This kind of inconsistency is particularly apparent in Dragon Age games.
For Inquisition, as it did with Dragon Age II, BioWare has refocused the series around a new protagonist. This time around, you are the Inquisitor, the sole survivor of a magical explosion that has left an expanding rift called the Breach in the skies above a country embroiled in civil war.
As the one person who is able to close such supernatural breaches, you are tasked with establishing a new faction, the Inquisition, in order to track down the agents responsible for the disaster in the first place.
“This isn’t about being a Jedi—this is about founding the Jedi Order,” says executive producer Mark Darrah. “You’re the tip of the spear. You aren’t waiting for the world to act on you, you’re acting on it.”
You’re responsible for shaping the Inquisition into anything from a military force to a network of spies. You’re given freedom over the formation of the organization’s identity that you simply didn’t have in the case of the first game’s
Grey Wardens, who came with a tremendous amount of history already established. That said, there’s a lot of parallelism between the two games: an invasion with its origins in dark magic; political turmoil; a hero with a unique link to the source of evil.
These parallels are, for BioWare, a way of expanding the scope of the series while presenting something that will be familiar—and hopefully resonant—to devoted followers of the previous games. In this way, Darrah argues, BioWare fulfills both of its responsibilities: to give fans what they want, and to show them something they haven’t seen before.
“Most people aren’t perfectly objective when they’re playing a game, myself included,” he says. “Henry Ford has a famous quote—‘If we asked people what they wanted, they’d ask for a faster horse.
There’s a certain amount of truth to that. Part of our job is to go out into the wilderness, beyond what players have seen, and light a torch so that they can see what could be.”
Longtime fans of the games shouldn’t fear change, necessarily. Characters will return, dangling plot threads will be resolved, and the presence of Dragon Age II’s Varric and Origins’ Morrigan in early trailers suggests a concerted effort to unite the previous two games’ divergent narratives.
I ask Darrah why Dragon Age always seems to undergo a major overhaul every time it’s updated—particularly when Mass Effect’s success was grounded in its series-spanning consistency. “In a lot of ways Inquisition is the game that we’ve wanted to make from the beginning,” he says. “From a systemic perspective, Dragon Age II is actually very similar to Dragon Age: Origins. Its bones are the same, but we put a very different outfit on top of it.
“For Dragon Age II, we decided that we wanted to do very different storytelling, something much more personal. No chosen one, no clear overarching threat. I don’t think it was a perfect success, but that was intentional.
A lot of the other changes that are perceived—the overall scope of the game, the perception of the combat getting a lot simpler—that was not intended, exactly. That was supposed to be more evolutionary. I think we just overreached. We pushed too hard.”
Darrah accepts criticism of the previous game openhandedly, but Dragon Age II was not without its strengths. The game’s companion characters were among the best BioWare’s ever written.
In describing Inquisition to the world, a great deal of focus has been put on explaining how the new game will avoid repeating the failures of its predecessor—but not how it will expand upon its successes. I put this to Darrah, and he’s happy to point out things that Dragon Age II’s writing didn’t achieve, which Inquisition potentially could.
“I think we’ve become trapped by the word ‘romance’,” he says. “I regret that in Dragon Age II we didn’t have a kind of ‘bromance’ option with Varric. He’s not a romance option, but you can hang out with him, be his bud. Some of what we would traditionally call romances in Dragon Age: Inquisition are falling more into that friendship area.”
This expansion of the game’s offering at the smaller end of the scale will be important to fans whose attachment began with Dragon Age: Origins’ well-developed characters and relationships. I’m hopeful that, after all of this time, BioWare has finally been given the resources needed to make a Dragon Age game that capitalizes on all of its strengths—that marries an open-world RPG with the depth of detail that encourages a sense of personal
investment.
That has always been the studio’s particular talent, and—after a rocky couple of years—I’m excited to see them reclaim it.
Where to Buy
You can get this Game from Amazon
