December 14, 2014: In The Age Of Dragons, Dragons Are Entirely Optional

But awesome. For serious.

I've been playing Dragon Age: Inquisition a lot lately (where "a lot" means "more than 50 hours in the last two weeks"), and I can sum up my experience with the game thusly: go buy it.

Okay, I'll go into a bit more detail. Inquistion takes a lot of what was good about the last two games -- interesting characters, great dialog, complex narrative, fun combat, lots of character customization -- and adds a big dose of exploration to the mix. That's really Inquisition's greatest contribution to the series: you're free to explore a gigantic world at your leisure, engaging in the parts that you enjoy as you prefer.

The games approach to dragon fights is representative of this, actually. 50 hours in, I haven't run into any dragon fights that are mandatory. If you want to fight a dragon, you have to seek that dragon out and fight it on its home territory. It's a high risk, high reward scenario, and it's entirely optional. There are ten of these dragons that you can hunt and slay, and let me just tell you: you want to. The fights are exciting, dynamic, challenging, and rewarding.

And that's what Inquisition is all about: serving you the trademark BioWare story and characters, but also giving you a huge amount of optional content that you can engage in if you want, and most of it is very, very good.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go attend a royal ball in Orlais. I'll be back in 70 hours or so.

-- Brian Engard