Review RPG Codex Review: Dragon Age: Inquisition

[Shadenuat]

Too little said about writing and characters imo, there should have been more, since, like Mass Effect, these new bio games only fun part are character/party banter, while gameplay, for people who actually like RPGs, is more like a filler to skip.
Like, we know the gameplay is probably crappy WoW just by looking at screenshots, but maybe there is at least a broGarrus to drink and shoot bottles with?

 

[kain30]

so, in closure is an single-player MMO"RPG"

 

[felipepepe]

It's a mediocre single-player MMO"RPG". DA:I's combat can't hold a candle to most MMOs. Hell, in Cataclysm WoW revamped some of the old "collect 5 X" quests, so even quest-wise it's worse than a MMO.

But there's ROMANCE, so 10/10 GOTY BLESSED BY DORITOS POPE.

 

[Delterius]

That dude's a gem.


Quick, someone ping mondblut.

The problem isn't his terrible definition of RPG, it's his terrible taste in characters and story and the fact that you spend something like 70-80% of your time doing the "bad" parts of the game. If he just wants to interact with characters and experience a story, he should be mad about the amount of time wasting between those activities if nothing else.

Perhaps but my views are a bit different. In an universe of millions, people like him are bound to exist. Not everyone is going to 'know better' and not to be enamoured by what we consider to be utterly banal. My cousin's first videogame, really, was Skyrim and she had real fun doing shit like casting the first fire spell.

So taste is part of the problem, certainly, but is it really a good argument? Let's think a second of how people comprehend games. They do so in parts, not just to ease the framing of arguments, but rather as something you can use to categorize and judge whole experiences. I have a Story/Exploration/Combat review written above, but I do not shy away from a more hollistic point of view. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, Plot/Combat/Exploration work in concert in order to tell a certain Story. That means everything is part of the story, down to the flamboyant animations or the mindless combat. In that, as a 'storyfag', I believe Inquisition's storytelling is pretty bad. The areas were unwilling to allow me to lose myself in an immersive world and the encounters were so banal I often wondered why the demon invasion was even a problem, perhaps because my soldiers have too much 'standing around' to do? In face of that, the plot can't do much at all.

Does the plot have problems? Of course, I did say it was 'enjoyeable, not memorable', which is perhaps a polite way of saying 'slightly more than mediocre'. But those hardly matter for the whole of the experience.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Even the big German Gamestar magazine is running a series on the flaws of DA:I Inquisition – after giving it 85/100 in their review.

Part One skewers the BioWare'ian "Chosen One" topos and Part Two the obvious "Open World / MMO" design.

The author of course insists that DA:I is still a great game with likable characters and a believable world which can be shaped ofter one's morals (which kind of contradicts his article).

 

[GarfunkeL]

See, that is exactly what has been bugging me for a long time - there are game journos who can actually see the flaws in AAA productions and they occasionally get to even dissect the games - yet the publications, if not even the journos themselves, don't take these flaws into actual consideration.

 

[Nomad_Blizz]

How did bioware go from making classics like BG2 and KOTOR to pandering to sjws with Inquisition?

 

[GarfunkeL]

How did bioware go from making classics like BG2 and KOTOR to pandering to sjws with Inquisition?

KOTOR

I predict that in few more years DAO will be listed among the "classics". Maybe in 2024 DAI will be labelled by a newfag as a "Bioware classic" when they wonder what happened with Mass Dragon Fuckfest LXIV.

 

[felipepepe]

He's barely a month old, he'll learn... the Codex will teach him.

 

[Jaesun]

How did bioware go from making classics like BG2 and KOTOR to pandering to sjws with Inquisition?

Because EA's target audience is the general console gaming public. Not people who play cRPG's.

 

[toro]

How did bioware go from making classics like BG2 and KOTOR to pandering to sjws with Inquisition?

KOTOR

I predict that in few more years DAO will be listed among the "classics". Maybe in 2024 DAI will be labelled by a newfag as a "Bioware classic" when they wonder what happened with Mass Dragon Fuckfest LXIV.

Fuck the review. Who is she?

 

[Gentle Player]

Fuck the review. Who is she?

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0221903/?ref_=tt_ov_st

 

[Mortmal]

To bash the dead horse even more than it deserves to be . The 9/10 reviews arent fair but saying its not fun even as a mainstream game is wrong too. (snip...)

Saying it is fun for a mainstream game, however, is an oxymoron.

Well i play all kind of games , from popamole mainstream to ascii indies.Its a matter of tastes , its fun for a mainstream game. I remmber something funny , you should have seen the reaction of some coworker, who wasnt much into gaming, had when playing oblivion, he absolutely loved it. Having dragon age reviewed by delterius , is as relevant as if a mainstream reviewer who likes call of duty and nba games had to review Divinity, shadowrun or neo scavenger.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Having dragon age reviewed by delterius , is as relevant as if a mainstream reviewer who likes call of duty and nba games had to review Divinity, shadowrun or neo scavenger.

 

[VladimirK]

Yeah, but there's something about those MMO mechanics that goes beyond that. It took me a while to click to it, but once you see it, it's there staring you right in the face.

Pokie machines. They're fucking pokie machines.

[...]

They crossed the fucking line when they introduced real money auction houses. Once they did that, gambling addiction wasn't just their game design anymore, it became their business model.
[...]

You're absolutely correct, thank you for saying this. I'd just like to add one thing:

Valve. VALVE FUCKING SOFTWARE. The saviours of PC gaming have, in their heavenly wisdom, created this kind drop system for their headline titles TF2, CS:GO and Dota 2:



The experience it not just similar to gambling. It's identical. The case is the slot machine and that guy's the sweating, nervous, "It's gonna be a big one, I can feel it!" 'player'. The jackpot here is a knife--CS:GO cases have a tiny probability of dropping a knife and knives are extremely coveted and expensive--hundreds to thousands of dollars IRL money.

It's come to the point where the ONLY way to get many items is through opening random-drop crates.

 

[Machocruz]

So how long before some insider spills the beans on how EA politicked to get a bunch of GoTY awards? For one thing, since when does a game with a review score aggregate in the 80s and positive but not ecstatic reviews on release blow past the rest of the field to be THE GoTY award winner? Say what you will about Skyrim or TLoU, but at least the awards were consistent with the level of praise they received at launch. Another thing: the higher scoring games were Jap/Nintendo games. Remember all the "Japan is dead" talk we've seen in the media...? And then there is the fact -yes, FACT- that DAI is full of lazy, remedial design.

Whatever the case, this game is the Kramer vs. Kramer, the Crash of game award winners.

 

[mondblut]

What does it say about these people that they think, as if by magic, they could fuck anything they wanted to and couldn't possibly be rejected. Worse yet, that such a state should be preferable enough to the real world to encourage escaping to.

That's the whole point of power fantasy, duh. Bioware just replaces the straight male power fantasy with demigender transfat power fantasy.

 

[Xorazm]

For one thing, since when does a game with a review score aggregate in the 80s and positive but not ecstatic reviews on release blow past the rest of the field to be THE GoTY award winner?

Dragon Age winning GOTY in 2014 tells you a whole lot more about 2014 than it does about Dragon Age.

AAA releases were just weak in 2014, full stop. Inquisition was the only established AAA franchise in the running which didn't completely fall flat on its face by oozing bugs and compatibility issues. Inquisition coming out in the same year as a GTAV or The Last of Us - no chance whatsoever. Not even in the running.

The only thing that really took me off guard was when Rock Paper Shotgun, the self-declared standard bearers for PC gaming, gave their RPG of the year award to DA:I. We just had our first good year for cRPGs in a decade, the first year that generally pleased the notoriously rambunctious RPGCodex, and the best RPG they could find was a flimsy offline MMO that treated the PC as an afterthought? You have a whole raft of games that did their very best to cater to the strengths of the PC as a medium, and the award goes to the game that seemed to hastily throw together a PC interface a few hours before launch? They even admitted it wasn't all that great a game:

>>You could gorge yourself on it and end up feeling profoundly bilious and if you were to analyse all of the ingredients too closely, you might well find that there’s nothing particularly nutritious or substantial, but it tastes great. And it’s somehow soothing.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/12/22/best-rpg-2014-dragon-age-inquisition/


I would have expected more outrage. DA2 was met with howls of anger and I still think it was a better RPG than Inquisition.

I guess a lot of people like comfort food.

 

[turul]

To understand the situation, there were hardly any good games in any genre, so choosing a GOTY award in 2014 was pretty much like finding the most liked piece of shit among an entire pile of shit.

On the other hand, this game won't have a longevity and be quickly forgotten, especially the fact, that modders can't and probably won't do anything with it.

Just browsing through quickly the nexus modding site, there are 400 mods available for it, all of them are cosmetic changes, like "Morrigan's eyelashes". Why? Because it's the Frostbite engine and its known to be a "tempering proof" engine.

Don’t expect to see many ‘Dragon Age: Inquisition’ PC mods, says developer
http://www.examiner.com/article/don...dragon-age-inquisition-pc-mods-says-developer

Inquisition No plans for a frostbit mode tool for dragon age Inquisition (self.dragonage)

submitted 7 months ago by Arrow_x86

So I asked the creative director on Dragon Age Inquisition Mike Laidlaw on Twitter about the Prospect of a frostBit mod tool for the game Here what he said

https://twitter.com/Mike_Laidlaw/status/480900852186480641

"No, there will not be at launch. We've already talked about that in several interviews."

when I couldn't find this interviews and all I can find is that there will be no mod tool for the game I asked him "all i can find is that there will be no mod tool for it at all . say it ain't so." he tweeted

https://twitter.com/Mike_Laidlaw/status/481082081905094659

"We have announced no plans for a mod tool."

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

There were several good RPGs released in 2014. Excidium?

 

[Ninjerk]

There were several good RPGs released in 2014. Excidium?

Tell me you already knew he self-ejected

 

[Machocruz]

For one thing, since when does a game with a review score aggregate in the 80s and positive but not ecstatic reviews on release blow past the rest of the field to be THE GoTY award winner?

Dragon Age winning GOTY in 2014 tells you a whole lot more about 2014 than it does about Dragon Age.

AAA releases were just weak in 2014, full stop. Inquisition was the only established AAA franchise in the running which didn't completely fall flat on its face by oozing bugs and compatibility issues. Inquisition coming out in the same year as a GTAV or The Last of Us - no chance whatsoever. Not even in the running.

Couple problems here. Bayonetta 2 blew it out of the water. So did Tropical Freeze. As did Guilty Gear Xrd. As did Divinity. Most of these were polished, tightly designed, challenging games. Even the sloppiness of Dark Souls 2 doesn't reach the level of half-assing that Bioware engaged in, and its core mechanics were vastly superior. There were plenty of superior products. You have the people handing out the awards admitting that there is a ton of dross in the game, but they don't care.

Second problem is the idea that only established AAA franchises in certain genres, that have a console release qualify. This also tells me about the games media. It it's a PC exclusive and it doesn't have the words Half or Life in the title, it won't receive serious consideration.

To understand the situation, there were hardly any good games in any genre, so choosing a GOTY award in 2014 was pretty much like finding the most liked piece of shit among an entire pile of shit.

It wasn't the most liked, and that's my point. Well, it wasn't the most liked until suddenly it's a GoTY contender. But so far it's not among the biggest sellers and the critical reception at launch was good but not ecstatic. What's the user score and sales compared to Mario Kart 8 (not saying that game should be a contender, but it got a bigger response from the masses)?

So if we know the biases (pro AAA console/pro "narrative" genres/anti-Japan/anti-PC exclusive), and we know it didn't achieve mass popularity, and we know that there is rampant conflict of interest in game news industry, and we know it got good but not top scores, and we know there were better put together games, then we know it's not about a weak year, which leaves ulterior motives/political shenanigans or superficial values (big = good).

I mean, this is all just a mental exercise since I know that you know this shit is a farce. We're already getting the usual post-release week backtracking about how maybe the game was kind of shitty, but no it's still really good.

 

[Infinitron]

So if we know the biases (pro AAA console/pro "narrative" genres/anti-Japan/anti-PC exclusive), and we know it didn't achieve mass popularity, and we know that there is rampant conflict of interest in game news industry, and we know it got good but not top scores, and we know there were better put together games, then we know it's not about a weak year, which leaves ulterior motives/political shenanigans or superficial values (big = good).

Even with those biases you had a better candidate: Shadow of Mordor, which unlike DA:I manages to be a well-executed ripoff. It did get some GOTYs, though.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

There were several good RPGs released in 2014. Excidium?

Tell me you already knew he self-ejected

Yes just that were he here he would likely have said averything released in 2014 is p. shit. We having a little fun.

 

[Machocruz]

Even with those biases you had a better candidate: Shadow of Mordor, which unlike DA:I manages to be a well-executed ripoff. It did get some GOTYs, though.

It did get its due. Even though I don't care for Arkham combat or Creed traversal, it was better made popamole. Brought something to the table with the Nemesis system. Someone here said that Din's Curse had a similar system. Anyway, DAI is middling and also-ran in every respect. I get that they want to push the whole narrative, games-cause-feels aspect of this medium, but it's mediocre in that regard too.