NOBODY EXPECTS THE DRAGON AGE INQUISITION!
Welcome back, everyone. Today, we take a much longer than usual look at the 3rd, and probably the most ambitious, entry in the Dragon Age series with my analysis of Dragon Age Inquisition.
Inspired by the success of The Elder Scrolls Skyrim, and determined to claw back the damage to their reputation caused by the disappointment around Dragon Age 2 and the controversial ending to Mass Effect 3, BioWare set out to create the biggest and most spectacular game in their library to date.
What would follow is a nightmare development cycle involving an engine that was in no way fit for purpose, a story that didn’t make any sense at the start, gameplay that no one at the studio enjoyed playing, and almost a year of crunch and stress to fix all the problems and drag this thing to its somewhat buggy release.
Despite all its trials, Dragon Age: Inquisition is still the best-selling game in the series. It won both Game of the Year and Best RPG at the 2014 Game Awards, and received great reviews from outlets across the board. Incredible characters like the endearing Qunari Iron Bull, the Warden with a dark secret, Blackwall, and even the Chantry seeker Cassandra were all spun together with a new protagonist into an epic drama that managed to push the stakes even higher than the Blight in Origins and create a truly compelling narrative. It’s a classic BioWare story of the people no one would bet on, coming together in the most dire situation to overcome tremendous odds and triumph in the face of evil.
For all it gets right, though, Dragon Age: Inquisition still lives in the shadow of Origins, and I myself was never able to finish it before working on it for this project. So this is clearly a game with some problems. Actually, it has one very specific problem that really brings down the overall experience, a problem that begins in open and ends in world.
So let’s slice this one open and feast on everything from the expensive prime cuts of story, world building, and great characters to the nasty, nasty offal of endless slogging through checkbox-style quests and infinitely respawning enemies with a deep dive retrospective. It’s time to saddle up the horses and go charging around Ferelden and Orlais, and see if we can’t save Thedas one more time from the terrors of The Fade that exist just beyond the veil.
———————————————– Chapters————————————————
00:00 Start
31:30 The story so far.
39:18 Setup
53:22 Characters Part 1
01:12:55 Running the inquisition
01:24:40 The Hinterlands
01:33:55 Sera and Vivienne
01:51:13 Iron Bull
02:00:55 Time travel
02:10:45 Dorian
02:18:56 The Elder One
02:45:07 Open worlds
03:00:17 Cole
03:09:49 The Imperial Ball
03:19:22 Wardens and The Fade
03:31:20 Combat
03:49:14 Companion quests
04:16:41 End game
04:34:05 Conclusion
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