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The much awaited third installment to the Dragon Age series has finally been released in November.

I am a big Origins fan : I have completed the game four times, one a full run on Nightmare. I have played every class and every race, tried all the different Origins and the different romances. To me, it is a PC RPG classic. The game was fun and challenging, the story was a bit cliché but choice oozed through the game, I loved the character customization options, the character development and despite a few slow parts, the game was engaging throughout.

When DA2 was announced, I was very excited and pre-ordered it. I was very disappointed. The gameplay was bad. I hated the waves system and how enemies would magically appear in your face, or worse, how assassins would spawn behind your mages and one-shot them, making positioning completely moot. Areas were constantly reused, the characters were really annoying, everyone was bisexual which made no sense (I'm not hating, but it is true that it made no sense, come on), the dialog wheel was a terrible, terrible design option since oftentimes what was actually said had nothing to do with what you chose, you couldn't customize the gear of your companions, the combat system was a bit mindless and so on. It was just a terrible game and I'll admit I didn't even complete it. In short, it was too "consolized". I was expecting a follow-up to one of my favourite PC RPGs and instead I got a console port. I can deal with console influence but it was obvious DA2 was designed with consoles in mind first and foremost.

What about DA:I?

I would have to say that I enjoyed myself while playing it, but that it is so almost completely in spite of the game itself.

Here's what I mean. You will read a lot of bitching and moaning by me about the game. There are so many things it does wrong and so little it does right. Despite all its faults, I can't say that I didn't enjoy myself. I've played 80 hours of it and completed it, although not at 100%. Looking back, it seems like a miracle that I even enjoyed it, but I did. Hopefully the reasons why will be made clear in this exploration.

Humble beginnings

I had a sense of dread when I played the first hour or so of the game. It was not interesting. Truth be told, the prologue is one of the worst ones I've suffered through. It's drawn out and it's boring. You are thrust pretty much in media res with a funky green hole in the sky that your character comes out of. People start thinking that Thedas' monotheistic goddess thrust you in the world and thus begins your quest for influence with the goal of countering what is now ailing the world. The Divine and her closest lieutenants are killed. Templars and mages are slaughtering each other and everyone caught in the middle. Demons appear out of nowhere. As is usual with Bioware games, you are the unlikely hero who's calling is to Make Everything Better (tm).

The story is disappointing at best. Origins' story was cliché but this one is somehow worse, complete with the megalomaniac evil dude who wants to become a god, resurrected from a DA2 DLC of all places. In essence, the whole story is a big deus ex machina. You can't get worse than this. It isn't engrossing. I found myself not caring at all about the main arc. It is simply so commonplace, so hackneyed by the Bioware writing team. I found myself nearly emailing EA for a refund. Things do not get better until you are thrust into the first main area of the game, where you finally get a sense of the scope of the game.

The Hinterlands are vast. In fact, the area is simply huge. There are tons of things to do, to see and to collect. Exploring the zone brought me the first inkling of fun of the game. Truth be told, it's simply beautiful. I remember when I first started playing World of Warcraft, that I was in awe at how big the game was, and felt immersed in the world. This happened in DA:I too. The environment is really beautiful, and it feels like a real world to explore. I found no stutter while playing on my machine (Core i5-4670K, nVidia GeForce GTX 760 4GB, 8GB DDR3 RAM) at the highest settings, except in cutscenes where everything was stuttering a bit. I must have spent at least 1/3 of the game in the first zone, attempting to do everything.

A lot to do...but is it fun?

I ended up giving up after a while on doing everything. Why? The game is menial. Once the first impressions disappeared, I found myself confronted with reality : there is not much you do that actually matters. Quests are all the same : go to x place, bring y materials or kill z enemies. In other words, the vast, overwhelming in fact, majority of the game is composed of MMO-style fetch quests. With the Requisition system, they even installed generic fetch quests as a whole, complete system. You're asked to bring certain ingredients at a table and this gives you Influence and I think XP, over and over. Wow. I completely glossed through this part of the game.

You have little to no choice as to what to do while completing the quests. I expected much more. In The Witcher 2, even the side quests were replete with hard choices, and they were varied enough and had enough possible outcomes that you did not feel like some sort of errand boy. Even DA:O's side quests often offered multiple conclusions. There is only one possible outcome to the vast majority of the quests in DA:I, and that is completion in the way the game wants you do. That's all. You are truly a glorified errand boy in the worst MMO sense. You do not feel like the Inquisitor, the hero who will one day save Thedas. You feel like a chump looking for some old woman's ring for reasons.

There is a lot of materials to collect in the game. Now let me tell you that gathering materials is a huge chore. It was even worse before the patch when the materials you "pinged" with your search button didn't show up as a blip on the minimap, so you had to look everywhere for the faint, thin orange outline that signifies something can be picked up upon hearing the "ping" sound. The search button in this game isn't an auto-highlight by holding the button like DA:O. It's more like a radar. You have to wander around, spam the search button endlessly and when you hear a ping, investigate the source. It's a huge pain in the ass. What was wrong with simply holding the button?

Not only are there materials to collect, but numerous collectibles, such as bottles, mosaic pieces, landmarks or shards. DA:I steals a page out of traditional open-world games like GTA or Saints' Row. There's a lot of these things that are scattered around the numerous, vast areas of the game, and aside from the rifts to close, suffer from the same flaw as the quests in that you don't know why you're collecting these at all, except for XP and Influence Points (IP). There is no objective reason to. They are often hidden in hard to reach, frustrating positions on the map. The game expects you to do a lot just for the sake of doing it.

Worse yet, the vastly uninteresting content of the game is basically forced on you. To unlock more areas and more story missions, you have to collect Power Points (PP) that are awarded upon completion of some of the quests and the collection of collectibles. Other reviewers praise the game for this tie-in, but I hate it. It's an obvious attempt to make up for the crippling majority of the content that is simply uninteresting on its own but becomes something you must do in order to advance to something more interesting. Truth be told, I wouldn't have completed most of the side quests if I didn't need to just to advance into the game further because they were that much of a drag.

The seat of your power

The quests that you are involved in are not the only quests in the game. With the "War Room" mechanic, you can send either one of your three advisers to do a task by clicking on them on the map, choosing who to send and waiting for a period of time. They will come back with rewards.


Figure 1 : All of this is yours

Again, the vast majority of these War Room quests are filler. Oftentimes, you will send one of your guys on a 3 hours mission and he'll come back to you with a crappy amount of gold, a ridiculously small amount of influence and an item you have long since overleveled. The long delays between choosing a mission and its completion, plus the very limited number of advisers you have (not all of which can be used on every mission) means that doing stuff on the map is very, very long. I'll be honest here : this feels like a F2P mobile game. You know the drill, the ones where every action takes a stupid amount of time unless you pay to have it complete quicker? It's the same concept, without the paying.

Some of these missions do unlock new zones or areas within old zones but they are few and far between and pretty obvious anyway. The War Room is meant as a mechanic to develop the influence of the Inquisition all over Thedas. It falls short because you cannot discern the meaning of what you're doing anyway. Oh good, you sent troops to help some Fereldan arl, here's 60 gold for your trouble. That's it. It doesn't matter. There are some War Room chain quests but again, you are left without any overarching meaning as to your actions. This is a definite theme within the game and its biggest weakness.

Once you unlock Skyhold, you have a base worthy of that name to call your own. You can customize it : which banner you will fly, how the windows look, what's in your garden, how your throne and your bed looks. There is a lot of choice as to that customization but again, most of it doesn't matter. Your bed, for example. You will probably never go in your quarters for the whole of the game, so what does it change that you have a Dwarven bed? Especially when compared to the much more important issue of equipment (I'll talk about it later), it feels like a lot of effort went into a part of the game that doesn't really matter to the detriment of the areas that do.

By doing War Room missions and side quests, you collect Influence which raises your Inquisition level. Inquisition levels allow you to choose perks from a list. Some of these perks are basically mandatory (the unlocking doors one comes to mind if you want to complete some quests, since you cannot unlock them any other way), others are useless (like the ones giving you a farcical 10 of each kind of metal separated by tier - you can swim in more crafting ingredients than you need in 20 minutes). These perks are also the only way to get alternate dialog options for the Inquisitor, which are mostly useless.

The meaning of all of this


Figure 2 : I thought I knew what the game was looking for too

All of this is done so that you can advance the main story. In almost every game I've ever played, the main story arc in the most involved and the longest. It isn't so with DA:I. I would estimate that 95% of the game is busywork, the rest is the actual story.

The main story is ridiculously short. This is so in nearly any modern Bioware game but DA:I takes it to an extreme. If one was to cut the Power mechanic, it would be perfectly possible to complete the main story in a single sitting. One could probably do it in an afternoon. There are almost no choices in the story arc. The first one you have is whether you go help the Mages or the Templars. The second one is what happens to them. You then have to decide who rules Orlais (the most involved choice, I think, and the best mission in the whole game IMO). Afterwards, you choose how to deal with the Grey Wardens, you can influence who will run the Chantry, and finally, whether you destroy or use an ancient Elven artifact, and whether Morrigan or yourself does it. My memory might be a bit shaky and I might have forgotten some choices, but that's basically it. The fact that I might have forgotten some of the actual choices that you are presented with is a testament to how soulless the game is. I can recite every choice in Origins' main story by heart, and I could do so by the time I first completed the game because I felt invested and involved. Not so here.

The worst part is that the choices you are presented with are either binary or a bit grey if only because you are not fully informed as to what will happen if you go through with it. Either this option, or that option. In DA:O, once you got to Redcliffe, you had the possibility to hurry to the Mage's Tower to find enough lyrium to complete the ritual to expunge the demon within Connor without anyone dying and without resorting to blood magic. You could also send Jowan, yourself or Irving in and use Connor's mother as a battery for the ritual. You could even strike a deal with the demon instead of killing it. There were sometimes a lot of different ways to complete a quest, and it nearly always ended up mattering. In Inquisition, there seems to be always just a few choices (often only two) that are mostly interchangeable. It isn't on Origins' level, much less The Witcher's. In fact, that the game's ending is so stupidly short speaks a lot to your level of actual involvement in what happens in the story.

Doing all the busywork you are meant to do actually ruins the main story, because you will be gravely overleveled when you do the story or explore other zones. The zones have a scaling range but do not scale to your level if you are too high (or too low) level for the area you are in. This means that the game basically plays itself even on the hardest levels if you go through all the shit you are meant to since you will be unstoppable. This is the one instance where full enemy scaling might have been warranted and they didn't put it in. In fact, the game actually actively works against itself where challenge is concerned. I'll let this final sentence stand as to how ridiculous the system is.

A system to kill them all, and in pain slaughter them


Figure 3 : THE RAPE TRAIN IS COMING AND IT AIN'T GOT NO BRAKES

Thankfully, there is one thing that kind of saves the game, and it's the combat system. Don't get me wrong, it's no Origins. Combat is way too easy thanks to how overleveled you generally are and the tactical screen blows chunks (again, console influence *sigh*). However, whereas the game itself is almost completely devoid of meaningful choice, the combat system does allow for some choices and strategy, if you choose to use it. You can still shatter frozen enemies, discharge paralyzed enemies and rupture weakened enemies, and there's still a bit of interplay between all the skills with cross-class skill combos à la DA2. You can melt ice walls. You have to engage your enemies wisely (in theory), as there are no healing spells. You heard me right. No healing spells. You heal solely through potions or some skills like the Reaver's Devour.

Mages cannot heal but can cast barriers to absorb the damage you take. Warriors can also generate guard that acts as a second life bar. This is my favourite change. In Origins, you could easily save your ass from a failed encounter by spamming healing spells and potions. Now, since your potions are limited in numbers and there are no healing spells, it favours a more careful style of play and a judicious use of barriers, at least in theory.

Controlling your character is at least very fun. I got a kick lasting 35 hours of pulling people with the Grappling Chain, then kicking their ass on the ground with the improved version of the skill only to land a Mighty Blow in their hapless faces, often killing them outright. Enemy mages and archers can be very frustrating (especially the mages since they can teleport around) so they are always a prime pulling target, and their low defense meant that I often one-shot them, giving me the sense that I was a Powerful Ultra Badass(tm). For the next 45 hours or so, I got a kick of using Charging Bull to knock whole groups of people on their ass then eating their flesh with Devour only to go apeshit crazy with Dragonrage spam. I felt that as I was playing a warrior, I was the one who dictated the flow of battle for my team by pulling or knocking down baddies I wanted to be dealt with as swiftly as possible and Whirlwind shitting on the rest. Basically, the spotlight was on me at all times. Controlling the Inquisitor is fun and a big step up from DA2.

The caveat is that the AI is dumb as a rock. Gone is the tactics screen from Origins. You can set who they will target (it's always the best choice to have them focus your target), when they will use potions (you're better off making them use them yourself) and how frequently or not they will use a given skill on a scale of 0 to 2 (not at all, sometimes or every time the cooldown is on). The AI will not use the skills correctly and will generally contribute little to damage. They will blow their focus abilities for little reason, or never use them, so you have to micro them. Worse yet, they will not GTFO from fire or any other bad shit on the ground, meaning they die easily to bosses and dragons. They play at the level of the worst WoW newbie.

You can fix all that by using the returned tactical screen, but it's terrible. It doesn't zoom out far enough to offer you a full view of the battlefield, for one. Controlling the cursor is a hassle. Sometimes the AI won't even do as you order them to. It's completely useless. I don't think anybody even uses it. I used it a lot in DA:O where it actually mattered. Nowadays I just play my main dude and hack everybody to pieces myself. I do ridiculous burst damage, even more ridiculous sustained damage thanks to how overpowered Dragonrage is and amazing AoE damage. Pulling, LoS and kiting don't really matter anymore aside from single enemies to instakill because the maps are so open. Positioning sorta does as a warrior, but only because Grappling Chain is buggy and will latch on a random nearby enemy if you aren't careful with your line of sight. I had equal success just potting up and ramming everybody with Charging Bull then Dragonraging everybody to death. At least there are no more random spawns and random waves.

The one thing that bothers me the most in the combat system is the skill tree system. There aren't many and they have very few skills. A lot of the points you spend will be spent on passive upgrades which isn't all that fun (isn't that why Blizzard entirely remade WoW's skill system?) You will only get one specialization in the game and you can never change it. You can't even choose your companions' specializations as they are all preset. The worst thing, however, is that you will use only 8 skills in the entire game (7 if you don't count the Mark focus skill) because there are only 8 skill slots in the shortcut bar and you can't cast the rest from the menu. Bioware says that's enough - I say that's an unacceptable limit to player freedom. In fact, it's an unacceptable encroaching of console gameplay into a PC game. Keyboards have a lot of keys, controllers don't. It's obvious why there even is this limit. What would have been the cost in time and money to put in optional, additional shortcut bars? I very quickly filled the tiny bar. I found myself wishing a lot that I had more options (for example, I wanted to make a Reaver that could pull people to him, taunt them, buff the whole team with Horn of Valor then go to town with 2H and Reaver skills, but there wasn't enough space to do so). Some of the skills are at least very interesting to use but most of them are not. Gone are the sustained skills with interesting effects (Death Syphon anyone?). All you've got are active skills.

Mages are the worst offenders. The old Primal tree in Origins is separated into 3 different elements. There are 4 base trees for every class in the game, plus one specialization tree. Basically, you have no choice but to play as a Primal mage and a bit of Entropy if you choose Necromancer, a bit of the DA2 Force tree if you choose Rift Mage and a melee mage if you pick Knight Enchanter which is the only true playstyle changing specialization. I loved Entropy/Spirit/Creation/Blood Mage mages for the insane amount of CC they could dish out and their very respectable damage. I could put whole groups of mobs to sleep, Virulent Walking Bomb, Nightmare spell combo all of them then stun them with the Glyph Spell Combo, then cast Blood Wound FTW. Anything that lived would blow up from the Bomb and infect others to blow up too. You can't do that in DA:I. There probably wouldn't be enough hotkeys in the bar for you do to so anyway!

In fact, mages have less CC than warriors do (they have more individual CC spells, but you have to choose between them as they are spread out between all the trees, giving you one or two real options to use, while nearly every skill a warrior gets and uses is CC), and their damage isn't that stellar since their spells are based on weapon damage, and staves are the worst DPS weapons in the game. Aside from barrier and the Veilfire/Energize map stuff, there is no reason to have a mage on your team. The sole exception is a Knight Enchanter main character because they are stupidly overpowered. They play a bit like Arcane Warriors (melee mages) and are just as broken, if not more because they can both do good DPS and never die.

Oh, and THERE IS NO BLOOD MAGE SPECIALIZATION. The single reason why mages are so dangerous in the lore makes NO APPEARANCE IN THE GAME. You'd think that due to every mage technically being an apostate, you'd see a lot more blood magic this time around, but there is none. Not even mobs. This is a HUGE OVERSIGHT. The caps prove it.

Melee rogues seem pretty bad (I haven't played one nor did I have one on my team thanks to the terrible AI) and I've heard they do less DPS than 2H warriors (especially Reavers) and that their DPS relies on their skills, with their daggers doing shitty auto-attack damage. Ranged rogues seem pretty fun in theory, I like the traps and the mines from the Artificer spec, and they do good opening burst.

The toughest enemies, the dragons, are stupidly easy and your teammates will only die because they can't dodge enemy attacks. Get a few resist flasks of the pertinent element and some resist gear, and you're done. On Normal, you don't even need that. My experience was that spamming Dragonrage and Devour in the Ring of Pain field was enough to kill any dragon. Normal enemies have a lot of health points to the point where a 5k crit won't kill them (my warrior has 1000 HP or so) but they do consistently pathetic damage to you. It feels a little silly.

Oh, and remember the trailer where you could blow up parts on the environment to fall on enemies and damage and hamper them? Forget that. I haven't seen a single point in the game where I could do that, much less have it matter.

Equipment, or how to look fugly 80 hours in


Figure 4 : my character would be more in its place in some kind of stage play than a battlefield dressed like that

You can customize your companion's gear. At least there's that. Aside from that, the loot table and equipment system is the worst of the series.

A word of warning to the wise : DO NOT PLAY A QUNARI INQUISITOR. I was very excited to play a Qunari because let's face it, they look badass. In this game, they look anything but. Armour looks terrible on them. They have no helmets. Forewarned is forearmed.

In contrast to the vastly useless Skyhold customization system, the sole area of the game where customization matters is seriously underdeveloped. Look at my armor. That's T3 (the final tier) crafted with Dragon Bone and other T3 materials. Does that look like any kind of badass late-game armor to you? The answer is : NO IT FUCKING DOESN'T. Late-game crafted Skyrim armour looked badass. Late-game DA:O drops could look good. You would be excused in Inquisition if you thought I had the same armour for the whole of the game, because I basically did.

This is the armour I had 15 hours into the game :


Figure 5 : barf

Yeah it's ugly as sin (especially the colour), but it was an unique and better than what I could craft.

This is the armour I had 30 hours into the game :


Figure 6 : alright...

The armour in the first picture in this section was my endgame armour. I crafted it maybe 2 hours before I finished the main story at 80 hours clocked in. You will notice that aside from the colour, it basically looks almost the same as the armour I had 50 hours earlier. There are only minute differences between the armour tiers. None of these 3 armours look badass. I'll admit the final one looks okay from a colouring standpoint, but it does not look epic. Counting the very first armour piece, I have worn a grand total of 4 armour pieces for the whole game, which brings me to my next point.

The loot tables in this game are horrible. Unique equipment (the purples) is almost always inferior to anything that you can craft yourself at almost any point in the game if you are dutifully hunting for schematics. At level 18, I still had minimum level 10 gear dropping from mobs. It was completely useless. Your characters will be stuck wearing the same equipment for extremely long stretches of time as white quality quickly becomes absolutely worthless. You will hang on to your magical equipment until you find or craft better, which can take a very long time. Most uniques have shitty stat spreads and are thus useless. Moreover, most don't even look good. That red armour was a unique. It's cringeworthy. Meanwhile, there's like 20 different banners and windows and 15 beds to choose from for your keep. What's the point? Why not focus artistic resources on something that actually matters? You might never visit your quarters but you'll look at your character all day long.

Qunari really get the shaft. I have found no uniquely Qunari armour but I've found restricted armour for every other race. Base armour looks terrible on Qunari. Qunari also cannot use helmets. Instead they have "vitaars" which are just face paints. As you cannot craft vitaar (but you can craft helmets) you are completely at the mercy of the game as to what vitaar you will use, and they are all generic stat sticks. I've probably used something like 3 different ones. They're all really ugly too, one made me look like an Asari (the one in the pic where the face of my dude is blueish) and another transformed my face into this road sign :



Aside from that, there's the usual belts, rings and amulets, and the weapons. The first three are completely forgettable (and you can't craft them, BTW, so again not only you're at the mercy of the loot table, but they will always be generic + stat or skill upgrades that make it last 30% longer or do 30% more damage), the last one is the most important part of the game but suffer from the same problem as armours in that most don't look all that awesome and what you'll find will be inferior to what you can craft.

Speaking of the devil


Figure 7 : at least crafting's fun

The crafting component in the game is by far and away the best part, and the most improved from the series. Notwithstanding how terribly dull and annoying collecting ingredients is, it gives you a lot of leeway in forging a piece of equipment you actually want.

There are offense, defense and utility slots whose number and amount of ingredient they will fit in vary, plus one masterwork in high-end schematics and one base slot in every schematic, and a rune slot for weapons. Each ingredient will have a different effect on the equipment that you are forging depending on which slot they are placed in. The base slot determines armour rating and damage, and it's always best to use the highest tier ingredient you can muster since that's all that matters in the calculation. Depending on which ingredient you use, the piece will change colours, so you can "dye" it to your liking.

Getting schematics is easy, you can just buy them. In fact, gold only serves to buy schematics since vendors are otherwise useless in this game. You can also use gold to buy influence but you'll have a lot of that doing the quests anyway. The gear they carry sucks, the ingredients they carry suck. You can also have schematics drop which removes the whole point of vendors in this game.

Even in the same tier, different ingredients will have different effects. For example, one metal in the utility slot might give you + constitution, + strength or a mixture of both. One leather in the offense slot might gives you + % bleed on hit or + % critical rate. Since every schematic varies and not all have slots of every type in equal proportions, it's important to find one that suits your character. For example, my 2H warrior serves as both main DPS and tank, so I like to have heavy armours with a lot of offense and utility slots instead of defense slots, so I can stack + % attack (offense) and + str/con (utility) materials on them to give me a well-rounded armour. Some schematics are quite useless (defensive slots on mage armour...)

The same mentality applies to armour and weapon upgrades that you can craft and slot in your equipment, so you can really customize your equipment to your liking if you choose to. Again, I mostly stack attack, str, health and con on mine to give me a warrior that can take damage and dish it out.

Masterwork slots use fade-touched or masterwork components to give your equipment special effects. For example, I crafted a weapon with a masterwork material that allows me to generate 3 guard with every hit, and I crafted an armour with a material that gives me 10% chance to cast Hidden Blade (usually a rogue skill), which is a multistrike skill, every time I smack someone. That allows me to both stack guard to survive and deal ridiculous damage when Hidden Blades procs. There are a lot of different masterwork materials that you can use but unfortunately, most of them just slap a generic 10% stat upgrade across the board, however some are very cool.

Furthermore, crafted equipment is vastly superior to anything you will ever find in the game. Once you get T2 schematics there is no reason to ever wear any armour or use any weapon you will find in the game.

You cannot craft accessories and you cannot craft vitaar (but you can helmets), which removes a bit of the point of crafting in the first place since you are still at the mercy of the RNG for your accessories, which will always be generic. No cool masterwork effects for them. So basically you will have crafted material in only three slots on your character, which is a damn shame because the crafting system is one of the best parts of the game.

I also felt that runes were underutilized. They are unchanged from Origins. They are either elemental damage or damage versus certain enemies. It would have been cool to have more options akin to WoW's enchantments, which were varied despite there always being a single best option. A chance on hit to get 100% armor penetration, heal on hit, stuff like that would have been very cool.

What dialogue?

Finally, dialogue and companion development.

The dialogue wheel is back. It's thankfully a bit better than it was in DA2 but I'm still of the opinion that a fully voiced protagonist removes some level of immersion. What is inexcusable is how what you say doesn't matter outside of the choices you have to take, which are clearly marked.

In every PC RPG under the sun, there is nigh always an option to charm, persuade or intimidate. No such thing in DA:I. Alternate dialogue options are unlocked through the perks, are linked to certain topics (for example, the Force one gives you knowledge about the underworld), show up once in a blue moon and rarely seem to matter at all. In Origins, a good Persuade level was almost mandatory due to how useful it was and how it could make your life so much easier. There is nothing of the sort in Inquisition, and it would be a bit useless anyway, given that 99% of the content gives you no choice at all.

In DA2, the kind of answer you'd give would shape the personality of your protagonist when interacting with companions and during unprompted dialogue. That's completely gone, but that's because the main character never speaks unless prompted to by the player. This is a bit of an uncomfortable in-between, as you still don't know what exactly your character will say, but you also can rarely check at a glance what kind of emotion it's supposed to convey as you at least could in DA2 (you can sometimes).

The companions are unfortunately a mixed bag. Varric is still Varric, and he's awesome. Cassandra is basically Aveline plus religious nonsense. Solas has the coolest back story and is interesting to interact with because of his Fade scholarship and his stories. Iron Bull doesn't act like a Qunari at all and sounds like he's been in Southern Thedas too long : he's almost completely assimilated despite (or due to?) being a Qunari spy. He's certainly no Sten. Sera is a crazy, infantile bitch. Cole's gimmick is that he's a cryptic Fade spirit. Dorian is okay, gives you a bit of a window in the Tevinter Empire which is a very underutilized part of the lore. Blackwall is the typical Warden, all duty, and is actually my favourite companion because next to almost everyone in the cast, he's down to Earth and rational. The cast this time around pales in comparison to Origins, but at least it's better than DA2's.

The interactions between the companions aren't witty, aren't funny, they aren't nothing. They are quite badly written. All I've heard is my team bickering. I can't even remember any of them. No Alistair asking Wynne to sew his socks. No Oghren hitting on Wynne. No Morrigan constantly insulting Alistair. No Zevran being Zevran.

The companion quests seem to be mostly filler that forces you to visit every single zone to find some shit. Cassandra wants you to kill a zillion targets out of revenge. Blackwall wants you to magically undercover Grey Warden artifacts stranded all around the world. They aren't involved. They aren't interesting. They might be farther in the chains but I gave up doing them because the first steps were just more busy work that I had done a thousand times already. Alistair trying to find his sister, for example, and having her be a gold digging bitch. Oghren trying to find an old love and his son with your character convincing him to settle down and have a life after Branka. Sten trying to find his sword and atone for the murder of the farmer's family due to his panicked state. Those were REAL companion quests. Mass Effect's companion quests were even better examples. I don't know what happened this time around.

And finally, the romances. They are still clumsily written, forced, geeky attempts at love stories, but that's a Bioware thing. Frustrated straight males still whine about the coverage given to homosexual couples, like such a thing matters. However, the two romances offered to straight male characters are even worse than Origins' attempts. Cassandra is the cliché of a tough girl with a sensitive, feminine side she tries to hide. She's a romanceable Aveline. Josephine is...uhhh...I don't even know. She's just really generic, the usual high-born girl. I will say that either of the options are uninteresting, unattractive and flat. I can't speak for the other options because I've completed the game only once. Maybe they are better. I will say that I do not really give a shit whether there are homosexual romances or not in the game. It's a game. I liked romancing Zevran in Origins as a male character because he was hilarious. I'm just glad the whole cast isn't bisexual as that stretches credibility a bit.

Conclusion

You have heard a lot of whining from me about the game and you might be wondering how on Earth I ended up enjoying myself. The truth is, I don't know. As I said, I did, but despite the game. The graphics were really nice. The maps were huge and fun to explore for the scenery's sake. Controlling your character in combat could be fun. The crafting system is well done, albeit incomplete. All in all, Inquisition feels a lot like a single player MMORPG. You do a lot of stuff but there isn't much you do that ultimately impacts the world. I think that the ending slideshow, which has like 4 or 5 slides telling you about the state of the world, implies how empty the game ultimately is. Origins' ending slideshow had a lot more parts and seemed much more complete. You don't even learn what your companions will be doing after the game except for Solas, who just GTFOs and you find out why in a cutscene.

Should you buy it? No, not right now. I would wait for a 50% price slash or a few DLCs if the latter are any good in the end. Critics are hailing it as the GOTY but I don't think it is, far from it. In fact, Bioware has only sunk a little deeper in my view. They are definitely not the company that brought us Baldur's Gate II (the devs involved with that all left, no wonder why) or even Mass Effect 2, which was a vastly superior game. Divinity : Original Sin and Wasteland 2 are much better RPGs. However, we must recognize that video gaming changed. People want a lot to do and for it to look as good as possible, but not much to think about. DA:I has a huge amount of content, a full clear will take hundreds of hours, and it's beautiful to boot, but that only matters if you even want to do it all, which I didn't. DA:I has a very imbalanced filler-to-stuff that matters ratio. I can only describe it as the most uninvolved RPG I've played. The Witcher 3 will undoubtedly blow this out of the water in May 2015. It won't even be a fair fight. Save your money for that if you have to choose.

That being said, video game critics are either retarded or bought and paid for, especially since it's an EA game. That's why there's even all this GOTY hype while there is no question that the game itself is average at best.

However, you can always be certain that you're getting the truth from Seroim.

Thank you for reading.

I regret that my response won't do your post justice.

As someone who is exploring and loving Dragon Age: Origins, its disappointing to hear of the troubles that beset its sequels. I'm blown away by the massive amounts of choices, variety, and possible directions to go in Origins, not to mention the plot behind it and even the background elements. All the companions are lovely, and while I have my favorites to take for combat purposes, I regret that I can't take more just to listen to their interactions...they seem to get along as characters in their own right, and that sort of feeling of being in a real party and not just a bunch of people following me around the map is one of the things that most appeals to me. It sounds like those things are severely lacking in Inquisition.

One of the things that kept striking at me when I read your review was the large amount of concepts that seem to have come from other games and even other genres. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but from what I've read it doesn't appear to have been done with much grace. The furnishing issue you bring up reminds me of how I felt about the Hearthfire DLC for Skyrim...it allowed you to build and customized your own houses and do things with them. I'm sure they were trying to evoke what people liked about The Sims, but to me it failed for two reasons...houses weren't important enough in the broad scheme of Skyrim, and the options were too limited to feel like you'd built anything on your own. The joy of the Sims was building the house of your dreams, something that I feel is lost on developers who try to implement housing/customization in their games. I'm sure that's the case here too. And the same goes with the other elements...

One conclusion that I disagree with is your assertion that people don't want much to think about in their games. I'm sure that some people don't want to, and of course the major studios will appeal to the lowest common denominator, but I've actually seen a renaissance of games that focus on gameplay and thought with the emergence of indie studios, crowd-sourcing, and new distribution methods, particularly the digital storefront and especially Steam. I would say we've come a long way from the dark days of the early 2000s, in fact, mostly again to the lowering of barriers for smaller and more ingenious studios.

I regret that my response won't do your post justice.

As someone who is exploring and loving Dragon Age: Origins, its disappointing to hear of the troubles that beset its sequels. I'm blown away by the massive amounts of choices, variety, and possible directions to go in Origins, not to mention the plot behind it and even the background elements. All the companions are lovely, and while I have my favorites to take for combat purposes, I regret that I can't take more just to listen to their interactions...they seem to get along as characters in their own right, and that sort of feeling of being in a real party and not just a bunch of people following me around the map is one of the things that most appeals to me. It sounds like those things are severely lacking in Inquisition.

Good choice. Origins is awesome. The whole party banter thing was my favourite part of the game. You're right, it gave it a lot of life and personality.

One of the things that kept striking at me when I read your review was the large amount of concepts that seem to have come from other games and even other genres. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but from what I've read it doesn't appear to have been done with much grace. The furnishing issue you bring up reminds me of how I felt about the Hearthfire DLC for Skyrim...it allowed you to build and customized your own houses and do things with them. I'm sure they were trying to evoke what people liked about The Sims, but to me it failed for two reasons...houses weren't important enough in the broad scheme of Skyrim, and the options were too limited to feel like you'd built anything on your own. The joy of the Sims was building the house of your dreams, something that I feel is lost on developers who try to implement housing/customization in their games. I'm sure that's the case here too. And the same goes with the other elements...

To me, that speaks of a game that tried to be too many things without a real global direction to take. There's a lot of stuff in there from different genres and games. The game has a lot of parts and a lot of things to do, but the whole is underwhelming and doesn't manage to tie in everything in a satisfactory manner. Even the many different parts are quite diluted and uneven, again due to its grand scope. You can't really write interesting side quests when there's 500 of them. This makes it so the game's pacing is extremely uneven. As I repeatedly said in the review, the devs force you to do some of the utterly uninteresting content to go on to more interesting stuff. Apparently, they knew that the vast majority of the content in this game is worthless so they devised a system to shoehorn you into doing some of it.

Quantity isn't quality. I would have preferred a tighter game that knew where it was going. It's not that Inquisition cannot decide where to go, it's that it simply doesn't know what to do with itself. Combined with bad writing and forgettable content, that's a recipe for disaster. Especially the writing. Inquisition's writing, both the main storyline and the characters, is cringe-worthy. It is so bad. If I were Bioware's CEO, these people would not have jobs anymore. I don't know what happened, seriously. Bioware writing has always been full of tropes and clichés with a few exceptions, but this takes the cake. I've seen this story a hundred times already. It's the story of about every D&D campaign under the sun. Let it go.

The Witcher 3 has about the same outlook but it's been in development for a really long time and I'm convinced that the guys at CD Projekt are going to deliver. They just seem to improve with every release.

One conclusion that I disagree with is your assertion that people don't want much to think about in their games. I'm sure that some people don't want to, and of course the major studios will appeal to the lowest common denominator, but I've actually seen a renaissance of games that focus on gameplay and thought with the emergence of indie studios, crowd-sourcing, and new distribution methods, particularly the digital storefront and especially Steam. I would say we've come a long way from the dark days of the early 2000s, in fact, mostly again to the lowering of barriers for smaller and more ingenious studios.

I disagree. Almost every indie game I've bought I've been disappointed with. There have been a lot of games I was interested in but didn't buy and that ended up being the good decision to take due to a spectacular failure on the part of the developer. Indie developers seem to have a lot of really good ideas but often fail to implement them correctly or at all, probably due to a lack of budget.

Furthermore, that "deregulation" of the gaming business where developers do not really need publishers anymore to come up with funding sounds great in theory, but I've often seen it fail in practice, especially in my fetish genre, 4X games. There is one instance I know of where an indie dev made a game that was really awaited for but unplayable at release, and instead of fixing it, started another crowdfunding for a sequel, promising a better game if only you would shell out your money again. A lot of crowdfunded projects don't deliver on their promises. There's a lot of vaporware as well. I also don't like paying for games that aren't completed (early access) as who knows whether they will ever finish it? The dismantling of accepted practice often brings along a bit of a Far West period. We've seen it in 2008 concerning subprime mortgages. Maybe it will stabilize with time, maybe not, but I'm not gonna play Russian Roulette with my wallet for the moment.

The sole exception I have personal experience with is Endless Legend. That game is great. Endless Space not so much but the dev seemed to learn from its mistakes and pushed out a quality product this time around.

I think the future lies in developers that are too big to be called indie developers but too small to be called AAA developers. Paradox Development Studio is a great example. Stardock, Triumph (of AoW fame), CD Projekt, Obsidian and Larian are others (although Stardock doesn't make most of its money from games, and Obsidian makes buggy shit). They have enough funding to push out quality games, and enough of a niche market to develop thoughtful products with amazing content and great gameplay. Their small sizes makes it so that they have to be creative in their distributing, selling and funding methods to be competitive which ensures they are innovative, and they have the money to have that innovation become reality. I personally can't wait for Pillars of Eternity and of course Hearts of Iron 4 (provided it's less of a PITA to play than HoI3 for sure). It's such a shame that Runemaster was cancelled, god that game looked awesome in theory.

I had made an exception with DA:I due to my love of the first game but I will not get burned by another AAA game again. The only one that fulfilled my expectations was Beyond Earth, and even then, just so. AAA developing unfortunately is not gonna die as these games appeal to the lowest common denominator, as you said. I'll save my money to throw it at Paradox instead. <3 these Swedish guys.

Good choice. Origins is awesome. The whole party banter thing was my favourite part of the game. You're right, it gave it a lot of life and personality.

Since playing multi-player games online, I've noticed that often single-player games feel...lonely, even in towns with many characters. In most RPGs NPCs are generic, from the vendors to your companions, but this was a nice change of pace, and I wish more games did more to emulate the feeling that actual people exist in their game worlds rather than mindless automatons.

To me, that speaks of a game that tried to be too many things without a real global direction to take. There's a lot of stuff in there from different genres and games. The game has a lot of parts and a lot of things to do, but the whole is underwhelming and doesn't manage to tie in everything in a satisfactory manner. Even the many different parts are quite diluted and uneven, again due to its grand scope. You can't really write interesting side quests when there's 500 of them. This makes it so the game's pacing is extremely uneven. As I repeatedly said in the review, the devs force you to do some of the utterly uninteresting content to go on to more interesting stuff. Apparently, they knew that the vast majority of the content in this game is worthless so they devised a system to shoehorn you into doing some of it.

Quantity isn't quality. I would have preferred a tighter game that knew where it was going. It's not that Inquisition cannot decide where to go, it's that it simply doesn't know what to do with itself. Combined with bad writing and forgettable content, that's a recipe for disaster. Especially the writing. Inquisition's writing, both the main storyline and the characters, is cringe-worthy. It is so bad. If I were Bioware's CEO, these people would not have jobs anymore. I don't know what happened, seriously. Bioware writing has always been full of tropes and clichés with a few exceptions, but this takes the cake. I've seen this story a hundred times already. It's the story of about every D&D campaign under the sun. Let it go.

I think there's a lot of interest from studios in making the 'game of games'...something that draws in things from as many genres and packed with as many things to do as possible, but they often seem to do so without any sort of understanding of why things may be appealing in one genre but not another...people are going to want to built and customize a house in The Sims, but not so much in a RPG. People don't want to sit and wait for hours for tasks to complete, and that's why F2P games capitalize on microtransactions. And drawing ideas from MMOs is a mistake because they have the added strength and task of having other human beings on the game to interact with. That drastically changes what you can do in a game without making it unfair to someone. A certain amount of generic stuff is required for them.

I'm reminded of TES: Daggerfall from 1993...it boasted a game world the size of Great Britain, with thousands of villages, NPCs, and quests. The problem was, besides being buggy, everything outside what was required for the main story was randomly generated, and the experience was as generic as you might imagine. When they went to make Morrowind a few years later, they decided to ditch that idea in favor of a much smaller and limited but more detailed hand-crafted world, so to speak, to much better results.

The Witcher 3 has about the same outlook but it's been in development for a really long time and I'm convinced that the guys at CD Projekt are going to deliver. They just seem to improve with every release.

I've played some of the first Witcher, but I was disappointed with how easy it was to accidentally get to a point where quests closed off for no reason. It's almost like you had to look up a wiki to show the right order to do things...is the second one better in that regard?

I disagree. Almost every indie game I've bought I've been disappointed with. There have been a lot of games I was interested in but didn't buy and that ended up being the good decision to take due to a spectacular failure on the part of the developer. Indie developers seem to have a lot of really good ideas but often fail to implement them correctly or at all, probably due to a lack of budget.

Furthermore, that "deregulation" of the gaming business where developers do not really need publishers anymore to come up with funding sounds great in theory, but I've often seen it fail in practice, especially in my fetish genre, 4X games. There is one instance I know of where an indie dev made a game that was really awaited for but unplayable at release, and instead of fixing it, started another crowdfunding for a sequel, promising a better game if only you would shell out your money again. A lot of crowdfunded projects don't deliver on their promises. There's a lot of vaporware as well. I also don't like paying for games that aren't completed (early access) as who knows whether they will ever finish it? The dismantling of accepted practice often brings along a bit of a Far West period. We've seen it in 2008 concerning subprime mortgages. Maybe it will stabilize with time, maybe not, but I'm not gonna play Russian Roulette with my wallet for the moment.

The sole exception I have personal experience with is Endless Legend. That game is great. Endless Space not so much but the dev seemed to learn from its mistakes and pushed out a quality product this time around.

I think the future lies in developers that are too big to be called indie developers but too small to be called AAA developers. Paradox Development Studio is a great example. Stardock, Triumph (of AoW fame), CD Projekt, Obsidian and Larian are others (although Stardock doesn't make most of its money from games, and Obsidian makes buggy shit). They have enough funding to push out quality games, and enough of a niche market to develop thoughtful products with amazing content and great gameplay. Their small sizes makes it so that they have to be creative in their distributing, selling and funding methods to be competitive which ensures they are innovative, and they have the money to have that innovation become reality. I personally can't wait for Pillars of Eternity and of course Hearts of Iron 4 (provided it's less of a PITA to play than HoI3 for sure). It's such a shame that Runemaster was cancelled, god that game looked awesome in theory.

I had made an exception with DA:I due to my love of the first game but I will not get burned by another AAA game again. The only one that fulfilled my expectations was Beyond Earth, and even then, just so. AAA developing unfortunately is not gonna die as these games appeal to the lowest common denominator, as you said. I'll save my money to throw it at Paradox instead. <3 these Swedish guys.

Maybe we've had different experiences, but for the most part I've been happy with the indie and one-person studios. Of course, I'm not into 4X games really, and I've always had a thing for games crafted by a small company or one person. I remember back before the internet when you would by CDs of hundreds of freeware and shareware titles for a few bucks, and they were full of games like that...of course there was crap on there, but there was also gold. I remember learning about such games as Stars!, Space Empires, Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol, and MinerVGA. Of course none of those games are much to brag about now (except for Space Empires, which grew and spawned four sequels), but as a kid in the mid-late 90s it was terrific.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and I ran into sites like Manifesto Games which sold and did reviews of 'indie' games, guided by an actual manifesto of exposing lesser known games and creating a better standard for smart gamers than what the major studios were doing at the time. It's here that I discovered games like Democracy and Kudos, before Positech Games got big(ger). And yeah, there was crap here too...you've know clue the shitty Diablo clones I tried in vain during this era, but this was my first experience with a website that struck out against the crap major studios were making at the time. Unfortunately it closed in 2009, but obviously the movement has gone on and has produced lots of great games (in my opinion).

My point is, there's always been demand for smaller, funner games, and at least in my experience there have always been good attempts at providing that...even if it's only the last few years it's become a really prominent movement. There's always been alternatives to major studio releases, and at least in my experiences there have been plenty of modest hits, especially for games and studios that target a niche audience as you pointed out with Paradox. And as always with the advent of technology and new ideas like crowdsourcing there's an adjustment period where the rules catch up. For every great success like Wasteland 2, there's a miserable failure like Yogventures, or a game that was abandoned before completion like Spacebase DF-9, but it's still a promising avenue to making and delivering games that risk-averse major studios wouldn't dare touch, in my opinion.

I think different experiences is a good phrase to summarize my thoughts on this.

You felt like there was nothing to do?  That it was all fetch quests or kill monster quests?

I almost felt the complete opposite to a degree.  For starters, to use the Hinterlands as an example, I felt like there was plenty to do.  There were various regions to discover, landmarks to find, Astrariums to find and complete their little puzzles, Oculariums that you can use to find shards to gather, different mounts you can ride through areas to get to places faster, and the like.  Sure, some quests definitely were "fetch this many items and bring them back" or "Kill X amount of enemies" but I felt like it was in balance.  You couldn't kill all of the enemies for a sidequest at the same time, because some were up there in difficulty, so completely certain rift quests had to wait until you leveled up a bit.

And honestly, what game DOESN'T have fetch quests or monster quests?  That's pretty much the summary of most MMOs out there - kill X amount of enemies then move on to collecting various materials from monsters/find a unique item/etc... to move on to the next quest which has you doing another one of those things.  Hell, if you break a game down, many RPGs come to this:

*Kill X amount of enemies to continue
*Collect item (s) to continue
*Kill the strong boss to continue
*Make it from point A to point B to continue
*Return to previous point, talk to someone/kill something/retrieve something, and then return to main area to progress.

If you take away the added fluff of romance and other game fillers (IE building a house), a driving story/plotline, and the like, and that's what games are.  Hell, Legend of Zelda is literally just buzz through dungeons, kill enemies, collect items, kill bosses, rinse, repeat.  Final Fantasy is just get through point A to B, backtrack constantly, kill enemies to get stronger, kill bosses, collect items, rinse, repeat.  Even Dragon Age Origins without the added fluff is: get from A to B, kill enemies to get stronger, collect items for your character or to appease others, kill bosses, rinse, repeat.

So criticizing a game for showing more of its main purpose than others is a tad silly in my opinion.  Not to mention if that's all your seeing despite all of Inquisition's added fluff, you were going into it with a critical mindset in the first place.  Heck, you criticize the game for making you get Power Points to move places, but I can think of a game with a worse system that was five times more annoying compared to Inquisition's easy (and it really was easy to me) Power gaining:  Xillia 2's Debt system.  You didn't like doing little quests to get Power to move places?  Try having to get X amount of money at specific points in times to travel to different areas, it'll make DA:I's Power system look like a godsend.  Considering you got one power for even the tiny sidequests (IE just closing a single rift would get you 1 Power), it wasn't really that gripe-worthy to me.

Origins had some high points as did 2, but they had their share of flaws as well.  Inquisition and DA2 had one specific beginning story compared to Origins' 6 different branches, but Inquisition and 2 had more a sophisticated dialogue wheel so you knew what impression you were making on someone.  2 is criticized for rehashing their areas over and over, but Origins also rehashed some of the same areas, even if it wasn't as blatant.  Origins and 2, while not completely linear, did feel closed at points since exploration wasn't their main focus, whereas Inquisition isn't completely open (since you do travel between even if there's open areas), but it still feels much nicer for exploration.  And backtracking, while there may be one specific story for all 4 races and various classes, people still respond differently to you depending on your race/class (I've noticed especially with the Qunari). 

Granted, that's not to say Inquisition isn't without its flaws as well.  I do agree that the beginning left a bit to be desired, and I wasn't very impressed with the once again tweaked leveling system.  But at the same time I did like the spread towards being able to gain skills from Inquisition perks, and being able to do little timed missions where you don't even have to do anything except choose your ideal person to take it.

You're welcome to your opinion, and I respect it, and this is merely my differing opinion.  But you're making it sound as if Inquisition is a mind-numbingly horrible game with some exceptions, and maybe to you it is.  But personally, I enjoy it as much as I did both Origins and Awakening, if not a tad bit more. 

This might be a tad harsh for me to say, but the reason your review of the game is so bad is because you're comparing it so harshly to Origins.  I lost count of the comparisons in the review ("But origin's--"  "Well Origins--"  "Origin's ____ wasn't as bad"  "Origins did a better job of---")  If you go into a game comparing it to the original, you're just going to be overly critical and miss out on a lot that the game has to offer.  Origins was far from the perfect game as fun as it was, and DA 2 was in the same boat.  Inquisition is not a perfect game either, but it's still an exceptional one.  The things it failed in in some areas triumphed in others, whereas Origins may have triumphed in the areas that Inquisition failed, and vice versa.  Hell, even DA2 triumphed in areas even if it failed in others, and honestly, all three of them were exceptional in their own right.  I wouldn't tell someone not to buy Inquisition, because I don't know what they're looking for in the games they play.  If they played the first two games and liked them, then I'd definitely tell them to try out Inquisition.  There are many people out there who liked Origins who will absolutely love Inquisition.  And maybe some out there won't.  Already right here there's two completely differing opinions coming from two different people who have played the other games.

Good choice. Origins is awesome. The whole party banter thing was my favourite part of the game. You're right, it gave it a lot of life and personality.

Since playing multi-player games online, I've noticed that often single-player games feel...lonely, even in towns with many characters. In most RPGs NPCs are generic, from the vendors to your companions, but this was a nice change of pace, and I wish more games did more to emulate the feeling that actual people exist in their game worlds rather than mindless automatons.

Fully agreed. One other system I liked was in Tales of Symphonia, the skit things. They also were very good at bringing life into the game. The best part about this is, well, unlike players, they don't say inane shit

To me, that speaks of a game that tried to be too many things without a real global direction to take. There's a lot of stuff in there from different genres and games. The game has a lot of parts and a lot of things to do, but the whole is underwhelming and doesn't manage to tie in everything in a satisfactory manner. Even the many different parts are quite diluted and uneven, again due to its grand scope. You can't really write interesting side quests when there's 500 of them. This makes it so the game's pacing is extremely uneven. As I repeatedly said in the review, the devs force you to do some of the utterly uninteresting content to go on to more interesting stuff. Apparently, they knew that the vast majority of the content in this game is worthless so they devised a system to shoehorn you into doing some of it.

Quantity isn't quality. I would have preferred a tighter game that knew where it was going. It's not that Inquisition cannot decide where to go, it's that it simply doesn't know what to do with itself. Combined with bad writing and forgettable content, that's a recipe for disaster. Especially the writing. Inquisition's writing, both the main storyline and the characters, is cringe-worthy. It is so bad. If I were Bioware's CEO, these people would not have jobs anymore. I don't know what happened, seriously. Bioware writing has always been full of tropes and clichés with a few exceptions, but this takes the cake. I've seen this story a hundred times already. It's the story of about every D&D campaign under the sun. Let it go.

I think there's a lot of interest from studios in making the 'game of games'...something that draws in things from as many genres and packed with as many things to do as possible, but they often seem to do so without any sort of understanding of why things may be appealing in one genre but not another...people are going to want to built and customize a house in The Sims, but not so much in a RPG. People don't want to sit and wait for hours for tasks to complete, and that's why F2P games capitalize on microtransactions. And drawing ideas from MMOs is a mistake because they have the added strength and task of having other human beings on the game to interact with. That drastically changes what you can do in a game without making it unfair to someone. A certain amount of generic stuff is required for them.

I'm reminded of TES: Daggerfall from 1993...it boasted a game world the size of Great Britain, with thousands of villages, NPCs, and quests. The problem was, besides being buggy, everything outside what was required for the main story was randomly generated, and the experience was as generic as you might imagine. When they went to make Morrowind a few years later, they decided to ditch that idea in favor of a much smaller and limited but more detailed hand-crafted world, so to speak, to much better results.

Yup the "game of games" has been attempted again and again, and it's always fell flat. To its credit, I do think Inquisition is the best out of these "game of games".

You put the finger right where it hurts, Inquisition's problem is that it's generic. This is something I tried to convey in my review. Unless you have a huge team and a huge time window, when you're cramming content into a game, it's pretty much certain that this content won't be fleshed out much and ultimately there won't be so much difference between quest x and quest y.

The Witcher 3 has about the same outlook but it's been in development for a really long time and I'm convinced that the guys at CD Projekt are going to deliver. They just seem to improve with every release.

I've played some of the first Witcher, but I was disappointed with how easy it was to accidentally get to a point where quests closed off for no reason. It's almost like you had to look up a wiki to show the right order to do things...is the second one better in that regard?

Much better. The Witcher 1 was a weird game, but I still liked it. I thought it felt very "Eastern European" if that's possible, being that the devs are Polish. There just seemed to be a different mentality to the game when it came to progress. Less hand-holding but with the possibility to gravely fuck up. I almost gave up on the game because the opening parts are so slow, but I'm glad I didn't, it ended up being very fun.

The Witcher 2 is a masterpiece. As much as I like Origins, I actually prefer TW2. The combat especially is amazing...it does feel like fencing (well, a dramatized version thereof) and it can be quite challenging. At higher levels, you'll NEED pots and traps to survive, so you can't just engage people by running in. You'll have to concoct little fields of death then pull mobs into them with throwing knives or Igni. In fact, aside from the emphasis on pulling and preparation and with the addition of a party, Inquisition's combat reminds me a lot of TW2's.

The story IMO was really something, there were lots of choice in almost every quest and they weren't that obvious at all. That game has 16 endings, I believe. I've completed it only twice going through the two major arcs (Temeria and Scoia'Tael). The only caveats I can find really are equipment and crafting. The crafting system is okay, but pretty basic and Inquisition's is better. The equipment is ugly and there isn't much variety, but that's par for the course in Witcher games, you aren't supposed to look badass, but weathered.

It's really inexpensive these days to boot.

Oh, and they got rid of the sex cards in 2. That was a bit infantile.

I disagree. Almost every indie game I've bought I've been disappointed with. There have been a lot of games I was interested in but didn't buy and that ended up being the good decision to take due to a spectacular failure on the part of the developer. Indie developers seem to have a lot of really good ideas but often fail to implement them correctly or at all, probably due to a lack of budget.

Furthermore, that "deregulation" of the gaming business where developers do not really need publishers anymore to come up with funding sounds great in theory, but I've often seen it fail in practice, especially in my fetish genre, 4X games. There is one instance I know of where an indie dev made a game that was really awaited for but unplayable at release, and instead of fixing it, started another crowdfunding for a sequel, promising a better game if only you would shell out your money again. A lot of crowdfunded projects don't deliver on their promises. There's a lot of vaporware as well. I also don't like paying for games that aren't completed (early access) as who knows whether they will ever finish it? The dismantling of accepted practice often brings along a bit of a Far West period. We've seen it in 2008 concerning subprime mortgages. Maybe it will stabilize with time, maybe not, but I'm not gonna play Russian Roulette with my wallet for the moment.

The sole exception I have personal experience with is Endless Legend. That game is great. Endless Space not so much but the dev seemed to learn from its mistakes and pushed out a quality product this time around.

I think the future lies in developers that are too big to be called indie developers but too small to be called AAA developers. Paradox Development Studio is a great example. Stardock, Triumph (of AoW fame), CD Projekt, Obsidian and Larian are others (although Stardock doesn't make most of its money from games, and Obsidian makes buggy shit). They have enough funding to push out quality games, and enough of a niche market to develop thoughtful products with amazing content and great gameplay. Their small sizes makes it so that they have to be creative in their distributing, selling and funding methods to be competitive which ensures they are innovative, and they have the money to have that innovation become reality. I personally can't wait for Pillars of Eternity and of course Hearts of Iron 4 (provided it's less of a PITA to play than HoI3 for sure). It's such a shame that Runemaster was cancelled, god that game looked awesome in theory.

I had made an exception with DA:I due to my love of the first game but I will not get burned by another AAA game again. The only one that fulfilled my expectations was Beyond Earth, and even then, just so. AAA developing unfortunately is not gonna die as these games appeal to the lowest common denominator, as you said. I'll save my money to throw it at Paradox instead. <3 these Swedish guys.

Maybe we've had different experiences, but for the most part I've been happy with the indie and one-person studios. Of course, I'm not into 4X games really, and I've always had a thing for games crafted by a small company or one person. I remember back before the internet when you would by CDs of hundreds of freeware and shareware titles for a few bucks, and they were full of games like that...of course there was crap on there, but there was also gold. I remember learning about such games as Stars!, Space Empires, Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol, and MinerVGA. Of course none of those games are much to brag about now (except for Space Empires, which grew and spawned four sequels), but as a kid in the mid-late 90s it was terrific.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and I ran into sites like Manifesto Games which sold and did reviews of 'indie' games, guided by an actual manifesto of exposing lesser known games and creating a better standard for smart gamers than what the major studios were doing at the time. It's here that I discovered games like Democracy and Kudos, before Positech Games got big(ger). And yeah, there was crap here too...you've know clue the shitty Diablo clones I tried in vain during this era, but this was my first experience with a website that struck out against the crap major studios were making at the time. Unfortunately it closed in 2009, but obviously the movement has gone on and has produced lots of great games (in my opinion).

My point is, there's always been demand for smaller, funner games, and at least in my experience there have always been good attempts at providing that...even if it's only the last few years it's become a really prominent movement. There's always been alternatives to major studio releases, and at least in my experiences there have been plenty of modest hits, especially for games and studios that target a niche audience as you pointed out with Paradox. And as always with the advent of technology and new ideas like crowdsourcing there's an adjustment period where the rules catch up. For every great success like Wasteland 2, there's a miserable failure like Yogventures, or a game that was abandoned before completion like Spacebase DF-9, but it's still a promising avenue to making and delivering games that risk-averse major studios wouldn't dare touch, in my opinion.

We'll have to agree to disagree. The only indie studio that I trust to release good games is Amplitude. Although I liked The Vanishing of Ethan Carter too, I don't remember who made it and I'm too lazy to look it up. There might be a few indie gems, sure, but there is a literal sea of shit too. One example was CONSORTIUM. I had read about it on Rock Paper Shotgun and I was really excited for it. It's an RPG-ish game inside a spaceship. What I was really excited about was the importance of dialogue. You could speak with everyone. You could even complete the game without firing a single shot if you wanted to, or you could kill everyone. The game had a lot of lore. When I finally got to play it, it was incredibly buggy. The game was utterly broken. I don't think I've seen a game as buggy since, actually. The second thing I wasn't informed of by the good folks at RPS is that it's really, really short. 3 hours, maybe, or even less.

Of course, not all indie games are like that, but I've experienced enough of it to steer clear of anything indie unless it gets stellar user reviews. There may very well be gold, obviously, I'm not saying all indie games are shit, but my point is that devs like Paradox, we'll call them "mid" developers, can crank gold like Midas. They have a much better shit-to-gold ratio in my experience. View it like a bell curve : indie devs crank more shit than gold, mid devs crank more gold than shit, then it drops down again with AAA devs. That's why I think the future lies there.

Speaking of Paradox, Hearts of Iron 4 will be their first game after they encountered a bit of mainstream success with CK2 and EU4. I can't wait to see what they will have in mind. HoI3 was an obscure piece of shit, so I wonder how much they will do to bring the game closer to mainstream tastes (and in that case, I consider myself very much part of the mainstream - there was so much pointless minutia in HoI3 that I never got into it like I did Victoria, EU or CK).

I actually remember these CDs even though I'm younger than you, but not buying them - they came with PC magazines. I do agree with you that gaming was better before the AAA studios. Some really old games still can't be beaten today (MoO2!) I remember playing this game, I forgot the name, but it was by Sierra. It was a turn-based strategy game with mechs that you could build from scratch and equip to your liking. It was like Mechwarrior, but TBS and you had a squad. My CS teacher in grade 7 had given it to me. I've still never seen anything like it, and I'm baffled as to why there is nobody jumping on that idea and making a new game in that vein.

I think different experiences is a good phrase to summarize my thoughts on this.

Well, you're allowed to have a different experience. It's a free country

I'm sorry if I sound a bit rude or snarky when I'll answer you, I really don't mean to be. I do feel that you have misread my review though, so that's why I felt it was important to reply. It's probably my fault, when writing long posts like these, my English tends to deteriorate the more I write.

You felt like there was nothing to do?  That it was all fetch quests or kill monster quests?

No, I felt like there was plenty to do. I commented at length on the fact that there is a lot to do. My feelings about this is that most of it isn't worth doing.

I almost felt the complete opposite to a degree.  For starters, to use the Hinterlands as an example, I felt like there was plenty to do.  There were various regions to discover, landmarks to find, Astrariums to find and complete their little puzzles, Oculariums that you can use to find shards to gather, different mounts you can ride through areas to get to places faster, and the like.  Sure, some quests definitely were "fetch this many items and bring them back" or "Kill X amount of enemies" but I felt like it was in balance.  You couldn't kill all of the enemies for a sidequest at the same time, because some were up there in difficulty, so completely certain rift quests had to wait until you leveled up a bit.

Discovering the scenery for the Hell of it was the best part of the game to me. But you see, I feel the collectibles in the game don't bring anything to it. As I have often written in the review, they don't matter, they aren't linked to the rest of the game in any way, they're just there. It feels like they're there just to make the world less empty. That's a problem with a lot of collectibles systems, which is why I usually don't like them.

It wasn't some quests that were kill or fetch quests, it was all of them. However, that's not the main problem I have with them if you read carefully. I would have liked a bit more diversity in the quests, sure, but there's only so many types of quest one can create. But...

And honestly, what game DOESN'T have fetch quests or monster quests?  That's pretty much the summary of most MMOs out there - kill X amount of enemies then move on to collecting various materials from monsters/find a unique item/etc... to move on to the next quest which has you doing another one of those things.  Hell, if you break a game down, many RPGs come to this:

*Kill X amount of enemies to continue
*Collect item (s) to continue
*Kill the strong boss to continue
*Make it from point A to point B to continue
*Return to previous point, talk to someone/kill something/retrieve something, and then return to main area to progress.

If you take away the added fluff of romance and other game fillers (IE building a house), a driving story/plotline, and the like, and that's what games are.  Hell, Legend of Zelda is literally just buzz through dungeons, kill enemies, collect items, kill bosses, rinse, repeat.  Final Fantasy is just get through point A to B, backtrack constantly, kill enemies to get stronger, kill bosses, collect items, rinse, repeat.  Even Dragon Age Origins without the added fluff is: get from A to B, kill enemies to get stronger, collect items for your character or to appease others, kill bosses, rinse, repeat.

You bring a good point, and I agree with it. When you boil down almost every video game to the bare bones, they are but the repetition of a task. After all, every human endeavour is simply a series of tasks to finish. During my law school education, I have had to read at least upwards of 300 judicial opinions written by interchangeable judges with little personality. The driest stuff you've ever read. That's all life is, just doing tasks, much the them the same ones, some of them over and over again. Again, but...

So criticizing a game for showing more of its main purpose than others is a tad silly in my opinion.  Not to mention if that's all your seeing despite all of Inquisition's added fluff, you were going into it with a critical mindset in the first place.  Heck, you criticize the game for making you get Power Points to move places, but I can think of a game with a worse system that was five times more annoying compared to Inquisition's easy (and it really was easy to me) Power gaining:  Xillia 2's Debt system.  You didn't like doing little quests to get Power to move places?  Try having to get X amount of money at specific points in times to travel to different areas, it'll make DA:I's Power system look like a godsend.  Considering you got one power for even the tiny sidequests (IE just closing a single rift would get you 1 Power), it wasn't really that gripe-worthy to me.

I'm criticizing the game because it is so overt with the lack of actual substance in much of what you do. I disagree that it is a silly criticism.

To veer off comparisons to Origins, let's consider Divinity : Original Sin. That game too had fetch quests and kill quests. Go there, find incriminating evidence as to the murder of that one dude. Go there, kill the troll. The mechanics, at the base level, are the same.

What made one enjoyable and the other not so enjoyable was the meat on the bones. Take a girl, or a boy if you swing that way. All human beings are basically the same if you strip enough of the upper layers. We've all got the same inner organs, protected by the same overall musculature and skeleton. We've all got eyes, skin, fingernails, finger, toes, a spine, and so on. When you get down to the basics, we're all the same. What makes you attracted to that girl or boy is not the fact that they're human and that they hopefully have a pulse. First, it's how that girl or boy wears that basic shape : pleasant traits for one. Second, it's the personality of that person : how they act, how they're dressed, and so on.

My point is that most of the content in Inquisition is absolutely bare-bones at its core. Yes, there is a lot of content, I never disputed that, but ultimately, much of the content is not "attractive". This is what I tried to convey in my review by whining about how much of what you do "doesn't matter" or "isn't linked to an overall direction in the game. In D:OS, you had the same quests you did in Inquisition, BUT they could be completed any number of ways. They ask you to go kill the troll, but you can strike a deal with him to stop killing people in exchange for a task. You have to find x object, but you can find it in any number of ways. Another example : in TW2, there was a quest where some guardsmen in the first town captured an elf believed to be a spy. They ask you to go in the cave, kill things and find evidence of her guilt of innocence. You can choose to bury the evidence, you can roleplay that you do believe her when she says she isn't guilty, you can have her cooperate or you can let the guards take her.

Do you see what I'm trying to convey? Inquisition fetch quests are fetch at their core like any other RPG quest, but there isn't anything else. There is no meat on the bones. People ask you to kill something or someone, you can't roll up and solve the problem in a different way. People ask you to fetch item x or y, you can't lie to them that you didn't find it and keep it for yourself. For the overwhelming majority of the game, there is a single way to do something, and that is to do exactly what the game wants you to.

Look at the Empress' quest, the one with the party. Isn't there a more fetch-y quest than "collect Halla statues to open these doors, find all the coins and eavesdrop on 30 assholes"? However, it was my favourite in the game simply because how many options you have as to how will rule Orlais, which depends on what items you've fetched. It's a fetch quest, make no mistake, but it has some meat, and the context is very intriguing. That's a far cry from "hey guy can you go fetch my ring in these ruins and bring it back to me please?" That's an errand. That's not interesting.

I would not have whined if the quests in Inquisition were flexible as in D:OS or any number of other RPGs, even if they all boiled down to fetch/kill quests. As you rightly point out, almost every quest in almost every RPG can be stripped down to the same formula. I do not contest this, and that's not the problem. But at least to me, what makes an RPG decent and what makes an RPG great is the extent to which you are allowed to roleplay. Isn't that the whole purpose? This is what keeps a game from becoming too "same-y" and what keeps quests for just being more busywork because I have an actual hand in the outcome and how I choose to resolve the quest, which keeps me interested. They allow me to build on my character's personality, to develop him/her in a way that I like. In other words, I have trouble doing stuff just for the Hell of doing stuff. There has to be something in store for me and my character, an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to do things in an unexpected way. Playing WoW, a game composed almost uniquely of fetch or kill quests, I never read the quest texts. It didn't matter why I had to do something or how my character would grow while doing it, because it wouldn't. I wasn't interested in the quests, but in leveling so I can get to the end game as quickly as possible. Inquisition feels very MMO-y in that regard.

This is why I wrote that I would have preferred a tighter game. With the amount of content Inquisition has, it's hard to flesh it out to a level other than the bare minimum. Resource and time constraints make it impossible. This means that in the end, almost all content in Inquisition is the same, and most quests aren't interesting on their own.

As I wrote, I still think the Power mechanic is a way to tie in the monotonous fetch quests into something of greater importance, but the link to too concrete, too obvious, too mechanical. It is the only thing that gives the tiniest bit of substance to the side quests. I agree with you that Power was easy to come by, but that doesn't change the problem I perceive : that most of the game is separated from the "core" of what an RPG should really be according to my perception of that concept and is linked to it by this tenuous, artificial link. That this link is a limitation or isn't ask annoying as another system doesn't matter. In fact, I have never said that the Power mechanic itself was limiting or annoying. It's the concept itself I have a problem with, not its implementation.

Origins had some high points as did 2, but they had their share of flaws as well.  Inquisition and DA2 had one specific beginning story compared to Origins' 6 different branches, but Inquisition and 2 had more a sophisticated dialogue wheel so you knew what impression you were making on someone.  2 is criticized for rehashing their areas over and over, but Origins also rehashed some of the same areas, even if it wasn't as blatant.  Origins and 2, while not completely linear, did feel closed at points since exploration wasn't their main focus, whereas Inquisition isn't completely open (since you do travel between even if there's open areas), but it still feels much nicer for exploration.  And backtracking, while there may be one specific story for all 4 races and various classes, people still respond differently to you depending on your race/class (I've noticed especially with the Qunari).

Agreed. Origins wasn't perfect, but it was still excellent. I'm currently debating giving DA2 another shot as perhaps there is something I missed, since I did not complete it. I also agree that exploration for its own sake was one of the best parts of DA:I because the scenery is varied and beautiful, and it isn't as empty of places as say, Skyrim's, where 70% of the map is wilderness.

I find it interesting that you speak about the Qunari because I was disappointed in the backstory of a Qunari inquisitor. I think they would have been much more interesting if he/she had been a real Qunari, a follower of the Qun thrust into the middle of a religious organization he/she doesn't understand by circumstances, having to make sense of a totally alien culture while at the same time being its beacon and it its forefront. This would have been an amazing backstory with a lot of potential. Instead, you're Tal-Vashoth, which means that people do call you a goat and are a bit apprehensive of you, but aside from that, you're a human with horns. Instead of being from a completely alien culture and having to come to terms with your new role as the Inquisitor (think of Sten, I suppose), you're the equivalent of a black person in Apartheid South Africa. I still appreciate how there even was a difference between the races as how people would perceive you, but I had higher hopes for a Qunari character.

Granted, that's not to say Inquisition isn't without its flaws as well.  I do agree that the beginning left a bit to be desired, and I wasn't very impressed with the once again tweaked leveling system.  But at the same time I did like the spread towards being able to gain skills from Inquisition perks, and being able to do little timed missions where you don't even have to do anything except choose your ideal person to take it.

Agreed on the leveling system. This is not something I talked about, but I felt that being unable to distribute stat points took away a bit of the fun. Instead, your stats being totally dependent on your skills and equipment felt weird.

You're welcome to your opinion, and I respect it, and this is merely my differing opinion.  But you're making it sound as if Inquisition is a mind-numbingly horrible game with some exceptions, and maybe to you it is.  But personally, I enjoy it as much as I did both Origins and Awakening, if not a tad bit more. 

I don't know about you, but I live in a free country I'm alright with differing opinions.

This might be a tad harsh for me to say, but the reason your review of the game is so bad is because you're comparing it so harshly to Origins.  I lost count of the comparisons in the review ("But origin's--"  "Well Origins--"  "Origin's ____ wasn't as bad"  "Origins did a better job of---")  If you go into a game comparing it to the original, you're just going to be overly critical and miss out on a lot that the game has to offer.

I'm a bit cross with that argument. It's one I've heard multiple times in multiple games addressed to multiple reviewers. With some exceptions, I never agreed with it.

First, the other games in a series are an obvious comparison point when reviewing a game from that series. I don't think anybody can deny that.

Second, I did compare it to Origins, and I did compare it unfavourably, but I do not think that skewed my perception of Inquisition to a degree that's so sweeping as to invalidate my thoughts about the game altogether.

Here's my take on it. My favourite game of all time is Deus Ex. If you don't know it, it's an old RPG/FPS hybrid centered on conflict resolution from multiple angles and the story is basically a huge conspiracy theory. This isn't something anybody on this forum knows about me but I love conspiracy theories, UFOs, all that jazz. Although I'm not a believer and reject many of the real world theories, I like to research them for fun's sake, and sometimes there IS something to them, albeit often not what the proponents of the theory think.

Anyway, there are multiple ways to complete every single mission. Your character is a bio-augmented agent and you can choose which augs to get, which skills to invest in, etc, which allows you to use any playstyle you want : stealth assassin with pistol or sniper, soldier with an assault rifle, demolitions expert chucking grenade, even sword fighter with the Dragon's Tooth. The maps weren't open, but there were big enough to offer multiple angles to tackle a problem. For example, you could infiltrate a base via the famous air ducts or maybe the roof, you could waltz in the front door, you could sneak in, reprogram the turrets and let their own automated defences kill the enemies. I grew up with that game, beat it more than 10 times.

I didn't like the sequel, Invisible War, mostly because the maps were so closed, the universal ammo system which was a bit silly and because everything was so goddamn dark, but the story was even better than the first game's.

However, I loved Human Revolution. The maps were more what I expected of a DE game, I really enjoyed the mechanics, I really enjoyed the lore, I really enjoyed everything, except the mandatory boss fights which meant you had to be good with guns to the detriment of the other skills. They modified with an expansion. In fact, I think I prefer DE solely because of nostalgia's sake. HR was what an AAA game should really be. It was slick, it was tight, it was thoughtful.

Now, why I am comparing what I thought of the original DE and HR with what I thought of Origins and Inquisition? While I really liked the original Deus Ex, I'm able to differentiate between nostalgia for nostalgia's sake and truly improved mechanics. I have the feeling that you don't like my review because you think I wanted more of the same and that I would have hated anything else. While I would have been satisfied with more of the same, that much is true, I wouldn't have bashed a game that does things differently, while standing on its own two legs.

HR did a lot of things very differently than DE did. HR has a cover system that never existed in a Deus Ex game before (that many DE fans hate). HR has automatically regenerating health instead of healkits (that many DE fans hate). HR has hacking and lockpicking minigames. HR had more focus on side quests. HR had no skill points, only the mechanical augmentation system (that some DE fans hate). HR is quite a bit less linear than DE was (I actually liked DE's linearity). HR is quite a bit more focused on stealth than DE was thanks to the cover system, but less focused on exploiting enemies' weaknesses in an overall scheme. HR is less strategical than DE was, but more tactical; it's more reactive. HR has a very, very nifty and unique persuasion system unlike anything I had seen before or have seen since. HR had actual bosses (that almost every DE fan hate). I could go on, but the point is that while HR did a lot of things differently, they were improvements in their own rights.

The only change HR brought to the series that I disliked were the bosses that one had to fight, instead of being able to talk your way out of them or just surprise kill them like you often could in DE. When you reached Lebedev's plane for the purpose of killing him, he first engaged you in conversation, explaining the purpose of the NSF. If you're convinced, you can spare him instead of killing him (whatever happens, however, the story is built around you betraying UNATCO and joining the NSF). Unbeknownst to you, your UNATCO partner is following you and if you don't kill him, she will, and if you object, you have to kill her which is very difficult at this point in the game, meaning that you will almost always get arrested and thrown in the brig. If that happens, once you get out, you have to fight her. You could either kill her with guns, use the killswitch phrase you can hack from computers OR plant a LAM (a mine) at the entrance of the plane before talking to Lebedev. When she comes it, it blows up and she dies. No fighting, over and done. You couldn't do that in HR which was disappointing.

BUT! Every other change, even those the DE community really disliked like regenerating health, I have liked. In my mind, they were two steps forward, sometimes two leaps forward. These changes brought a lot to the game and it could compare favourably to DE even if it wasn't "more of the same". It wasn't just an improvement on DE, it was its own game. Its own really good game.

However, in my view, Inquisition's changes are mostly two steps back. There are exceptions, like the open maps and the crafting system. Even the combat is improved IMO from Origins (I can understand why that isn't what my review looks like it says, in fact it sounds like the contrary, I'm sorry about that, but I did write that review late at night). The barrier change was really good. I like the autoattack system, which is something a lot of Origins fans bash and something I haven't written about. It's more involved than the click and watch of Origins for sure. In fact, I think it's why I completed the game. Combat was fun. As I wrote, I got a kick lasting 35 hours of pulling people, kicking them on their asses then shoving my greatsword in their face. Charging Bull is really fun to use too. I'm not hard to please, really. In fact, just for the combat, I might even replay it in a few months. And because I'm stubborn and want my money's worth, I might even full clear it. It'll be a drag, but it'd be fun to be able to say I 100%'d Inquisition. I'm thinking about a DW Rogue since I heard mages are really boring to play in this game. Have you tried them?

However, the overall feel of the game, how everything is linked together, the quests, the characters, the writing, to me that's all two steps back.

Your criticism would make sense if I thought Inquisition would have been a good game if it weren't Dragon Age. However, you're wrong. Had it been a completely different series, I would have thought that it had the same faults I think it has now and would have the same opinion. Yeah, I'm comparing it a lot to Origins, both because I liked that game and because it's a natural comparison point as I've written above. However, the fact of the matter is that I do not like Inquisition for what it is. It's too huge, too sprawling, too over the place without any real substance. It's a single player MMORPG. As Moot said, what saves MMOs is the player interaction. This is what gives them substance. Not only there is not such thing in Inquisition for obvious reasons, but your party doesn't manage to replace player interaction. Their banter is awful, just awful. Most companions don't have personalities that appeal to me.

Inquisition would have been better IMO, Dragon Age or not, if it had been a tighter game, with less content but deeper content. In its present state, most of the content didn't keep my attention. That's what I tried to convey in the review.

Origins was far from the perfect game as fun as it was, and DA 2 was in the same boat.  Inquisition is not a perfect game either, but it's still an exceptional one.  The things it failed in in some areas triumphed in others, whereas Origins may have triumphed in the areas that Inquisition failed, and vice versa.  Hell, even DA2 triumphed in areas even if it failed in others, and honestly, all three of them were exceptional in their own right.  I wouldn't tell someone not to buy Inquisition, because I don't know what they're looking for in the games they play.  If they played the first two games and liked them, then I'd definitely tell them to try out Inquisition.  There are many people out there who liked Origins who will absolutely love Inquisition.  And maybe some out there won't.  Already right here there's two completely differing opinions coming from two different people who have played the other games.

Aside from the exceptional part, agreed. Origins had problems too. I'm not disputing that. It's a classic because it's great, but no game is perfect.

As for the buying recommendation, I expect people who have the same outlook on gaming as I do will follow it. That's what it's there for, anyway. Besides, this day, with ridiculous DD sales, "wait for the sale" is always sound advice

A pleasure talking with you, and I don't mean that in any sarcastic way. It really is. I like butting heads in regards to opinions, however I recognize we're both right. I'm happy you enjoyed the game, and again, I'm sorry if that came out snarky or defensive.

Well, you're allowed to have a different experience. It's a free country

I'm sorry if I sound a bit rude or snarky when I'll answer you, I really don't mean to be. I do feel that you have misread my review though, so that's why I felt it was important to reply. It's probably my fault, when writing long posts like these, my English tends to deteriorate the more I write.

Considering the tone I imagine mine had, I wouldn't have been surprised if there was a bit of the same in your response.  I do apologize if mine translated similarly, by the way.  It wasn't intended, it just happens sometimes.  <.<

My point is that most of the content in Inquisition is absolutely bare-bones at its core. Yes, there is a lot of content, I never disputed that, but ultimately, much of the content is not "attractive". This is what I tried to convey in my review by whining about how much of what you do "doesn't matter" or "isn't linked to an overall direction in the game. In D:OS, you had the same quests you did in Inquisition, BUT they could be completed any number of ways. They ask you to go kill the troll, but you can strike a deal with him to stop killing people in exchange for a task. You have to find x object, but you can find it in any number of ways. Another example : in TW2, there was a quest where some guardsmen in the first town captured an elf believed to be a spy. They ask you to go in the cave, kill things and find evidence of her guilt of innocence. You can choose to bury the evidence, you can roleplay that you do believe her when she says she isn't guilty, you can have her cooperate or you can let the guards take her.

Do you see what I'm trying to convey? Inquisition fetch quests are fetch at their core like any other RPG quest, but there isn't anything else. There is no meat on the bones. People ask you to kill something or someone, you can't roll up and solve the problem in a different way. People ask you to fetch item x or y, you can't lie to them that you didn't find it and keep it for yourself. For the overwhelming majority of the game, there is a single way to do something, and that is to do exactly what the game wants you to.

Look at the Empress' quest, the one with the party. Isn't there a more fetch-y quest than "collect Halla statues to open these doors, find all the coins and eavesdrop on 30 assholes"? However, it was my favourite in the game simply because how many options you have as to how will rule Orlais, which depends on what items you've fetched. It's a fetch quest, make no mistake, but it has some meat, and the context is very intriguing. That's a far cry from "hey guy can you go fetch my ring in these ruins and bring it back to me please?" That's an errand. That's not interesting.

I would not have whined if the quests in Inquisition were flexible as in D:OS or any number of other RPGs, even if they all boiled down to fetch/kill quests. As you rightly point out, almost every quest in almost every RPG can be stripped down to the same formula. I do not contest this, and that's not the problem. But at least to me, what makes an RPG decent and what makes an RPG great is the extent to which you are allowed to roleplay. Isn't that the whole purpose? This is what keeps a game from becoming too "same-y" and what keeps quests for just being more busywork because I have an actual hand in the outcome and how I choose to resolve the quest, which keeps me interested. They allow me to build on my character's personality, to develop him/her in a way that I like. In other words, I have trouble doing stuff just for the Hell of doing stuff. There has to be something in store for me and my character, an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to do things in an unexpected way. Playing WoW, a game composed almost uniquely of fetch or kill quests, I never read the quest texts. It didn't matter why I had to do something or how my character would grow while doing it, because it wouldn't. I wasn't interested in the quests, but in leveling so I can get to the end game as quickly as possible. Inquisition feels very MMO-y in that regard.

This is why I wrote that I would have preferred a tighter game. With the amount of content Inquisition has, it's hard to flesh it out to a level other than the bare minimum. Resource and time constraints make it impossible. This means that in the end, almost all content in Inquisition is the same, and most quests aren't interesting on their own.

As I wrote, I still think the Power mechanic is a way to tie in the monotonous fetch quests into something of greater importance, but the link to too concrete, too obvious, too mechanical. It is the only thing that gives the tiniest bit of substance to the side quests. I agree with you that Power was easy to come by, but that doesn't change the problem I perceive : that most of the game is separated from the "core" of what an RPG should really be according to my perception of that concept and is linked to it by this tenuous, artificial link. That this link is a limitation or isn't ask annoying as another system doesn't matter. In fact, I have never said that the Power mechanic itself was limiting or annoying. It's the concept itself I have a problem with, not its implementation.

I get where you're coming from, and I actually do agree.  With the lack of having a "Persuade" "Intimidate" "Lie" and actions like that, it's actually made the game suffer a little.  You're forced to finish a quest rather than being able to lie and say you did, you can't persuade someone to do something for you or let you get away without doing it, and you can't intimidate someone to do it for you either.  There's still star moments and specific character moments (such as the mage character being able to tell Cassandra that they don't need a weapon to be dangerous), but they're normally met with more negative responses than positive ones.  I am actually rather disappointed with the removal of those simple actions since they do feel like they've neutered the game quite a bit, now that I think about it.

Agreed. Origins wasn't perfect, but it was still excellent. I'm currently debating giving DA2 another shot as perhaps there is something I missed, since I did not complete it. I also agree that exploration for its own sake was one of the best parts of DA:I because the scenery is varied and beautiful, and it isn't as empty of places as say, Skyrim's, where 70% of the map is wilderness.

I will say that while I do enjoy DA2 despite its flaws, you most likely won't enjoy it if you felt Inquisition was empty.  DA 2 is the one that started that feel since you only have one town that you frequent, and while many of the maps are rehashed and of decent size, they feel just as empty if not a tad more so (even though I's are bigger) than Inquisition's.  The choices you made definitely mattered (even more so in DA2 than Origins, where choices you made on the smallest of quests will haunt you at some point later in the game) and the story driving it was pretty well done, but the familiar-location spamming alone was enough to drive most away from enjoying it completely.

I find it interesting that you speak about the Qunari because I was disappointed in the backstory of a Qunari inquisitor. I think they would have been much more interesting if he/she had been a real Qunari, a follower of the Qun thrust into the middle of a religious organization he/she doesn't understand by circumstances, having to make sense of a totally alien culture while at the same time being its beacon and it its forefront. This would have been an amazing backstory with a lot of potential. Instead, you're Tal-Vashoth, which means that people do call you a goat and are a bit apprehensive of you, but aside from that, you're a human with horns. Instead of being from a completely alien culture and having to come to terms with your new role as the Inquisitor (think of Sten, I suppose), you're the equivalent of a black person in Apartheid South Africa. I still appreciate how there even was a difference between the races as how people would perceive you, but I had higher hopes for a Qunari character.

I can agree with this as well.  While I was glad that they they did introduce the Tal Vashoth as a choice, I was hoping they would break it up; have the Tal-Vashoth be a choice if you chose a rogue-ish class, have you be a follower of the Qun if you were a Warrior class, and have you be the Ketojan (sp?) if you chose the Mage class (complete with a similar look to the one you meet in DA2).  But I was hoping for a similar thing with the Dwarves and Elves too.  But considering you were stuck being purely a Dalish elf and (the one that really got to me here since you fight them in the last two games) being a Carta Dwarf, I knew they were going to stick to just the Tal Vashoth for Qunari.

On an off note, I'm glad at least that the male voice actors were pretty decent (and thankfully you got to choose at least between two this time.  As much as I liked Hawke's voice in both games, I wanted to choose his/her voice), and it showed at the beginning.  Whoever did the female voice actor for the more British voice (I believe is the one I'm thinking of) did a terrible job.  When someone shouts "Some please, help me!" And your character runs up and says "What's going on here?" in the most tranquil, calm, uninterested voice imaginable, it's almost cringe worthy.  When both male voice choices did it, there was a pretty good sense of urgency in their tone.

Agreed on the leveling system. This is not something I talked about, but I felt that being unable to distribute stat points took away a bit of the fun. Instead, your stats being totally dependent on your skills and equipment felt weird.

I touched on it before and I'll say it again: the biggest reasons I was against this was because A) In 2 they already took away the Skill tree and pushed all of those skills into attribute increments (IE every 10 cunning ups your lockpicking).  But now with the removal of the skill tree AND attribute building it just makes me a little sad.  I really did like the introduction to Inquisition perks and thought it was a nice touch, but I do miss being able to level up Coercion, Steal, and things like that (that reminds me, could you even steal in Inquisition?)

As for the buying recommendation, I expect people who have the same outlook on gaming as I do will follow it. That's what it's there for, anyway. Besides, this day, with ridiculous DD sales, "wait for the sale" is always sound advice

I go with the way of "don't follow the hype."  people will rant and rave about it, and people will praise the ever loving hell out of it.  But I always tell people that if it's something you're considering trying, and if you've played the earlier games, then at least give it a shot.  They may find things enjoyable that others didn't, and likewise they may find things that they can't stand that others may have liked.  But they should be the one to figure that out.

Who knows?  Others might like the MMO feel that Inquisition has.  Kingdoms of Amalur is that to an even more extensive degree (with less of the added material that Inquisition has), and I still hear people raving about it being one of the greatest RPGs of all time.  And while we may not like the fact that not everything you do is linked together like in the previous games, others might not care about that, and might actually see it as a welcome change.  One never knows what people might or might not enjoy. 

I actually remember these CDs even though I'm younger than you, but not buying them - they came with PC magazines. I do agree with you that gaming was better before the AAA studios. Some really old games still can't be beaten today (MoO2!) I remember playing this game, I forgot the name, but it was by Sierra. It was a turn-based strategy game with mechs that you could build from scratch and equip to your liking. It was like Mechwarrior, but TBS and you had a squad. My CS teacher in grade 7 had given it to me. I've still never seen anything like it, and I'm baffled as to why there is nobody jumping on that idea and making a new game in that vein.

I believe you're referring to MissionForce: Cyberstorm, which I also played some as a kid because I had a demo that was packaged with some other game! The demo allowed you to do whatever you wanted with the mechs but only allowed you to play two missions, and I played the shit out of them. I loved going through all the various components and especially weapons...but you could also mine ore and shit too. Unfortunately I never played the full game...by the time I found it years later it didn't play too well on more modern computers, and emulation wasn't a thing yet.

I recall there was also a sequel, but I don't believe it was as well-received from what I read.

Heh...maybe we ought to start some kind of old game club to explore these sorts of forgotten treasures.

I actually remember these CDs even though I'm younger than you, but not buying them - they came with PC magazines. I do agree with you that gaming was better before the AAA studios. Some really old games still can't be beaten today (MoO2!) I remember playing this game, I forgot the name, but it was by Sierra. It was a turn-based strategy game with mechs that you could build from scratch and equip to your liking. It was like Mechwarrior, but TBS and you had a squad. My CS teacher in grade 7 had given it to me. I've still never seen anything like it, and I'm baffled as to why there is nobody jumping on that idea and making a new game in that vein.

I believe you're referring to MissionForce: Cyberstorm, which I also played some as a kid because I had a demo that was packaged with some other game! The demo allowed you to do whatever you wanted with the mechs but only allowed you to play two missions, and I played the shit out of them. I loved going through all the various components and especially weapons...but you could also mine ore and shit too. Unfortunately I never played the full game...by the time I found it years later it didn't play too well on more modern computers, and emulation wasn't a thing yet.

I recall there was also a sequel, but I don't believe it was as well-received from what I read.

Heh...maybe we ought to start some kind of old game club to explore these sorts of forgotten treasures.

YES, that! God that game was fun. My CS teacher and I had sneaked it onto two school computers and whenever I was done with my tasks (I was in a computer-centric high school program, most of my time was spent in the computer lab, even had one less French and Math period for more CS periods), we'd fire it up and play a game together. I was 11 or 12, so I'd get pwned I remember the monkey pilot that was much better than any human pilot you could get...lol. I always got a bit freaked out playing that game because the pilots look so alien...dead? Weird art.

I miss Sierra. They made/published some good games (and some shit too, but still).

My CS teacher is the one that made me discover old games...MoO2, Master of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Freespace 1 and 2, Galactic Civilizations 1, Lords of the Realms 2 and 3, Homeworld 1...he'd burn me the CDs In return I'd burn him newer games like GalCiv 2 and Homeworld 2.

One of the first computer games I ever received as a gift was Kings Quest V, also by Sierra. I never finished the game, but the game had charm and the franchise is a classic from a genre that was dormant for a long time until recently...the point and click adventure game. I'm curious what you think of Activision Blizzard's move to revive the brand to produce sequels of its old game library.

As for old games...where do I start? I still have Lords of the Realm II and play it every now and then...it's dated now compared to newer games, but at the time it was very novel and I liked the turn-based management. I usually don't like real-time battles, but the AI was easy to beat and I often defeat large armies with bands of archers, of all things, lol. Other than that, the games I played the most back then were SimCity Classic/2000, SimTower (a great game I wish they'd made more sequels of), Age of Empires II, Stronghold, the Battleground series (turn-based historic battle games), Warcraft II (still better than III, imo), and Civ II, though I have physical CDs for many more games. It's ironic that many of those games have been re-released for modern platforms like Steam and for modern OSes. You can play many of the others through online websites that emulate it without having to even download anything to your computer.

The last game I bought on CD that was newly released was Warcraft III, and I was so disappointed I swore I'd never pay that much for a game again without playing it first. Years later I'd buy Diablo II (the last game I bought on physical CD) only after a friend shared his pirated version with me and I played it extensively. From there it'd be another five years before I'd buy another game, after I discovered Steam and its many sales. As a sidenote, since Warcraft III I've never spent more than $17 on a computer game.

I will say that while I do enjoy DA2 despite its flaws, you most likely won't enjoy it if you felt Inquisition was empty.  DA 2 is the one that started that feel since you only have one town that you frequent, and while many of the maps are rehashed and of decent size, they feel just as empty if not a tad more so (even though I's are bigger) than Inquisition's.  The choices you made definitely mattered (even more so in DA2 than Origins, where choices you made on the smallest of quests will haunt you at some point later in the game) and the story driving it was pretty well done, but the familiar-location spamming alone was enough to drive most away from enjoying it completely.

I'm actually replaying DA2 right now for want of something to do and I'm enjoying it a lot more than I did a few years ago. The writing is much better than I remembered, I love how as you say, the smallest side quest can have grave consequences, and it feels much more fast-paced than either Origins or Inquisition. I'm playing a Mage and I'm having a lot of fun as fights seem based on AoE, giving your Mage that badass feeling. The spells are much more diverse than in Inquisition as well.

I'm still annoying at the waves stuff and randomly spawning enemies, the lack of gear customization for your companions and the reused environment but that seems less of a deal breaker than it did when I was younger. I'm much more interested in the story, pacing and writing, which actually are better than Origins'.

It still shows that the game was rushed and a bit consolized, but I'm enjoying it.

They literally only have to remake Origins with the Frostbite Engine, to make me the happiest person alive.

What's insane is that my grey warden blood mage completely makes my Qunari Mage Inquisitor look like a bitch, because he is so over-powered, and yet Dragon Age: Origins is about 50 times harder, even on normal.

Dragon Age: Origins had a generic setting, but the writing was just so good, and the characters so amazing (Shale, anyone?) that they tricked me into thinking I was busy witnessing the finest story gaming had to offer.

Dragon Age: Origins also really didn't shy away from the grim consequences of your actions. Case in point: if you started as a city elf, you had to go and rescue your wife and your cousin from a fucktard minor lord who wanted to rape them in his castle. Of course, you painted those halls red, because OF COURSE you fucking do, only to later learn that your actions made the nobility come down hard and make life miserable for all your fellow city elves after the fact. And to top it all off, the nobility, which in all other playthroughs were shocked and appalled by Loghain selling the elves as slaves to the Tevinter Imperium, suddenly decided that he might be right in selling "those filthy savages" in the city elf playthrough.

One of the things that pissed me off about Inquisition the most, was the fact that they completely raped all the choices that we made in Dragon Age: Origins. I think everyone should remember Morrigan's morally questionable ritual to save your ass at the end of the game. I went into that fully expecting some sort of Beowulf-esque situation in the future games, but the only thing that happens is that Morrigan raises some boy you see for like two seconds who has some strange abilities, and then Flemeth comes along and removes the Old God Essence closer to the end of Inquisition, and from what I can discern of the post-credits scene, she sends the essence into the fade anyway. So congratulations, fucktards over at BioWare, you raped the consequences of what should have been the most devastating choice in gaming history!

Oh, Leliana is also suddenly alive? Funny, I distinctly remember decapitating her whiny ass when she gave me shit for destroying the Urn of Sacred Ashes.

Seriously, BioWare, I don't care about starving villagers who need me to hunt 10 deer for them in the Hinterlands, I care about actual consequences to my actual morally questionable choices throughout the series.

I was also incredibly pissed when my Hawke, a bloodmage of some repute, and also a cynical bastard who killed his own brother for annoying the living shit out of him, suddenly took a moral stand against blood magic when we went to face the grey wardens. By the time the choice came for me to choose between Hawke and Loghain, I was just like LOL, and left his hypocritical ass to fend of the giant spider demon. Which, allow me to say, was TOTAL FUCKING BULLSHIT! My Inquisitor is not fucking afraid of spiders, you royal fucktards!

So yes, I completely agree that Inquisition is a game I enjoy despite its best attempts to make me burn it.