Apparently on the internet opinions vary in terms of which is the best Dragon Age game. It’s weird, but it seems not everyone’s is Dragon Age: Origins. Well, opinions are subjective and in my subjective opinion these people are objectively wrong.
I have a bittersweet relationship with Bioware. I really loved Mass Effect when it came out but blame its success for ruining Dragon Age. DA:O is one of those few games which really nicely straddles that line between the hardcore, slightly impenetrable, RPG and the story-heavy accessible action-epic beautifully. Where Mass Effect was a spiritual successor to the Knights of the Old Republic games, Dragon Age is to Baldur’s Gate. And much like how you wouldn’t want KotOR to turn into Baldur’s Gate or vice versa, you want a large amount of separation between Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Oh dear.
To be fair to Bioware they dialled back on the Mass Effect-but-with-darkspawn-except-worse that was Dragon Age 2 with Inquisition but the favouring of epic storytelling over deep RPG gameplay remains apparent everywhere – but most obviously in how much better the game plays with a controller over keyboard and mouse.
Don’t get me wrong, I really love the presentation, story, cutscenes and all that jazz in Inquisition – and I also have no problems in principle with the idea of shifting genre slightly from sequel to sequel. Case in point is The Witcher series which I think positively gained from doing just this. I love all three of those games equally – but then I’d argue that CD:Projekt is a bit of an outlier in this regard. Remember when they made all those outrageous claims about The Witcher 3 during development which sounded… kiiiiinda arrogant at the time? Yeah, turns out it’s not really arrogance when you can actually deliver on it 😀
So anyway, Dragon Age Inquisition. In theory it has a lot of the same pull to me as The Witcher 2 did. Both games have great stories, both place the presentation of that story front-and-centre, both dialled back the gameplay complexity in favour of something a bit more action focussed, both have beautiful graphics. But I can only love one of them. I’ve been struggling to work out exactly why – on paper much of what Dragon Age Inquisition does sounds like it ought to be incredibly compelling. Building up the Inquisition, acquiring a stronghold and developing it, a war-room with decisions to make giving you a bigger-picture perspective than just what happens in any one region you’re exploring, people to judge and either execute or exile, and a goat being thrown at a wall. In other words, lots and lots of consequence to decisions you make along the way.
And all that stuff is incredibly compelling. Add to that the beauty of much of the visuals and you’ve got a strong hook to keep me playing. But in-between all that stuff, the core gameplay is just… well… tedious, unfortunately. The first time you close a rift in the story it’s awfully dramatic. But then region after region there’s a bazillion of these buggers and I grew tired of it as rapidly as I did with those cursed Oblivion Gates in TES: Oblivion. And then there’s twenty-thousand (slight exaggeration) shards to collect in order to unlock loot which you almost certainly won’t need by the time you get it. And then a good 70% of region quests are “search for the thing” which involves running to a circular area which seem to get progressively larger as you get through more of the story repeatedly pressing the left thumb-stick in until you get a ping and an arrow to follow. It’s really fun that, repeatedly clicking a thumb-stick. In fact, I spend about 90% of my time in the game clicking the left thumb-stick. Why not just have that ping happen automatically? It’s not exactly much different in terms of gameplay following a ping and and arrow versus pressing the thumbstick then following a ping and an arrow. Complicated treasure hunts, these are not.
So I hate to say it, but if you take out all that glorious presentation and the epic-ness of much of the story, what you’ve got left is a pretty basic game where every region boils down to doing pretty much the same as in every other region. Quest-wise it feels like it has a lot more in common with MMOs than single-player RPGs. Combat consists of holding in the right trigger to fire until cooldowns on other moves have ended, then triggering those. The presence of a tactical view seems present only to trick fans of Origins into thinking that this is the same. It’s not. So what you end up with is a game which feels like an action RPG but which lacks any moves which would make the combat fluid. If you play as an archer, as I do, it’s almost impossible to avoid being hit since you lack any dexterity moves like quickly rolling out of the way. Any moves like that you do have come with cooldowns and boot out an offensive move from the tiny array you’re permitted to have given that you only have as many as can be assigned easily to an XBox pad.
So the upshot of all this is that you never really get to customise your character. If you’re an archer, you’re going to end up identical to every other player’s archer and Varric. His uniqueness is that he has a crossbow, is a dwarf, and has outrageously high-resolution chest hair. If you’re a dual-wielding assassin, you’re a re-skinned Sera. There’s such little room to move in each class that, at this point, the presence of skill trees starts to feel pointless. You could literally just hand me skills automatically as I level up and nothing would really change other than you’d be dropping the pretence that this is anything other than a threadbare RPG-lite with flashy graphics.
All that said, it is a testament to quite how nice-looking and how compelling everything around that core gameplay loop is that I continue to play it. It’s just a shame that it couldn’t be more like Dragon Age: Origins 🙁
Also, Sera needs to be burned in a fire and purged from the game code. She’s shit – mostly because whoever designed her tried waaaaay too hard for her to be “the quirky and funny one” and, well, just failed on that score miserably. For all its faults, the Dragon Age 2 roster of characters was far better.