Dragon Age Inquisition Part 1: What the heck?

I’ll be going on a bit about the Dragon Age series now. I had a phase where I wouldn’t buy games on Steam unless there was a Linux version. My obsolete Radeon video card made this even more limiting. I was happy until the AMD proprietary driver broke Ubuntu forcing me to give up Opengl 4.x for the open driver. I started buying Windows games again and picked up Origins on sale.

What a terrific blend of adventure, role playing and strategy. For whatever reason, I wasn’t expecting much from it. It’s an older game after all. The characters are so engaging. I accidentally fell into a romance with the delightful Alistair simply by being nice to him and couldn’t bring myself to break it off. Typically he ditched me in the end. How was I supposed to know I had to “harden” him as wrong as that sounds.

The second Dragon Age is not available on Steam but I was able to play a demo. I debated buying the PS3 version but I got the PS4 version of Inquisition with DLC on sale instead.

Waiting to buy popular games has its benefits. The DLC clearly improved the experience. Inquisition suited my play style quite well. Still I had issues. The game badly confused me at first. That was partly my fault. Sometimes I can look at an interface and just not see things that are obvious. But Inquisition throws a lot of complicated systems at the player without an in depth help system. The tutorials are OK but I somehow missed how to bring up the radial menu and I had no idea how to take a potion. For awhile I couldn’t figure out how to even equip a potion. That made battles tougher than they needed to be and I ran back to camp a lot.

The lack of health spells and the carry limit on potions upset me at first and I didn’t really grasp the tactical menu or how to make the most of party abilities. I was driven to strategy guides and You Tube videos quickly. I now suspect that I am the type of player Bioware was targeting with some of their game play decisions. I was very intrigued with Origin’s tactical system but found it overwhelming. I used it mostly to spam health spells and potions. Battles were reduced to keeping my mage alive with everything else on auto pilot. Inquisition forced me to use not abuse the tactical system and I came to appreciate that once I learned how to manage potions of course.

I did not finish the game with my rogue. I was not all that engaged with my companions and I spent so much time learning how to play the game that I felt out of touch with the main story line. I wasn’t all that enthused with my character either. Building an organization makes a lot more sense for an open world game than pursuing a frequently interrupted personal quest and I thought war table missions contributed to that world building illusion. I didn’t feel as invested as I would have liked however.

Was it the game or was it me? Starting over with a new character seemed the only way to find out. Normally I make a female character because it used to be a novelty for me but this time I wanted to play as an aggressive male two handed warrior Qunari. I didn't have much patience with the character editor this time around. I liked head 2 well enough. It is handsome but menacing. I'm not fond of Iron Bull's tiny head so I minimized the horms and ears. I settled for the default name and got right into it. I planned to take a different path and engage in as much romance as possible. He turned out to have a dual nature. He’s obliging or ruthless whenever it suits him. He relates his story in the following post.