Dragon Age: Inquisition

The pitch

Dragon Age: Inquisition is BioWare's 2014 fantasy RPG, following the previous two Dragon Age games with a larger, more open world, deep companion relationships, and a "your choices matter" campaign against a sky-tearing threat called the Breach. It won Game of the Year honours across multiple outlets in 2014 and arrived on Steam in June 2020, six years after its original Origin-exclusive launch.

The reputation holds up

Reading the review corpus confirms what the accolades suggested: this is a genuinely well-loved game, and that hasn't faded with time. Even reviewers giving the game a thumbs-down over unrelated issues routinely open with real praise — "I love this game. I've clocked over 300 hours in it," reads the single most-upvoted negative review on the page, before pivoting entirely to its actual subject. That pattern repeats across dozens of reviews: the story, world and combat aren't the complaint.

The complaint that dominates everything else

What is the complaint, overwhelmingly, is the EA launcher. "Origin" appears in 92 of the 100 most-helpful negative reviews on this game's page — an extraordinary concentration for a single issue. The specifics are concrete and repeated: "bought game, started it, got error something something license key, tried steam support, got told to talk to ea support, which told me to talk to steam support," reads one; another describes the EA app hanging while "connecting to EA servers," flipping between fullscreen and windowed. A 463-vote review calls the launcher "a known malware commonly referred to as 'Origin Launcher'... attaches itself to the boot sequence, runs in the background." One reviewer's blunt framing sums up the shape of nearly every negative review on this page: "Great game but Origin makes it hard to enjoy."

Not a fixed, historical problem

The reason this deserves real weight in 2026 rather than being written off as an old complaint is that it keeps recurring. A December 2025 review: "Amazing and fun game on Console. On Steam is a totally different situation... I returned this game because I couldn't play it," blaming "this stupid EA software layer." A June 2026 review — a month before this piece was written — reports "Heavy DRM, extra EA account required... the game sometimes runs slow and slightly choppy at times, I suspect due to DRM background processes." March 2026: "EA Launcher making it impossible to launch this game." Six years of Steam availability, and the same category of complaint is still being filed.

Worth stating clearly: it hasn't sunk the score

For all of that, this isn't a story of collapsing sentiment. Recent English reviews — the 100 most recent, spanning early July to August 2026 — run 80% positive, comfortably ahead of the 75.7% lifetime figure. Most players evidently get through the launcher friction and land on a positive verdict about the game itself; the complaint is prevalent, not fatal. One 401-vote review makes exactly this point: "Great game, people are idiots. EA launcher is installed when you boot up the game for the first time. You can easily toggle it to not run when the system starts."

Depth and where people stop

Achievement data reflects a genuinely large game: the most-earned sits at 66.1%, and the median across 69 achievements is 15.5%, with the deepest content — including multiplayer-specific achievements — down under 2%. That's a normal shape for a huge single-player RPG with a bolted-on multiplayer mode most buyers never touch, not a red flag on its own.

Value

At its current 75%-off price of NZ$12.48, this is an easy recommendation on value terms alone — one of the genre's best-regarded entries for the price of a couple of coffees. The monetisation score in this review reflects the launcher friction specifically, not any in-game predatory design; there isn't any.

Verdict

Dragon Age: Inquisition earns its reputation as one of BioWare's finest RPGs, and its own players keep saying so even in reviews written specifically to warn you about something else. That something else — a mandatory EA launcher that's generated complaints in every year since this game's 2020 Steam debut, including as recently as June 2026 — is real, worth knowing before you buy, and not, according to the numbers, enough to keep most buyers from recommending the game underneath it.