The Dragon Age: Inquisition Thread

[Xorazm]

Well, that's just depressing. By all appearances this game might actually brought some new ideas to the table - hell, might have even been good. Somewhere locked within Bioware are a few people with some genuinely decent gameplay ideas, clawing and scratching at the windows to be set free (although it's interesting to note that one of the ideas which was evidently too radical for Inquisition is one of the first things you do in Divinity Original Sin). The keep strength timer might have helped with one of those most retarded aspects of Inquisition by putting some actual stakes into your questing, whereas in the shipped product the war has absolutely no urgency. What's that? The sky is falling apart and our army is on its last legs? Time for our most valuable asset and de facto leader to go flower picking.

Now the question becomes whether these innovative elements were cut for time-constraint reasons, or if an memo came down from EA with the headline CUT EVERYTHING THAT CAN'T BE FACEROLLED VIA SWORD-SPINS and all the intriguing environmental interaction ideas were the first on the chopping block. I also wonder if there wasn't kicking and screaming from people who worried that the keep-strength timer might interfere with the OCD gamers' ability to do absolutely every last thing in every single map.

I doubt we'll ever know.

 

[kris]

I said this when I wrote my part of the review. I do remember this old video and it clearly seemed like they took out the fun parts of the areas and the actual decisions. There are even at least one relic from that in the first choice as that clearly claims the two choices have different consequences. While the combat still would have been shit, this thing is the real difference between DAI having been a good game and what it became, a chore.

 

[eskar]

I'm still wondering where all the GOTY awards are coming from. DA:I is really not demonstrably good at anything but the VA and the graphics, and neither can save that ship from sinking, plus even in those aspects it's not the best or most outstanding. Surely the 100+ websites that gave their GOTYs are not so easily hypnotized by these superficial features? The open world tries to emulate Skyrim's but it's dead and soulless - it's on life support and the only thing keeping it breathing is the aesthetics. The combat is repetitive and mindless. The story is by far the worst cliche BioWare story to date, with a comical villain and a few very contrived plot lines. Even if these reviewers managed to get past this - even though it's the majority of the game - in favor of the thing BioWare does "best", the characters, even in that aspect it's nothing GOTY worthy.

Am I missing something? Are these reviewers under some sort of spell? EA must have payed for some of them but I doubt their intention was to pay off some random Ukranian or Polish websites for GOTY awards.

 

[Karwelas]

I'm still wondering where all the GOTY awards are coming from. DA:I is really not demonstrably good at anything but the VA and the graphics, and neither can save that ship from sinking, plus even in those aspects it's not the best or most outstanding. Surely the 100+ websites that gave their GOTYs are not so easily hypnotized by these superficial features? The open world tries to emulate Skyrim's but it's dead and soulless - it's on life support and the only thing keeping it breathing is the aesthetics. The combat is repetitive and mindless. The story is by far the worst cliche BioWare story to date, with a comical villain and a few very contrived plot lines. Even if these reviewers managed to get past this - even though it's the majority of the game - in favor of the thing BioWare does "best", the characters, even in that aspect it's nothing GOTY worthy.

Am I missing something? Are these reviewers under some sort of spell? EA must have payed for some of them but I doubt their intention was to pay off some random Ukranian or Polish websites for GOTY awards.

Three words: Stupidy, ignorance and money.

 

[Gondolin]

Am I missing something? Are these reviewers under some sort of spell? EA must have payed for some of them but I doubt their intention was to pay off some random Ukranian or Polish websites for GOTY awards.

EA is a high level wizard who can cast "Dollaritos" and "Mountain Dew Cashflow" at will.

 

[imweasel]

Am I missing something? Are these reviewers under some sort of spell? EA must have payed for some of them but I doubt their intention was to pay off some random Ukranian or Polish websites for GOTY awards.

Almost the entire game reviewing industry is corrupt or under immense pressure from big publishers like EA.

All The Pretty Doritos: How Video Game Journalism Went Off The Rails

 

[Sykar]

Am I missing something? Are these reviewers under some sort of spell? EA must have payed for some of them but I doubt their intention was to pay off some random Ukranian or Polish websites for GOTY awards.

EA is a high level wizard who can cast "Dollaritos" and "Mountain Dew Cashflow" at will.

That's what Quicken and Maximize metamagic feats are there for.

 

[Ninjerk]

 

[Xorazm]

Am I missing something? Are these reviewers under some sort of spell? EA must have payed for some of them but I doubt their intention was to pay off some random Ukranian or Polish websites for GOTY awards.

Almost the entire game reviewing industry is corrupt or under immense pressure from big publishers like EA.

I dunno guys, that's all a little too easy. One of the biggest mysteries to me is why DA:I hasn't been met by nearly the same degree of kicking and screaming that met DA:2. If it was just EA's magical dollars bamboozling journos then surely the gaming public would still be furious, right? And while the reaction has been mixed, you're certainly not seeing the outrage that met Mass Effect 3 or Dragon Age 2 (or even The Old Republic).

The thing that really does my head in is that when the guy made the stupid "push a button, something awesome happens!" comment, everybody ripped into him. When Jennifer Hepler complained that the tactical combat just got in the way of really mattered, which was the story, people ripped into her.

But then Bioware went and did exactly that - releasing a game in which the combat has been reduced to awesome button fluff so that it doesn't get in the way of what really matters, which is the story. They did precisely the thing that everybody got so mad about, and apart from the Chans and the Codex there's nothing approaching the disgust that met Dragon Age 2 (I'd even argue that Dragon Age 2 was a better game and certainly a better RPG).

I genuinely don't get it. And I don't mean that as a rhetorical device, I mean that I'm seriously at a loss to explain this.

 

[Space Satan]

I dunno guys, that's all a little too easy. One of the biggest mysteries to me is why DA:I hasn't been met by nearly the same degree of kicking and screaming that met DA:2. If it was just EA's magical dollars bamboozling journos then surely the gaming public would still be furious, right? And while the reaction has been mixed, you're certainly not seeing the outrage that met Mass Effect 3 or Dragon Age 2 (or even The Old Republic).

They got smarter - they paid in advance.

 

[Delterius]

I'd say that both games are much alike in terms of design philosophy, but Dragon Age II was shittily made.

 

[Infinitron]

Xorazm It's all about the sense of scope. It's perceived to be okay to lack depth when you compensate for it with breadth.

 

[untalkative_bunny]

Am I missing something? Are these reviewers under some sort of spell? EA must have payed for some of them but I doubt their intention was to pay off some random Ukranian or Polish websites for GOTY awards.

Almost the entire game reviewing industry is corrupt or under immense pressure from big publishers like EA.

I dunno guys, that's all a little too easy. One of the biggest mysteries to me is why DA:I hasn't been met by nearly the same degree of kicking and screaming that met DA:2. If it was just EA's magical dollars bamboozling journos then surely the gaming public would still be furious, right? And while the reaction has been mixed, you're certainly not seeing the outrage that met Mass Effect 3 or Dragon Age 2 (or even The Old Republic).

The thing that really does my head in is that when the guy made the stupid "push a button, something awesome happens!" comment, everybody ripped into him. When Jennifer Hepler complained that the tactical combat just got in the way of really mattered, which was the story, people ripped into her.

But then Bioware went and did exactly that - releasing a game in which the combat has been reduced to awesome button fluff so that it doesn't get in the way of what really matters, which is the story. They did precisely the thing that everybody got so mad about, and apart from the Chans and the Codex there's nothing approaching the disgust that met Dragon Age 2 (I'd even argue that Dragon Age 2 was a better game and certainly a better RPG).

I genuinely don't get it. And I don't mean that as a rhetorical device, I mean that I'm seriously at a loss to explain this.

I'm guessing a lot of people stopped caring after DA2. & I don't think you need to bribe journos to like DA3. They want easy, pretty, & kinda interesting games; and you would too if you had to play dozens of garbage games every year as a job.

 

[Sykar]

 

[Crevice tab]

I'm guessing a lot of people stopped caring after DA2. & I don't think you need to bribe journos to like DA3. They want easy, pretty, & kinda interesting games; and you would too if you had to play dozens of garbage games every year as a job.

There's nothing interesting in DA:I.

Otherwise agreed.

 

[DeepOcean]

I dunno guys, that's all a little too easy. One of the biggest mysteries to me is why DA:I hasn't been met by nearly the same degree of kicking and screaming that met DA:2. If it was just EA's magical dollars bamboozling journos then surely the gaming public would still be furious, right? And while the reaction has been mixed, you're certainly not seeing the outrage that met Mass Effect 3 or Dragon Age 2 (or even The Old Republic).

In reality, Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 got some heat not because of failings on their gameplay. Most people hated Dragon Age 2 because of the ridiculous production values it got looking like a shovelware game published by Deep Silver on some places and some people hated Mass Effect 3 because Bioware got itself on a corner with that whole importing save bullshit, the idiots Bioware obviously lied to demanded real consequence on their choices... those fools just ignored how Bioware rolls. They hated the ending not even because it is pure schlock but because it, conviniently for Bioware, doesn't show what happens to their waifus. Shitty gameplay is completely irrelevant for the average Biodrone.

Modern Bioware has a farm of illiterate storyfags that are a valuable cash cows but I don't think the reaction of the general public was that enthusiastic as the random Biodrone mouth breather. The Assassin Creed and Skyrim public this game obviously tried to catter to didn't gave a fuck because Skyrim players are obcessed with immersion and LARPING and Ass Creed players are obcessed with historic virtual tourism something that Dragon Age Inquisition doesn't has.

 

[Rahdulan]

I dunno guys, that's all a little too easy. One of the biggest mysteries to me is why DA:I hasn't been met by nearly the same degree of kicking and screaming that met DA:2. If it was just EA's magical dollars bamboozling journos then surely the gaming public would still be furious, right? And while the reaction has been mixed, you're certainly not seeing the outrage that met Mass Effect 3 or Dragon Age 2 (or even The Old Republic).

The thing that really does my head in is that when the guy made the stupid "push a button, something awesome happens!" comment, everybody ripped into him. When Jennifer Hepler complained that the tactical combat just got in the way of really mattered, which was the story, people ripped into her.

But then Bioware went and did exactly that - releasing a game in which the combat has been reduced to awesome button fluff so that it doesn't get in the way of what really matters, which is the story. They did precisely the thing that everybody got so mad about, and apart from the Chans and the Codex there's nothing approaching the disgust that met Dragon Age 2 (I'd even argue that Dragon Age 2 was a better game and certainly a better RPG).

I genuinely don't get it. And I don't mean that as a rhetorical device, I mean that I'm seriously at a loss to explain this.

I can't for the life of me remember who the author is, but one guy reviewed Inquisition for some group and he said it really simply in his opening.

Prior to playing Dragon Age: Inquisition I heard a lot of people say a lot of different things about it; from how it was way better than Dragon Age 2 to that it's on par with Origins, etc. Having actually played the game myself I can safely say those people are wrong – Inquisition is almost as bad as DA2. It just happens to be a different kind of bad.

 

[pippin]

Well, Inquisition is the "real" Dragon Age 2, make of that what you will. The DA2 we all know was meant to be just another expansion for Origins, but for some reason (EA) the devs were forced to release it as a different game. Same old story, when it comes to EA. Still, most of the capable people had left Bio at that point and they have become what we know now.

However, I do wonder why they went with the single player MMO design. I mean, Amalur had that too, with the same colorful fantasy background DA has, and it was considered as a "failure". With this precedent, tt's weird the jewmasters at EA allowed Bio to do Inquisition.
Also, it should be noted that, even with the DA2 an ME3 incidents, the average gamer still doesn't consider Bio to be a "failed" company. At least in my opinion.

 

[Xorazm]

However, I do wonder why they went with the single player MMO design. I mean, Amalur had that too, with the same colorful fantasy background DA has, and it was considered as a "failure".

My best guess is that, after people criticized DA:2 for being too "narrow" their first design decision was to go with the biggest spaces that they could. Once you're already locked into that design decision, however, suddenly you've got a problem with getting your party through all those combat encounters. Also, now you've got to populate those massive environments with quests and discoveries of some kind.

Now you could go the Morrowind/Gothic route and meticulously craft the entire world with hand-crafted, meaningful discoveries and combat encounters. But notice the problem you run into immediately - both Elder Scrolls and Gothic games are primarily solo games, whereas Bioware's primary fanbase are people looking for friendship-simulators. So now they're tied to both a party system and massive environments.

The only solution they could come up with was to ape MMOs with mindless awesome-button cooldown combat, because otherwise forcing people into genuinely challenging combat encounters would (I'm guessing that they thought) slow everything up too much. You either make the combats meaningful, in which case they're spread out so much that the environments feel empty, or you make them frequent but so stupid a five year old could beat them. Ho ho, did you guys just see me smash that skeleton with my hotbar axe move!! NEVER GETS OLD, MAN! NEVER GETS OLD!

Similarly, you could fill up all those environments with meaningful, hand-crafted quests, but then you run into two problems: (1) it would take a massive amount of time and thought to fill all that space with non-fluff and (2) the casual players would never be able to remember it all. Even something as kinda-challenging as piecing together the relevance of the Ascended Sleepers to the resurrection of the Sixth House in Morrowind would, I have to imagine, blow the minds out of the Bioware audience.

So the solution was to just do what MMOs do, because MMOs are lucrative as hell so people must be playing them. Bioware must figure that people who play their games for the gameplay tuned out years ago, so you can give your core audience something grand, striking and meaningless, and so long as it has romance and a pandering storyline, they can expect a success.

Just spitballing here, but I think the design decisions all start to make sense if you begin with the assumptions (a) the decision to go with a massive open world was baked in from day one and (b) Bioware's fear that filling that world with any sort of challenge or depth would alienate their audience. If those two are true, then the rest of kinda of falls into place.

 

[Lord Carlos Wafflebum]

The impression I got was Bioware just couldn't focus on what they wanted to copy. They started out wanting to make Dragon Age: Skyrim and have a whole bunch more reactivity.

Then they realized that world reactivity would keep them from realistically copying their old stuff, specifically a bunch of super involved companions. They didn't want to upset their fanbase and nixed a bunch of the new and interesting mechanics in favor of developing a bunch of companions.

Then they wanted to push their diversity nonsense, and watered down their companions to force them into their clearly labeled boxes.

Then they realized they had a whole bunch of partly put together concepts and the due date was coming up. They said, "Oh boy-o, better push back that release date and figure out what game we're making!" and no one could agree on what game they wanted to make so they just mashed together all the shallow concepts they had, called it good enough and tried to make it all look as pretty as possible hoping no one would notice DAI is an intensely schizophrenic game.

 

[Cyberarmy]

They should've tried to copy Dragon's Dogma instead of Skyrim at first. At least that'd made gameplay tolarable for most of the players.

 

[Tommy Wiseau]

Is Laidlaw(esome) the developer whose genius plan was it to shift the focus of the series to mundane Fedex side quests and introduce enemies with bloated hit points since Dragon Age 2? It's a shame the effort expended in designing these graphics is tied to such a bland game.

 

[turul]

So the solution was to just do what MMOs do, because MMOs are lucrative as hell so people must be playing them.

I had updates coming from their Facebook page a couple of years back. When the first images and videos surfaced, most people assumed, that they were making an MMO. There was no denial or acknoweldgement from the dev team or the Facebook PR guys, what they were making.
Many called out on the ugly textures used for the character models. They were obsolete looking already, compared to Mass Effect or even Skyrim, which had the excuse of their game being optimized for 6+ year old obsolete consoles and a and derived from a 10 year old Gamebyro engine.

DA:I characters are actually uglier than Dragon Age 2, less optimized, more simplfied.

Some were speculating, that the lack of graphics is done in sacrifice of performance if the game will feature MMO- like multiplayer capabilities of 20-30 people logging on to a map, since the Frostbite Engine (Battlefield series) was designed specifically for this feature (among with destructable environments, optimized net-code for 20+ player- team battles) while Dragon Age :I hardly utilizies any of the capabilities, beside having multiple maps to walk around with 3 bots and kill other mindless bots (Battlefield's weak point has always been AI bots, hence the lackluster single player campaigns in any Battlefield versions) .
IMO, Dragon Age :I may be a failed MMO experiment, and halfway through the development was restructured to be mostly single and max 4 player co-op game.

 

[Makabb]

Newest and biggest patch will introduce new critical features such as


tinting your hat

 

[Roguey]

Since it's also adding autoattack I might very well get this (after or around November of this year) after all.

They gotta add click-to-loot as well.