Summary
I’m still trudging throughDragon Age: Inquisition. A few years ago I decided to fill the Dragon Age-shaped hole in my backlog withOrigins, and fell in love. With the characters, the combat, the storytelling,the choices. Then I played Dragon Age 2, which made good use of its few assets and continued the story of the first game impeccably, even taking my original choices into account. ThenI bounced off Dragon Age: Inquisition. Twice.
Third time lucky, I guess? WithDragon Age: The Veilguardlooming large on the horizon, I need to plough through this story so I’m well-equipped for the next instalment. It’s just a shame that the gameplay is dire and the narrative is stretched too thinly between repetitive open world segments that occasionally have style but never substance.
As determined as I am to persevere through this drivel,as buoyed as I was by Mother Giselle’s beautiful musical number, I’m struggling. The little snippets of character work and devastating choices the series is known for were already too few and far between. And then I was sent to the desert.
As open-world areas go, Dragon Age: Inquisition covers every biome. The Hinterlands is widely dismissed as boring because of its green pastures, jutting mountains, and boring quests, but the Storm Coast is much more impressive. There’s a swamp, a castle, a fancy city in Orlais. And then there’s the desert.
The Hissing Wastes might be the most boring area of the game (the most boring area of the gameso far, I hear you say). They are barren, visually uninteresting and the only quest there is to establish a camp to boost your power points when it comes to the war table. Except, is it?
After destroying a couple of Fade Rifts and planting a few banners in the beige sand, I set up the camp. I spent ten minutes clicking ‘A’ and walking between the Requisitions Officer and the table next to them, further boosting those crucial and engaging power points that are needed to progress the story. That’s gaming, baby!
However, there was one interesting crumb mixed in with the unending desert sand: a temple. Notes left by miners long since dead spoke of a place of great magical power, a place which may be cursed, or worse. The Elven ruins in the Forbidden Oasis are a mystery waiting to be solved, and to enter you must… pay six shards?
Shards are collectibles dotted around the maps of Dragon Age: Inquisition. They’re usually found in difficult to reach places, marked by staring through skull-shaped Ocularums. They’re dull collectibles like any other – Spider-Man’s pigeons or Batman’s Riddler trophies. And yet, in this area where everything points towards the central mystery of the Solasan temple, you are forced to collect these shards in order to progress.
The six to enter the main door was easy enough, I’d picked them up on my journey thus far. Once inside, three more doors demanded six more shards, each, in order to progress. I did as they bade, and collected nearly every shard in the Hissing Wastes. I fell onto ledges, I magicked bridges across fearsome drops, I tiptoed on annoying rocky outcrops, but I did it.
My reward? A minor buff and another door, this time requiring 12 shards. My stock now empty, I worked out that I needed another 48 shards to open every door and fully understand the mysteries of Solasan. Is this engaging gameplay? Or is it a futile attempt to add more content into a game that’s already bereft of meaningful mechanics?
I turned to my friends and colleagues at TheGamer. We’ve got plenty ofDragon Agestans writing for the site, so I wanted to be sure that my experience wasn’t unique. Was I playing this wrong, or am I experiencing the same awful game design as everyone else? There was good news and bad.
The good news was that I was not alone. The gameplay, pacing, and Hissing Wastes in particular are all universally disliked (although, to varying degrees). I was glad of the news – misery loves company – but I was then told that all of this was entirely optional and functionally pointless. What’s more, a quick Google told me that if Ireallywanted to solve the mystery of Solasan, I would need another 54 shards on top of the 48 I hadn’t yet collected. To what end?
This is wherein lies my issue with Dragon Age: Inquisition. This game is so bloated, so filled with chaff and pointless missions that it’s often difficult to see the good. Don’t get me wrong, there is good buried deep within here; brilliant quests and that iconic BioWare dialogue. But it’s so hard to tell from the war table which mission will satiate my need for great fantasy roleplaying and which will result in hours of dullery.
The temple of Solasan is a pointless timesink, like so much of Dragon Age: Inquisition. I can only hope that as I play further I grow more attuned to which missions seem vital (or narratively promising) and which seem needless. I can only hope that the narrative takes off and the need for more power, pointless power earned through monotonous side questing, tapers off. And most of all, I can only hope that I need to collect no more bloody shards to progress.
