At best, Inquisition feels like your standard BioWare game mixed with a pale shadow of Elder Scrolls. Most of the non-core quests are a slog, though, and if Inquisition does anything it proves how hard it is to encapsulate what makes Skyrim a great game. It ends a bit abruptly, and it’d still feel a bit padded out of necessity (you’ll have to grind a bit to get to the recommended level for each piece of content), but Inquisition‘s main through-line is strong. If you played through the core story and only dabbled in the side content, this is a perfectly decent story. On my ultra-scientific Dragon Age: Origins to Dragon Age II scale, Inquisition definitely leans towards the former, and I’m constantly impressed by the extent of the world-building and lore-crafting BioWare has done for this universe. This is where tacking a score on a game feels awkward. By dropping a few settings I was able to run it on my laptop (a mid-tier Origin gaming machine) with few problems, although the frame rate took an occasional dive.
On the plus side, Inquisition is well-optimized. My least favorite bug was when the game crashed to desktop four times during the course of my playthrough. My favorite bug saw me flying two dozen feet into the air for no discernible reason. If ever somebody complains again about how many bugs are in Bethesda games, point them at Inquisition, which proves the problem isn’t with Bethesda but with the entire genre of massive open-world RPGs.
Once you’re in an area everything seems fine, though there’s a bit of distracting texture and object pop-in, but those initial loads are mammoth. Even simple cutscenes required a few seconds of black, and loading into a new area meant it was time to pull out my phone. This wouldn’t be too egregious except that Inquisition‘s load times are massive. Changing any graphics options requires the entire game to be restarted, and switching between mouse/keyboard and gamepad necessitates exiting to the main menu. There’s nothing like hearing that it’s “urgent” you save the Empress of Orlais or she might die immediately, only to be told to come back in six hours when you’ve gathered enough “Power” (a meta-currency) to actually attend her masquerade ball.Īnd then there are the even weirder bits. The ratio of engaging story content to useless fetch quests is not very favorable here, and the worst part is it screws up the pacing of the main story as a result. You were given enough side quests to make each location feel lively, but most of your time was spent on the main story. In the past, however, I felt like BioWare tried to keep the amount of filler down. Skyrim is guilty of it, The Witcher is guilty of it. There’s a lot of filler.įiller is par for the course for RPGs. You could do it faster, I’m sure, but I tried to play the game the way BioWare clearly intended-exploring the nooks in various environments, chatting with my companions, and generally absorbing each location as I came to it. I clocked it: The first time I really felt “into” Inquisition, I was a dozen hours in. As gamers, we always joke about “This game is slow at first, but it really gets going five hours in,” as if it should be perfectly acceptable to waste five hours of your life to get to “the good part.” There are only five or six story beats in the entire game, and each of these main beats is padded by five or six hours of garbage collection on either side. “Collect these seven letters from dead soldiers, collect these ten supply caches, collect these four signs that a dragon has been around, collect these six herbs, collect these twelve rocks, collect this key, collect these landmarks.”īut the main story is padded, and padded hard.
Inquisition ‘s wilderness is like an endless series of Skyrim‘s procedurally generated quests. The crux of the issue is how much of said content you’ll want to do. I’m never going to 100% this game, but BioWare’s claim of “150 hours of content” seems reasonable. And that actually is a lie, because there’s plenty to do. My main issue is that there’s not much to do. These are discrete environments, though-it’s not Skyrim‘s single massive map. The focus is on exploration, and there are around a dozen sizable environments for you to traipse around, from wind-whipped deserts to lush forests to tundra. The closest thing to a city is your own town, Haven (and later, Skyhold) where you’ll find all your companions, plus a handful of merchants and tertiary characters. This “massive” city is actually smaller than any of the wilderness maps in the game, consisting primarily of a central square and a handful of merchants. You’ll unlock an achievement at one point for gaining access to the city of Val Royeaux. In fact, there are now (oddly) zero cities for you to explore.