Dragon Age Inquisition Playthrough: Endless Collection Hubs

We are continuing our Dragon Age Inquisition playthrough, and at 60 hours (and level 17) we are ready to put the game aside for a while. We just completed the 'protect the Empress' party quest, and we have exhausted our attention span for the game.

The characters are interesting and the graphics are phenomenal, but we are facing a couple problems that drain the want to come back out of the game for us:

• The story moves at a snail's pace
• The quest zones are too sparsely populated and boring
• The war doesn't feel like a war

I think the third one is critical for us. I would have loved to see a war on my battle map with lines and castles to capture, and the ebb and flow of the world as we begin to make changes and contribute. In the first part (mages versus templars) the war felt like is was just some 'off map' thing, and now with the big bad supposedly running the show, he is nowhere on the map to be seen. I want to take the fight to the bad guy, siege his castles, and push him back until the final battle.

Instead, the big bad guy is just mentioned as an invisible force that we must rally against, or just some off-stage actor speaking lines and supposedly being the cause of all that ills the world.

In Skyrim, if one side or the other pissed you off, you could take the fight to them, and you did this by yourself. You could walk between the three, join one side or the other, and in some mods the range of factions you could join and get in trouble with was amazing.

In Shining Force, it was a one-true-way game, but you felt every battle was important and critical drove the story on.

In Dragon Age Inquisition, the zones are more "collection hubs" and less "sandboxes". In a sandbox, the NPCs would fight, live, and go about things as they would in a normal world. If templars and mages were in the same zone, they would seek each other out and you could jump in on one side or the other. The townspeople would go about their normal lives, run for cover when the war or monsters showed up, and the world would feel alive. Instead, the world feels like a traditional 8-bit RPG, with people just standing around waiting to deliver their lines.

Compare this to Grand Theft Auto 5, with a world full of people and cars, living their lives, and the world feels like it is alive. It is a veneer of programmed responses, but it feels real and authentic, which I don't get from Inquisition. With the latter game, I get this grindy feeling that the maps exist to be striped bare of collectibles and discoveries, and nothing really of any importance or meaning happens on them.

They are beautiful, no doubt, just empty in every way. You get this feeling that nobody lives in this world.

So we are parking the game and getting back to it when we want to see how the game ends. At 60 hours, that is going to be a tough one because I am not willing to put in another 60 just to see how it ends. It does not feel like that compelling and driving of a narrative to justify giving up time in other games just to see how the story comes out, at least for us.

It got to the point where we would rather put the videogame away and use the pen-and-paper game to finish the story the way we want it to. Ultimately, I think that would be the wiser and more satisfying ending for us.