After picking up the PS4 I felt a bit underwhelmed by my available options for gaming. There were some solid downloadable titles to play, and I'll get to them later, but right now I'd like to talking about Dragon Age: Inquisition. I spoke about Origins oh, ages ago, and I didn't really feel that DAII was worth my time after being bored by its demo. But there was a lot of positive buzz about Inquisition, and from what I'd read the gameplay returned to the original. This game has sooo much going on that it's going to be difficult to keep this review flowing as I'd like, so I'll do my best to not jump around.
As usual I spent way too much time creating my character, and eventually just gave up making him look like anything in particular and just went with a standard elf rogue. I was very tempted to go with a mage but understood from what I'd read that the mages weren't quite as pigeonholed as in the first game, so I wouldn't have to saddle myself to the class I never really enjoyed playing.
You start the game in a standard Bioware tutorial level that establishes that you're about to have all the responsibility in the world for no reason other than you were in the right place at the right time, and your hand glows. Actual qualifications be damned. You'll be given a base of operations and a bunch of companions that range from reliable and useful to Cassandra Pentaghast. You're not technically in charge to begin with but then they decide you are after some heroic story progression.
Just like before you get rogues, mages, and warriors. For the most part your warriors and rogues will specialize in one style of combat, and throw some points into their support tree. Mages can be a lot more versatile, or can heavily specialize in one area. After a certain level every character will have access to their sub-specializations that technically have no bearing on their current skill tree. The PC is the only one who gets to pick their sub specialness, and I found that the sub specializations are more entertaining in description than they are in practice.
GAMEPLAY
The game is mainly driven from the War Table. Your advisers hang out around the table and you direct missions that you'll eventually handle or they'll just do whilst you're gallivanting about and trying to get various NPCs to show you their wobbly bits and such.
Around this table you've got a handful of advisers, each of them have a special area of use, espionage, military, and political, and for the most part you can tell them to handle any mission you find on the table that isn't a map. Each one will offer a solution that leans on their mad skills, and have different results, however I'm not certain that any of these has much more to do with missions than the flavor text. The time you have to wait for your adviser to be ready to act again is different for each mission, and this will largely dictate who you pick to do each job.
As your Inquisition gains notoriety you'll gain access to special perks that are offered by each adviser as well. The perks involve lots of different aspects of the game, but I found them to be ill weighted. Some will give you a small amount of crafting materials that are completely inconsequential (seriously, you can run around and find them EASY), others will let you carry more potions (a good thing), and yet others will just open up dialog options when talking to everyone you meet.
From the war table you can deploy yourself to about a dozen large areas you can explore and fulfill dozens of missions each. Most of these are just fetch or kill quests, so you have to entertain yourself with the decisions you make while on the main missions, and by doing waaaay too much armor and weapon crafting and modification. I spent a lot of time modifying my armor, only to realize it's rare that you'll ever need to min/max your kit (e.g.,dragon hunting), and so you just pick what you like and go about slaughtering whatever you find.
Getting around without fast traveling is done by your legs. Run, kill, fetch, run, kill, fetch.. The landscape looks great, but after a while you stop noticing because you're just hitting the button that scans the area and highlights whatever hedge or rock you can throw in your backpack. You're almost afraid of running off to whatever your current errand is for fear you might not have the materials you need for some potion or armor. The problem is that progression is scaled in such a way that your gear gets better so slowly that you just ignore it until things start getting tough, then you notice you've got enough stuff to outfit yourself with good stuff again.
Just like in Origins you can queue up actions and assign behaviors, only this time the tactical nature of the beast is just part of the game, rather than a reward, you can let your team do their thing or go into a tactical overview and assign everyone their next action, hit play, and then assign the next action when it's time. Magic and Energy are harder to read and understand, there are no numbers on the HUD, so you just need to know what percent of it you're going to be using. It automagically regenerates in combat, and each skill has its own cool down. The skill trees grant new active and passive combat and magic abilities to fry and impale your enemies and make it easier to use the skills. I won't dig into the tree too much, there's a pretty good variety of things you can do, and nothing unexpected or of note.
PLAYING THE GAME
There were some fun NPCs and then there was Cassandra, Cole, and Vivienne. I only used Cassandra when I didn't have a better fighter on hand. Cole and Vivienne never made it on my team and I only interacted with them because they were there, and there might be some goodies if you complete their plotlines. Most of the story line was well written and intricate, however there are times where Bioware sidesteps their writing to get all flashy about saying how much they love the civil rights movement. I only mention it because many of these plot lines aren't written in very well and it feels like the dialog isn't there for the game, but for PR.
You spend hours and hours completing quests and directing the Inquisition around the map, directly involving yourself in a lot of very repetitive missions. At first I thought this would possibly be broken up by the base-building element the game supposedly has, but it doesn't take long to find that choices made while building said base are inconsequential. The most useless feature of any game is "cosmetic", and it shines in DA:I. If I'm supposed to be leading an army, let me lead an army. It doesn't have to be like the Total War series, but for crying out loud, my choice of whether or not I build an infirmary or sparring ring should mean SOMETHING. I had a serious problem with the whole 'base building' aspect of this game. Either make it relevant or just get rid of it.
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