Dragon Age: Inquisition

Three years on, BioWare’s biggest Dragon Age is a work of glorious and slightly tragic excess

- Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Running a country is, we’re sure, a messy, awkward business and so, much of the time, is Dragon Age: Inquisition. Consider Skyhold, the game’s gradually restored mountaintop fortress that is the most obvious manifestation of your power as Inquisitor, but which often inspires a sense of helplessness, with companions, crafting stations, merchants, furnaces, wardrobes and gardens scattered throughout its courtyards and battlements. A hundred hours into the game, it is still possible to get lost while walking around your own seat of government – confusing the door to your quarters with the one to the war room, for example, or the stair to the great hall balcony with the one to your aviary. The perks of lording it over Skyhold aren’t a huge departure from commanding the Normandy in the Mass Effect series, but Inquisition drags out the distances and piles on the pomp. If you want to acquire new armour before setting out on a mission, you’ll need to dismiss your advisors and slog back down the hall to the undercroft, then call another meeting at your war table. There is, perhaps, an object lesson here about the narcissism of tyranny, about being engulfed by the trappings of megalomania.

Next to the imposing scale and liveliness of this space, with its laden banquet tables and multitude of cobwebbed, candelit nooks and crannies, the Inquisitor her or himself is quite the non-entity. This is often true of BioWare’s ‘blank tablet’ protagonists, each stretched thin by the demands of morality gauges and multiple-choice dialogue systems, and in this case, there’s a little more method to the blandness. Your character is appointed Inquisitor, an ancient role invoked during times of crisis, following a cataclysm which at once helpfully kills off the realm’s previous spiritual head, wipes your memory and endows you with a unique mark that can be used to seal portals to the Fade, Dra