The Dragon Age: Inquisition Thread

[Kleptocratic debt serf]

What Jaesun is unfortunately correct.
The mainstream current is just too strong for niche commentary and critiques to shake the faith of the masses in their brand.
It baffles me why people seem to think the controls is perfectly fine when I can barely make sense of what is going on unless I constantly pause and break the flow of the game.
Tactical view is supposed to remove this frustration, but it's limited view made it impractical. I can deal with the 3rd person MMO gameplay if autoattack is in there. But it isn't. There's nothing more frustrating than holding LMB and swinging at air repeatedly.

From what I've gathered the mainstream seems to love consolized and streamlined bioware garbage. A sad state of affairs, but idiocracy wasn't a movie...

 

[imweasel]

The mainstream current is just too strong for niche commentary and critiques to shake the faith of the masses in their brand.

True, there are some pretty hardcore Biodrones out there.

But somehow EA felt obligated to spend a lot of time and money on DA:I. They could have just churned out another DA2 for another quick cash in if they wanted to, but they didn't.

 

[Arkeus]

But somehow EA felt obligated to spend a lot of time and money on DA:I. They could have just churned out another DA2 for another quick cash in if they wanted to, but they didn't.

Biowares actually believes they managed to make a top-tier game. Whether they did or not, well..

I need to figure out the tactical mode if I want to get some kind of enjoyment from this game.

Yeah, that's currently my biggest problem with the game- or at least, the one that's the easiest to fix so i am really hoping a fix is coming.

The action combat mechanic is just terrible with melee having to use the constant pausing just to lock-on and switch target midway or risk swinging at air.
Also, these explorations are meaningless challenges. Let's put it this way: there's no reason not to spam potions. Potions are free and you can always return or quick travel to camps to replenish your stock of Red Bulls. It's just funny how much emphasis was put into limited consumables after the 99x Elfroot experience we get in DAO but then rendered meaningless with infinite restocks and easy escapes from open world encounter (stealth > walk away).

Well, restocking potions means rewalking to a camp/etc, and this is an interesting mechanic by itself. It's basically the equivalent to a DnD "adcenturing day".

I don't dislike that.

 

[RK47]

What I'm saying is a self-imposed challenge mechanic isn't going to be interesting when not much of a care is given when exploring.
To me these are all just activities to 'pad content' there is nothing very fun when the challenges felt so incredibly pointless.
Why the fuck do the devs inflict this upon the player is beyond me.
Even the rewards from exploring baffles me.
A chest. A giant chest. Holding a piece of paper in the middle of the wild?! Why?
Crafting is an overrated mechanic in Single Player RPGs, there's no need to import MMO elements like that when you want to sell the world's lore to your players.

And the LORE. THE STORY. THE NARRATIVE.
A giant awesomeplosion at the start.
I felt no connection to this world. It was embarrassing when I don't even know what Leliana was mourning about 'Justinia's fate' in front of me.
Who is she? And why is Leliana so upset at the fact the Maker let Justinia die?

Then I discovered Justinia is actually the Divine whose meeting I attended. And I met her moments before the explosion.
Holy shit. What the fuck? Was I clueless or did I not notice? No. The game doesn't seem to give me any details. I felt no attachment everytime they spat out Codex entries my eyes can read but my mind would reject. IT DOESN'T MATTER. IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER. IGNORE IT.
WHEN THE EMOTIONS ARE DISENGAGED, ALL ACTIONS WITH OR WITHOUT CONSEQUENCES FEEL HOLLOW.

None of these deaths and explosion really mattered to me. All I know is I just wake up post-explosion with something - THE ONLY THING that could seal the threat that could destroy the world(tm)

This kind of setup is just absolutely horrible.
We have been complaining about Oblivion storytelling when Picard tells you that he saw your face in his dreams.
But this is literally the game handing you the hand of McGuffin without you asking for it nor work for it.
How the fuck do people who cared about the story get past this without batting an eyelid and praised it to high heavens is just way beyond me.

Why can't they set it far before this actually happened, make you take part in the peace process. Have you gather allies, undertake missions to make sure this peace summit happen?
And when all is done and good, you think to yourself 'Yes, I've achieved my objective. Shame it's quite short...' then a single explosion right at the Conclave takes away everything you worked for. And worst, people accused you being the part of this event since you pushed so hard for this.

THAT, would make a fucking awesome midpoint twist. Compared to the fucking menu explosion we had to endure at the start followed with a sense of detachment and a woman telling that I should take responsibility for clicking START NEW GAME BUTTON IN THE FUCKING MAIN MENU.

 

[Rivmusique]

How ridiculous. Starting the game without an army of admirers under you, what is this? The 80's?

Sounds like you're not even muthafucking ready, for the new shit.

 

[PhantasmaNL]

Despite (or maybe thanks to) the intense backlash on the net i was a bit curious about this so decided to check it out. Appears that i can rebind the keys to match the setup i use for a lot of other games (lefthand mouse to control cam, move with arrows, all other functions on numpad/block above the arrows). This is much better than i expected.

Only big complaint about controls would be looting which requires far too much effort and precision. On my (lower) midrange system (gtx760,i5/4670k,8gb) the auto select for graphics gave me a mix of high and med (no msaa), which runs smooth and looks ok-good, not great. The tac cam is near unusable in its current state, but playing on normal i dont think it will be needed much/at all. As expected, since it is basically a console game, inventory and other menus are not very userfriendly for mkb users (just like skyrim in its released non modded state).

 

[RK47]

Yeah the equip weapon, armor, accessories being separate UI bothered a lot.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Hahaha, shitstorm continues while i spend over 12 hours now in-game [on PC with mouse&keyboard] and i could say that 3/4 of criticism that this game gets is pure bullshit.
UI is great, clear and handy and easy to access and operate, with auto and proper sorting of items, party is easy to manage, tactical camera only lacks edge screen scrolling, you can choose detailed AI behavior in fight too and SI handles NPC's in team very good, much better than in any other cprg. It's not a problem to switch fast by just click or F1... to another party member and lead the party as him/her. UI during combat works well, there is no problem with giving orders to party members [they are reacting instantly to them], control the battlefield, pause the game at any moment, give orders and so on. If you choose real-time combat only way of playing, you will see that AI NPC's handle themselves really good, and there is no need to "mash" the button like some "i saw it somewhere, but haven't actually played it" people says, just hold lmb to continue attacks or feel free to mash as hard as you like in diablo style hehe. To say more about combat it gives nice challenge as you could be killed even on the tutorial [of course if you choose one of the last 2 levels of difficulty]. And you could really play it fine with slow-paced and more tactical approach or go wild and jump into middle of fight and make small massacre - it is good approach as having turns started to kill some rats when you are experienced character and spend 10 minutes for that makes me angry in many other crpg's [ hello, Fallout 1&2 hehe] . System is really flexible, and someone spend some time to design it properly.
Tactical view takes some time to "learn" and get used to but it's great feature into combat system, and helps greatly. It is also very easy to switch forth and back between "real time" and "tactical" or "just pause" views/styles. You can do it on the fly and really do not trust some morons that saying it's hard, they must be playing with wooden stick or something...
Feeling of the game is great, graphics[ one word: great] with music [music deserves some RL prize and it is one of the greatest fantasy OST i heard in computer game for a long time, it beats Kai Rosenkratz and J. Soule] plus a hell lot of details makes incredible mix of fantasy climate. Whole art style, architecture designs, map designs, flora and animals , items, armour, clothing, cards in codex, little details like trees moved by wind, etc. makes this game best looking crpg to date. And codex is much better now, and don't require binoculars to read.
Optimization is great, i m playing Inquisition with very smooth fps on my weaker PC for games only [mix of new and old parts] which is archaic Intel Q9550, 8Gb ram, geforce 780gtx and Vista64bit at 1920x1200] with every setting to the ulta plus features like full HBAO, MSAAx2 and all post process effects and other settings maxed out, shadows included. And i do not have single stutter, during gameplay or in-game "movies" nor in dialogues [just set vertical synch off].
Story itself is told and driven great, with lot of connections to the lore and previous DA games - including great idea of DA-KEEP which gives fast access to change outcome of previous games and makes replayablility and experiments with story easier. Part of so much feared [with me included] overhelming lgbt agenda is completely subtle and depicted in the way which i can name "tolerable", so unless you have for example gay-romance dreams yourself you have nothing to fear of. It is acceptable, and i'm not huge fan of Lgbt.
Also writing and characters looks really good, but of course if You are dickhead who expects to found Faulkner, Salinger etc. level of writing here you will be just sad panda. I could write more about great feautres of this game and how good it is, but it makes no sense as it will be criticized here by many just becouse it is so jazzy to criticize everything that comes out from EA/Bioware, or to clap brofists with many other around hehe. I wrote that becouse maybe someone neutral will read this thread and will give up on this game becouse of bullshit shitstorm this game gets from some people. And links for metacritic are completely funny, becouse is just retarded site where some people could give away their everyday frustration.
In this case it's about hard to crack anti-crime system, that makes thieves sad.
This game is almost so fun to play as D:OS another great crpg game from this year, and way ahead "just" decent games like Wasteland 2 [another broken kickstarter attemp - just go play Underrail if you want nice post-apo game from 2014] etc. And about scores, games are just "great, good, decent and shit" or more simple good and bad, it is like art and paintings, do you look at nice oil painting at think "well it deserves 8.5" , well scores are for morons it's just very popular but completely broken system. But facebook generation could not live without it. Like brainless zombie horde.
So have fun boys swimming in your shitpool, im going back to Thedas.​

 

[Angthoron]

Are you lacking an enter key? Maybe you have some kind of an amazing point or some hilarious lulz and tears, but fuck if I'm going to start reading that paragraphless heap of letters.

l2paragraph, I'm sure whatever eskimo language that is your own teaches the use of it.

 

[RK47]

Yeah, learn to paragraph and people might read your post.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Yeah, paragraphs are the only thing you are able to disscuss about... hehe, see ya.

 

[treave]

That's a bit much of an effort just to troll about Dragon Age, isn't it?

 

[Angthoron]

Yeah, paragrphs is only thing you are able to disscuss about... hehe, see ya.

Yes, when your posts are unreadable shit, that's all we can discuss. Learn to paragraph.

Alternatively, find a job at BioWare, I hear they like to publish unreadable shit.

 

[SwiftCrack]

hehe, see ya.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Son, i could hire You to edit my posts but you must have some job experience first.
As for a job, do not worry im happy with mine but you could get any for sure.
Have a nice swimmnig.

 

[dryan]

In this case it's about hard to crack anti-crime system, that makes thieves sad.

Looks like I won't be playing this game for a looong time...

 

[Echo Mirage]

Why can't they set it far before this actually happened, make you take part in the peace process. Have you gather allies, undertake missions to make sure this peace summit happen?
And when all is done and good, you think to yourself 'Yes, I've achieved my objective. Shame it's quite short...' then a single explosion right at the Conclave takes away everything you worked for. And worst, people accused you being the part of this event since you pushed so hard for this.

THAT, would make a fucking awesome midpoint twist. Compared to the fucking menu explosion we had to endure at the start followed with a sense of detachment and a woman telling that I should take responsibility for clicking START NEW GAME BUTTON IN THE FUCKING MAIN MENU.

In the bioware twitch streams the developers mention that they actually had an extended prologue. But they cut it because they didn't want to load a new player down with plot and lore they may know nothing about.

Which is the exact reason to have a prologue to begin with. Without it you have no idea how these people are interconnected. But I also assume Bioware covered most of this stuff in knock off books and comics in the build up to release.

I am also willing to believe that Bioware and EA are willing to sell a extended prologue DLC. So that may also be a reason for the lack of a full opening.

 

[Angthoron]

Son, i could hire You to edit my posts but you must have some job experience first.
As for a job, do not worry im happy with mine but you could get any for sure.
Have a nice swimmnig.

I would refuse the dubious honor of editing your posts, even if you would be able to afford my hourly rate with your monthly wage. Even MS Word would kill itself. Just get back to writing Nigerian Royalty mails and romancing The Bull.

See ya! Haha.

 

[RK47]

Bioware ... it doesn't have to make sense (tm)

 

[Arkadin]

Hahaha, shitstorm continues while i spend over 12 hours now in-game [on PC with mouse&keyboard] and i could say that 3/4 of criticism that this game gets is pure bullshit.

UI is great, clear and handy and easy to access and operate, with auto and proper sorting of items, party is easy to manage, tactical camera only lacks edge screen scrolling, you can choose detailed AI behavior in fight too and SI handles NPC's in team very good, much better than in any other cprg. It's not a problem to switch fast by just click or F1... to another party member and lead the party as him/her. UI during combat works well, there is no problem with giving orders to party members [they are reacting instantly to them], control the battlefield, pause the game at any moment, give orders and so on. If you choose real-time combat only way of playing, you will see that AI NPC's handle themselves really good, and there is no need to "mash" the button like some "i saw it somewhere, but haven't actually played it" people says, just hold lmb to continue attacks or feel free to mash as hard as you like in diablo style hehe.

To say more about combat it gives nice challenge as you could be killed even on the tutorial [of course if you choose one of the last 2 levels of difficulty]. And you could really play it fine with slow-paced and more tactical approach or go wild and jump into middle of fight and make small massacre - it is good approach as having turns started to kill some rats when you are experienced character and spend 10 minutes for that makes me angry in many other crpg's [ hello, Fallout 1&2 hehe] . System is really flexible, and someone spend some time to design it properly.

Tactical view takes some time to "learn" and get used to but it's great feature into combat system, and helps greatly. It is also very easy to switch forth and back between "real time" and "tactical" or "just pause" views/styles. You can do it on the fly and really do not trust some morons that saying it's hard, they must be playing with wooden stick or something...

Feeling of the game is great, graphics[ one word: great] with music [music deserves some RL prize and it is one of the greatest fantasy OST i heard in computer game for a long time, it beats Kai Rosenkratz and J. Soule] plus a hell lot of details makes incredible mix of fantasy climate. Whole art style, architecture designs, map designs, flora and animals , items, armour, clothing, cards in codex, little details like trees moved by wind, etc. makes this game best looking crpg to date. And codex is much better now, and don't require binoculars to read.

Optimization is great, i m playing Inquisition with very smooth fps on my weaker PC for games only [mix of new and old parts] which is archaic Intel Q9550, 8Gb ram, geforce 780gtx and Vista64bit at 1920x1200] with every setting to the ulta plus features like full HBAO, MSAAx2 and all post process effects and other settings maxed out, shadows included. And i do not have single stutter, during gameplay or in-game "movies" nor in dialogues [just set vertical synch off].

Story itself is told and driven great, with lot of connections to the lore and previous DA games - including great idea of DA-KEEP which gives fast access to change outcome of previous games and makes replayablility and experiments with story easier. Part of so much feared [with me included] overhelming lgbt agenda is completely subtle and depicted in the way which i can name "tolerable", so unless you have for example gay-romance dreams yourself you have nothing to fear of. It is acceptable, and i'm not huge fan of Lgbt.

Also writing and characters looks really good, but of course if You are dickhead who expects to found Faulkner, Salinger etc. level of writing here you will be just sad panda. I could write more about great feautres of this game and how good it is, but it makes no sense as it will be criticized here by many just becouse it is so jazzy to criticize everything that comes out from EA/Bioware, or to clap brofists with many other around hehe. I wrote that becouse maybe someone neutral will read this thread and will give up on this game becouse of bullshit shitstorm this game gets from some people. And links for metacritic are completely funny, becouse is just retarded site where some people could give away their everyday frustration. In this case it's about hard to crack anti-crime system, that makes thieves sad.

This game is almost so fun to play as D:OS another great crpg game from this year, and way ahead "just" decent games like Wasteland 2 [another broken kickstarter attemp - just go play Underrail if you want nice post-apo game from 2014] etc. And about scores, games are just "great, good, decent and shit" or more simple good and bad, it is like art and paintings, do you look at nice oil painting at think "well it deserves 8.5" , well scores are for morons it's just very popular but completely broken system. But facebook generation could not live without it. Like brainless zombie horde.

So have fun boys swimming in your shitpool, im going back to Thedas.
​

no

 

[PhantasmaNL]

A good prologue would give you just enough information to get intrigued, not more, although maybe the adhd console crowd would indeed need a full explanatory intro (strictly using simple words and very short sentences of course). As your game series expands, providing a good intro will probably become more and more difficult, since you want to sell your game to veteran and new players. This is especially true if your game is heavy on "story".

Since BW basically has 1 story which they recycle in slightly different versions (DA2 was the exception) and im very familiar with the DA lore the prologue was definitely mediocre for me.

The diverse and personal intros of DAO are hard to beat.

 

[Infinitron]

(And the expansions, while better, were made by other companies)

This isn't true. The first expansion (the less good one...) was co-developed with another company.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

(And the expansions, while better, were made by other companies)

This isn't true. The first expansion (the less good one...) was co-developed with another company.

Then I've been terribly misled and actually love Bioware. LOOK WHAT YOU'VE GONE AND DONE, INFINITRON!

 

[Alienman]

So, been playing a couple of hours now. My impression is: singel-player game trapped in a mmo-world.

It starts out rather good, some combat, with plenty of dialogue options, the way I like my Bioware games. I'm not expecting high class drama or anything but just
interruptions, to give meaning to the stuff you do. But oh well, after the tutorial area, and some other introduction parts you get sent off to your first "quest-island".

I was expecting something like Skyrim, Gothic, Risen etc one big world. No, it has quest-areas. They are pretty big, but they are also designed the way quest areas in mmos are designed.
Just a big area filled with random creatures, buildings and dungeons. With no effort at all making it realistic. The quests are designed the very same way. Sure, most of the quests is leading up to something
that are part of the narrative, but the quests are so fucking boring. Go there, kill these guys, collect this... after a while you just look at the map, and run from objective to objective with no real interest in what is going
on. And you do these quests... because.. reasons, and you need influence.

All this is taking such a looooong time, just the running, the brain-dead filler combat. I never thought I would say this, but I miss Skyrim. For every second I'm playing Dragon Age, my lust for a crazy-modded Skyrim
experience is increasing. DAI has the elements of an open-world, but everything is static, lifeless, dead and dull. No random people wandering around and those that are wandering around all want to murder your ass.
It just feels so dead and unrealistic. It's like they took inspiration from Kingdom of Amalur for making their own world, instead of looking over the pond (Piranha bytes). Disappointment, but after paying 45 euros for this I have to
play mooooooreeee to justify my purchase...

 

[SausageInYourFace]

I, for one, welcome Wulfric Pinewood 's apparently honest and reasonable first impressions (he could however indeed add a few paragraphs next time. The english itself is alright, I always understand what he is trying to say).

A welcome change from the endless circlejerk and over three years of shitposting in this thread. Just because he likes the game does not mean he is a troll. It is in fact quite revealing how a diverging opinion immediately gets lashed out against. You don't do that when you feel secure in your opinion, you do that when you feel threatened, and in this case its the nice cosy ingroup cohesion that is threatened. You just want to participate in the endless ingroup circlejerk with unwavering self-confidence. And that is so much better, less biased and more objective than everybody elses presumably brainwashed opinion, right? Amplify what supports cohesion, belittle what threatens it. And nevermind either that the users who are supposed to write the 'so much more objective Codex review' are demonstrably fundamentally biased already either - even before they were playing the game. But it is only bad when the others do it, not when we do it, because our bias is the right kind of bias.

That kind of behavior is group bias and conformity pressure at its best, revoltingly disguised as reasonable objectivity.

In this sense, I find it ironic that gaming journalism is usually immidiatelly discarded as corrupt (but of course only in specific cherry picked cases) - but that the user reviews on metacritic apparently mean something now. Is it not usually consensus here that "the mainstream masses" are just drolling morons who will eat every shit that marketing feeds to them and yadda yadda? And when said 'masses' downvote a Bioware game that stupid mass opinion suddenly changes to the infinite wisdom of the collective gaming hivemind? If you were at least a bit consistent about this stuff it would lend you a bit more credibility.

Edit: Had to cross last part out for (perhaps) overreacting. I was triggered by the metacritic image.