Chunks of earth float hundreds of feet into the air, the remnants of a sacred temple and the battleground for the final fight between an evil sorcerer and the only person capable of stopping him: me, the player. Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third title in the series, concludes on a charged confrontation between Corypheus, an ancient mage who seeks to become a god, and the Inquisitor, the player character who helps build and lead an organization of (mostly) religious zealots to stop him. Miles of sky churn with brooding energy as Corypheus tries to tear the veil between the Fade, a spirit realm, and the mortal world. But in the end, he is no match for the might of a continent rallied under a single banner, the banner of the Inquisition. With a final effort, the player banishes the would-be god into the Fade, an ironic twist of fate. The sky crackles and shifts as the heavens slide back into their rightful place.
After the dust settles, and everyone rallies–friends relieved to find each other intact, and relieved to find the rift in the Fade sealed shut–they all make their way back to their headquarters, Skyhold, for a much needed rest.
When I reached the end of DAI and saw my character mounting the steps of Skyhold, cheered on by a crowd of passionate adherents to our cause, it felt momentous. Naturally, I expected the Inquisitor to turn, face the crowd, and deliver a well-deserved speech–here, at the hard-won fulfillment of the organization’s purpose.
Instead, in the scene the Inquisitor just walks straight into Skyhold, where they enjoy a small banquet with their close followers. It’s a slightly deflating moment, one that seems focused on reaching the narrative finish-line. The entire game, the player has all the time they could possibly want, even as a sinister evil attempts to tear the fabric of reality apart. Now, at the end of everything, a victory speech is snuffed. While nitpicking such a minor moment at the game’s conclusion may sound petty, I think it is a moment worth acknowledging because of how it reflects a general trend in the game as a whole.
The World at Large
I have been wanting to write about Inquisition, and about the Dragon Age series generally, since before I even began the third installment in the trilogy. But now, with the final game still fresh in my mind, I feel compelled to linger on an aspect of its narrative (and gameplay, for that matter) that nags at me perhaps more than it should: Dragon Age: Inquisition does not care about time.
Below are two maps of the game-world in DAI, the lands of Ferelden and Orlais, which are southern portions of the continent of Thedas. Also, for reference, I am linking a helpful blog post that estimates how much time it would take to travel to various places on the map, using the headquarters of Skyhold as point-of-origin.
Images courtesy of the Dragon Age Wiki
For argument’s sake, the post “Inquisition Travel Times” claims it would take about ten days, traveling 220 miles on horseback, to reach Redcliffe in Ferelden from Skyhold. Redcliffe and the surrounding Hinterlands are the places where new players spend a lot of their time in the game world and the setting for events early in the narrative. If other players are anything like me, they will go back and forth from Redcliffe and Skyhold throughout the course of the game, over and over and over again. That is multiple twenty day journeys there and back, not including time spent at the locations. Yet the game never makes me feel the actual time and energy spent on these journeys. The sense of scale is lost in a few button-clicks and the knowledge that when I get back to Skyhold, nothing will have changed.
This general apathy towards scale applies to everything, not just travel. Sure, the game does not care about how long it would take to travel from the shores of Lake Calenhad in Redcliffe to the far wasteland of the Western Approach. It also does not care how long it might take to establish not one but multiple forts across a continent and coordinate troops and supplies between all of them, a central mechanic while exploring. Nor does it care that the Inquisitor may decide to go kill ten dragons–ten WHOLE dragons–across Thedas while Corypheus plots and maneuvers his demonic forces.
Players are expected, I think, to overlook the small issues of inconsistency between player actions and narrative pace. To genuinely honor the urgency of the Inquisition’s plight would mean to set the player on a very narrow path without much room for adventure or dungeon-delving or dragon-slaying. I absolutely recognize this gameplay need. But part of me wishes that the gameplay had been designed a bit more appropriately for the narrative. Or maybe the gameplay would be better served with a different narrative. Conversations about ludonarrative dissonance are a bit old-hat, but for a series as story-centric as Dragon Age I would expect Inquisition to have less distracting inconsistencies than it does.
I’m not a game designer or professional writer (I’m barely an amateur blogger), so I don’t presume to know anything about what makes a good narrative decision. Still, I can’t help but feel pulled from Inquisition’s world every time I accomplish some feat of record-breaking cross-country travel, or when I kill an afternoon picking flowers and flirting with local Tevinter spice-rack Dorian while an ancient evil plots its next dastardly plan, only to show up at the plot days later without any complications. There is an unshakeable wrongness in the way that DAI disregards the scale of its world and its conflict that I feel compelled to dissect, in part because I think the game doesn’t understand how important time really is as a narrative force, but also because I think both prior games in the Dragon Age series, DA: Origins and DAII, don’t suffer the same shortcomings. In fact, I think both DAO and DAII are games where gameplay and narrative support, rather than disturb, each other because of how they convey time to the player.
Let’s Get Academic (uh oh!)
A near-essential quality of stories is that they take place over time. The timeframe between stories may differ, as may time’s place in the story. But the core narrative building block upon which so many stories rest–something happens–relies on a before and an after, and the fact that time passes between them. Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian literary scholar, is well known for his contribution of the term “chronotope” to literary study. In his essay “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” he writes: “We will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (84). Readers aware of Einstein’s conception of “space-time” will see similarities to Bakhtin’s chronotope, which is exactly the point. In Bakhtin’s writing, we see the chronotope taken from science and applied to literary study. Why? Because “it expresses the inseparability of space and time” which Bakhtin believes is intrinsic to literature. Novels, for example, are generally focused on characters who change over time. The hand of time is seen in this change. Time “takes on flesh,” as in characters who change over the course of a story (85). What the chronotope helps us see is that literature (or certain genres of literature such as novels) is tethered to and driven by our conception of time. Literature is “inherently chronotopic,” as it literally gives form—the story—to time.
Many popular stories feature characters and conflict of some form or another. A protagonist, with both strengths and flaws, sets out to accomplish some goal and finds adversity. In the struggle for success, the protagonist may learn and grow–or perhaps fumble and fail. Whether or not the goal is accomplished, readers follow the protagonist as they change under the pressure of adversity. From 19th century British novels, to high fantasy, to Greek tragedy and Japanese noh plays, character struggle and change is central to a plethora of human stories. And it is time that provides the context and arc of change.
To use a by-now rote example of the fantasy genre, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is notable for the sense of scale, both of time and distance, that it conveys to readers. Consider how the Fellowship embarks on a long journey to destroy the One Ring. In their quest, the members of the Fellowship face struggles and change; such change is also mirrored in the journey itself, as the road shifts from pleasant trails to deep forests and even battlefields as they struggle to their goal. In the beginning, the hobbits leave as happy and innocent as their lives in the Shire. When the hobbits return, weary and marked by conflict, it is to a Shire similarly scarred by the war. All three–the hobbits, the road they travel, and the home they depart–are chronotopes, in that they are the substance of time’s changes.
Perhaps Tolkien could have written a version of The Lord of the Rings whereby the hobbits return to the Shire exactly as they left it, to rest in perfect domesticity. But such a conclusion would run counter to something that I think Tolkien understood about human experience: there is no going back to the way things were. “You can’t go home again,” as the adage goes. History marches on, whether you are present for it or not. As much as we humans may resist it, time and the changes it brings are inevitable and inescapable. Our every waking moment is filtered through time’s eye, and so our stories are as well, which is what Bakhtin’s chronotope helps emphasize.
What does any of this talk of time have to do with the Dragon Age series? Arguably, a whole lot, and what a chronotopic analysis of Dragon Age can tell us about its narratives has as much significance for Dragon Age as it does for video game narratives as a whole. If we pay attention to the different ways that the three installments of DA portray the passage of time, then Inquisition fails to create a believable story specifically because it does not properly consider time either narratively or mechanically. This failure, however, is not exclusive to Inquisition and is symptomatic of gameplay design trends in the videogame industry–particularly “triple A” games–that prioritize player agency and control over narrative coherence.
The Series' Origins (hah)
Let us begin with a look at the first installment in the series, Dragon Age: Origins. The game is rooted more strongly in “grim” fantasy than later entries, setting a tone that would be developed and revised with each sequel, and also focused on gameplay elements that would see similar development and revision (Origins hews closely to its CRPG influences like Baldur’s Gate, whereas both DA2 and DA:I lean into a focus on action). Additionally, I think that Origins is a more narratively-focused game than Inquisition, which is demonstrated in the game’s awareness and representation of time.
Just like in LotR, much of the story of Origins takes place on roads. In fact, the game has a whole map of roads criss-crossing the land of Ferelden where it takes place, and that map is one of my favorite parts of the entire game.
Also courtesy of Dragon Age Wiki
Wherever the player character may begin their journey with one of the game’s six origin stories, they inevitably wind up in the very southern edge of the map, in the Korcari Wilds. Here the player first witnesses the Darkspawn horde, a malicious and demonic force bent on destroying civilization, and understands the threat that both Ferelden and Thedas as a whole face. Then they are inducted into the Grey Wardens, a storied organization of warriors and mages established to defend against the Darkspawn centuries ago, and prepared for what is meant to be a swift end to the Blight before it can begin.
However, the Ferelden king and his forces are swiftly destroyed, betrayed by his powerful ally who conveniently withdraws his forces to take the throne for himself. Now the player must bandy together with the only other remaining Grey Warden in Ferelden and set out on a desperate mission to unite the lands against the Darkspawn or watch everyone be annihilated. From the moment you embark on your journey, rag-tag companions in tow, you are told time is a limited resource. The Darkspawn will continue marching north, they will kill and pillage, and victory is not guaranteed. Your greatest assets when you start the game are your Grey Warden status, a friend or two, some moth-eaten treaties guaranteeing support from powerful rulers, and–if you make the right choices–one very good boy.
With narrative tension biting at your heels, DAO isn’t content to just let you wander around Ferelden shaking hands and making names. Dread follows the player as they quest to gather support because the Blight is spreading from the south, narratively and mechanically. As the Blight moves north, it is mirrored on the map of Ferelden that players use to navigate the world like a dark infection. With each major event that passes in the story (such as departing from Lothering, or gaining support from Orzammar), that darkness on the map grows, swallowing more of Ferelden and, as a result, cutting off the player’s access to previously traveled areas. Once the party leaves Lothering, an introductory hub early in the game, the scrappy town is wiped off the earth by the Blight. It is gone. If you left a quest unfinished, a box of gold unlooted, or an important character ignored, that’s it. Everything is gone. The Blight has taken it. It is going to take more.
Even as players travel the yet unconquered regions of Ferelden, they may still confront advance forces of Darkspawn. The Darkspawn are a screaming, ceaselessly multiplying horde, and they know nothing of narrative convenience. These random encounters mid-travel along the roads help reinforce the main threat, even if the player happens to be fulfilling a sidequest at the time with no relation to the main story. Every second spent in this world is another second that the Blight advances, terrible and gnawing. The archdemon of the horde does not care if “Stop the Blight” is the player’s active quest or not.
This existential pressure on the player continues up until the very end of the game. When all the allied forces finally gather in Denerim, the game map shows a Ferelden covered in darkness, swallowed by the Blight. Who knows how many have lost their lives already? Who knows how many communities are forever wiped from the face of Thedas? The player and their allies are a small speck of desperate hope amidst apocalypse. From the first battle in the Korcari Wilds to the very bloody end atop Castle Denerim, the Grey Wardens struggle by the grit of their teeth. This struggle, against an ever-encroaching force, is central to the narrative and is backed by game design elements like the travel map and random encounters. Origins knows the story it is telling, one where time is always passing and time is of the essence. If unchecked, the Blight will spread and take all it can.
Dragon Age II is Good, Actually
Succeeding Origins is the rather blandly-named Dragon Age II. While the sequel received its fair share of criticism at release, it has since earned its place in the series among critics for various reasons. Katherine Cross explores DAII’s complicated reception in her opinion piece on Gamasutra titled Why did Dragon Age II leave some fans so cold?. The game’s protagonist, Hawke, is a normal refugee of the Blight, and their entire arc is shaped by that experience and identity. As Hakwe, the player is humbled, and limited in ways that the Grey Warden of DAO and Inquisitor of DAI are not. Feeling more at the mercy of the narrative rather than in control of it is a stark change, but key to the story. Cross writes:
Bioware wanted to tell the story of someone who was, at times, just as much buffeted by change as the catalyst of it. That Hawke never quite seizes the reins of history, save for fleeting, almost accidental moments, has a kind of realism to it and makes the struggle of her and her companions all the more compelling to me.
Such a relatable protagonist is essential to the game’s story and scope, and makes it unique among the Dragon Age games to date.
Another unique aspect of the game is its narrative structure, which is divided into three acts that take place over a decade. In Origins, the player does not need to be told that time is passing; they can see and feel the effects of the Blight’s approach. In DAII, entire years pass between certain key moments in the hero Hawke’s journey, and these shifts in time bring new faces, opportunities, and explorable areas for the player to encounter. Of all three entries in the series, it is the second that most accounts for and embraces time.
The Dragon Age series, like many Bioware titles, are focused on player choice. But DAII is notable for how it conveys conflicts and consequences over several years of the player character’s life. The game is about Hawke’s rise from zero to hero, a refugee from the Blight who arrives in Kirkwall with barely a goldpiece to their name and then rises to become Champion of the city. This heroic but slow rise to fame acknowledges that such an accomplishment does not happen in a day. I have already discussed how Origins helps the player feel time’s strain, but there is little direct communication of how many months pass from the game’s beginning to completion. In the official timeline, the Fifth Blight lasts about a year, but the player can be forgiven for thinking it only takes a few months.
DAII, conversely, is explicit about its timeline, which I think helps ground the player further in the story as it is told. Couple this explicitness with the shifts that occur between time-jumps—such as Hawke’s leaving his uncle’s house in Lowtown for a lavish town home as he secures his family’s reputation, or the gradual Qunari occupation of Kirkwall—and DAII’s narrative strength relative to the other two games is clear. That strength is in large part due to how the passage of time manifests in the world.
Dragon Age: Fast Travel
Now we come to the third game, Dragon Age: Inquisition. There are significant changes in Inquisition from the previous two games, both from a gameplay and a narrative perspective. For the most part, these changes serve to make a fun and interesting experience. Trading the gradual rise to renown of the first two, Inquisition puts the player character in a significant position of power within the first few hours of the game. The protagonist’s accidental acquisition of control over the Fade (that dream-like spirit realm) is a power that few or none others possess, making Inquisition a chosen-one narrative by happenstance. Like Origins, DAI presents a story of many people from many walks of life stepping up and rallying entire institutions to their cause. It is a continent-spanning story of capital “p” Powers duking it out not just for the world but also seemingly for the fabric of its cosmology, with gods and stranger powers having a stake in the fight. Inquisition is the Dragon Age attempt at “go big or go home.” And it does go big.
The problem with DAI, in both gameplay and narrative, is that the game does not understand the size of itself. Origins takes place in Ferelden, a collection of cities, villages, and vast wilds that, while expansive, provide a good setting for what is meant to be a lengthy struggle against a Darkspawn invasion. The very simple act of traveling and camping from place to place via the game map reinforces the long journey the characters have embarked on. DAII takes place largely in a single city and its surrounding area over ten years, as various slow-burn conflicts between local groups come to a boil: its tight narrative is owed to its tight scope. But Inquisition begins with building a continent-spanning institution to stop a politically-messy rebellion, and then fighting a virtual god and his legion of cultists and demons across multiple fronts. All this is quite a herculean effort, even for a protagonist with glowy hands and a strong sense of duty. Such a story should, at first glance, necessitate the kind of attention to scale not just of space but also of time that prior games demonstrate.
Unfortunately, Inquisition’s greatest narrative stumbling block is its focus on moment-to-moment gameplay and an always-open world that erodes any sense of scale, both of the world itself and of the conflict taking place. Charlie Stewart from Gamerant, in their article Dragon Age 4 Should Not Be an Open-World Game, uses DAI’s fumbling in the series’ transition to the industry standard of an open world to argue why its already announced sequel should return to past games’ more modest scopes. Among their reasons is that “the plot… gave the protagonist a clear central motivation from the get-go: close the rifts and defeat Corypheus.” Contrast this with other open-world games such as Skyrim, in which “the main quest didn’t present itself until later in the game.” The optional nature of the main quest in Bethesda games is a great contrast to the urgency of the Inquisitor’s quest in DAI, an urgency such that doing anything else feels like a “rejection,” as Stewart writes.
Mechanically, the “war table” is one of the few measures of scale in the game, as it lets players engage with the “grand strategy” aspect of the Inquisition, issuing orders to the organization’s faceless soldiers and agents to accomplish tasks and gain “power.” The war table operations pass in real-world time, likely as a way to simulate the amount of time it takes for the events to play out in-fiction. If the player sends soldiers to safeguard travelers in the Frostback Mountains, it may take four hours of real-world time. But if the player wants to pull connections to have a Tevinter scholar find the true name of Corypheus, that may take twenty.
Courtesy of Dragon Age Wiki
Though the war table serves as a way of aiding and tracking the Inquisition’s progress as a major power, the actual narrative pay-offs for this mechanic are scarce. Certain character meetings, different regions, and key missions are unlocked by interacting with the war table, but these are as simple as clicking a button. There is no challenge in these unlocks. In terms of the war itself, few decisions ever impact the Inquisition negatively. Sending forces to Ferelden in response to some brigands does not leave Orlais open to attack by demons or what-have-you. Like the rest of the game, the war-table only ever lets the protagonist get better. There is no consequence for bad strategy. There is not even strategy, just less productive outcomes.
Similarly, very little occurs, either at the war table or in the open-world proper, to mark Corypheus’ efforts against the Inquisition. Every conflict waits in a stalemate for the player to get involved, whether the machinations at Redcliffe Castle or the assault on the Well of Sorrows. And at almost every occasion, the Inquisition comes out on top. Someone who spent several actual days on war-table operations will ultimately see the same successes as someone who only did the most essential operations. Yet this is not an argument that the war-table should reward “real” players who spend literal days waiting for timers to count down. The point is that what the game presents as a threat—that Corypheus is waging a shadowy war across the continent to dismantle the powers of Thedas and become a god-emperor—does not align with the threats that the player actually faces. No battlefield is too far, no plot too complicated, no alliance too fragile that the Inquisitor cannot fly in and save the day rather than suffer any meaningful setback.
As a thought experiment, consider that something similar to the map-infecting Blight in Origins was applied to Inquisition. Certain areas of the map might become contested by Corypheus’ forces, forcing the player to fend off an assault to keep the region under Inquisition control. Or perhaps the longer a particular key mission goes ignored, the more progress Corypheus makes against the player, taking away resources or access to certain places until the next threat is dealt with. At the very least, forcing random encounters on the long roads to and fro might provide that missing sense of struggle and of time passing, all while making use of the game’s open-world design.
Also consider the way that DAII uses time-based acts as a way to make the big narrative choices in Inquisition carry more weight. How does the war effort look a month after the player chooses to aid the mages rather than the Templars? Perhaps siding with the mages saves the Hinterlands but loses Emprise du Lion, or spending time to deal with Venatori in the Western Approach leads to the Emerald Graves being overrun. Such pressure put on the player’s use of time and resources would highlight the seriousness of Corypheus as a villain far better than the game’s lax open-world, time-absent structure.
All this is to say that Inquisition is not a bad game or a bad story. I quite enjoyed my time as the Inquisitor. The environments are stunning, the main cast endearing, and the politics are less problematic than those of Origins. Also, the game does weigh itself and the scale of its narrative with the Trespasser DLC, where the Inquisition’s actions finally catch up with them. However, I wish the main game had a greater awareness of scale and consequence, because as often as I was immersed in the autumn-tinged hills of the Hinterlands or compelled by the private stories of companions like Iron Bull, I always found myself inevitably distracted by the slight absurdity of something like cross-continental fast-travel, or Corypheus kindly waiting until the Inquisitor is ready for him to commence his next evil plan.
This king courtesy of Dragon Age Wiki
The story of Inquisition is the kind of epic fantasy that, maybe counterintuitively, demands a little limitation. In writing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien does not just skip to Rivendell after the hobbits leave the Shire, or let them ride eagles into Mordor. The journey is as much a part of Frodo’s story as the places he visits along the way. We feel the exhaustion and relief as the Ring is tossed into Mt. Doom all the more when we have seen the long and troubled road traveled to get there.
That is ultimately what I want from Inquisition: to see that long and troubled road, to feel the exhaustion and relief of the Inquisitor as they sublimate Corypheus into the Fade atop a temple floating in the sky. For so much of the game, I didn’t feel like the characters really struggle. Everything is too convenient, too easy, too un-troubled for the Inquisition to ever be anything but in control. Fighting the archdemon atop Castle Denerim as the Grey Warden is all the more dramatic because the Blight has visibly swallowed the land. Hawke’s confrontation with Knight-Commander Meredith feels all the more earned because the player has seen the city of Kirkwall reach a breaking point over a decade of walking its streets. In Inquisition, the final fight against Corypheus himself is one of desperation for the villain, the attack on Skyhold being his last-ditch effort not to win but to spite his nemesis. Sure, I had personally put in a lot of time and effort to get the Inquisitor to the final battle (my war table can attest to that). But had the Inquisitor, really? It’s hard to say, and that’s the problem.
As discussed above, the issues with Inquisition in terms of narrative mostly have to do with gameplay decisions, which I think have a lot to do with market trends and “Triple-A” expectations. Though DAI shares a series with Origins and DAII, the third installment at time of release enjoyed greater attention and a bigger market than the first two. The third also came out in the shadow of games such as Skyrim, Far Cry, and Assassin’s Creed. Which is to say Inquisition was made in an environment where open-world player-empowering design was—and still is—the standard. In an article published on Polygon titled Dragon Age: Inquisition is for players that still appreciate the long game, Alexa Ray Correira cites ex-Bioware producer Cameron Lee on the game’s design ethos. While the main-story is there for players to get to, the creators “wanted to have a world that’s fully immersive and well-defined for you to explore, discover, and get involved in.” This ethos alone does not separate the game entirely from its predecessors. But, as Lee says, “We’re just making more. More and more and more. And it’s entirely up to the player. It’s your world, your game.” Therein lies the glutted philosophy of modern triple-A games.
Of course the protagonist can go anywhere they want, anytime they want, and never feel like their efforts are wasted or that they make poor decisions. Bioware wanted to tell an epic story, but they also needed to give players over a hundred hours of content and to feel like the center of it all, because the market demands it. Anything but marginal progress for the player, the slow march of the experience bar and the gradual uptick of resources, makes for a potentially upsetting experience. No matter how long I as the Inquisitor sit at Skyhold and admire Iron Bull’s chiseled jaw, the Inquisition will beat Corypheus. Worse, they won’t even break a narrative sweat doing it.
For in Inquisition, the player always has everything they need, even time, and I don’t think that makes for a very good story.