Through careful mitigation (certainly not relying 100% on the AI) of barriers and which enemy my rogue chooses to engage over my shield warrior most of the NPC’s would not be able to actually break into my health bars. However, ignoring the use of the tactical display (used mostly do apply barriers and dodge big attacks) even running around as a level 22 group saw level 15 NPCs take out half my party before I realised what was going on. The noise of the battle is certainly not that noisy when the fight was paused 5-10 seconds to reissue commands and the situations assessed. A longer fight? Certianly was; it took me 40 min to take out my first dragon. But it was nightmare difficulty and the dragon was one level above me. That was one of the greatest feelings of triumph I have felt in a game.

Game of the (last) year!

I’ve played Dragon Age: Inquisition for about 70 hours(!) now. It’s a large and complex thing, and I don’t have a single concise opinion about it all. And the good stuff is good indeed. But man, it is disappointing to see Bioware make the same mistakes over and over.

Their idea of player choice is still about choosing things off a menu instead of doing stuff. Most choices are still loop-arounds to an ordained plot. This would be okay if it let you express yourself, but you still cannot actually roleplay a specific kind of person, unless the entirety of that person is limited to being sassy and vacuous. The narrative is still completely disconnected from every other mechanic in jarring ways. In fact, the other abstractions are weirdly connected, such as the Power mechanic: finding someone’s lost goat in the Hinterlands is effectively helping you gain an invitation to a royal party in Orlais. The combat is still too noisy, entirely attritional and a chore. Enemies in combat still live by different rules. There’s even fewer options to set up and script companion combat tactics now.

It also fails to show-don’t-tell. Bioware’s never been great at this, but I’m tired of hearing how powerful the Inquisition has become when there is little evidence to show for it but random NPC chatter.

Some of these are undoubtedly tradeoffs for the ever-rising production values of their games, but I believe most of their design is in dire need of a complete overhaul. Everything, in fact, that does not have to do with companions and their character arcs. Pouring even more stuff into the mix, as Dragon Age Inquisition does, does not help.