First Contact Project: Mass Effect Andromeda

The unfairly maligned fourth installation in a much beloved series.

My love of the Bioware game is... not a small one. We shall not dwell on the number of hours I have played in the Dragon Age franchise, mainly because it's threatening to include the word "thousand" and that would be... well it would be something. But that and Mass Effect are my comfort games. They got me through furlough and lockdown with a modicum of sanity retained, and they just hold a very deep, dear place in my heart.

But somehow, I have never played Mass Effect: Andromeda. Well, I say somehow. Until approximately mid-March, the reason for that was clear - I had never had a machine capable of running it. And so, naturally, the first thing I did once I acquired one was to download it with a swiftness hitherto unwitnessed in the realms of man. But I was cautious. You see, I've heard things about Andromeda (hereafter ME:A because typing is effort). Not... good things. It is the awkward ginger stepchild of the franchise, at the bottom of every ranking, beloved of none, though I had never seen a clear reason why. It was just not as beloved, and so I went in concerned that it simply could not live up to the legacy of the previous games.

In my opinion, not only did it do so, but it bested them. It is, without a doubt, for me, the best Mass Effect game in existence, and there exists clear water in between it and the rest.

But I'm going to come back to that. I want instead to examine first why I think it is not beloved, why I think it is unfairly maligned, and what that says about the franchise and the fandom more broadly, and perhaps why coming to it at a number of years removed might have helped my appreciation of it.

Simply put, I think the problem is that it's not a game about Commander Shepard. Maybe that's too simplistic, but it makes sense. For the whole of the original trilogy, you play as this legendary, badass hero, as she* becomes even more legendary and badass, you see her through a galaxy-wide crisis, through death and beyond, as she holds in the balance the future of every analogue and digital life form in the Milky Way. She is the soul and centre of the trilogy, no matter how compelling are her companions, and so the game is her. Can Mass Effect be Mass Effect without Shepard? Maybe for a lot of the fandom the answer to that was a resounding "no". It doesn't matter that the ending(s) of the original trilogy leave us in a place where creating a genuine sequel story would be nigh on impossible, with some incredibly complicated and wide-reaching world-state variations to try to account for. The heart wants what the heart wants, and if that was more Shepard badassing about the galaxy saving worlds and cutting through red tape, then anything else won't do, no matter what logic tells you.

And I think this is a deeply unfair expectation for ME:A to come in to. It can be understandable and unfair at the same time. It is what it is.

They went in knowing they couldn't fit something in to follow on from that trilogy, so they didn't try. They decided to wipe the slate entirely fresh - literally move to a new galaxy - and leave their connection point to the existing story where things still weren't resolved. We still have connections, snippets of links to known places, people and things, but those connections are trailing into the past, and we enter a fresh gamestate, in a fresh setting, unfettered by the player's previous decisions. It's the best they could have realistically done with the corner they had painted themselves into, and I think it's a shame that player reception didn't accept that.

But it didn't, so here we are. It meant I went in with extremely low expectations, which were met, exceeded and then fully blown out of the water. Why? Because this was a game that, for me, totally got what Mass Effect could be good at, and leaned into it, while making the best use of the updated game mechanics and system design that wasn't around when the first game came into being. It adapted the heart of the feeling of the first game - the exploration, the relationships, the badassery, the building up of a legend of a person, and made it fresh. How could I not love that?

 That being said, the game it most reminds me of is Dragon Age: Inquistion. And I mean, it's Bioware, right? They're all paddling in the same pool. But it's a Mass Effect story in a map/quest/structure environment that feels so similar to what Inquisition does with its multi-area stuff, its camp exploration, and its supplementary off-screen missions that get you tangible rewards. And I love that. I think it's a game shape that really works, so why wouldn't they do it? They both have the same problem - there's a point when you're about half way through the game where you have a lot of open quests and no real drive to pick any single one over another - but on the whole, they both work really well as a vehicle for telling good stories. Not just a single story, though of course there's one that takes priority, but a bunch of interlocking stories, about different people, different cultures and different places, and put you in a position to steer those stories in the direction you want, and to fit an overarching theme on top of it, as well as giving a lot of space for additional personal storytelling.

There's so much space in the Andromeda galaxy in the game to imagine stories. There's so much potential. That's what the world after Mass Effect 3 no longer had, and that's what it needed. All of this untapped narrative potentiality for players to map their thoughts onto, and characters to fill it with and move around. Characters that felt deep and real.

I personally did not like Mass Effect 2 (because I did not want to be on team Bad Guy), but it is an incredibly character-focussed game. Your companions have depth, and have their own stories that you are a part of, but not the whole of. You help them, you may steer their decisions, but you are not their world, mostly. It's the standout part of ME2, for me. And Andromeda gets this, and gives it in spades. They still have the loyalty mission mechanic (good, yes, correct), and if anything have expanded it, so each companion quest is a big, multi-step affair. You spend real time with these people, learning who they are and what they care about, and it is wonderful.

And, of course, you can romance some of them. Unlike the recently-released Baldur's Gate 3 (and previous Bioware release Dragon Age 2), Mass Effect: Andromeda does not let you romance indiscriminately - all of your romanceable companions have their own sexuality and preferences, and not all of them will line up with who you are. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I do think it makes characters more diverse and well-rounded if they represent a variety of different sexualities - it forms a part of who they are, and if it is integrated into their story, all the better. But on the other hand... there's always such a small cast. You functionally limit people quite severely by doing this. If someone is playing say... a gay man, and you have only two male characters who are receptive to male advances (in this case, one pan, one gay)... well, that player has to hope he likes one of them. I got some veeeryyyy awkward dialogue when my female protagonist hit on the male engineer, let me tell you. It's a tricky balance to find, and for me, I think the Andromeda cast is just that little bit too small to pull it off well. You want to give players options. Full pansexual chaos gives you those options. Luckily, at least for me, there were characters I liked well enough and who were willing to date a woman, so it worked out. But that won't be true for everyone. 

The romance is also... a little on the weak side. There's just not a huge amount of content to it, outside of romance specific missions and a few snippets of dialogue here and there, which feels like something of a shame, given how characterful the rest of the story and missions are.

But it's a small price to pay. The story, for the most part, really does work, and there are some genuinely dramatic and moving moments throughout. The key antagonists of the story are worked in pretty early and pretty well, and the way they fit into the wider story of the world makes really good sense. There's also a strong thread of alliance-building throughout, which I really appreciated - there's a lot of options to be respectful and collegiate with the existing inhabitants of Andromeda, and to defer to them on matters of leadership and who gets to go where. Does it entirely erase the colonial vibes of the premise? Well... no. But neither does it go full bore space empire, which I quite appreciate. Baby steps, I guess.

It is something of a shift away from the previous Mass Effect games that your character has a lot more options to start both as a rule follower and as being diplomatic in the face of conflict. Even the upper left bluest of Shepards is something of a maverick (derogatory) in that regard, and I appreciate being given the option to at least try solving problems without shooting someone in the face. It's a shooter game, so it's going to come to that eventually, but it's nice to be able to say you did your best first, y'know?

I don't want to bog this review down too much with nitty gritty, but I do also think that this is the mechanically smoothest of the Mass Effect games, which again, I appreciate. I felt much more at home in skill selection and utilisation than I have in any of the others, even if the tutorial stuff at the start didn't entirely bring me up to speed on everything. It's slightly annoying that you can only use three abilities in any given fight, rather than the slightly bigger number I'd have expected, but once you get used to it - and with how well some of them combo - it works really well, and they do their best to make it easy to switch out between the abilities between fights, and create specific builds for specific purposes that you can port in. Unlike previous games, you have complete free licence to select abilities from any of the different skill trees, though you do benefit from concentration in allowing you to get to higher level options sooner, and with levelling up of certain skillsets. They're managed a good balance between simplicity, functionality and badassery, and once you get going, it feels really good.

Also you have a jet pack. The jetpack is great.

Is it a perfect game? Of course not. I'd have liked more character dialogue between each other, I think the pacing could have been better (though some of that was down to my own playstyle), and I think the difficulty scaling towards the end of the game isn't... great. The last couple of fights were epic in story scale, but surprisingly easy for my very high level party, in a way that made them less satisfying than they could have been. I ideally want to just scrape through the final boss fight, or maybe die once and then triumph on the second go. If I'm breezing straight through it... well, it's not my superlative skill at videogaming, let me tell you.

But honestly? I don't care. I had an absolutely great time with it, packed in 83 hours of play time for a relatively completionist run, fell in love with several characters, hated at least one location with the burning fire of my heart, jetpacked and biotic-zoomed my way across the maps with gleeful abandon and fully just felt like I was playing a Mass Effect game again. Also Jaal is an absolute sweetheart and Indira Varma voices two - two! - characters. What more could I want?

So did coming in later to this game help in my enjoyment of it? I expect it did. Tempers had long since cooled, and the grumbling was sufficiently distant that I had forgotten the substance of most of it, only the vibe, which was much easier dispelled by a fun playing experience. But truly, I cannot imagine not loving this game, even had I played it the year it came out. It does too many things I love, has too many characters in it who work well together, has such a smoother set of mechanics... I simply cannot see that the lack of a Shepard, the lack of further closure on that story, would manage to hold me back from falling for it. It's a good game that deserved better. 

*I played as FemShep throughout, and assigning her any pronouns but these sounds weird to me.

--

The Math

Highlights: genuinely excellent characters with great interpersonal dynamics, 

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Video Game Review: Mass Effect Legendary Edition

Sometimes you can go back home

In 2003, Canadian developer BioWare released Knights of the Old Republic—a real-time RPG based in the Star Wars universe. BioWare was a relatively young studio at the time, having only released a few licensed Dungeons & Dragons properties (Baldur's Gate I and II and Planescape: Torment). Knights of the Old Republic took the basic formula and applied it to a Star Wars setting, resulting in an instant classic that is widely considered to be one of the best licensed games ever made.

A sequel was guaranteed, but BioWare Project Director Casey Jordan and lead writer Drew Karpyshyn had bigger ambitions. Parent company Electronic Arts farmed the sequel out to Obsidian Entertainment. While much of the studio focused on the original action RPG Jade Empire, Jordan and Karpyshyn started work on an ambitious new project. That new project would build off their licensed games, but in an original science fiction setting.

Mass Effect released in 2007 as an Xbox 360 exclusive. It was an instant hit for Microsoft's console, selling 3 million units and an additional 1 million for the later PC release. The sequel, Mass Effect 2, was an even bigger hit. By 2012, the trilogy had surpassed 10 million units sold across all platforms.

Mass Effect introduced gamers to a galaxy where humans have recently joined more established species in a sort of galactic confederation, but where fast-multiplying humanity's role in the galaxy remains highly controversial. In the first installment, a series of mysterious attacks on human colonies leads one of its most accomplished soldiers, Commander Shepard, to uncover a vast conspiracy led by an ancient AI that threatens to destroy the galactic order.

The later games continue Shepard's quest to save the galaxy from the Reapers, a cybernetic species of sentient ships that reappear every 50,000 years to "harvest" all organic species that have discovered FTL travel. As the series progresses, Shepard and his crew discover more about the Reapers and their purpose, culminating in a denouement that polarized gamers upon release, but which —as I'll argue below— deserves re-evaluation.

The Mass Effect series introduced or refined a number of gameplay elements that are commonplace today. It may be hard to remember, but third-person shooters were not that common in 2007. Mass Effect took the over-the-shoulder shooter formula pioneered in games like Max Payne (2002) and Resident Evil 4 (2005), refined it from a gameplay perspective, and then added spells (i.e. biotic and tech powers) that, borrowing from Knights of the Old Republic, could be triggered in real time or via a pause menu. The effect was so visceral and elegant that nearly all Western RPGs deploy some variation on Mass Effect's gameplay mechanics.

Mass Effect's true genius, though, is its story. Avid readers will note that the central plot —plucky gang of heroes unlock wisdom of the ancients to defeat existential threat to civilization— is a fantasy cliche. On top of that, there are elements of nearly every successful science fiction media franchise blended into Mass Effect: Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, Dune, Alien and so forth. In this case, though, the medium makes a difference. After all, books, film and television are all passive media, where you are the observer to the events portrayed; in video games, by contrast, you are an active participant in the events portrayed—and your actions have the potential to shape how the story unfolds.

Mass Effect was not the first game to give players meaningful choices that could alter the shape of the narrative in significant ways—Knights of the Old Republic, for example, famously gave you the choice of becoming Master Revan or Darth Revan. But Mass Effect links your choices in earlier games to outcomes in the final chapter. It is, to my knowledge, the first series to do so, and the effect is as striking today as it was when the games first came out. It is epic in a way no game before —and few since— can credibly claim to be.

The games are also frequently moving and emotionally resonant. Character deaths, romantic relationships —even friendships— provoke deep feelings in ways I often experience with books and films but rarely, if ever, with games. And the choices you have to make are often painful, pitting what you know in your heart is right against what is most expedient in the fight against an existential threat.

Remastering a Legend

In recent years, game studios have looked to remakes and remasters of old titles to bolster sales in an era of spiraling costs and lengthening development cycles. These come in two basic flavors: (1) remakes, i.e. new builds of old titles that often make significant changes to gameplay; and (2) remasters, i.e. new releases of old titles with upgraded graphics and little else. Mass Effect Legendary Edition fits squarely between these poles.

Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2 are clearly remasters, with upgraded graphics and little else. That works just fine for Mass Effect 2, the most loved and best reviewed chapter in the trilogy. But leaving Mass Effect 1 as is feels like a missed opportunity. The game is still fun, but the gameplay feels clunky and antiquated in a way the later chapters do not. BioWare could have married its excellent story to the more developed gameplay mechanics of Mass Effect 2 and 3.

Mass Effect 3, on the other hand, does include some significant changes. There's no multiplayer component anymore, and the method of building war assets to fight the Reapers has been both simplified and streamlined. It is also easier to get the "good" endings, which if you'll recall is the singular reason Mass Effect 3 isn't as revered as the middle entry in the series.

The reason why the ending rankled so many fans is the same reason the endings to Battlestar Galactica, Lost or Game of Thrones rankled so many fans: you've invested a lot of time in something and then you get a conclusion that is rushed, unsatisfying, or just out of left field. And in this case, there's no save from a few hours prior that you can go back to—if you screwed up certain decisions in Mass Effect 2, then you're going to have a very hard time getting the ending you want in the original version of Mass Effect 3.

While that's still true now, the path to the good endings isn't as fraught as it once was—and you also have the benefit of decision-tree guides to help you set things up right for the final episode. For some, this will still be an intolerant rupture in the suspension of disbelief; for me, the decision-tree guides are a convenient tool for getting me where I want to go. And getting there completely recontextualized Mass Effect 3, a game I had decidedly mixed feelings about after my first playthrough way back when.

Like many, I have always thought of Mass Effect 2 as the best entry in the series—and it's still an excellent game. But on replay I'm struck by how much more I like Mass Effect 3. Building war assets is by far the most fun minigame in the trilogy, while most of the annoying tasks from the previous chapters have been removed.

What Mass Effect 3 does best, though, is capture the feeling of a galaxy at war—a war in whose outcome you have a major stake. Mass Effect 1 and 2 are variations on the D&D companion quest, which any RPG fan has played a multitude of times. Mass Effect 3 takes this format and repurposes it: now Shepard has to build a coalition to take on the Reapers, enter key battles in that war and, eventually, execute the final push. Decisions are meaningful and often fraught, and character deaths are frequent and moving, while the narrative as a whole is brisk and visceral. You feel heavily invested in outcomes that are beholden to actions you have taken at many points over the course of the trilogy.

Mass Effect 3 also benefits from the simple passage of time, in the sense that its story about rogue AI and the struggle to reconcile synthetic and organic life just feels more… well… topical. What passes for AI these days is not really: ChatGPT or Gemini can't think, after all; they just process data. But are we that far off from true artificial intelligence? That may not be fully clear yet, but we are definitely at the point where we need to start thinking hard about what happens when we cross that rubicon.

Mass Effect 3 provides a surprisingly sophisticated discussion on the topic. It doesn't spoon-feed you the answers, but gives you the tools for navigating your own thoughts and feelings through the decision tree. Without spoiling it, there is one decision deep into Mass Effect 3 that is particularly fraught—especially after certain assumptions seeded through the first two games turn out to be false. I made my choice and, in the process, began to think more deeply about my own views on sentience and the rights of sentients. I'm still processing those decisions in ways I did not the first time around (more than a decade ago).

At the end of the day, the Mass Effect trilogy is a rare masterpiece of triple-A gaming, one that absolutely deserved this loving remaster. It would have been better served by more significant changes to Mass Effect 1, but it still works well enough as is. Highly recommended for series newbies and old hands alike.

Highlights

• Mass Effect: Legendary Edition remasters the classic trilogy for nostalgics and new gamers alike
• Mass Effect 2 still plays like a classic, while Mass Effect 3 is vastly improved
• However, the decision to remaster, rather than remake, the original Mass Effect is a missed opportunity

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator, since 2012.

Microreview [video game]: Mass Effect: Andromeda by Bioware

A Distant Star

Regardless of how well or poorly you personally received the ending of the original Mass Effect trilogy, following those games with a non-reboot, non-sequel game in the same universe is going to be a tall order for anyone. Mass Effect: Andromeda (as reported by Kotaku) had a difficult development, and it shows. But the biggest factor for whether or not you'll get some enjoyment out of this game can be boiled down to a single question: what did you think of Dragon Age: Inquisition?

In the non-reboot, non-sequel Mass Effect: Andromeda, you're a pilgrim, a passenger onboard the human ark sent to colonize the distant Andromeda galaxy. The trip takes 600 years of cryo-sleep, and everything goes wrong when you finally wake up. A coral-like space growth called The Scourge inhibits space travel and wrecks ships. The Nexus, a space station sent ahead of the arks, is barely functional and none of the other species' arks have arrived. Worst of all, none of the "golden worlds" surveyed in advance of the voyage are suitable for colonization. Something horrible happened over the 600 year trip. 

The Mass Effect and Dragon Age series are linked by more than just having a common developer. They were largely developed in parallel, and borrowed gameplay mechanics from each other on numerous occasions. When Dragon Age 2 came out and it felt like Dragon Age shoehorned into Mass Effect, with a greater focus on a smaller scoped story and action over tactical combat, it was a disappointment to me but the problems I had with that game were mechanical. Enemies warped in from thin air (with no particular in-game reason), and it overly reused game environments. 

Mass Effect: Andromeda feels like Mass Effect shoehorned into Dragon Age: Inquisition. This time around, I'm not that mad about it. I loved Dragon Age: Inquisition despite the game having too many collect-a-thon quests, and too many fetch quests that added nothing to the game. This one suffers from the same problems, but the gameplay loop itself is enjoyable. The combat in the Mass Effect series has continued to build upon itself and become more fluid over the stop-and-pop Gears of War-esque combat of the original Mass Effect. Planetary exploration is done with the Nomad, a six-wheeled vehicle that's far more fun to drive than the Mako. Here's a piece of advice that carries over from Dragon Age: Inquisition: if something isn't a core quest, or a companion quest, and it doesn't interest you from the start, don't bother doing it. There are tons of quests that are meaningless. Do what seems like fun, unless you're a completionist and a masochist.

What hurts Andromeda is that it doesn't take the conceit of being a different galaxy 600 years into the future far enough. It adds a couple of new Andromedan species of sentient aliens, but their designs aren't exactly inspired, and it brings with it the core species from the original series, and none of the cool edge species. Of course, there are going to be Salarians, Turians, and Asari, but we've gone to a different galaxy. There should be more than two sentient species here when the Milky Way had handfuls of aliens. It even leans too hard on an ancient, technologically advanced species that influences the present. 

Playing this game months after release has turned out to be the best way to experience it. Early reviews noted a plague of technical issues within the game. I saw none of that. The chief complaint was that faces were poorly or weirdly animated. I never noticed anything particularly out of place. 

Over the course of 53 hours, I enjoyed my time with Mass Effect: Andromeda. While I'm not inclined to buy DLC, I would look forward to a second game in this series. Mass Effect: Andromeda has more in common with the first game of the original trilogy than the other two, and that was my personal favorite of the three. It's a more optimistic game, even if it suffers from borrowing too heavily from the original trilogy and Dragon Age: Inquisition. It's hard for me to say whether or not a newcomer to this series of games would enjoy Andromeda more without playing the original trilogy, but it's at least a competent game.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 Eschews grimdark and dread for optimism and a brighter future

Penalties: -1 Feels too much like a Mass Effect side story

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 (still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore)

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POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Bioware. Mass Effect: Andromeda [EA, 2017] 

Revisiting Dragon Age

A Look Back Before Dragon Age: Inquisition

It’s been three and a half years since Bioware released the last major entry in the Dragon Age series. In video game sequel time, that’s about a million years ago. An entire new generation of consoles has been released since Dragon Age 2. Three Assassin’s Creeds and four Calls of Duty were released since Dragon Age 2. Dragon Age: Inquisition is coming next week. I think it’s time for a refresher on Dragon Age, and whether or not we should be excited for Inquisition.

Dragon Age: Origins was the first major game in the series. After Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect, Origins felt like a return to form for Bioware fans like me, who remember Baldur’s Gate and their older Infinity engine games fondly. Where Infinity engine games were Dungeons & Dragons based, Dragon Age was an entirely original fantasy setting and system. What Bioware brought back with Origins was diverse backgrounds and character selections: different races, classes, entirely different prologue chapters based on those combinations. On PC, it also brought back a more tactical combat system. You could take the camera into an overhead perspective and position your characters to block melee enemies or flank them. It wasn’t strictly turn-based, but almost every ability had a cooldown time. The story was a typical fantasy epic of good versus evil but it also included some civil intrigue. A lot of attention to world-building was given in Origins, and there was a massive amount of text codex entries to flesh out the land of Thedas.

On a whole, I was a huge fan of Dragon Age: Origins. In fact, it was the first proper Bioware RPG I ever finished besides Mass Effect. Beating Dragon Age: Origins felt like a spiritual victory to me. I had played bits and pieces of all of the previous Bioware games, but Dragon Age: Origins pulled me in with a new fantasy world and traditional RPG combat. In the old Infinity engine titles, I would get sidetracked or I’d hit a difficulty wall at about the 10 hour mark, and I’d play something else. Dragon Age: Origins held my attention for the whole 40+ hours. “I can finish a proper Bioware RPG,” I thought to myself. I can do what millions of others have already figured out, but that’s beside the point. I’ve really enjoyed playing those RPGs in the past, and this was the first one I saw through to completion. It felt like a milestone for me and Bioware.

By this time, Bioware was deep into development on Dragon Age 2. Dragon Age 2? Yes, a proper numbered sequel to a game with a relatively dumb title. I mean, Dragon Age isn’t exactly descriptive, and “Origins” is usually tacked on to the prequel, not the first entry. But regardless, we were going to get Dragon Age 2, and it’s going to be a smaller, more focused game than the last! Wait, what? Instead of going for bigger and more, as most sequels, numbered sequels, do, Dragon Age 2 was promising a tighter focus and more compact experience focused on a single character and a single city over the span of several years.

I’m going to be honest here: I think Dragon Age 2 is an awful game. Rather than a diverse selection of backgrounds, you could play a human male or female, warrior, rogue, or mage. Dragon Age 2’s Hawke was a fantasy equivalent of Mass Effect’s Shepard. Like Shepard, Hawke is fully voiced, which is an improvement over Origins’ near silent protagonists. The combat in Dragon Age 2 was also punched up a bit to be more action-y and look less like characters waiting for their turn to swing at you. Those are the almost good things about the game.

The bad parts about it can be measured by what it doesn’t have compared to Dragon Age: Origins. The top-down tactical perspective is gone. That’s okay, because tactical battles are also gone. Enemies frequently warp into combat from thin air, making any kind of positioning irrelevant. Battles became slogs that made me only wish they would end sooner. These battles don’t take place in diverse locations anymore either. Nevermind the limited scope of the game, where you spend most of your time in a single city that doesn’t significantly change over the years, but areas of the game are frequently reused and passed off as entirely different locations. You’ll get very familiar with a particular cave structure. Anytime you go to a cave, it’s the same map, but with different doors blocked off. You can see the rest of the map in the minimap, but you can’t get there. You can see where the doors should be, but there’s just a giant stone block. The companion characters ranged from uninteresting to outright unlikeable. The story is on a clear rail, with no meaningful choices to be made. Dragon Age 2 is the definition of a sequel that was rushed out of the door to capitalize on the successes of Dragon Age: Origins and the popularity of Mass Effect.

Where does this leave Dragon Age: Inquisition? I won’t speculate on the content or how Inquistion looks. However, we can look at the previous games. Origins was a fantastic roleplaying game. Dragon Age 2 was a mess that didn't come close to living up to expectations. Since Dragon Age 2, Bioware has released the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Mass Effect 3. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that both of those have been divisive games, and neither of them have been unqualified masterpieces. There’s still a massive amount of Dragon Age materials that aren’t Origins or Dragon Age 2, including the Awakenings expansion for Origins, mountains of DLC for both games, mobile games, comic books, a web video series (featuring Felicia Day), and five novels, among other Dragon Age media. If you want to immerse yourself in the Dragon Age world, there are plenty of ways to do it. It's a deep, rich world with a lot of interesting characters and stories, but the mainstream games are one for two in terms of being worth playing. In the meantime, I would hold off on making any pre-release purchases on Inquisition until you can play it for yourself.

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POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014