Dragon Age: Inquisition tears Thedas apart and sets the stage for series’ next act

It’s easy to lose yourself in the scale of Dragon Age: Inquisition. The third game in the series realises Bioware’s fantasy setting in a way that just wasn’t technically possible (or at least feasible) with the first two installments. Though it stops short of a fully-simulated open world experience, it’s still the closest the developer have gotten to bridging the gap between the scale of the world they describe and the one that players experience. Where previous games could only provide limited windows into Ferelden and Kirkwall, Inquisition offers up the entire of southern Thedas to explore.

However, it’s important to look beyond this sense of scale. Inquisition doesn’t just take the world of Dragon Age bigger than ever before, it also dismantles many of the narrative pillars that hold the fiction together.

Across the first two games in the series (and the accompanying books, comics, animated movies and web series), players have built up a number of assumptions about the way the world of Dragon Age works. By the time they get to Inquisition, they already know how Grey Wardens, Blights, The Fade and Red Lyrium work. It’s for the best then, that Bioware directly attack these ‘rules’ — channelling the results into a new paradigm for the series’ status quo. Whatever game follows Inquisition will be playing with a new set of rules — and that’s a detail rife with potential.

The first of these pillars challenged is the Grey Wardens. The heroes of the first game, the Wardens are seen as heroic and virtuous souls who give us their lives for the greater good. In comparison, Dragon Age: Inquisition is a little more resistant to buy into such romanticism.

In fact, both indirectly and directly, the game shines a light on the corruption and fallibility of the independent military power. The lead-up to and battle of Adamant Fortress explore and present the idea that the Wardens fixation on the darkspawn could easily be manipulated by the cunning. As further demonstrated by Blackwell’s subplot — even they can’t escape the series’ own complex morality.

Of course, this is far from the only simplistic assumption that Bioware add more dimensions to in Inquisition. The series’ monstrous and orc-like darkspawn receive a similar reframing.

The game builds on the idea of intelligent darkspawn introduced in Awakening and The Calling, tying this group of shadowy antagonists to the both creature’s mythic origins. The flatly-delivered absolute evil nature of the darkspawn has long been a narrative weakpoint for the series and Bioware are actively addressing by building up Corypheus as the third game’s antagonist.

One of the original magisters (mage-kings) who broke into the Golden City and set the apocalyptic Blights into motion, he brings the series’ past face to face with its present.

Perhaps more importantly, he solidifies one of the series’ longer running narrative arcs. We’ve now encountered two of the seven, it’s hard to imagine the remaining five don’t have a major role to play and harder to imagine it isn’t to do with providing a more permanent resolution to the threat the darkspawn represent.

The same goes for lyrium. First introduced in an almost offhand fashion in Origins, lyrium also gets drastically reframed over the course Inquisition.

Dragon Age 2 introduced us to the corrosive and toxic red variant but Inquisition takes that evolution a step further and confirms the material is organic — and therefore susceptible to the blight.

The Descent expansion further delves into this, showing us that the underworld of Thedas is just as sprawling as its overworld. There are plenty of stories to be told and mysteries solved down there as there are in Tevinter or Nevarra.

Finally, Inquisition introduces to Solas — The Dread Wolf. One of the Elven gods made manifest, he brings the lost glory of the series’ subjugated elves to the forefront of the narrative and radically reframes the player’s perception of it.

Inquisition’s final DLC, Trespasser, develops this beyond just setting Solas up as a potential antagonist in the next game. By casting a light on his role in the destruction of the Elvish empire (and the nature of that empire itself), we’re left with a much better idea of how the oppression of the elves fits into the larger trajectory of the series.

With the Elvish gods are revealed to be nothing but mage-kings whose reputations grew with the ages, Bioware tie their ongoing struggle to the series own preoccupations.

If we understand magic as a heightened manifestation of the concept of power, then the broader question the series is asking is how best can society overcome fear and find a balance between freedom, trust and security.

In addition to being set up as a future villain, Trespasser also paints Fen’Harel less of a trickster god and more of a revolutionary. Making him a figure far closer to the series heroes than its villains. Even without going into the arcane implications of Solas’ creation of the veil between the Fade and reality, it’s safe to say his arc in Inquisition serves as a potent fertiliser for whatever comes next.

Bioware make the most of Inquisition’s size, leaving the Dragon Age universe a far more complex and interesting place than they left it in Dragon Age 2. As the bigger picture of the series begins to take shape, the gap between that picture and it’s ambitions is growing smaller and smaller.