14 DAY TRIAL // I like Dragon Age: Inquisition, I gave it a positive review and I have since continued to play it every few days, exploring some new choices for a different type of main character and trying to find new ways to use character abilities and focus powers.
But while actually spending time in its world, I often wonder whether its size, which is truly impressive, is an asset for the role-playing game from BioWare or a problem, and whether in the future I would like to see the same core formula linked to other franchises.
Here’s an example: I am currently trying to get all shards that open up access to a particular temple and its rooms, where my main character can get some boosts and has access to a number of interesting items that can upgrade the abilities of my party.
This is mostly fun, traveling the world trying to locate them and then battling foes in order to access their remote locations.
But there are some shards that are well hidden in hard-to-reach areas or require me to circle around a mountain for ten minutes trying to find a patch up.
These are the moments when I want to simply abandon Dragon Age: Inquisition for a long time and search info about the quests that I never completed on fan forums or the wiki created by the community.
The new BioWare title feels like a triumph of quantity over quality.
The core mechanics are solid, but they are never truly innovative, and that’s easy to overlook when there is so much to do and so many areas to move through.
BioWare has learned the lesson of Dragon Age 2 maybe a little too well, and I am afraid of how sprawling and unwieldy the next Mass Effect might be if the same approach is used.
Maybe the studio needs to try and use the Keep as a way to allow fans to play the elements of the story they want to directly experience, while also offering them a simple and quick way to look at the outcome of their decisions for those quest chains that they are unable to experience.
Dragon Age: Inquisition and the replay value
For a long time, one of the core elements of BioWare titles has been replayability, the fact that there are so many origins and choices that just one playthrough is not enough to experience everything the title has to offer.
With Dragon Age: Inquisition, my first run through the game took about 50 hours and I feel like there’s about one third that I never experienced as I should.
I originally planned to try out at least three different approaches to the title, using a rogue, a mage and a fighter, and varying the way they react to the companions and the big decisions.
Although I like the game, I have now reduced that number down to two and I feel that even this plan might be ambitious given the free time that I have.
Modern gamers, no matter how dedicated they are to a developer or a series, are no longer able to give just one title a few months of their life, and that means BioWare needs to find a way to make fans experience all a Dragon Age title has to offer in the space of about 30 hours.
