Dragon Age Inquisition

[Shrinweck]

Probably best not to get into more "Was DA2 good or bad?" discussion, but I think it can be almost universally agreed upon that it was disappointing. In any case, this next version seems to be an attempt to re-establish Bioware as a company that isn't so squarely under the boot of EA. I think the most glaring example of this is that there is no Day Zero DLC for the game. There are a lot of improvements made since DA2. They've basically been promising since day one of the announcement of the game that there will be no more backtracking through rehashed maps. Also back is actual character creation (races (including Qunari, those weirdos with the horns), classes, etc.).

They're introducing multiplayer to the game, too, which actually looks fairly cool. It kind of looks like MMORPG instances/dungeons where you get to go straight to the action, unlike ME3 multiplayer which basically had you defending a patch of land for 30 minutes while doing typically lame objectives. Also unlike ME3, the singleplayer will not be affected by the multiplayer.

The main point of this post is that if you're going to be playing this and expect to import your save, they have changed the importing system (thank god). They've made this website www.dragonagekeep.com where you essentially get to pick and choose what happened in the past. And god damn are there a lot of choices. Will they all have a major impact on the game? Let's face it, almost certainly not. But it's definitely cool. My actually completed games got buried in the literally dozens of characters I've created for Origins and DA2, so it took me a good 30 or so minutes to tweak the worlds how I remembered them. Expect to use Google to remind yourself what a bunch of these choices even mean.

[Shrinweck]

Reviews are out and they're positive (PC Gamer gave it an 87), but trusting big time reviewer scores is kind of like going up to a fat person while they're eating fast food and asking how they're enjoying it. It does sound like the game will be up my alley, though. All I really wanted was more Dragon Age and for them to not make the game stupider than DA2. I will say that releasing a game for review before its release is a step in the right direction.

Also PC Gamer released a guide for Dragon Age Keep which could be helpful for people who don't remember dozens of hours of Dragon Age questing.

[bovine]

I've played through a bit of the intro (2-3 hours), and I'm not really sure about this game. The tactical combat feels good, but I think I'm just not firmly attached to the universe and its disjointed storytelling between entries. I am not entirely sure what is going on, story-wise, because of how separate this is from the other games. The templars and the mages were getting together at an enclave to do something? What were they doing? Did this have something to do with whatever business that Hawke was tied up in in 2? Maybe I just need to pay better attention to the story.

The combat feels like it is trying to give people the option of a shitty, action version or a timely tactical route this feels more similar to how I played the first game.

I miss mass effect.

[Eric]

This is the first Bioware game without Ray Muzyka & Greg Zeschuk, so I'm definitely keeping an eye out for criticisms.

The intro on Xbox One seems fun enough, but I'm interested in the entire overarching picture.

I actually didn't have the biggest of problems with DA2's combat, I thought it was more fun then the original's where very often 2-3 seconds into combat a mage would pop up and annihilate 2/3 of my party and I could do bugger all to stop it heh.

[Shrinweck]

The PC Gamer article basically just opened up with that the game bombards you with a dumb amount of lore in the opening and you just have to power through (while probably paying attention :D ) for a while. I can see how people who haven't gotten into the story would be apprehensive about the game. It definitely sounds to me like they're doing that thing that gets done in anime a lot where they're throwing you into the deep end of the plot lore-wise with little explanation and just hoping that the player will stick it out long enough to figure things out.

I'll have more of an opinion on that on Tuesday probably.

I quite liked DA2s combat, too. It flowed nicely and melee combat had this really great weight to it. All I was really getting at was DA2 was a fine game, but an extremely shitty sequel in terms of being compared to the original. I kind of feel like Mass Effect 2 was the same way, in terms of gameplay. Also getting stuck being Hawke after the amazing character creation in Origins was just the lamest. I think DA2 would have been better received if it wasn't labeled as a sequel at all and was just labeled as, like, a full price expansion that happens between (and partially during) Origins and Inquisition.

[kali o.]

My opinion will form soon enough. Sadly, I know someone plans to buy it for me as an Xmas present...I guess I could pirate it in the meantime, but I gotta be careful...

I am fine getting DA:I as a gift, since I hope the multiplayer adds some replay value. I am running through DA:O again (...so boring) and then DA2 (agree the combat feels better) in preparation. I tried out the Keep...a bit cumbersome to use. I don't like it...they should just add that interface/function in the game, not have some website, but whatever.

For fun, here is a link to some of our original impressions of DA2. I dug it up while trying to remember what I originally thought of DA1 and 2:

http://www.tows.cc/forum/viewtopic.php? ... 1&p=151721

[Shrinweck]

DA:O isn't a game that's very fun to replay imo. Without the aid of curiosity in the story, the gameplay falls apart. There's just so much menial boring shit to do in that game. For every minute you're doing something interesting like a good fight or conversation, there's like 10 milling about, muling items for quests, doing a 3/10 puzzle for the second (or more) time, etc. etc.

I replayed through DA2 a year or so ago and it had better replay value. There are a lot of small things that change based on how you go through the game and at times that's enough to fascinate me through an additional playthrough or four. They also did a decent job of, while not eliminating it, making it so that the constant wandering around turning stuff in can be done efficiently. Also the focus on character interaction is a REALLY good step in the right direction for gaming, even if in the end DA2 wasn't a game that I would call super amazing.

I kind of agree about the Keep. It's quite neat, but they really could have made it quicker to use/navigate. I went through our DA2 impressions somewhat recently but I can't for the life of me remember why.

I still stand by Isabella being that annoying overly (boring was a stupid word) sexual cliche character, even if her story had a few decent moments.

I bought DA:I during one of those overly long PC release droughts to make myself feel better about potentially buying a bunch of games around now... but now that we're actually in November I don't really actually want to buy any of these Ubisoft games. Tales from the Borderlands (Telltale Games Borderlands game) looks kinda cool, but I'm not buying one of their new franchises for full price (MAYBE Game of Thrones if that actually happens).

but I gotta be careful...

lol

[Shrinweck]

Oops, I typed out a couple paragraphs of my impressions and lost them because I wanted to restart for a windows update *facepalm*

tl;dr Game is fun as fuck. Had to move it to my SSD so that load times wouldn't be 40-60 seconds.

[kali o.]

Really? Most of the fan feedback ive seen has been fairly blah. The most common thing seems to be people confused about how this game is dragon age, as the story/lore seems to be totally unconnected.

Of course, perhaps most folks love it and those people have been too busy playing.

[Shrinweck]

Internet just likes bitching. They think the story/lore isn't connected because they just aren't/haven't been paying attention. I imagine it would be easy to get overwhelmed by all the new shit to do, but at its core anyone who doesn't think this is just as Dragon Age-y as the other two games isn't worth listening to. I think it's the difference between people who spent 1-2 hours getting bombarded by lore before shit posting on Metacritic or whatever and the people who've put 10+ hours into the game and have gotten used to the differences.

The only really big reason to not like this game if you had it on the PC would be if you didn't have a SSD. Ehhh, I guess all the padding could get tiresome if all you wanted to do is power through the main storyline. For people who want to attempt absorbing everything, it's well done. The majority of the fluff is optional, though if you can resist it you probably don't really care for Bioware games to begin with.

In the end, if you liked the other two games there'd really be no reason to not like this one. The combat mechanics are basically straight out of DA2, with a tactical mode that's kind of out of Origins. The companions are definitely more interesting than either Origins or DA2.

Dragon Age has always been a kind of merging of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. Origins focused more on the Lord of the Rings side of things and DA2 focused on the GoT. This one balances both out pretty nicely.

While I usually find Reddit to be something best ignored, I think the Reddit page during release week is usually indicative of a game's health. The fact that basically all the front page posts are positive or sharing in nature tells me that the game is probably going to settle in as respected. I think, in the end, not many people actually like RPGs. They see high-ish reviews and think "I should like that" but they skip all the reading and paying attention and just want all the stupid shit.

[Shrinweck]

Most of the people complaining about the game are going OCD in the first area (Hinterlands) of the game and trying to complete everything. This is, according to an excellent post in Reddit, the equivalent of spending 8 hours killing rats in the tavern cellar. The optional missions are largely tedium incarnate and you don't miss anything except for maybe a couple paragraphs of flavor dialog/lore text if you skip it. A lot of the time, not even that. The Inquisition isn't going to fail because you didn't do the quest to return a wedding ring to a fucking widow. This is kind of like reading the first part of Fellowship of the Ring and stopping because it's about short people throwing a party for some old guy.

So, basically, spend as little time doing boring shit as you want because the game has a ton of it, and it's all optional. You aren't going to be getting any gear from a farmer, and you're just overleveling yourself for content that would have actually been enjoyable if you hadn't gone ham on tedious bullshit.

What Bioware should have done is level scaling like DA2 so you could do everything whenever you wanted. Or just not include overwhelming amounts of optional shit.

Signed, someone who 95%'d a bunch of the first areas and enjoyed doing 90% of it.

[kali o.]

Initial impressions: I dunno, I think I have to disagree with you here. I think you are being far too generous. I've put about 15 hours in - yup, most of hinterlands (minus a few rifts, dragon area and redcliff) and stormcoast. My criticisms dont really have to do with content but the game itself.

Criticisms:
- the entire game feels "off" and sloppy. You can tell it was designed as an MMO early on.
- bugs. Alot of bugs and glitches and performance issues.
- tactics dont really exist and alot of skill were removed. This is MMO style arcadey and grindy
- Unpolished and the game is bad at explaining mechanics
- it is a little too early, but I do have some concerns about the story

I wont have a firm impression until I finish a playthrough...but this is definitely an odd game so far.

[Shrinweck]

You haven't even played through 5% of the story. You don't have access to the specialist class trees since you're not progressing through the story. You're focusing on the grindy MMO bits on purpose and ignoring actual progression. Once you actually get to said progression, you're going to be over-leveled and any tactics would be rendered optional (although to be fair, Dragon Age games have always been overly simplified in this department). Did you see my recommendation and go against it just so you could have the opposite opinion? :P I realize not doing things in a game is a little weird but there's no reason not to put them off.

I wouldn't call the story a masterpiece but the general idea that it wasn't very "Dragon Age" was just ignorant.

I would never call it a 10/10 game, but if you play it as you come upon stuff instead of grinding everything on each map, then I maintain that it's really fun.

They were never games where you had 12+ skills and you had to rotate through them depending on the situation. Even Origins which is by far the most sound tactics-wise was pretty meh in that department.

I wouldn't compare it to an MMO. I think they tried to put Skyrim-like exploration/crafting/freeform-nonsense into it and failed because there's no level scaling. Gigantic open-worldish RPGs are always released in a very sloppy form. The weird stuff I ended up getting used to. Once I learned to tab target in certain situations, the combat flowed a lot more nicely. I've never happened upon something that actually stopped my gameplay and warranted a re-load, which in the end is the only REALLY terrible bug a game like this can have.

I will agree that for the first dozen plus hours the game felt off. The performance problems definitely had a hand in that feeling. Did you have a SSD to put it on? Because a lot of the shit that was driving me crazy was alleviated after I reinstalled it. It's also very memory-intensive. I had to close Firefox (memory hog at 800mb+ depending on what I was browsing, namely keeping Twitch on in the background as I gamed).

[kali o.]

Ha!~ No I took your comments under advisement, that's why I brought it up. Still, I intended to play as a normally would -- I mean, is it fair that to make a game stop sucking, you need to change? A game should just be fun.

Now, it does get better after

Spoiler: show

Skyhold

but a lot of my criticisms are still true. That said...I do enjoy it more than the other DA games. The bar is low, lol, but DA3 is pretty good.

Oh and PS - the Rogue specialist trees are awful. At least if you are ranged (artificer is still awful).

[bovine]

Sera + Iron Bull + Vivienne (my team) produces some fairly entertaining idle chatter. Iron Bull and Sera are always coming up with different combo moves that they might be able to pull off, Sera and Vivienne have a great antagonistic relationship, and Iron Bull and Vivienne are just delightful to listen to.

I have been very pleased with a lot of the character arcs with your party. It's very diverse and super interesting. I found the cast of DA1 to be tolerable, DA2 to be forgettable, and this cast is definitely on the level of a Mass Effect for how I am becoming attached to these characters. The combat is whatever and the overall story is also nothing to really draw you in, but it's this cast that really has done it for me. Who is everyone else traipsing around Thedas with?

[Eric]

Ha!~ No I took your comments under advisement, that's why I brought it up. Still, I intended to play as a normally would -- I mean, is it fair that to make a game stop sucking, you need to change? A game should just be fun.

Now, it does get better after

Spoiler: show

Skyhold

but a lot of my criticisms are still true. That said...I do enjoy it more than the other DA games. The bar is low, lol, but DA3 is pretty good.

Oh and PS - the Rogue specialist trees are awful. At least if you are ranged (artificer is still awful).

Are Rogues ever not awful in DA games compared to mages/ranged?

[Shrinweck]

I've played a rogue in all three games and they do alright. Artificer is definitely garbo-looking. I'm leveling an archer now (8ish at the moment) and I plan on going tempest. The removal of cooldowns/stamina from the beginning of fights basically has the best initiate tactic that I've come across in the game. I remember CRUISING through content as a rogue in DA2, at least. These games are definitely made by someone with a pro-magic agenda :D

I played to 17 on my assassin before moving on to try different classes (and also because I hate the male elf body model, everything looks like trash). Assassin had some interesting abilities and definitely excels at making health bars go down but I didn't find it especially fun and a 7 second group stealth is probably the most boring focus skill in the game. I have a warrior that I'm having fun with and I got a few hours in with the reaver tree before I decided to fire up a previous save and go templar. Reaver just had too much stamina resource micromanagement in order to feel like I was taking advantage of all the skills. Templar has a couple situational skills that just seem fun.

Knight enchanter is heralded as the most OP class to the point where it basically makes even dragons soloable. It's definitely the class where EVERYTHING synergizes and nothing else really has that except for that tanky warrior class and you probably aren't going to be soloing dragons with that class. I don't really have any interest in actually playing a mage.. tends to be the class type that I stay away from in all games.

I'd recommend Solas and Sera - their teasing of each other is pretty great.

I'm getting the banter bug (widely known issue that Bioware can't seem to replicate) where there are long stretches without any banter, which genuinely sucks.

[kali o.]

The action is too arcade for a melee rogue, imo (mind you, in DA2, melee rogues were badass). Combat has taken a step backwards - very MMO like for some reason. I got used to aligning my skills for ranged though, so it was less crappy than anticipated (but not much fun).

Nothing you do really matters *at all* (in particular, the optional unlocks/items at the war room table) and the ending is about as anti-climatic as it gets. Not Mass Effect bad...just a letdown.

That said, DA3 is a good game and worth playing.

[bovine]

beat in 85 hours. I'm still going to play it for the endgame/side content and probably start a new character after that.

[Eric]

beat in 85 hours. I'm still going to play it for the endgame/side content and probably start a new character after that.

Well, somebody went balls deep.

[Shrinweck]

Basically spent every day between Nov 24th and Dec 3rd (according to my lack of gaining any new achievements) running alts to see what class/race I wanted to actually beat the game with. Finally got around to beating the game and experiencing what I'm going to assume is 90-95% of the content (a handful of dragons, bottles, and throwaway quests). I can see why people take a bit of issue with the ending. Bioware left it open for a sequel/DLC even more than usual (not counting ME2). I do hope that this means that DLC will focus on adding on to the ending of the story rather than semi-meaningless affairs that happen during the core game like in... basically everything they've ever done DLC for except for Awakenings in DA:Origins. Play time was around 50 hours for the character but taking all the alts into account was likely 150ish with STILL more I'd be willing to experience.

My core party ended up being Sera, Blackwall, and Solas since that fit well with my two handed warrior templar inquisitor. I also ended up switching Sera to daggers because I just don't think the AI was doing a very good job with archery. The difference was very large. Every once in a while during a fight with one of the brute/juggernauts I would leave Sera and Blackwall to distract it while I killed an archer or mage only to turn around and see it long dead. Something that never happened when she was ranged. Good banter, too. Blackwall is one of the more interesting companions and even tells a long 5+ part story as you do the Tomb quest in the Hissing Wastes. I'm actually still much more interested in what Cassandra has to say than Blackwall but I figured I'd save that for myself in subsequent playthroughs for motivation.

I liked most of the (mostly) meaningless additional areas, as well, with the only one I'd be unwilling to do ever again being the Exalted Plains. SO BORING. NO PAY OFF. What the fuck? I would collect every shard in the game again three more times before I would consider playing through that bore of an area again.

It's hard to get an approximate amount of time I've played the game together... The timer continues unless you've hit esc to go to the menu, so all the times I got up or alt-tabbed while war council timers ran to watch a movie are taken into account. I fell asleep two or three times without bothering to close the game, or even hit esc to pause it. Etc. etc.

I think I liked dragon fighting in this game more than the other DA games. While I miss the ridiculously bad ass kill sequences in Origins (i.e. if you got the killing blow while standing in the right place an animation would take place where your Warden would jump onto the head of the dragon and just... fucking wreck it in slow motion) it just felt more consistently epic. They even captured a certain amount of sadness in killing such 'majestic' creatures that I've only felt once before in recent memories with the whale harpooning in Assassin's Creed Black Flag. Namely depressing in the screaming for pain, the rain of blood from limbs, and killing their offspring in front of them.

[kali o.]

I won't comment much more, but I am level 17 in a nightmare completion run (likely my last playthrough)...and all my previous thoughts remain true, imo.

Good enough game to pay retail price for...and since I hated DA1 & 2, I think that is a compliment.

Haven't tried multiplayer, as I let my PSN lapse. Haven't heard good things though. Miss Fea is playing all the time...no idea if they are still lurking on the board.

[Oracle]

beat in 85 hours. I'm still going to play it for the endgame/side content and probably start a new character after that.

Well, somebody went balls deep.

I picked the game up a bit late.

Finished my 1st Nightmare run in 160 hours, according to the game clock (yay week off due to appendicitis!). I'm sure a good chunk of that was idle time (crap, the kid! moments), but still :p Played as a male Quinari sword and board Templar. Main party was usually Sera, Dorian and Solas.

I did everything, except for the stupid ruin-chain quest in the Hissing Wastes - fuck that place.

On my second nightmare playthrough as a female elf mage. I plan on skipping at least half of the optional crap this time around (and spend WAY less time compulsively crafting and collecting materials every time I get a new recipe).

I'm finding I still play whoever I have in the party who is s/s - just far easier to control the fight. I personally like parties with 1 melee, 3 ranged - it's just way less headache vs. relying on the exceptionally poor melee AI. I'm wanting to use Iron Bull this time around, so I'm going to have a sword and shield Reaver as my main tank - should be interesting. Other members will be Dorian and likely Cole. I'll be using Vivienne for the Dragon fights, however - she's freaking broken with her spell blade that regenerates barrier with every hit. As far as her 'character', however, she can rot for all I care - quite the bitch.

[Shrinweck]

I actually quite liked Vivienne. Her coldness was a bit much at times, and she overwhelming disagreed with basically everything I did, but she's typically operating from a position where her heart is in the right place. The people she's horrible towards typically deserve her cold shoulder if you take her views on things into account. She's very into her idea of stability and has a fairly open mind of how to get there and is knowledgeable about how the system works. Objectively, out of

Spoiler: show

Leiliana, Cassandra, and Vivienne - Vivienne is probably by far the best objective choice to become the new Divine. She's open to extreme change and knows how to get shit done when it comes to those in power.

The thing I learned from my first playthrough was that combing landscapes for murals was a complete waste of time because all it gets you is a codex entry. And the one I unlocked wasn't even that interesting of a codex entry.