Just a BioWare Fan

I thought it ideal to stop 50-some hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition, a quarter of the way through the touted 200 hours of content, to write a review of the game thus far. While I do have a few complaints, in the main my reaction boils down to one word: wow.

This review will avoid spoilers but the main story quest has consistently impressed and surprised me. Think Skyrim meets Dragon’s Dogma meets the beauty of BioWare’s wonderful storytelling. Here’s the tl;dr version: Dragon Age: Inquisition takes a little getting used to but it has amazed and delighted me and I’ve only just found out what the main story’s about.

Note, please, that I’m playing on the X-Box One. Hubby has had continuous problems on his PC, including taking three days to download the game and a number of freezes and crashes. I’m not going to address those because they aren’t the game, they’re likely a combination of hardware and Origin problems. Let’s talk about the glorious masses of content, instead.

Something’s Gotta Give

In a low voice, Kaidan told the group about the camera and microphone he’d found in Jenkins’s crushed pin. “I wasn’t about to confront Udina right there but Captain Anderson and I thought you should know.”

Pressly leaned back with a low whistle. “No wonder they always put the spike-heads on the right.” Jenkins, whose eyes were already round with surprise, turned to stare at the navigator as comprehension dawned. Pressly nodded knowingly, as though none of this were a surprise to him.

A passing wave of suspicion left Kaidan dismayed. Pressly enjoyed the way Jenkins looked up to the more-senior officers and was just playing the world-weary cynic. He didn’t exactly embrace alien relations but there was no way he was a good enough actor to have sat through all of those discussions about the insignia with Kaidan and Anderson without giving away that he knew something.

A Heart Conscripted

A young man in worn novice robes emerged. He’d clearly outgrown them—his thin ankles and wrists showed where the size intended for young people hadn’t kept up with his adult size. His head was turned as he spoke to someone behind him and for a moment he remained unaware of the threat facing him.

When Jowan faced the room he stopped cold, his greasy black hair tumbled across eyes widened in fear and anger. In a fraction of a second he'd pulled a little blade from its sheath at his belt and drawn it across his wrist.

The room erupted into bedlam. The Templars reacted with their abilities made to suppress blood magic, their training overtaking their shock at being confronted so boldly. Irving flung a spell of paralysis at the younger man. The homely woman in yellow Chantry robes behind him screamed and flung herself away, burying her face in her hands.

I’ve rewritten this review of Destiny several times because I keep forgetting to post it and keep thinking of new things to say. The upshot? Despite its woefully thin veneer of RPG it’s a console-loving, MMO-flavored, first-person shooter, a whole lot more Halo than Mass Effect.  In and of itself that doesn’t make it a bad game, it just isn’t a Bioware game.  For me, it has almost no longevity. I wanted it to fill the gap until DA:I hits my mailbox but I'm back to Far Cry 3 already.

That’s the short of it, but of course a game this well-hyped deserves a more-thorough review.  Destiny offers plenty of fun and takes a step away from Halo without abandoning what made Bungie such a hit in the first place.  Here’s a run-down of the good and the bad I’ve found in several days of FPS goodness.

If you haven’t yet seen the multi-player trailer for Dragon Age: Inquisition, give it a watch.

I admit that, after the great fun that the Mass Effect multi-player format turned out to be, I’m excited to see how BioWare does the sword and sorcery version. Devs have assured people repeatedly that the single player campaign will not be affected in any way by what’s known by the unfortunate acronym DAMP and that’s good enough for me, at least for the moment.

Then I got to thinking about why they would add a multi-player element to a story so dedicated to role playing. For me, the answer lies not in BioWare’s history (though they’ve shown enough interest in social play over the years) but in the wild success of Bungie’s Halo series on-line.

Other game series have had on-line multi-player, certainly, but it was Halo that actually brought me into that world. After a decade my family and I still hop on to Bungie’s servers from time to time and go nuts fighting total strangers. Even I, a terrible shot and someone who never remembers to look at her radar, can have fun blasting away in various game modes. Who doesn’t love blowing half a dozen skulls out of someone in Headhunter?