke though; any comparison with the huge, sprawling, detailed Vizima of The Witcher 3 would be downright embarrassing for Inquisition.

The strategic elements of being a faction leader (planning quests through advisors, managing a stronghold, holding trials) are simplistic but entertaining. Combat is on the easy/chaotic side, but at least friendly fire is not tied to difficulty setting anymore, unlike in DA2. Character building isn't deep, but race selection is a welcome return. Companion approval level is wisely hidden from the player.

A special praise for the Dragon Age Keep, which allows players to import decisions from previous games: this is a simple but neat idea, something which should be done by every series where you can import old saves to see consequences of previous choices.

Excuse my grammar and spelling mistakes. The game was created and developed around 2014. The graphic is amazing. I enjoyed some places where it is breathtaking such as the place in Trespasser. When comes to Darkspawn's design, I personally, liked the old dark spawn design in the previous games. As for the combat, I liked slightly that the AI characters follow you and make sure that they are in close distance from the main character. I liked the range distance combat of mage and archer which felt realistic. The glitches and bugs in this game are hilarious and fun. For example, the few people you see in the hinterlands. This game is half open-world. Open-world games are my favorite, but I understand the struggle to pursue 100% gameplay. This is what I think of an open-world game: I like to explore and experience the game in many aspects such as exploring in the dragon age inquisition to take pictures of a few places because of the thing that I mentioned about the graphic. The story, I liked how the story continued and progressed from the previous game. I enjoyed the DLC Trespasser to experience what will happen in the future and what happened after the event of the Inquisition. I am more amazed that they included LGBTQ+ character and romances for all the dragon age games. This game holds value and is simply divine. When comes to the character called Cullen, I remember hearing rumors that he is bisexual before. He is confirmed straight, but I am not sure why they needed to include the flirt rejection option for the male inquisitor for Cullen. Overall, the game is MASTERPIECE, one of the best RPG games. I recommend it, and I give it more than 10 stars.

So, this is no doubt an awesome game. The vast areas to explore, the amount of content, the characters, even the story. Yet I can't help but feel what could have been done better. And there are quite a few things.

1) Atmosphere. I wish Bioware had kept that dark fantasy setting for Dragon Age II and Inquisition. It worked so well for Origins. That was one of the main things that made Origins so memorable to me.

2) More cutscenes. The shortage of cutscenes, even in just regular conversations, was disappointing.

3) Pointless/uninteresting filler quests. Those quests that have you gather resources or kill a few soldiers. And there were so many of them. I can't help but feel they should have had less of that and invested more time and effort in letting us actually explore some of the war table quests that we only got to read about and not do ourselves. Going to Denerim, for example. Or investigating the tunnels in the Frostback Mountains. Anything with even a hint of real story to it.

4) Lack of revisiting old locations from Origins. I get they wanted to give us new areas to explore, but many fans (myself included) wanted to see another place or two from Origins and see what it's like now. That nostalgia factor. I'm glad we got Redcliffe, but they could have made it look at least a LITTLE more like it did in Origins, so it's actually recognizable. And they could've added more things to do in Redcliffe. Maybe even allow us to visit the castle outside of that one quest.

5) More things to do in a couple of areas. The Fallow Mire has it worst, I think. There's one main quest, one or two smaller quests and nothing else, outside of rifts, pretty much. They could have done so much more with, what I think is, one of the more interesting areas in the game. The Storm Coast and Forbidden Oasis are the other two I felt seriously lacked in things to do.

6) Perhaps a little more depth in the class specializations. Mages, especially. Compared to the depth of the mage class in Origins, this one is severely disappointing.

Again, awesome game, and these things I listed would've all made the game perfect. But not every game can be perfect, so I am happy with what we did get. Already look forward to the next game!

Did I play this game 7 times? Yes I did. Will that stop me from playing it again? Most definitely not.