Dragon Age Inquisition: A Retrospective

In the past, Dragon Age and Mass Effect were, to me, exemplars of what can be done with games in terms of narrative design; and I held their creators at Biowere in high esteem. When I discovered Inquisition, I was in high school, still unaware that I wanted to write for games or their potential as a storytelling device. They were the first games I played that put the story front and center, giving players the ability to make changes in it through gameplay, showing me for the first-time what games could be capable of as an artistic meduim. However, as I playback again through Inquisition, I notice a few cracks. Things that other games have done leagues better with far smaller teams and ideas that are less married to a more traditional frame of storytelling. Things that didn't detract from my enjoyment of Dragon Age games, however, it has lowered my overall view of Biowere and their games. Not to the point where they don't have my respect anymore, but more in that I no longer think they're the undisputed masters of the craft. If I had to summarize my thoughts on Inquisition, it would be: good ideas, poor execution.

Take the main draw of the game, leading the Inquisition. Something not done before in a Dragon Age game. Before you were just one cog in the overall machine of the world. Yes, a very important cog, but your power and influence was limited to a single person or group. Now in Inquisition, you oversee an entire major organization with wide-reaching effects on all of Thedas; however, managing the Inquisition is shallow and somewhat unfulfilling. If I am the boss of a major organization like this, why do I only have three agents to send out? Why can I only pass judgment down on certain story characters? Why is the Inquisition's overall presence and duties tied to markers on a board that I have little influence over?

Across all these points, there is one common problem, connectivity. Yes, each choice and action fits within a management style type of gameplay; the problem is how rigid they are. For example, passing judgment; one of the highlights of being the Inquisitor, that is sadly given little time to shine in the grand scheme of things. In these segments, a character from a previous quest is brought before you to be judged for a crime they committed in said quest, and it is up to you to mettle out punishment. Here the game does something excellent. It gives you power befitting a major peacekeeping force like the Inquisition, connecting that motif of creating order from chaos to gameplay in a fun little side activity. However, the instances you can pass judgment are few and far between, locked to major story quests or activities. Meaning it's less of a side activity and more just a side note to a major quest. There is no hunting down your enemies in-game and having them thrown before you to face punishment.

This disconnect is the crux of this issue in-game; your connection to the events at large are small on the world scale. There is no expanding your operations with more agents, no building and using your influence, no connecting tissue between the Inquisition being an up-and-coming force of order and gameplay. If I could recruit more agents aside from the three I start with, if I could reduce the time it takes for quests to finish, if I could pass judgment down on more people; then a link would be there, and I could feel more like I was commanding a force of the righteous rather then watching and listing to one.

Of course, that would only be the start. If we are changing things to affect the world in a greater capacity, we should start with the quests. At the moment, quests in Inquisition are the flat and run-of-the-mill variety of go to a place, kill X number of people, and get a thing. Even many companion quests are like this, with little room for nuance or interesting characters to meet and interact with. For example, on one map, I ran into a clan of warriors whose chief challenged me to a duel on the grounds he believed my God was false. When I arrived, he fought me without any foreplay; I then killed him and later judged his father for throwing a goat at my castle. While that sounds all well and good, know that I had no idea who this chief was outside of this desire for religious murder, nor did punishing his entire people for his action make sense when disciplining him.

This disconnect was because I knew nothing of him, his people, or his beliefs; he was just another bandit/cultist/rat for me to kill for XP and better gear; this is fine for filler quests, but when all of your quests are filler quests, the world loses some of its luster. A good quest should engage the player both narratively and mechanically. Think back to Fallout New Vagas; even in the smallest quests, players are introduced to outlandish and engaging characters and prompted with an array of options for addressing a problem. In a quest like Fly Me to the Moon, you can use Charisma to talk your way out of fights, barter with the enemy, use Science to mess with tech, or blow everything up that moves. The quest gives players a chance to try out and utilize the skills they've been building in new and exciting ways, driving them to continue, explore, and complete quests.

Inquisition should be doing one or the other; either provide more engaging quests with more exciting characters and outcomes or create more complex and varied challenges for players to address from multiple angles. Using systems already in the game, let's look at a quest in the Western Approach where a bunch of Tavinter Agents are attempting to undo a time spell to get a powerful staff. There are no characters to interact with within this quest, and that's fine. However, say when we get to the staff chamber, a little option came up if you were a mage or had a mage in the party to remove the staff without unfreezing all the demons around you. That way, players would be encouraged and rewarded for keeping a balanced party or playing different classes. It doesn't have to be a world-splitting event, but it has to be enough to make the player feel like they had some choice over the matter, and we're not just being railroaded through someone else's story.

Something that will also help make this the player's story is revamping how the Inquisitor is characterized. As it stands, there is a limit to how much a player can customize their Inquisitor's personality and backstory. However, I have written about this exact problem in the past, so I will be brief on this one. In short, there are two problems with the Inquisitor: number one, there is no through-line between the options players pick to flesh out the Inquisitor's character; and second, in an attempt to give players a system to let them play any character they want, the options available are all on a similar level as the story splitting ones.

To tackle each one at a time, firstly, nothing builds within the Inquisitor. None of the player's choices affect how the character grows and informs how the player should make their choices. Geralt in Witcher 3, for example is a character driven by the player but with a defined personality the player can affect and mold as the game goes along; complete with ambitions and goals players can strive towards as their own as well. So when the player makes a choice as Geralt, there is a clear reaction to that choice that colors Geralt differently as a character which then informs later decisions. The Inquisitor does not have that. They almost have something in the beginning, with the doubts of them being the Harrold, but that fades once you reach Skyhold, and you're left high and dry. If they took that search for meaning found in the first third of the game and built scenes around it, this problem would be better solved. Like, what if there was a quest that required the players to make a definitive statement to if they believe they are chosen to rally the Inquisition. At that moment, players could decide if they believe they are special because of their gifts or by their will alone, better defining what the Inquisitor values more in life.

However, the second problem is less easily solved; here, it's a limitation of the medium. Video games can not be as expansive as their tabletop forefathers. They can be equally immersive but in more controlled and streamlined ways. Inquisition is trying to have it both ways, allowing players to create their own character while chaining them to a preestablished backstory. Something that worked for them in the past with Origins and Dragon Age 2, but in those games, we got to play the backstory and make it somewhat our own with our choices. In Inquisition, your backstory is set by your race and class without input, then delivered through text before the game starts.

For example, I was playing a Quanai mage, and I wanted to play him as a mage on the run as Quanri society is centered around control, and mages are bound into slavery to keep their mind-bending powers in check. I wanted his story in the Inquisition to be about finding the proper amount of control an organization should have over a society, having seen the extreme in his homeland but still believing in the core teachings of his people. However, the game gave me a backstory that clashed with this idea; instead of being a mage on the run, I was now just an outcast mercenary. Sure, a few elements transferred, but it was no longer my story - it was someone else's. This clash of ideas is emblematic of RPGs stuck in this tabletop mindset, trying to create sky-high limits in a limited medium. Our imaginations will never fit onto a disk, but writers can compensate for that by showing us possible paths for us to take. It may not be as extensive or personalized as a tabletop character, but it's still a story and background generated by the player's decision; they're writing their own story along with what the game's writers wrote during development.

However, I don't want this to come across like I'm ragging on Biowere. I still enjoyed my overall time with Inquisition and fondly remembered my time with their games. I want to convey that there is no end-all-be-all for narrative design. Bioware had good ideas, but they made mistakes like the rest of us. But from their mistakes, new forms of narrative structure should arise, ones that hold true to the good ideas that Biowere puts into their games while expanding past their shortcomings to create new stories. We are currently living through a narrative renaissance in games, as developers, big and small, recognize that story is just as big of a draw as gameplay. We are going to see many new stories come out of games, not all of them good, not all of them unique, but each of them will be a building block to creating the stores we will be telling for years to come. Built on a foundation that companies like Biowere help set.