The Dragon Age: Inquisition Thread

Well there's only so many ways you can write DAI is shit.

 

Well Commissar was afraid after watching a few of Comrade RK-47 DAI videos that this is GAME OVER Moment but guess what Comrades and Trannies? Entered Titan Canyon and played 6 hours straight like in old good times. delivered; This is best moment in Wasteland 2 and heard that California will be even better ; So what are you all doing here discussing this POS faggots? Go play real games like Wasteland 2, read Tolkien books or talk to your kin or go find this special girl; Remember RK-47 sacrificed his sanity and got swallowed by warp for us all so we didn't played it and saved our souls. [Achievement Unlocked] Not played DAI.

 

Meanwhile massive butthurt on GameSpot for Inquisition losing out to Tolkien for GOTY.

 

no it wasn't. he believed in gods and angels and wrote a story about gods and angels. there was nothing adult about it. the apparent restraint is really just inconsistency; wizards can do whatever, but not all the time.

I discovered this hilarious decades-long debate between Tolkien fans about whether balrogs have wings or not, because at various points he describes them in various ways. the clincher on the argument was that balrogs are the essentialisation of Tolkienic inconsistency and mind-changing, and that at the -start- of the paragraph or two describing the balrog in Fellowship the balrog does indeed not have wings, but by the end of the description, it does.

Tolkien's only work of any value was The Hobbit, and that was because it celebrated its vignettey children's story nature. everything else was trash, as is the genre that imitates it.

 

PST was pretty well written. It was certainly not weaker than, say, your average Joss Whedon / Christopher Nolan, to use a few examples from screenwriting. But movies aren't primarily judged by their screenwriting, and the same goes for games. PST is an example I'd comfortably use to say that games already have deep writing. It's the rest of the game that I'm not comfortable using.

And no, there's no Tolstoy in video games, in the same way there's no Dickens in screenwriting. These are not literary mediums we're talking about. They're cinematic ones, at best, and in the case of video games, not even that.

 

visual and interactive media are better-suited to understated, implication-heavy storytelling. they don't have the space that a novel does. that said, there's absolutely no reason why the script of a game or a movie can't equal or exceed the script of a novel. it's just not where the development focus generally goes, because the audience the genre has cultivated in its short history isn't one that likes words. or thoughts.

you don't have to tackle "serious real life issues" to tell a compelling story. it's almost a cop-out, although it's so hard to do well that that's really not fair of me to say. what's really impressive is telling a story that makes people care that they -can't- relate to their own lives. a story that's about people, rather than about ideas. A Song of Ice and Fire might qualify as an example; it's really not making a statement about anything except for the nature of blame and consequence. ASoIaF is so great because when you ask "whose fault is this whole mess?" the chain is endlessly looping, and at every stage you can understand why the character did what he or she did, as shitty as his or her choices were. there's no reason you couldn't tell a story like that in a video game. it's just a question of budget, of perspective shifts, of text versus voice acting.

 

Magic in Tolkien was subtle yet when Tolkien tried to materialize it, he still did switch to the same old tropes - eg Gandalf shooting fire from his staff, blinding the orcs with a flash of light, casting Tenser's Transformation Eldar Powah on himself so that he's able to go toe-to-toe with a Balrog as a weakly old man, etc. You remember the elvish rings being imaginative because they actually didn't do shit, except for Nenya which had greenhouse effects that allowed the elves to maintain Lorien.

 

frankly I'm surprised the One Ring even had as concrete an effect as invisibility. power seems largely to be abstract in Middle Earth. it's just...a thing you have. it doesn't really mean anything precise.

 

Gandalf was never weakly and in the sense that matters he wasn't an old man either. He just looked old.

 

Yea technically he was an angel, and that's why he was able to do battle with devils eg balrogs. Tolkien described a few mortal magic-users in Middle-Earth, but I remember being disappointed that in the end, all the actual magic-users in the story were effectively angels/devils.

 

Wow.
Did anyone mention the fucking convoluted areas? DID ANYONE? I cant find my way around, AT ALL. The maps are so fucking WRONG, it boggles the mind.
Just THIS makes the game 10 times worse than Dragon Age 2.

I haven't experienced maps like these in 15 years of fucking gaming.

 

Dragon Age 2 was a GEM compared to this crap.

 

What's wrong with the areas?

 

The fact that they are a maze. I think that's what convoluted means, n'est-ce pas?

 

Oh, I thought you were going to complain that they were boring corridors.

 

A maze? Are you sure you're playing DAI?

Besides, even if they were, you have your nice little quest marker so you can find your way around with no worries.

 

I like corridors. Corridors are bro's. They don't lie to you.

 

They become boring quickly though. Well not always but as a trend...

 

With dumb comments like this, you should prob stick to vague and dumbed down Dragon Age and TES lore.

 

The quest markers don't help you, if there is no clear and visible way toward something. The maps are littered with hills and hillocks, and they all pretty much look alike. That's generally not what I sign up for, when playing a console RPGs.

 

Mmmm... I never had any problem when exploring. Lots and lots of problems with its content, yes, but not to navigate the areas themselves. Actually, I though they were pretty well crafted in that regard.

 

You must be from the silent asshole school of game appreciation. Good to know.

 

Yea, got a BA in douchebag.

Why are you assuming that a console game has to be extremely dumbed down? Is exploration really that horrible?