In retrospect, it was never meant to be. Scout Harding is the total package — sweet, cute, independent, and reliable — but as the Inquisition’s lead scout, there wasn’t ever real hope that she’d strike up a romance with her big boss, the Inquisitor. Sure, there was some confused flirting and, at one point, an overt invitation from her to share drinks and conversation at the local tavern. But nothing ever materialized.

To be fair to Scout Harding, it’s not her fault. She’s ultimately bound by the limitations coded into her character, and the narrative wizards at BioWare deemed her a second-string player long before any Inquisitor ever laid eyes on her. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, she’s just one tiny piece of a grand tapestry, perhaps the most complex journey this studio’s ever constructed. But the dangling plot thread that Harding represents says so much about Inquisition‘s simultaneous success and failure.

The dangling plot thread that Harding represents says so much about Inquisition’s simultaneous success and failure.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is BioWare’s largest-ever single-player story, the product of more than four years worth of effort. It’s stunningly massive in scope, a sprawling adventure set in a beautiful world where one person can change everything. You are that one person, an unlikely hero thrown into a leadership role that only ever suits you as well as you allow. In the realm of video game power fantasies, Inquisition is peerless; this is a story that exists to shape itself around your whims, conscious and otherwise.

It all starts with you in chains. There’s been a cataclysmic event: a magical rift that tore across the sky and the disappearance of a religious figure on par with the Pope, vanished into the mists of a magical realm. After finding you at the scene with no apparent memory of what occurred, the military arm of the world’s dominant religion locks you in a cell. It’s a magical mark that saves you, mysteriously burned onto your hand. The mark has the power to close rifts like the one up in the sky and as far as anyone can tell, it’s unique.

There’s simple math at work here, an unlikely-yet-incontrovertible A-to-B progression that quickly establishes your hand-crafted protagonist as the de facto leader of an entire Inquisition. Yours is a trifling power at first, barely an eddy in the tidal forces swaying the competing interests in Dragon Age’s world of Thedas. It’s through your efforts — on the battlefield, at high-society soirees, and in the shadows — that the Inquisition becomes a rallying force for this world. It’s under your banner that the evil is eventually overthrown.

This power play unfolds on multiple levels. On the ground, your heroic world savior — he or she, human, elf, dwarf, or Qunari — goes and does Dragon Age things, same as it ever was. There’s more territory to explore in Thedas than we’ve ever seen before: looming forests and windswept deserts, snow-capped mountains and crumbling ruins. All of it is filled with enemies, and secrets, and tiny slices of life in need of a savior.

Your day-to-day work as an RPG Hero ripples into the Inquisition’s grander goals. You earn loot, XP, and new companions for completing an array of tasks large and small, but that’s only part of it. Traditional role-playing game lures are there, but it’s the grand scheme that matters in Dragon Age: Inquisition. The more evil you snuff out, the more citizens-in-need that you come to the aid of, the more your power base grows.

That, in turn, fuels the game’s macro level of Inquisition management, realized as a series of so-called “Operations” that you wield to expand your influence in various ways. Agents dispatched from your council chamber’s War Table complete assigned tasks against a ticking clock. There’s often a choice tied to each Operation, a process of delegating the activity to one of three advisors — a general, a diplomat, or a spymaster — that in turn determines how the assignment plays out.

In the realm of video game power fantasies, Dragon Age: Inquisition is peerless.

There’s no failure for these Operations; they’re primarily here for narrative color. You do a lot of reading at the War Table, first to learn what a task is and how each advisor would tackle it, then to see the results of your choice. Sometimes there’s a tangible reward, anything from new gear to expanded influence. That’s secondary to the closure, though, a layer of narrative texture that further reinforces the idea that this is your Inquisition.

The War Table is also where you go to propel the story forward, with power that you’ve amassed serving as a sort of high-level currency, used to unlock key quests. It makes a certain amount of sense. The Inquisition lives and dies by its reach, and a growing power base means you can bring more forces to bear against the rising tide of magical threats in the world. A pleasant gameplay loop develops: Explore the world to grow your power, then spend that power at the War Table to move the story forward.

Imhotep now has Alex and with the bracelet attached to him, doesn't have long to live. That's not the only problem. The mummy returns free.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is very good about never letting you forget the position that you hold. Everything feels big and momentous. It’s an illusion, of course, with a no-fail endgame that is impervious to political mishaps. You pass judgment on the accused from your low-rent Iron Throne and decide whether to use military might to help a whining noble or a spy network to weaken his position, but none of it really matters, beyond coloring your experience.

Simultaneously, Inquisition is also very bad at keeping micromanagement at bay. Traditional exploration-and-monster-slaying is enjoyable, but the deluge of equipment and crafting materials that you pick up turns the latter half of the game into a menu-shuffling timesuck. There’s miles and miles of depth here, especially in the crafting system, but it quickly grows tiresome to sort out who gets what equipment between the 10 playable characters.

The micromanagement works much better in multiplayer. It’s a cooperative dungeon crawl for up to four players, with all of the character and equipment progression depth found in the main game. The two modes are completely separate, but the multiplayer has plenty of hooks in its multiple character classes and crafting options. There’s still a lot of time spent in menus, but the micromanagement balances perfectly with the multiplayer mode’s emphasis on raw action.

Dragon Age has never been an experience to rush through, of course. Story is your reward for patience. There’s reams of text to be read and dialogue to be heard. You don’t have to take it all in, but doing so adds flavor and nuance to the world. The player that’s willing to sift through Inquisition‘s encyclopedic Codex isn’t going to be inconvenienced by time served on party micromanagement. At the same time, there’s also no real penalty for driving a straight line through the story beyond missing the subtext.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is BioWare’s strongest effort to date, but the massive scope of the world comes at no small cost.

The real problem with Dragon Age: Inquisition is the story’s frayed edges. There’s so much here, such a convincing world that’s been painted, that the boundaries are all the more obvious when they do crop up. In some cases, the impact is purely functional. Character animations and facial expressions aren’t nearly on par with modern gaming standards. Equipped weapons are magically fused to a character’s back when not in use, with no obvious straps to hold them in place. Bugs and mechanical quirks are constant companions.

More problematic are the barriers that prevent the player from realizing his or her own Dragon Age fantasy. Like poor Scout Harding, the victim of an apparently unfinished romantic subplot. You can flirt with her, even nurture the kernel of a relationship. She’ll mention that she hangs in the tavern at night and maybe you’ll see her there. But there’s no follow-through. Scout Harding never sets foot inside the tavern; she stands like a statue just outside, the victim of a limited and seemingly incomplete conversation tree.

That’s a real problem. A game that places as much emphasis on narrative investment as Dragon Age: Inquisition does suffers mightily beneath the burden of undercooked plot points like Harding. This is a character you can slowly build a relationship with over the course of 50-plus hours, but there’s no delivery, no closure. If she spurned you, that would be one thing. But that’s not it. Like so many of the game’s patchable mechanical issues, she’s just unfinished.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is BioWare’s strongest effort to date, but the massive scope of the world comes at no small cost. The boundaries the game necessarily places on your dungeons-and-dragons-fueled power fantasy are clearer than ever once you spot them. There’s an unseen script that, if you manage to stick to it, crafts an unassailable illusion. But deviate too much, and you run smack into a narrative wall.

Scout Harding is just an example, one of the many invisible barriers your fantasy power trip could potentially crash against. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the fairly paid material cost of Dragon Age: Inquisition‘s grand ambitions.

This game was reviewed on an Xbox One using a disc provided by Electronic Arts.

Highs

• Huge world filled with things to do
• Complex story filled with meaningful relationships
• Does a great job making you feel like a powerful ruler
• Co-op multiplayer has lots of depth

Lows

• Many dangling threads at the edges of the game’s ambitions
• Party management is a menu-shuffling chore
• Needs patches to improve overall stability

BioWare's vast RPG makes up for a slight lack of focus with a deeply generous spirit.

There's a definite end of an era feel to much of Dragon Age: Inquisition, whether or not BioWare has a fourth in the pipeline. This is what everything's been leading towards; all those choices, all the adventure, all the drama, and all the epic battles so far - of good vs. evil, of mages vs. templars and, of course, of RPG fans everywhere vs. Dragon Age 2.

Love or loathe that game, Inquisition feels like an open attempt to atone for its sins - a comeback play from a company that knows that still being one of the genre's heaviest hitters doesn't mean its reputation isn't on the line. Luckily, lessons have been learned. No longer does one cave try to pass for ten, or has streamlining taken all the choice out of adventuring. This is still firmly a modern BioWare RPG rather than a return to Origins' long abandoned old-school aspirations, but one bursting in ambition and scale.

That scale isn't just in its maps, though those are the first hint of it, and the difference between them and what came before is night and day. Finally, Thedas feels like a world rather than a series of glorified corridors - one open for exploration. It's not fully open, a la Skyrim; each major area is neatly packed in its own box, linked by a map as before. Those boxes however now stretch out as far as the eye can see, across valleys and mountains, with waves smashing the coast, villages, enemy camps, caves, swamps and temples all littering the landscape.. along with a number of smaller maps for specific stories and major interiors.. and both a horse and fast travel needed to zip around on your many jobs. How beautiful does everything look turned up to full? Enough that I put this review on hold for a day so that I could get a GeForce 970 to replace my old 660. It was clear it deserved nothing less.

Once the shine had worn off though, disappointment began setting in. Inquisition zips quickly through its set-up, in which you're a survivor of a mysterious breach in the sky that's spitting out demon spawning tears, but not quickly enough to hide that you're an amnesiac hero, the threat is basically Oblivion's gates recoloured green, and that the villain of the piece is referred to as 'The Elder One', as if the entire writing team had just thrown their hands up in defeat. The role-playing too, pretty as it is, didn't feel like BioWare. There are straight up MMO style quests, like collecting 10 bits of meat, which at least make sense in context - that you're helping refugees and refugees need food. Others, however, are thrown in with no finesse whatsoever. You find a letter that says, in about as many words, 'Girls really dig people who can kill bears!' and then ping, your Quest Journal suddenly thinks you're interested in bear-hunting. The first hour of a game is a bad, bad time for it to be resorting to this crap.

The reason for the sack of activities where normally there'd be more involved quests is that Inquisition takes as many cues from the likes of Assassin's Creed as other RPGs, with its maps a sack of quests, collectibles, secret bits and general things to do. These in turn provide levels and gives the Inquisition the power to take on bigger problems in more traditional quests, like preventing the assassination of the Empress of Orlais, home of some of the dodgiest accents this side of 'Allo 'Allo. The further you get, the more of that good stuff there is to do, including spin-offs from the main quest like your companions' personal quests. Early on though, it's just busy-work. The big threat is boring, and it's hard to take everyone seriously when they rattle on about its urgency but still have time to make fancy Inquisition banners and armour, and the basic solution is openly 'Just get some mages to help zap the green swirly thing.'

No-one expects the Inquisition

Like Mass Effect 3, Inquisition features a multiplayer mode. It's a relatively simple seeming four-player co-op where you face waves of enemies while exploring locations like a set of Elven Ruins, with a choice of characters that can be unlocked through play or by spending money. As the bulk of the game is single-player though, and we've not had a chance to play it on live servers, it hasn't had any bearing on this review. We'll take a look after launch.

Thankfully, a fifth or so of the way in the villain finally tips their hand, and amateur hour ends. Now you're officially in charge of the Inquisition instead of simply the only person in it able to get anything done, the stakes become meaningful and dramatic, the mysteries become interesting. Most importantly, there's a beautiful sense of actually having power, of sitting in judgement over defeated foes, of dispatching spies and soldiers around Thedas to do your bidding, of conquering forts that fill with your people instead of just setting up campsites, of going from this small heretical organisation to a major power that decides the outcome of elections and gets called up by the King for favours, and seeing your home base go from a ruined, desolate castle into the salvation of the land. At least, if all goes well.

None of this is remotely deep or strategic. When asked if a situation calls for diplomacy, spies or military strength, any of them will work and few require any more effort on your part than actively not declaring 'Zhu Li, do the thing!' at an unlistening monitor. There's enough of it to compensate for that though, and more than enough wrapping to sell the illusion, while still justifying why you're always in the field instead of consigned to a desk. Most stories and decisions just provide trinkets or Dragon Age's equivalent of Mass Effect 3's War Assets, though others can unlock their own stories and decisions further down the story. Somewhat oddly they have timers of the kind you'd expect to see in an F2P mobile game, but those don't get in the way. Actual story quests are clearly labelled, and the flavour ones optional.

Much of the time though, the only way to get things done is to head out with swords, shields, staffs and spells and crack some skulls. Inquisition changes up the combat dramatically, with the biggest difference being that there are now no healers or out-of-combat health recharges. Instead you have camps where you can heal up and replenish your stock of healing potions, with more opening up as you push through each map. Regular potions are free, and all I ever used. You can discover better and different ones though, which require ingredients to make, as well as upgrade the ones you've got, providing a good middle ground between Dragon Age's constant herb farming and automatic healing. This is also much how the whole game works when it comes to aspects like crafting custom gear, upgrading weapons and ticking off all the quests on each map. You can if you like, but at least on Normal difficulty, you never actually have to if you just want to plug on with the story.

Combat tries to offer a similar compromise, though it's not entirely successful. By default fights are much like Dragon Age 2's pausable action, with other party members controlled by basic scripts. By default, for instance, they'll glug potions until you're down to two, so that you can choose who gets the last couple yourself. It's also possible to zoom out to a tactical view as in Origins and play from afar. In practice though, everyone moves around far too much and too quickly, with mages especially just spamming endless pyrotechnic attacks limited only by a slight cooldown. There were many exciting battles on the main story, but none I could say were tactically very interesting, and none of them against one of the oddly unimaginative damage-sponge bosses, with Rift clean-up detail especially wearing out its welcome. Like the equally boring Oblivion gates, every one is basically the same - deal with a couple of demon waves, don't stand on exploding ground, close rift. Yawn. At least there are meatier bonus challenges elsewhere, not least taking on the huge dragons around the world.

While that side provides most of the raw action though, it's the adventure and political parts of the game that make Inquisition work - its understanding that a party in Orlais, where the Great Game is played for the highest stakes, should be just as dangerous as anything that happens in a dungeon. After two games of controlling a ragtag bunch of misfits, it's also interesting to be in a position of genuine power for once; to be the one who directly makes and lives with calls on controversies like whether mages deserve their freedom.

At times though, it can still be oddly.. not bland as such, but definitely flatter than it should be, with an odd reluctance to follow through on anything that might create a sense of vulnerability or ambiguity. Case in point: the Inquisition is constantly sold as being controversial and deeply mistrusted, but in practice just about everyone except all-out evil factions tend to be reasonably happy to see you, and often desperate to sign up. Your first proper enemy meanwhile literally introduces himself by punching a nun in the face.

This is all especially notable because the whole concept, and your position at its head, feels like it was invented specifically to offer interesting moral choices and difficult decisions. Very rarely though are you given a choice whether the best option isn't obvious, and I can't think of a single one that rebounded in an interesting way later on. There's nothing wrong with classic heroic fantasy and do-gooding of course, but here the shades of grey are notable by their absence rather than their intrigue, especially in the wake of other recent offerings like The Witcher 2 and Game of Thrones, where decisions constantly have huge implications. Here, everything remains insular, confined to its own bit of the story rather than being intertwined and paying off when you least expect it. At least, unless I was just unlucky.

It doesn't help that the cast is ridiculously big for a group of people that you're meant to forge connections with. In BioWare tradition, new party members come thick and fast, but here you also have a team of up to four advisors with their own storylines, a castle full of people, a big board of operations and all kinds of distractions. It's just too much at once, with the inevitable result being that most of the team just ends up standing around waiting to be called on.

Easily my favourite of the ones I used was Dorian, the amusingly moustached Tevinter mage and the Inquisition's designated snarker (also BioWare's first gay party member, though that only really comes up in his personal quest - a somewhat on-the-nose PSA with experience points), who tended to be partnered with the slowly defrosting Cassandra from the last game and a Qunari warrior called Iron Bull. The rest of the team run the gamut from a childlike elf to a mysterious spirit, but having no particular need of them, I had to go out of my way to even say hello. I'd have made an exception and brought Varric along on quests even though I didn't need a rogue, but he and Leliana (now your spymistress rather than a party member) have gone through the same thing as Anders, with much of their humour surgically removed between sequels. Leliana in particular is barely recognisable as the bard who was once up for a foursome with Isabella the pirate queen, and the ambient dialogue in general never got close to the zip of Dragon Age 2's banter or the squabbling between Morrigan and Alistair. BioWare games usually do a great job of making your group feel like family. Here, they were assets.

Despite this and its shaky start though, Inquisition does come together into a very worthy Dragon Age sequel that never stopped being compelling once it had the chance to build up its momentum. To some extent the quieter moments throughout even help to amplify the bigger quests and more dramatic plot points, while the free choice of where to spend your attention afterwards makes for a refreshingly open RPG that's still focused on the story it's telling - one that goes from strength to strength as the stakes ramp up and the war for Thedas begins.

Its not-so-fatal flaw is that in offering so much, both in terms of player choice and in going for peak-BioWare in every aspect of the game, those individual moments, characters, activities and plot beats often don't benefit from the focus and importance needed to unlock their full potential. Still, that's hardly a crime, and one more than made up for by the many high points that I can't name directly for fear of spoilers, the hours and hours both adventuring in Thedas as it was always meant to be, and sitting at the highest levels of its politics. The true power of the Inquisition may be illusory, but that doesn't stop it being satisfying to wield while it lasts.

8 /10

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