Dragon Age Inquisition...

LordAshur

LordAshur

Banned
... is the worst Dragon Age game so far. It managed to fulfill the seemingly impossible task of being a greater disappointment than 2. The combat system is one of the worst I've ever seen, the open world is terribly implemented, the story once again follows the BioWare template in place since the first Mass Effect. All the quests that seem even marginally interesting are just points on the war map you send your henchmen to complete, while the Herald Of Andraste is busy running around finding lost Druffalos and playing FedEx.

How is this game praised as a worthy successor to Origins?
 
The last game of theirs I completed was Jade Empire. Dragon Age reeks of generic fantasy. I played Origins for twenty hours before realizing I had seen it all before. That being said it did appear to be a good game just not my taste.
 
It's a hit and miss mix bag.

On one hand, It had a great story. It's open world was lacking with memorable side quest. I like the more tactical combat that was lacking in two and has a decent hybrid between the first and second game in inquisition.

The War Map, Could have been done better with side quest for the inquisition. Instead of in real time simulator with text. I think it cheapens the experience.

It's strong points were the companions you gain, I really liked In Hushed Whispers and Champions of the Just. Really fun to play through. Haven's destruction was also really nice transition into the castle. Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts was really good example of how you can still play a game and not fight things every second.

Over all i give the game a 7.7/10 While Dragon age 2 get's a 6/10 and Origins an 8/10

It could have done better with more side quest and less massive worlds with nothing of value other than farming for Veridium all day.
 
I liked Inquisition more than Origins honestly. It's full of a lot of busywork, but the parts that aren't "running around fetching things for no reason" are really good. It's an odd sort of game because to enjoy it you have to kind of know how to play it first. But I felt the character writing was really good and some of the narrative beats really worked for me.

The main story mission where you're hanging out at a fancy party and needed to fit in was great. I'd like to see more of that sort of thing in RPGs which are more or less on narrative rails.

But to be honest, I really liked DA2, and that's apparently an opinion not shared by many.
 
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It is not that bad. Main quest, companions and world building are all pretty good, but on the other hand the entirety of the game is full of questionably fetch quest and the combat system is not so solid or fun. It almost seems as they tried to stretch the lenght of the experience, adding a lot of useless-or-so, MMORPGish content just to increase game time. Overall it feels like a mashup beetween the previous title, it could have been done better but is still a good, modern, RPG. So said, I didn't feel the urge to replay it after I finished my first run, differently from the other DAs.
Surely the lack of similar AAA titles helped it to shine a little bit more than it deserved.
 
I find the combat in particular to be the game's weakest point. Having to hold the left mouse button down (or click) all the time killed anything resembling "tactical combat" for me. It would have been excusable if any single hit felt the least bit consequential, but since every single creature in the game (player and party included) has thousands of hit points, it became extremely annoying. And the gazillions of flashy magic effects that often make you lose sight of your own character were forgivable in the former games where the character would still attack the enemy no matter what, but now that I manually have to position and turn him towards the enemy it's often an issue.

When it comes to the story, it might well be the game's strong point, but what little of it I experienced I could not get into. In Origins, the blight was something to be feared and you saw its consequences wherever you went. The demons in Inquisition were a nuisance at best. Dragon Age 2 made the praise-worthy decision of not focusing the main story on a "great evil coming to destroy the land", although it would have been better if we had more diversity instead of just "mages vs templars" over and over again.
 
I finished all the hinterlands quests (thinking that at least one of them might be of any significance) and went into the marshes to rescue the kidnapped soldiers. I just got sick and tired of all the boring combat and I don't think I'll be revisiting the game any time soon. Up to that point the only actual choice I faced was whether to charge the rift in the mountains or flank it. I understand that there may be more consequential choices up the road, but I feel that what I must traverse to get to them just isn't worth it.
 
I won't lie: DA:I could be hard to withstand, the first areas more than everything else, especially if the player decides to solve every single one of that useless sidequests. Like Cabbage said some posts before, you have to "learn" how to handle the title if you don't want to get bored pretty soon, starting to ignore every mission clearly not needed to progress through the main story. Some of the major sides are still good to be done, you might want to give them a try. Same thing with the companions-related ones, obviously, even if I tend to consider them part of the main story as well.
In the end, if you wanna continue your playthrough, consider that after the prologue - first 8/10 hours or so - the real story starts to kick in, so maybe you may feel yourself more interested in going on with the game.
 
I think the big problem that DA:I had is that the first area (the Hinterlands) is really sticky, and a lot of people's learned behavior in video games is "complete all quests before proceeding" and this happens to be a really bad way to play DA:I. There are certainly people who have obsessive-compulsive tendencies for whom "do all the things" is a reasonable way to play the game, but it's not going to be for most people since there's quite a bit of filler.

I mean, it makes sense as an abstraction. In order to progress in the story, as the head of a political entity, you need to accumulate power and influence and there's lots of ways to do this. Every random farmer you do a favor for is someone who can either be called upon to return the favor, or will provide some materiel benefit. So to progress in the story you need to help out some people with their problems, because you need political capital before you can launch anything big, but doing all of the things is a waste of everybody's time. So I guess the secret is to only do those objectives that, in the moment, seem interesting to you (personally I really dug the star puzzles but I can see why others would hate that.)

The tip I would give to anybody playing it now is to pay attention to the war table, the storyline missions are the ones that when you highlight them have a big green glowing rift over them. They will have associated a cost in terms of power and a recommendation in terms of player level. As soon as you can afford to do them and you're in the right range of levels, unless you're still having fun exploring or helping random people, do the next story mission ASAP.
 
PossibleCabbage said:
I mean, it makes sense as an abstraction. In order to progress in the story, as the head of a political entity, you need to accumulate power and influence and there's lots of ways to do this. Every random farmer you do a favor for is someone who can either be called upon to return the favor, or will provide some materiel benefit. So to progress in the story you need to help out some people with their problems, because you need political capital before you can launch anything big, but doing all of the things is a waste of everybody's time. So I guess the secret is to only do those objectives that, in the moment, seem interesting to you (personally I really dug the star puzzles but I can see why others would hate that.)
Click to expand...

It does make sense for the inquisition to make an effort to gain favor, but for the head of a political entity to go around finding lost druffalos and playing FedEx? These are the quests the common grunts should be handling. However, when there are actual issues which it might even make sense for the player to be handling, you can only choose which one of your henchmen to delegate them to. And it would have been completely possible for the player to go on these quests had the game not been so "open-world" focused.
 
Why untalented? A lot of their titles are more than good, with some being objectively seminal for the genre.
Probably they had worsened after the EA acquisition, but surely they are still better than your average nowaday software house.
 
I think people compare the Bioware of today with the Bioware of the past.

It does seem like Bioware has for all of their games a very similar formula which they use from Kotor, to Dragonage and Mass Effect. One of them is the cinematic approach. The other is how companions works. Many of the comanions in Dragon Age for example could be clones from their companions in Kotor. The writing is different, sure, but the tone isnt.

Anyway. I am not saying their games are bad. It's just that Bioware lost a lot of diversity within their titles. It's all about AAA quality now. If you know what I mean.
 
Yes, maybe they rely a little bit much on their same archetypes when it comes to companions, still I find their work to be pretty enjoyable and solid, even after the EA affaire.
It is also undoubtable they are more and more shifting towards AAA standards, with all the pros and cons that comes with this statement, again "thanks" to EA diktats. If this means they are going to totally equiparate to the shitty level of the average modern software house, well, let's just enjoy their products until they still have some value and hope for the best, aka they manage to find the right dimension, even under different pressure and conditions, before it is too late.
 
Yes, but this pretty much summarizes the current status quo of the majority of AAA gaming industry, not Bioware only.
What I wanted to point out is that in their case digging under the first layer of DLC-and-preorder-based filth often pays off, because the experience wich lies under is rather enjoyable, differently from many of other similar situation. Keep in mind I'm not accepting this as the norm, just acknowledging what at the moment seems to be usual for a lot of software houses, or should I say their publishers.
Obviously at the same time I'm worried about the outcome of Bio's future projects, Andromeda be the first.
 
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