14 DAY TRIAL // Next up in our Softpedia Game of the Year 2014 awards is the best narrative of the past 12 months.
The meaning of stories in video games continues to shift in subtle ways and more and more video games, especially high profile ones, understand that they need to have solid narrative hooks even if their focus is on the mechanics of the genre they represent.
Dragon Age: Inquisition is the winner of this Game of the Year category by virtue of offering so much story to explore in some many ways, with the team at BioWare taking to heart criticism about the previous installments in the series and deciding to put as much meat on the bones of their world as possible.
Each of the included major zones, from the Hinterlands to the Hissing Wastes, has its own core quest, introduced when the player first visits it, and there are usually at least three other stories unfolding in each location that the player is encouraged to complete.
There are also smaller side activities, some of them weird, some of the emotional and others a little boring, that can be uncovered by exploring the world and by talking to NPCs.
BioWare also makes party members more important in terms of story, with each of them delivering two unique quest chains at the least and more options based on player relations.
Emerging narrative versus developer-created
Dragon Age: Inquisition manages to deliver some emergent narratives.
I currently appreciate the way some titles that are not necessarily focused on stories, like Crusader Kings II or Football Manager 2015, manage to create interesting tales that can be shared with fellow gamers and affect the way players interact with the mechanics in the future.
Dragon Age: Inquisition is a very directed experience, but BioWare, by choosing to introduce a lot of open world elements, has still managed to create plenty of situations where stories emerge organically by playing.
The most interesting for me are the preparations and the process which involves taking out dragons, the most powerful enemies in the role-playing game.
The player is not a dragon hunter but I behave like one, choosing party members with protection skills and solid offensive powers, getting the best potions and equipment, making sure that Focus is charged and ready to deploy.
Taking out even the lowliest of the beats is a great achievement in Inquisition, and when re-telling it to friends, the tale takes on heroic aspects and has a great personal significance and BioWare did not need to write a line of dialogue for it.
This is the full review we have for Dragon Age: Inquisition.
