Format: Xbox One
Genre: RPG
Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts

There are two ways to convey a video game world; the "reaching for photorealism" route, and the "minimalistic impliciteness" path. The former is mostly just a function of technological progress, and Dragon Age: Inquisition, with the increased polygon counts and texture resolutions available to modern consoles, illustrates the principle well; foliage-filled forests, barren deserts, and pestilence-filled swamps are brought to life like no other game world before.

There must be some agency, or set of agencies, in the world that produce orchestral music so uninventive and cliche that it could very well be procedurally generated. A BioWare agent was seen walking out of one of these shops, "Hollywood Trailer Music #17" CD under his arm-- viola, the Dragon Age: Inquisition sound track! Voice acting is a strong suit, but given the inanity of the story, there just isn't much point to having voice acting in the first place.

Dragon Age: Inquisition takes the tight level design of the first game and the not-so-tight level design of the second title, throws them both down the garbage disposal, and replaces them with theme park MMO-style levels, complete with deluges of cookie-cutter FedEx quests. The occasional story quests are more interesting, but are far too sparse. The first game's tactical view is back-- in theory-- but it's clearly not implemented in the same way, and doesn't really work correctly.

This title is trying to be everything for everyone, but winds up doing nothing well; it has a mediocre crafting system, mediocre World of Warcraft-style maps, mediocre story missions, and features enough fantasy crap filler voice acting and chanting choruses of Hollywood orchestral work to last a lifetime. It's stuffy, it's formulaic, and almost the entire thing seems like it was designed with artificial filler content, so the developers could brag about how long the game takes to beat. The first Dragon Age title was a wonderful riff on the Baldur's Gate formula-- but given the two sequels, apparently BioWare is a "blind squirrel" situation.