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The Dragon Age: Inquisition Thread
- Thread starter Bradylama
- Start date
- Joined
- Mar 27, 2013
- Messages
- 3,915
Da fuq?! In Lotr that scene was great! How dare you compare it to that poorly made rip-off?
Crevice tab
Savant
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2013
- Messages
- 224
What's worse is that they're quite proud of ripping off stuff from better franchises and turning it into shit.
Makabb
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2014
- Messages
- 11,753
Sykar
Arcane
IncendiaryDevice
Self-Ejected
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2014
- Messages
- 7,407
It's why I rarely ever play Bioware games...
turul
Augur
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2011
- Messages
- 149
Unfortunately- beside a few caves and burial chambers- there aren't. Which is shocking.
When I first stumbled upon a beat-up fortress on the Hinterlands, it was a site to behold. Looks truly amazing unlike all the over decorated crap on other maps, I was like "finally! Dungeon crawling here we go!"
Then after walking around, hopping around for a while, I realized there is no entry ! Even that Solas character says "There is plenty of history here"-- getting me all excited for nothing and pisses me off.
I have to say, the only worthwhile thing I've found doing in this game was killing dragons, period. I don't remember dying while closing those
Not to mention, this game makes me feel like traveling with a bunch of gay people, while I'm the only straight one.
Level 15 vs a lvl20 dragon is no easy task, especially with retarded AI team members, but some dragons got me trying a few times, before I was successful.
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Sykar
Arcane
Sykar
Arcane
Well they went probably like this while playing Dragon Derp:
RPGMaster
Savant
- Joined
- Feb 23, 2011
- Messages
- 703
Surely they won it by default because no other developer gives a fuck.
- Joined
- Oct 25, 2012
- Messages
- 228
The comments on that article...
No, it is not fun. And the correct answer to the aforementioned question would be, I don't play bioware games because they've been shit for some time now.
No, it is not fun. And the correct answer to the aforementioned question would be, I don't play bioware games because they've been shit for some time now.
It seems no one posted this here yet, so... the DA:I tavern songs are available for download on the official site till 9 February for free (they plan to sell it after that)... I didn't play the game and don't plan to, but I'm always up for medieval tavern songs and these are pretty cool.
http://www.dragonage.com/en_US/news/inquisition-tavern-songs-giveaway
http://www.dragonage.com/en_US/news/inquisition-tavern-songs-giveaway
meanwhileInPoland
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2011
- Messages
- 2,234
EA giving something for free?
DraQ
Arcane
If anything this should go to Bethesda for Vivec alone.
Surely they won it by default because no other developer gives a fuck.
Making LGBTQXYZWTFETC characters isn't as much help as those gaytivists would like to believe if they are as repulsive as about anything that falls out of BW.
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turul
Augur
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2011
- Messages
- 149
I'm betting on the addition of another bisexual elf or another transexual templar team "mate".
It hasn't been exxagarted enough to make their political statement, that the entire crew to choose from are:
1. A gay Houdini from the 1920s.
2. Alan DeGeneres with a bow.
3. Some Ethiopian woman, calling everyone "honey"
4. A transexual Columbian guy, thinking he (she) is a holy templar
5. A butt-ugly Indian woman
6. the crossbow dwarf, possibly the only sane person in the entire game.
7. A heroine addict elf (Solas), who - spoiler alert - isn't the person he tries to be.
8. Some homeless drug-alcohol rehab teenager, who has problems making sense.
Crevice tab
Savant
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2013
- Messages
- 224
^This.
On one hand the 'I'm the gayest' reward for SJWness is at least somewhat earned instead of entirely bought unlike the GOTY business.
On the other 999 hands not only are all the characters crap but the whole let's push sexuality and SJW in everyone's faces in a very stupid manner (because Bioware can't do smart) isn't actually all that good for the LGBT message. Don't want to be stereotyped? Then don't fucking approve of something that only has stereotypes- and dumb ones at that.
Vivec being bisexual/hermaphrodite/whatever-it's-complicated actually has a purpose in the narrative beyond SJW!trans- and of course having way better writing helps. What's more Morrowind is more than a decade old- back when having LGBT characters wasn't all that popular. So why the flying fuck wasn't Bethesda praised for its inclusiveness back then when it was actually something special and exceptional for the time?
Xor
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 21, 2008
- Messages
- 9,345
So a friend who knows I like RPGs but apparently isn't aware what kind of RPGs bought this for me for Christmas, and I finally got around to playing through it.
First of all, the keep. I actually really like this idea - it feels like a natural extension of the save import system Bioware has been building up since Mass Effect. It's also a great convenience because I don't have any DA1 or 2 saves anymore. I feel like the keep could have been implemented into the game itself, though.
The story is a paint-by-numbers 3 act Bioware plot that they've used in just about every game but ME2, complete with the destruction of your home in act 1, an ancient evil you must defeat, and you being the chosen one. It's only lacking a betrayal at the end of act 2 and the death of your mentor to hit every cliche in their playbook. Despite how archetypal it is, I did find it charming. At least your status as the chosen one is sort of explained - you're an exceptional individual who lucked into a position of leadership. The plot beats feel natural for the most part.
Corypheus is an utterly bland villain. I was completely disinterested in him from the start. He might as well have been the archdemon from DAO or the babby reaper from ME2 for how much characterization he receives. Fortunately he doesn't show up very often. And I was disappointed with how Skyhold is never attacked despite them making a big deal about how much of a fortress it is when you first arrive there. Not doing so seems like a huge missed opportunity; it would have given more meaning to strengthening the inquisition if your actions had a direct effect on how the seige played out. Even the NWN2 OC pulled that off. I really wouldn't be surprised if the designers originally intended the climax of the game to involve a siege of Skyhold, but it was cut for time.
The end of the game feels incredibly rushed. You go from the last story mission, where you foil the villain's backup plan, to the final battle with him. No buildup, no fighting through an army, not even a cutscene framing how you got there. You just start the mission, and you're in the middle of an abandoned castle with the villain. There had to have been more planned for that confrontation, because as it is it was incredibly anticlimactic.
The vast majority of the game is spent running around large open areas mashing the v key, sometimes getting into fights with bears. I imagine this is what took up the majority of development time - building these large open areas and populating them with stuff to explore. And I can definitely see why they did it; Bethesda has shown that the theme park RPG is potentially very lucrative. The execution is a bit botched, though. First of all, you need to collect resources to do just about anything - upgrade your potions, craft gear, upgrade Skyhold, and more. And collecting resources is fucking boring. I got enough of that when I used to play WoW. Around halfway through the game I just gave up collecting things, and then I found myself completely unprepared for the specialization quest, which of course required running a fetch quest as well as collecting a shitload of herbs for no reason.
While the environments are for the most part varied and some of the areas did seem to have interesting quest lines, I quickly grew bored with exploring them, and after a while only did quests so I'd have enough power to finish the main story. I'm usually a strict completionist (I even did every side-quest and explored every planet in ME1), but when I finished Inquisition I had done probably less than 50% of the side content. I just couldn't force myself to do more.
As for the story missions themselves, those were much stronger. Definitely an improvement over ME3's story missions, which basically involved bouncing all over the galaxy with little rhyme or reason to shoot at TIM's endless supply of Cerberus troops. The first two missions are mutually exclusive - side with the mages or the templars, which seems like a refreshing bit of C&C. I haven't played through the templar mission yet to see the consequences, but while I doubt it impacts the main plot very much beyond having you fight mages instead of templars, there did at least seem to be a decent amount of dialog that would need to change.
The other missions were nicely varied. While assaulting the Gray Warden stronghold you end up dumped in the fade, which I was completely unprepared for. Unlike the fade missions in DAO, this plays out more like a traditional dungeon. I'm not sure if that's a good thing; the fade in DAO was botched in execution but it's also one of the more interesting areas of that game. Then there's the mission to save the empress, which involves almost no combat and is mostly about political intrigue and uncovering a murder plot. And a good amount of running around mashing the v key, that is still the game's staple gameplay mechanic. The last mission, though, is where the game starts to feel rushed. What should be an epic struggle of breaking through Corypheus's army is instead just a pleasant jog up a hill through maybe 10 packs of enemies. And the ancient temple just has the same incredibly easy puzzle three or four times with a slight increase in complexity each time.
I did notice several instances where my choices from the previous games seemed to be referenced in game. Probably the most notable examples are when you meet Hawke, and when Hawke takes you to meet Loghain. I'm told if you didn't spare Loghain there's a generic Gray Warden in his place, and I'm assuming Alistair might be a candidate as well if he didn't become king and stayed with the Gray Wardens. There were numerous other small changes as well, like the dwarf who wanted to be a mage showing up if you brought her to the circle. Overall a much better effort than with the Mass Effect series, where besides the cameos from ME2 characters in ME3, you'd at most get an email.
The characters are, as ever with Bioware, a mixed bag. And like the story, they tend to fill the same archetypes that Bioware always writes. Iron Bull is the mercenary who loves fighting. Cole wants to learn what it is to be human. Vivienne is the bitch. Sera is the oh-so-quirky one. In spite of that, most of them turn out to have more than one dimension if you make friends with them. Except Sera, who is pretty much exactly as annoying as she seems to be when you first meet her.
Blackwall turns out to not be a Gray Warden at all, but rather an officer guilty of treason who got his men killed and took up the name of a dead man in an effort to atone for his crimes. Cassandra seems like a religious zealot but is really far more reasonable than she seems, she's just desperate. And despite being the token gay, I found Dorian to be much less insufferable than I thought I would. Which is progress of a sort, I guess.
On the other hand, Sera was utterly insufferable and Cole's questioning of what it is to be human bored me. Leliana turning into a sociopathic murderer was also far more over the top than they probably meant it to be.
There isn't much to discuss when it comes to the combat system. It's very similar to DA2, with some polish here and there. Enemies have more health and don't spawn out of nowhere except from fade rifts, where it actually makes sense. Even then you only ever get two waves of enemies from those. There is also limited level scaling, from what I understand - areas have a minimum and maximum level, and things will scale to your party's level based on those caps. Combat difficulty seemed to depend heavily on my build - there were a few points where the game started getting hard and I'd respec my characters, and then it would be easier. Until near the end I found an incredibly broken build with the reaver specialty and suddenly combat became trivial.
I do want to spotlight what they call the tactical camera. It's an excellent idea - the camera zooms out and you're able to give orders to your characters RTS style, with the ability to queue multiple instructions. It's exactly the sort of thing I would love to have in a party based RTWP game. Unfortunately, like with so many other things Bioware has attempted, the execution is horribly botched. You can only zoom out a short way in tactical view, so you can almost never see enough of the battlefield and have to move the camera around. The controls in tactical view are horrible. And sometimes the AI will get bored halfway through executing your instructions and go back to what they were doing. Still, the feature itself is a great idea, so I do have to give them some credit for trying.
There are a few other things I could nitpick, like the inventory system sucking (when will Bioware figure out how to make a decent inventory?), or how the war table missions complete in real time (which was just an utterly stupid design decision), or the occasional glitch. But small annoyances don't really detract from the overall experience.
Overall I saw Inquisition as a game with a lot of potential that it failed to live up to. There are definitely some great ideas in the game, but they're either badly executed or buried under an avalanche of filler content. The game is definitely huge, I can see why it took three years to develop. But pointlessly exploring large areas for quests that will have zero impact on the main story can only get you so far. If they had cut maybe half of those areas and instead focused on expanding the main story, the game would have been far better for it. Perhaps an exploration of Corypheus's past to humanize him, along with the siege I mentioned earlier.
I didn't hate this game nearly as much as I hated ME3, in spite of many small similarities between the two. Part of that probably has to do with Inquisition's introduction and ending not being written by an idiot. But Inquisition also feels like a much more coherent game. It entertained me enough to make me wish it had been more. But that's very often the way I feel with Bioware games - they obviously have people with talent and good ideas. Why can't they produce a better game? Ultimately, however, disappointment is what I've come to expect from Bioware.
First of all, the keep. I actually really like this idea - it feels like a natural extension of the save import system Bioware has been building up since Mass Effect. It's also a great convenience because I don't have any DA1 or 2 saves anymore. I feel like the keep could have been implemented into the game itself, though.
The story is a paint-by-numbers 3 act Bioware plot that they've used in just about every game but ME2, complete with the destruction of your home in act 1, an ancient evil you must defeat, and you being the chosen one. It's only lacking a betrayal at the end of act 2 and the death of your mentor to hit every cliche in their playbook. Despite how archetypal it is, I did find it charming. At least your status as the chosen one is sort of explained - you're an exceptional individual who lucked into a position of leadership. The plot beats feel natural for the most part.
Corypheus is an utterly bland villain. I was completely disinterested in him from the start. He might as well have been the archdemon from DAO or the babby reaper from ME2 for how much characterization he receives. Fortunately he doesn't show up very often. And I was disappointed with how Skyhold is never attacked despite them making a big deal about how much of a fortress it is when you first arrive there. Not doing so seems like a huge missed opportunity; it would have given more meaning to strengthening the inquisition if your actions had a direct effect on how the seige played out. Even the NWN2 OC pulled that off. I really wouldn't be surprised if the designers originally intended the climax of the game to involve a siege of Skyhold, but it was cut for time.
The end of the game feels incredibly rushed. You go from the last story mission, where you foil the villain's backup plan, to the final battle with him. No buildup, no fighting through an army, not even a cutscene framing how you got there. You just start the mission, and you're in the middle of an abandoned castle with the villain. There had to have been more planned for that confrontation, because as it is it was incredibly anticlimactic.
The vast majority of the game is spent running around large open areas mashing the v key, sometimes getting into fights with bears. I imagine this is what took up the majority of development time - building these large open areas and populating them with stuff to explore. And I can definitely see why they did it; Bethesda has shown that the theme park RPG is potentially very lucrative. The execution is a bit botched, though. First of all, you need to collect resources to do just about anything - upgrade your potions, craft gear, upgrade Skyhold, and more. And collecting resources is fucking boring. I got enough of that when I used to play WoW. Around halfway through the game I just gave up collecting things, and then I found myself completely unprepared for the specialization quest, which of course required running a fetch quest as well as collecting a shitload of herbs for no reason.
While the environments are for the most part varied and some of the areas did seem to have interesting quest lines, I quickly grew bored with exploring them, and after a while only did quests so I'd have enough power to finish the main story. I'm usually a strict completionist (I even did every side-quest and explored every planet in ME1), but when I finished Inquisition I had done probably less than 50% of the side content. I just couldn't force myself to do more.
As for the story missions themselves, those were much stronger. Definitely an improvement over ME3's story missions, which basically involved bouncing all over the galaxy with little rhyme or reason to shoot at TIM's endless supply of Cerberus troops. The first two missions are mutually exclusive - side with the mages or the templars, which seems like a refreshing bit of C&C. I haven't played through the templar mission yet to see the consequences, but while I doubt it impacts the main plot very much beyond having you fight mages instead of templars, there did at least seem to be a decent amount of dialog that would need to change.
The other missions were nicely varied. While assaulting the Gray Warden stronghold you end up dumped in the fade, which I was completely unprepared for. Unlike the fade missions in DAO, this plays out more like a traditional dungeon. I'm not sure if that's a good thing; the fade in DAO was botched in execution but it's also one of the more interesting areas of that game. Then there's the mission to save the empress, which involves almost no combat and is mostly about political intrigue and uncovering a murder plot. And a good amount of running around mashing the v key, that is still the game's staple gameplay mechanic. The last mission, though, is where the game starts to feel rushed. What should be an epic struggle of breaking through Corypheus's army is instead just a pleasant jog up a hill through maybe 10 packs of enemies. And the ancient temple just has the same incredibly easy puzzle three or four times with a slight increase in complexity each time.
I did notice several instances where my choices from the previous games seemed to be referenced in game. Probably the most notable examples are when you meet Hawke, and when Hawke takes you to meet Loghain. I'm told if you didn't spare Loghain there's a generic Gray Warden in his place, and I'm assuming Alistair might be a candidate as well if he didn't become king and stayed with the Gray Wardens. There were numerous other small changes as well, like the dwarf who wanted to be a mage showing up if you brought her to the circle. Overall a much better effort than with the Mass Effect series, where besides the cameos from ME2 characters in ME3, you'd at most get an email.
The characters are, as ever with Bioware, a mixed bag. And like the story, they tend to fill the same archetypes that Bioware always writes. Iron Bull is the mercenary who loves fighting. Cole wants to learn what it is to be human. Vivienne is the bitch. Sera is the oh-so-quirky one. In spite of that, most of them turn out to have more than one dimension if you make friends with them. Except Sera, who is pretty much exactly as annoying as she seems to be when you first meet her.
Blackwall turns out to not be a Gray Warden at all, but rather an officer guilty of treason who got his men killed and took up the name of a dead man in an effort to atone for his crimes. Cassandra seems like a religious zealot but is really far more reasonable than she seems, she's just desperate. And despite being the token gay, I found Dorian to be much less insufferable than I thought I would. Which is progress of a sort, I guess.
On the other hand, Sera was utterly insufferable and Cole's questioning of what it is to be human bored me. Leliana turning into a sociopathic murderer was also far more over the top than they probably meant it to be.
There isn't much to discuss when it comes to the combat system. It's very similar to DA2, with some polish here and there. Enemies have more health and don't spawn out of nowhere except from fade rifts, where it actually makes sense. Even then you only ever get two waves of enemies from those. There is also limited level scaling, from what I understand - areas have a minimum and maximum level, and things will scale to your party's level based on those caps. Combat difficulty seemed to depend heavily on my build - there were a few points where the game started getting hard and I'd respec my characters, and then it would be easier. Until near the end I found an incredibly broken build with the reaver specialty and suddenly combat became trivial.
I do want to spotlight what they call the tactical camera. It's an excellent idea - the camera zooms out and you're able to give orders to your characters RTS style, with the ability to queue multiple instructions. It's exactly the sort of thing I would love to have in a party based RTWP game. Unfortunately, like with so many other things Bioware has attempted, the execution is horribly botched. You can only zoom out a short way in tactical view, so you can almost never see enough of the battlefield and have to move the camera around. The controls in tactical view are horrible. And sometimes the AI will get bored halfway through executing your instructions and go back to what they were doing. Still, the feature itself is a great idea, so I do have to give them some credit for trying.
There are a few other things I could nitpick, like the inventory system sucking (when will Bioware figure out how to make a decent inventory?), or how the war table missions complete in real time (which was just an utterly stupid design decision), or the occasional glitch. But small annoyances don't really detract from the overall experience.
Overall I saw Inquisition as a game with a lot of potential that it failed to live up to. There are definitely some great ideas in the game, but they're either badly executed or buried under an avalanche of filler content. The game is definitely huge, I can see why it took three years to develop. But pointlessly exploring large areas for quests that will have zero impact on the main story can only get you so far. If they had cut maybe half of those areas and instead focused on expanding the main story, the game would have been far better for it. Perhaps an exploration of Corypheus's past to humanize him, along with the siege I mentioned earlier.
I didn't hate this game nearly as much as I hated ME3, in spite of many small similarities between the two. Part of that probably has to do with Inquisition's introduction and ending not being written by an idiot. But Inquisition also feels like a much more coherent game. It entertained me enough to make me wish it had been more. But that's very often the way I feel with Bioware games - they obviously have people with talent and good ideas. Why can't they produce a better game? Ultimately, however, disappointment is what I've come to expect from Bioware.
turul
Augur
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2011
- Messages
- 149
Don't loose too much sleep over it. Beside the main-plot mission while flighting mages instead of templars, in the rest of the game, you will be fighting both mages and templars at certain spots on the map. And they respawn, just as everything else in all maps.
The developers didn't bother to make the progression in game feel like progress or make the player feel, that they have achieved something.
Loots? Laughable. Just as in previous Bioware games, you will seem like picking up a turd from the side of the road. And it will turn out to be a small statue worth of 300 credits, or a "rare" or "unique" weapon, which is most definitely be under-powered to whatever you can forge on your own.
I ended up spending way too much time doing side missions and leveled to lvl18, while I haven't even explored a bunch of other maps. Killed 3 dragons..and all 3 required the same strategy of killing them so I gave up trying to kill the rest,they were just utterly boring.
Using the "tactician pendant" or whatever it's called, I switched about 5-6 times of my and some of my followers' skills to match my enemies weaknesses, the game became super easy. It felt like cheating.
Trying to explore a new location got extremely boring, especially, when I saw that the monsters were level 12, while I was level 18. Actually, I just kept disengaging from fights, because there was no point killing them. Otherwise, they would drop some low level useless loot and they would respawn later anyway, just like everything else.
Finishing the main plot- being level 20- it was utterly laughable and downright ridiculous. I walked up to the villain smashed away the buttons. Drank 1 health potion during the entire fight. Actually I had to do the final fight twice, because the thoughest enemy of the game was DirectX11.
Any lengthy conversation with any characters would crash my game, forcing me to restart my PC.
So I skipped most of the cut scenes towards the end and randomly pushing on what to answer, even if I had no clue about the topic of the conversation. It made no difference anyway, beside Solas running away and have a long kiss with the old witch woman.
After the main plot finished, I forced myself to visit some maps I didn't really explore, but quit after 10 minutes, being utterly boring and hearing conversations about the rift and the end of the world, that I have already stopped from happening.
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Xorazm
Cipher
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2015
- Messages
- 106
The best that I can make of the reception to this game is that people who care a lot about the story and characters either liked it or at least found a lot to enjoy, and the people who care more about gameplay and strategy came away bewildered that anyone could possibly have fun with such a thing.
Seriously, the number of debates I've followed in the wake of Inquisition involving people arguing that combat and strategy just get in the way of what really matters in an RPG - the story - has been a deeply surreal experience. How a person could argue that the thing you spend the vast majority of the game doing is ultimately peripheral is just ....oh, look, the blood is leaking out of my ear again.
Dragon Age Inquisition is proof than Jennifer Hepler was right all along. There is no more succinct way to put it.
Seriously, the number of debates I've followed in the wake of Inquisition involving people arguing that combat and strategy just get in the way of what really matters in an RPG - the story - has been a deeply surreal experience. How a person could argue that the thing you spend the vast majority of the game doing is ultimately peripheral is just ....oh, look, the blood is leaking out of my ear again.
Dragon Age Inquisition is proof than Jennifer Hepler was right all along. There is no more succinct way to put it.
DragoFireheart
all caps, rainbow colors, SOMETHING.
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2007
- Messages
- 23,731
pippin
Guest
Well, someone should point them the existance of adventure games, starting with the fact that in most of them you can't even die.
imweasel
Guest
I haven't played too much of this turd, but I heard you can win practically every battle by holding down the mouse button and mashing the hotkeys in an arbitrary fashion - even with your eyes closed. You can apparently also win most battles by not even touching the controller. This is because the AI does all the work.
Hamburger must be proud.
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