Hello there, my RPG lovers and welcome to another video Dragon Age Inquisition is definitely not the most beloved Dragon Age game. After the disappointing sequel to origins, a lot of people had high expectations for the next game in the series and not without a reason. Bioware was marketing Inquisition as their biggest game, yet it was supposed to fix everything that was wrong with Dragon Age 2 and it actually did, but not in a way how fans of Origins expected Dragon Age Origins has set a very high standard for this franchise. But that’s not the reason why the fans didn’t receive the sequels with open arms. The sequels just changed a lot of things, especially the inquisition, voiced protagonists, huge open world and action-oriented combats are undoubtedly the biggest changes when it comes to Inquisition. It’S really easy to see why someone who was really invested in origins won’t like the Inquisition, regardless of the quality of those changes when this is the case, it’s easy to judge this game for what it’s not. This is one of the reasons why the Inquisition is not an easy game to critique. It’S definitely had problems, but it also had a lot of good things worth mentioning fans of medieval fantasy RPGs. Don’T have a lot of new games to look forward to at least not anytime soon so revisiting. Some of this older RPGs could be a great option. So, let’s start from the beginning, whatever we were before, we are now the Inquisition, no matter what order game you decide to revisit, the visuals are usually the best indicator of the game stage unless the developer is going for that heavily stylized look, even though Inquisition was Aiming for more realistic, look, it’s almost not showing any signs of bad aging. I think it’s really hard to believe that it came out in 2014. The visual style as a whole package is quite different from the previous games in the series. Inquisition is a lot more colorful than its prequels, which kind of changed the overall vibe of the game for better or for worse well, for both. Actually, I prefer vibrant colors in my games, but origins did a great job with setting the mood of the game with his gray colour palette. It fits perfectly with the narrative that the game was trying to tell at the expense of everything looking gloomy all the time. Something similar happened with the first Witcher game as well. The sequels never managed to create that dark and horror atmosphere from the first game, mostly because of the different color palette and again it fits the narrative of the game. But if you want to make different looking environments using a limited color palette is not a great idea. The amount of different environments with unique looks in Inquisition is truly impressive, considering the size of these maps. This is one of the reasons why the exploration always feels fresh. You won’t be stuck in one place with the same team for the rest of the game. The character models are obviously looking a bit dated, but this is not a huge deal breaker to me since I mentioned the exploration and the world map. Let’S talk about that Dragon Age Inquisition has a different take on the open-world formula. It has multiple locations that are disconnected and only accessible by using the fast travel option. All major locations are really big and totally opened, while the smaller locations are usually only used for particular quests. This world design method is actually really similar to origins. You have different locations on the world map which are only connected with the loading screen. You could argue that Inquisition is not an open-world game because of this, but they wouldn’t agree simply because of the size of this individual maps. A single map from Inquisition is bigger than some open-world RPGs death being said, I’m not a huge fan of this design decision, because the world feels disconnected and that’s not really immersive, and we have to keep in mind that bigger doesn’t always mean better. We are still talking about the game, though, fortunately for Inquisition, the size of these maps is not affecting the quality of the game in a bad way. Actually, I think that the road design in Inquisition is one of the best when it comes to open-world RPGs. Every map has a decent amount of vertical exploration and a lot of things to do some activities can be classified as busy work, but except those annoying fetch quests. A lot of the side activities can be a fun distraction, especially if you like the lore of the game, because you’re going to find a lot of notes when it comes to exploration itself, it’s usually quite rewarding. The loot in containers is randomized, but it seems like we have a decent chance for a good quality item. The RNG is not really aggressive. If you explore every nook and cranny, you will be rewarded either with the actual item or the crafting recipe which can be equally exciting, we’ll get to that part soon. The open road design lacked a couple of things to be truly amazing, even though the layout of these maps is wonderful, the lack of big cities and major locations is really disappointing. It’S not because they don’t exist. You just won’t be able to stumble upon them while exploring this brings us back to the problem. With the disconnected world design, a large majority of important locations are only accessible through the loading screen. These locations are used for pushing the story forward and it feels like every time you need to do something important. You need to go to the war, room and teleport. The presentation itself is great. You always have some new dialogue lines to hear, but this is not a very convenient way to push the story forward in an open-world RPG at least, I would gladly tolerate accessing maps to the loading screen. If you can visit all the major locations that are progressing. The story within those maps, the problem I have with this is kind of subjective, but I had to talk about it because it bothers me. To conclude this part: we have to mention the war room and the actual method of unlocking different locations. The concept of the war room is actually really interesting. It has some slight strategy elements and it changes the pace of the gameplay in a good way. This is the place where you unlock different areas in quests on the map and send your companions on individual missions. You always have a couple of options to choose how we’re going to approach different missions for the most part. This is not an illusion of choice. There will be consequences, but in order to start doing missions you will need power in influence. You gain power and influence by doing quests, seizing encampments and strongholds, sealing rifts and so on. In the beginning, you won’t have a lot of options when it comes to the mission table, but the game opens up considerably after a few hours. Speaking about a few hours, that’s exactly how much time you need for some missions. There is a timer attached to every major mission that you don’t attend. Personally, this can range from 30 minutes all the way to 18 hours, which is really absurd. I wouldn’t have a problem with this if all the missions are kept on one or two hours max, because you’re usually going to spend that time by just exploring the world and doing different quests, some missions have preferred advisors who can complete the tasks up to 20 % faster, but this is not exactly fixing the problem. The only thing that makes this feature not terrible is the amount of stuff that you can do in the game. I really like all the extra dialog from your companions in war room and you have a lot of different imposition perks that you can unlock. So I would say that the war room feature is good in general, but it could have been a lot better if they didn’t make the timer that aggressive. I think this is the good time to start talking about the story. I will be pretty vague about the stories, so I probably won’t spoil anything. Let’S start with all the good parts, all major characters are fairly interesting and their interaction between themselves is amazing. I see it berrak, but what’s it doing here, magic could have drawn on lyrium beneath the temple, corrupted it evil, whatever you do, don’t touch it. This has always been a strong feature of the series and imposition certainly didn’t disappoint the voice. Acting takes a huge credit when it comes to characters. Obviously, these voice actors did an amazing job and combined with the great presentation, by over brought these characters to life so seamlessly. You could argue that the game has some over-the-top characters that are not so believable like Sara and Cole, but even those two characters are really interesting to me. Maybe the word realistic is more appropriate. These two characters are really interesting, but not so realistic, even for fantasy RPG standards, but anyway, all major characters and followers are definitely memorable. Arty banter is always interesting to listen, and if you truly wish to experience all different interactions between characters, you would need to play the game at least a couple of times. I can’t think of a game that does a better job when it comes to this, and I think this feature didn’t get enough praise that’ll, get you every time. She’Ll respond, a story, it’s more believable and less prone to result in premature execution. It’S probably because the people come to expect this from a Dragon Age game. So if the characters are so good, the story must be amazing right. Well, no, no, it’s not. The whole premise of this story was instantly disappointing to me. You start off as a special guy or a girl with a special mark on your hand, which is somehow connected with all the ships happening in the world. Nobody knows what exactly this means, but pretty much. Everyone knows that you are special. If you can’t tell by the sound of my voice, I really have a problem with this method of storytelling and if you watched a couple of my RPG discussion videos, you probably know why long story short. I don’t like when the game is pushing the hero. Narrative right from the beginning of the game, there is nothing wrong with becoming a hero by earning that status, but starting off as a hero really makes me cringe. It’S a lot different if you’re playing as a premade character with a strong background story. That’S not the same. The reason why this didn’t bother me a lot in Inquisition is because you have a decent amount of options when it comes to the dialogue, even though you play as a hero of Andraste the dialogue options offer you a decent amount of variety for approaching the story. You can straight-up refuse to accept your title in all dialogue situations. I have no interest in being a hero. All I want is to find a way to steal this bridge, but this is more related to your character, personal beliefs than the actual truth, pragmatic, but ultimately irrelevant. In the end, you are the hero of Andraste, whether you believe it or not. Only you can seal rifts with the scar on your hand and kill the main bad guy. There is no way around it. So, even though I don’t like the story itself, I really enjoyed everything around it. If that makes sense like I said, I really love the characters and their personal background stories, so I was always curious to see how they’re going to react in different situations. Cassandra and soleus are definitely the most interesting characters in inquisition, at least in my opinion. Of course, that would be it when it comes to the story. Now, let’s talk about the gameplay one of the main reasons why keep returning to Dragon Age Inquisition is the gameplay. The way that combat works is actually really unique, while origins combat was highly tactical Dragon Age to try to make it more action-oriented up to the point where tactics didn’t really matter much Dragon Age. Inquisition, try to do something in between the main focus is still on the action side of the combat, but the strategy elements are more important than the Dragon Age 2, but this will highly depend on the difficulty option. A lot more difficulties basically don’t require any strategy. You can just play with your character without worrying about your party or tactics, but if you play on the hardest difficulty, you will absolutely need to think before you engage in combats. I played the game a couple of times of nightmare, which is the hardest difficulties. So I can’t speak about other difficulties that much, but your overall combat experience will mostly depend on your character class. The strategy elements that I mentioned are really basic so that shouldn’t intimidate you it’s mostly about positioning your party accordingly and setting a basic character behavior for certain situations. You have the option to pause the game and use the tactical camera, but unfortunately this feature is kind of clunky but, like I said, the tactical elements are pretty basic, so you can still manage to give your party some essential commands and return to action. You will mostly use this feature before the fight begins and, if you’re in some serious trouble, sometimes the a I will just misbehave and not listen to your commands, so you’ll have to pause just for that. The action side of this combat system is solid. It doesn’t require much precision, it’s mostly stat, based, even though it might look otherwise the way you set up your skills, the gear and your party is way more important than how you’re going to react in combat. But even though this is the case, the action is still really enjoyable. The animations are pretty good, the skills are fun to use and there is an interesting synergy of skills in combat that you can use to your advantage. So, for example, when soleus freezes an enemy, I can combine that with one of my skills for massive damage. It’S a pretty good mechanic and I like it a lot when it comes to all the classes in the game. Most of them are fairly interesting. The game doesn’t show you all the available classes up to a certain point in the game when something important happens, this kind of caught me by surprise, because you feel like you’re, getting a lot more options for your build. You do. The combat scenarios in equation can look like rates in MMORPGs, mainly because you’ll have that Holy Trinity in your party, a tank damage dealer and a healer. Actually, you can’t play as a healer in Inquisition because there are no healing spells at all, but you have some support skills that you can use. I think it’s really important how RPGs handle healing and Inquisition did a solid job when it comes to this, you can heal exclusively with potions, and you have a limited amounts that you can carry with you until you rest and restock. You can’t actually pause the game and abuse consumables or anything similar to that. This single design decision is really important because it gives a certain weight to all fights in the game. Besides, the solid combat Inquisition has an amazing crafting system. A few months ago, I’ve made a video about this crafting system and I recommend watching that video. If you’re interested to hear my in-depth thoughts while you’re exploring the world, you will find crafting materials and schematics all over the place, almost all items in the game. He have different tiers of quality, even the crafting schematics and materials. My most favorite thing when it comes to crafting is the ability to grab the same item with different materials. So, for example, if you need a claw item, you can use different quality of clothes. Rare quality items will obviously give you more stats, but also a different color. The same piece of armor that you can craft can look different on other characters, which is a really nice attention to detail. I could talk about this crafting system all day, but definitely check out that video. If you want to hear my complete thoughts and the best part about the game play around out to be the dragons that you’re going to find all over the world, there are ten in total, I believe, and they are pretty challenging on the nightmare. Difficulty. The presentation of these fights is great and they are pretty interesting mechanically as well. It’S easily one of the best parts of the gameplay in Inquisition. Now, let’s mention a couple of more problems. I had with this game. Before I end the video, the cutscenes are locked at 30fps, which is a weird decision and it’s probably related to console limitations. It wouldn’t be that weird, if you have around 30 FPS constantly, but if you’re playing on a PC – and you have a lot more frames per second switching to a locked 30 FPS cutscene feels really bad. Inquisition uses the Frostbite engine, which was a really weird. While this engine is capable of some amazing visuals, it’s never meant for an RPG. First-Person shooters and sports games are great on this engine, but a huge open world RPG was a big challenge for this team. One of the developers said that his experience with frostbite was very much like this. You could do amazing things and go very fast in some elements, but it’s very delicate and very hard to manage. So we can only guess what kinds of trouble Beyer had to develop. The game of this engine, and that would be it pretty much. I think I already answered my own question about why you should play this game in 2020. While I do have some problems with the game, I still really enjoy playing it. It has a great replay value, the game plays pretty solid and it still looks amazing. Your experience with the game could be totally different than mine, but if you’re a fan of open road medieval fantasy RPGs – and you don’t know what to play, you should definitely consider playing Inquisition for the first time ever or for another playthrough. It doesn’t matter, and what’s your opinion about this game, leave a comment down below if you enjoyed this video, a like would be highly appreciated, don’t forget to subscribe for more content and click on the bell icon, so you don’t miss any future uploads special thanks to My patrons and if you aswell, want to become one of them all the links are in the description. Patient is definitely the best place to directly support my work and every contribution is highly appreciated. That would be all and I’ll see you in the next one.
