Dragon Age is Forever
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #181. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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What’s left when we’ve moved on.
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There’s a room in Dragon Age: Inquisition that most players never see. Locked behind an ornate door in the Oasis is Solasan, an ancient elven temple. To open its doors you need shards, a collectible resource gotten from Tevinter devices called Oculara. Its final room requires you to miss no more than 10 shards. This means that you’ll have to do most of the Oculara puzzles, which reveal their treasure in the corners of each and every map, where you have to not just notice them but hike over to get them. Just 6% of players, on the Steam version anyway, have done so.
The shards are a symptom of the content explosion Dragon Age: Inquisition represents. Dragon Age: Origins had CRPG elements that sometimes played like the Baldur’s Gate franchise. Dragon Age II leaned more into real-time. Now in Inquisition, action-combat bedazzled with cooldowns awaited you when you crested a snowy hill and fought your first wraith. You would fight about 10,000 more wraiths over the course of the game, and close nearly a hundred rifts (95, googling tells me). Most of these fights are the same, fighting green-hued and spectral enemies, and end with your Inquisitor holding their palm up to the sky, a bit awkwardly, forcing the world back into shape.
At this point in my life, I have a pretty good memory, and I can’t stand repetition. I have an internal rule that I’ll wait for a decade before I can replay a game. That means this month, November 2024, Dragon Age: Inquisition comes back into eligibility. Except, Inquisition is an exception; it’s successfully made me feel that no matter how often I return, it has something new for me.
The issue with Inquisition as many people saw it at release wasn’t just repetition, but the amount of its content that was basically empty calories. The biggest nitpick was its first area, the Hinterlands. With the release of Veilguard, which starts much faster, this has come up again: there are enough fetch quests in the Hinterlands to level you up halfway to the end of the game without doing anything else, to the point where people got stuck there. The feeling is Dragon Age is trying to overwhelm you with numbers while it makes you do fantasy chores.
I disagree with the second point; even if the actions you undertake in the Hinterlands are cattle rescues and wolf pelt gathering, your reward is the writing – both the party banter you get and the quest itself – rather than the action of getting whatever you’re supposed to get. But I can’t argue with the first one. Throughout the game, the number of numbers can be crushing. Over 100 war table operations, which change depending on your character background. Nine companions, making three changeable sets or 84 combinations, and each character has banter with the others. I could run through Thedas a hundred times and still see new banter combinations. This sounds great, but then you get back to what you’re spending lots of your time doing: searching for shards, or closing your 60th rift. To enjoy that, you need to see spending time in the world as its own reward, and not everyone agrees that it is.
Another example of Inquisition’s alleged time-wasting is the Solas romance. Not only did I romance Solas the first time I played the game, he was my first videogame romance all together. Replaying the game last year, when I met him on the snowy ridge in the Frostback Mountains, I couldn’t remember what made him so attractive in the first place. Maybe that’s the distance of a decade talking. But the fact is that romanceable Solas is a phenomenon; I’ve met many people who say they always romance him, despite the difficulty.
Because it’s hard to romance Solas. First, you have to be a female elf, meaning that you’ll be part of the Dalish Lavellans (a group of nomadic elves) whom Solas has a problem with. If you have Elven facial tattoos (vallasin), he’ll tell you that they’re slave markings to the old gods, who he, uh, doesn’t have the best relationship with. In general, if you agree with him, he’s kind; if you disagree, he’s arrogant and rude. When you manage to win his heart, it doesn’t stay that way: no matter what, Solas will break up with you before the end of the game. And in a content-first outlook, nothing wastes your time more than a doomed romance.
Everything that extends the runtime of the game, the shards, the dragons and the lore-laced fetch quests hook into each other like a piton into the crack in a mountain. It’s almost as if the game doesn’t want itself to end. And the Solas romance turns that up to 100; as soon as you get its final scene, the game is already wrapping up and you’ve seen the best of it. Inquisition’s weakest part by far is the leadup to the final fight, a series of hallways you’re probably over-leveled for if you did anything else, filled with monsters ridiculously weaker than you. And you’ve just broken up with your digital boyfriend, so it’s even worse.
As a serial Solas romancer, the second time through, with insight, means a mix of dread and superiority towards the game’s plot. You can put off the turn for as long as you want, as long as you never meaningfully continue the plot. (It also means the other characters’ romances will remain forever fresh, something to come back to, a fact I confront each time I make a female elf in the character creation screen.) Whenever I reach the middle of the game, I find myself wanting it to pause between his penultimate and last romance scenes, when his approval is the highest. He stands in the foyer of Skyhold and calls you vhenan, “my heart”. If one of the biggest criticisms of Inquisition is that it overstays its welcome, then one of its best qualities is that it lets you live inside the dream for as long as you want.
To be more than fair to Inquisition, it doesn’t force you to do even half of what it offers. You can finish the game without even going to four or five of the areas. Last year, when I replayed it, I was stunned that what I remembered as an endless game could be finished in under 30 hours. By standards now, that’s almost short. You don’t have to do almost any side quests if you don’t want to. But then again, those “chores” are the road to some of the best character writing in videogames, even if they’re menial.
I get why frameworks exist to apply value to art, even if it makes me throw up in my mouth a little. Will this be worth the time I spend learning about it and trying to get into it? Can I trust that my time with this will have been worthwhile? These are useless questions, but I understand why they’re asked. Of course I hate it when my time is wasted. I’d rather finish something than have an infinite grindable quest. At the same time, is that really true? I used to leave a lot of my favorite games barely unfinished, 99% done but not wanting to put the nail in the coffin. With Inquisition, it took me nine years to load up an old save, walk through some hallways, and see the end, and I didn’t even do the DLC (of maybe my favorite game) until this spring! It’s the sign of a special piece of art that I want to linger in my first experience of it.
Playing Inquisition for me is like having breakfast with someone I see every day. We might eat the same thing and tell the same stories, but talking about nothing is just an excuse for the interaction to happen at all. See how the light plays on their smile lines; how the same jam you eat with your yogurt still tastes good. I’m still capable of finding new aspects of something despite how often I’ve seen it before.
Sure, Dragon Age can waste your time, like the drive to a museum can waste your time, like a painting, or a play, or any art that needs interpretation or patience can waste it. What’s waste is only determined by what’s valued.
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Emily Price is a freelance writer and PhD candidate in literature based in Brooklyn, NY.
