If you love fetch quests, I suggest you stop reading this review right now and just grab Dragon Age: Inquisition. The game is chock-full of them. It's actually really difficult for me to say anything insightful about the quest design, simply because of how bare-bones most of the quests are. For example, let's consider the quests about establishing the Inquisition's presence in wilderness areas, which open up resting camps. All of them involve reaching a certain location and clicking on a prompt. Some of them involve small navigational puzzles that requires the player to figure out how to reach a location. For the most part, though, only the player's ability to follow a quest marker is challenged.
Most of the activities in the game follow the same pattern. Clear a number of enemy camps. Free a number of prisoners. Close a number of Fade rifts. Sometimes the game is merciful and only assigns one objective, though rarely an engaging one. It's only on occasion that I was reminded that BioWare actually knows how to design engaging adventures. At times I was asked to make decisions that left me very conflicted, whether to let the Chantry or the elves learn about the true nature of a controversial event in their past, for example. Episodes like that were a breath of fresh air, but all too rare.
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Re-reading this review, I can't help but wonder if I've been too harsh. Dragon Age: Inquisition is a surprisingly relaxing pastime, and there's a lot of it. Played one or two hours a day, it can last for a very, very long time. In many ways, it reminded me of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, another game that left me very little, but was very easy to play for long stretches of time.
But that's not what I think games should strive for, and that's not what BioWare's games strove for in the past. While the developers often fell short of their reputation as master storytellers, they always tried to craft interesting universes and fill them with stories that would resonate with people. I genuinely hope they weren't trying this time, because Inquisition would be a spectacular failure.
