I'm not going into gameplay here, because I can deal with pretty much anything in an RPG if the story is captivating enough, but in the first chapter (the Hillbrandt section) the story and writing were just awful in my opinion.

After spending an hour questioning people in the town, it was already clear who all of the villains were. At this point I was still somewhat intrigued. I hoped there might be some interesting twists, that things were not entirely as they seemed, that they would not let me get away with uncovering the truth, that I could side with the bad guys, or that I would at least be able to uncover some motivations that would justify their actions to a certain degree, which would force me to make moral choices and whatnot.

Instead, all of the people who were obviously heretics were heretics. And anyone who was only slightly suspicious turned out to be innocent. The entire town acted like idiots whenever you brought up an accusation. "Oh no, this cannot be! You must be mistaken! That evidence will not suffice! You cannot get away with this!" ... And then you get a confession through torture or the suspect dies by some other means and they all make a 180. "They confessed? We will just have to take your word for it! I did not think it was possible that they would do such a thing! But the evidence was so clear, why did I not see this before? You were right! You are so much smarter than us! Whatever would we do without you?" As for their motivations? "It was so tempting and exciting," "I just hate the world" and "The end is coming as foretold! MUHAHAHA!" The only one that was somewhat interesting was the girl trying to avenge the death of her lover.

In short, I felt like the story here was an insult to my intelligence. Almost every game I play, I see through to the end, but at this point I'm unsure whether it's worth it for me to continue playing. So the question is, does the story get better from here?

This can be subjective. After playing through the entire game, I must admit I stopped playing the game right at the end of Act 1, where the game has already mentioned Azrael has been released and Bafomet and Cerdie might possibly be released as well, mainly due to the very long dungeon crawl in the Orc Caves. I did continue after a few months. After playing through the rest of the game, my thoughts are that overall, the story may be a bit predictable for some as the guilty parties involved usually tend to either give short answers to your questions and you seem strangely limited in the amount of questions you can ask them, and especially in Act 3 where right at the beginning they refuse to answer any of your questions when they should be lying to put up a better façade.

Still, for a roleplaying game, I can appreciate the sidequests where the NPCs will have slightly different dialogue, offer you discounts, provide a useful proof to advance the sidequest or main story, refuse to trade with you or answer any of your questions, and affect your alignment and spellcasting and equipment to use.

So if you like to do sidequests and doing good or evil in the game world, it is probably worth continuing to Act 3. If you prefer to just advance through the main story, it will be somewhat predictable as the main antagonists and their plans has already been established somewhat early on at the end of Act 1.

I have to say that for me there were a few unforeseen things, unexpected twists and moments, or surprising explanations in the game even though the pattern for the main villains might look the same all the time. But as woosk says, this can be subjective. I usually let the storyline and NPC characters drive me whatever way they want, believing them whatever they want me to believe - without saying "Yeah, looking at your dialogue options and the way you answer, I'm sure you're the heretic here."

The quantity of dialogue options offered to the player by the heretics didn't bother me so much, honestly. There was in fact a lot you could discuss with the main villain in Act I. It was just very clear from his evasive responses and blatantly obvious misdirection that he was hiding something.

What I was hoping to find in terms of plot was something more elaborate. I'll write a little example conceived in ten minutes of creativity:
Master D'Arvias is a beloved man in Hillbrandt and in his position has started to overshadow the Inquisition itself. He believes that the cruelty of the Inquisition is becoming a stain on the principles of the faith, and thus leads people to heresy. He seeks to change the ways of the Church, with some success, but not everyone likes what he's doing.

Meanwhile, Judge Vallarian is doing everything in his power to see the head of the Order of the Righteous in Hillbrandt hang to reduce the influence of the paladins by ruining their reputation. As a long term goal, he wants to instate a complete theocracy with none to question or judge it, because he believes that only a nation fully united under the reign of the clergy of the Inquisition will be able to stand against the rise of heresy.

Jeremiah, a heretic who has infiltrated the clergy, sees an opportunity to frame the Judge and feeds off the fact that he's already making himself look suspicious. He and his lackeys plant evidence and bribe some of the locals to provide testimonies that will make perfect sense when the time comes. He pushes Vallarian to request the aid of a new inquisitor (the player) to investigate the local heresy, knowing full well that Vallarian will attempt to make the inquisitor hunt down the master of the paladins. Jeremiah stands to gain from this, whichever side the inquisitor chooses. The paladins are a clear enemy of the heretics and a stained reputation for them will mean one less militant order to have to deal with, and if the inquisitor decides to remove Vallarian from his office, then Jeremiah receives a promotion.


Not saying it had to be exactly like this, but the actual plot was rather simplistic in comparison. Which is a real shame, because the setting would have allowed for much better.

I think I might take a break from the game and return to it at a later date, with different expectations.

Just wanted to post that I can appreciate the game more now that I revisited it. The same glaring issues still exist in the following chapters, but to a lesser degree. Not all the villains are as obvious as in Act 1, and Act 3 actually has some interesting moral choices and the characters you meet tread in the grey area as well. Choosing not to do certain things out of principle will actually stop you from completing certain optional quests.

In fact, while I thought Act 1 was really bad and Act 2 was just tolerable in terms of story quality, Act 3 is really quite nice so far. It's like the writers grew into it more as they progressed. And the combat gets better as well, as you get more options and spellcasting monsters stop forcing you to run away forever to bring them down (so it doesn't take days to finish a single 3-level dungeon). On top of that it seems like all of the best music in the game was saved for the last Act.

So in my opinion Inquisitor suffers from a poor start. It starts off feeling like an insufferable waste of time on many fronts and picks up the slack rather late. But better late than never, I suppose.