Editing Bioware (section)

====Dragon Age: Inquisition====
Dragon Age: Inquisition picked things up... a little. It's certainly the best of the more recent Bioware games by a solid margin, but a lot of that is because literally everything about the game is risk-averse. Both the story and the gameplay are assembled from pure fantasy cliche, and the [[grimdark]] city-based environmental art style prevalent in the previous two games has been largely replaced with a glorious [[noblebright]] mostly-outdoor setting (dang if it doesn't look gorgeous though). Much of the shittiness of the DA world still exists, but its all moved to the periphery so as not to sour the fun times. Put a different way, if DAO felt like Lord of the Rings if it was written by George RR Martin or Andrzej Sapkowski, then DAI feels a bit like a Dragon Age entry written by Disney (the characters even sing to lift their spirits at one point). Which isn't to say that its ''bad''. It just doesn't have the Grimdark edge that was part of what fans loved about the first entry.

The storyline is based on the player character accidentally becoming the [[Mary Sue|Chosen One]] by accidentally picking up a shiny green orb which allows them to fix tears in the fabric of reality.  The villain has some interesting implications about the lore of the setting, but the writers never really actually commit to any of that lore, preferring to have it remain as hearsay, and the villain becomes boringly one-dimensionally evil because of that. Gameplay-wise, Inquisition started as an MMO, and you can still feel the MMO influence; you explore about ten wilderness zones which are very large and pretty but have very minimal interaction, spend most of your time running fetch quests, and only hit story beats every three levels or so. Combat is a game of managing cooldowns and throwing particle effects everywhere.

That said, unlike some of the past games from Bioware's decline-and-fall period, Inquisition is actually fun to play. Most of the characters in your party are well-rounded (except for Vivienne and to a lesser extent Sera), there's a ridiculously large amount of party banter, and the romance quests actually feature involving character development instead of being something to add to the checklist. There's even some series-essential lore locked away in some of the romances (in particular, Solas's romance reveals absolutely vital information about the history of the Elven race). The gameplay, cliched and MMO-ey though it may be, is actually involving and fun at times, and the quest to hunt down all ten High Dragons is pretty awesome (as well as being pretty much the only way to get value-for-money from the game's otherwise superfluous crafting system; pretty much every piece of gear you can craft is outclassed by the loot you find from monsters, except for crafted items which use Dragon Bone, which are hilariously overpowered). Certainly not a great game, but it's quite good if you aren't overly sensitive to cliche.

While the main game doesn't add much to the setting's lore (such as the lore around the BBEG), the DLC missions add '''a lot''' of lore to the setting.  The first is a mission to help a Dwarf realm plagued by earthquakes and Darkspawn where you learn more about the origins of the Dwarfs and Lyrium (the setting's equivalent of [[Warpstone]]).  The second is one where you fight the fanatical followers of a tribal war god while trying to unearth the lost history of the Inquisition (it reveals more about the nature of the human vs Dalish elves conflict).  The third takes place after the main game and has the biggest implications of all in the setting, where you start by dealing with political blowback against the Inquisition and end up in a counter-espionage move against qunari assassins and conclude by meeting an elven god whose plans to help the elves endangers the world.