SJW Inquisition: Beaten. Good God this game is tedious. There are huge, very expansive environments that are mostly served towards making you do quests that really feel meaningless (find my engagement ring! Kill a bunch of goats! Put flowers on a grave!). When you get to an area, there's this vomit of quest objectives all over the place, but very few of them are worth your time in the end. You get Influence and Power for doing most things, but beyond a certain point, both have very little practical utility and you don't gather enough influence to really make some of these minor things worthwhile. Really, the only thing worth doing most of the time are clearing out the rifts, since that gives a good chunk of experience, influence, and power. Eventually, you learn that most quests aren't worth going out of your way to do at all. This ended up being like 2/3s of the game, and thus the majority of the game's runtime is spent doing what really feels like busywork. The main game can probably be done in 20 hours, but it's a shame that the extra quests you do in this game don't feel like they're substantial at all. There is potential in this kind of gameplay loop wherein you stake out territory for the Inquisition and really effect change in the politics of an area, clearing out rifts and generally making some of these areas into less of a shithole. All you do currently is get camps that act as fast travel/potion restoration points. The Inquisition expands its influence in terms of territory, but then it is just there.
Most of the story missions are fairly interesting, but they do range from the novel (the Winter Palace) to weird mumbo jumbo Fade magic demon nonsense. It also falls into the weird Bioware trap where you make choices that feel like they could matter in the moment but things turn out the same way no matter what you do. Choices that should have had emotional resonance rang a little hollow or seemed clearcut, perhaps because I hadn't played the previous games in such a long time. The story itself was a lot of aforementioned mumbo jumbo, which would have been fine if the characters were stronger. They have converse with each other here and there with each other and there are some nice contextual banters (Iron Bull being elated every time he fights a dragon), but the character quests seemed fairly brief rather than having fully realized arcs. I didn't have an especially strong affinity for many of the characters. Iron Bull was entertaining and Varric is okay. The others are sort of fine. Dorian is clearly a character that was only made because of SJW masterminds. I think that most of these characters will leave my memory in a week. The Codex in this is extensive as usual but I don't think I'll really go back and read it over. I say that after every Bioware game.
All of this may have been fine if the combat weren't so damned awkward. I don't even know how to describe it, but positioning is annoying and all of the attack animations are very prescribed. It got to the point where I decided to control an archer instead of my main dual dagger character. Archers are really straightforward to play and I got lazy. I played on hard and some fights did get a little dicey and forced me to make use of the tactical mode, but for the most part, it felt like I was just chipping away at enemies who had too much HP for their own good. Combat felt kind of like a chore after a while, and this is a shame because I do think the skill trees could have made for some really interesting character setups if the combat felt better. Even DA2 with all its problems felt more gratifying when you were splattering dudes for ridiculous damage with a dual dagger rogue. Here it's just a lot more laborious and it doesn't feel like you're getting more powerful until you get a weapon that's of your level (level-locked weapons are such a boring idea).
The character unique skill trees all had some cool stuff in them, but I was so underwhelmed by the combat that it felt kind of wasted. There were imbalances here and there (Vivienne's specialty was overpowered), and I never found reason to deviate from my main party later in the game unless it was a part of a quest. The inventory is also kind of fucked but someone here already mentioned that.
I feel like the structure of putting together something like the Inquisition could have been so much more interesting. You have three advisors who oversee the military, your intelligence network, and diplomacy, but all that amounts to is Candy Crush-like countdowns to finish missions for paltry amounts of gold or Influence. It unlocks a few other quests but little that felt really meaningful. Again, a major problem here is that it never felt like you were really affecting anything in the world. You would get an alliance with major world players but that manifests through like 60 Influence points, not any story or conversation options. You accrue a larger army but that doesn't amount to anything. I mentioned this in a post about Mass Effect 2's Suicide Mission, but I would really like a game where you put together a squad or build and organization and your personnel decisions and what you build towards affect meaningful outcomes. Bioware hasn't managed to get there yet (ME3 only had a minimum readiness requirement) and SJW Inquisition doesn't come close either. It's frustrating because the ideas are there but maybe they can never come to fruition with the current formula. Maybe something with Mordor's Nemesis system where you can choose who to take out but with more substantial damage to the enemy's power structure. I don't know, I feel like some of these systems can really be put together to make something amazing but it's not there yet.
So I spent 60 hours on this in total and I don't necessarily regret them, but a lot of those hours were spent in that empty open environment loop which doesn't amount to much that is tangible. I don't really recommend this game, and I'll be fairly happy to move onto something else.
