The Dragon Age: Inquisition Thread

[Zeriel]

I thought Deep Roads were cool. Then again, it was just a lot of combat in a game that had acceptable combat, so not surprising I was okay with it. Isometric perspective with good UI makes all the difference, I suppose.

 

[Nryn]

The comparison to DA:O is praise to me. I really liked DA combat. Not nearly as much as BG2 of course, but still a great deal. That's why I gave you the from PST combat (horribru) to BG2 SCS combat (awesome) spectrum. So if they're (DA:O and DA:I) comparable I'm not sure why a combatfag like myself should steer clear

Honestly, you're setting yourself up for disappointment expecting anything similar to DA:O's combat. The combat here is fundamentally different, and not in a good way. It tries to mix elements of RTwP with real-time reflex-based combat, and the end result is something that's one giant clusterfuck. I can summarize some of the key differences by giving a hypothetical combat scenario in DAI:

- Your party sees a group of 4 enemy soldiers and moves forward to engage

- Unfortunately, there were 4 additional enemies that you need to fight since the new tactical camera does not have enough range or elevation to properly survey the battlefield

- The fight doesn't start as well as expected since the new camera is unable to zoom out as much as the older camera, leading you to observe only half the screen.

- The exaggerated spell effects cover the remaining half of the screen, making you decide to switch back to third person view for the rest of the combat

- You pause the game and try to position your party properly, and then realize that you can only queue move commands in the underwhelming tactical view

- The enemy boss has reached your warrior and is about to unleash an attack that takes away half his health. Unlike in DA:O, this game is more reflex based, and so you are expected to move out of the way when you see the boss winding up his attack

- You attempt to move out of the way of the attack, but unlike in most decent action games, there is no attack cancelling; since the game no longer has auto attack, you were holding down the attack button to make your warrior swing his sword. As a result, your warrior is rooted in space until he finishes his attack, leading him to getting hit by the special attack and dropping to 50% hp

- Not wanting to feel left out, the party's sole mage healer randomly runs forward and is almost 1-shotted by the boss' special attack

- Panicking, you open the character spell screen by mistake, and notice that the warrior, rogue and mage classes actually have active dodge abilities. You begin to wonder if the enemy damage is balanced around active dodging, but you are also confused about how active dodging is supposed to work when you are controlling a party of 4.

- Back in game, you spam the potion key, and notice that there is a hard limit to the number of potions you can carry. You also realize that there is almost zero healing spells but that's alright since the game has made an innovative change by replacing healing spells with spells that give you extra life bars.

- You want to prevent the repeat of your ranged characters running into melee change, and also want to create the powerful spell combos that you could in Origins and DA2. So you open up the tactics screen

- You realize that tactics, as they existed in Origins and DA2, are gone. In their place is a very basic screen with 5 hardcoded situations that you can can't change beyond percentages.

- Back in game, you remember that mages in Origins could turn the tide of a losing battle due to how overpowered (and fun) some of the spells were. In the name of balance, those spells have been toned down significantly, if not outright removed.

- While you were fumbling around on your mage, the rest of the party randomly beat on the enemies for quite a while and victory is yours. It does take quite a while though due to how much hp the enemies have

- You come away from the battle with the conclusion that you were far more in control of the combat in Origins, or even DA2

I'm probably missing other issues, but this should give an idea about what combat is like. Most of these issues are magnified even more, especially the positional problems, on fighting dragons at higher difficulty settings.

 

[Grunker]

it was just a lot of combat in a game that had acceptable combat.

Basically, yes. If you enjoy DA:O's systems I suspect you'd enjoy DR.

However it's reductionist to write of some of the cooler content chunks of DR IMO.

 

[Grunker]

Honestly, you're setting yourself up for disappointment expecting anything similar to DA:O's combat. The combat here is fundamentally different, and not in a good way. It tries to mix elements of RTwP with real-time reflex-based combat, and the end result is something that's one giant clusterfuck. I can summarize some of the key differences by giving a hypothetical combat scenario in DAI:

- Your party sees a group of 4 enemy soldiers and moves forward to engage

- Unfortunately, there were 4 additional enemies that you need to fight since the new tactical camera does not have enough range or elevation to properly survey the battlefield

- The fight doesn't start as well as expected since the new camera is unable to zoom out as much as the older camera, leading you to observe only half the screen.

- The exaggerated spell effects cover the remaining half of the screen, making you decide to switch back to third person view for the rest of the combat

- You pause the game and try to position your party properly, and then realize that you can only queue move commands in the underwhelming tactical view

- The enemy boss has reached your warrior and is about to unleash an attack that takes away half his health. Unlike in DA:O, this game is more reflex based, and so you are expected to move out of the way when you see the boss winding up his attack

- You attempt to move out of the way of the attack, but unlike in most decent action games, there is no attack cancelling; since the game no longer has auto attack, you were holding down the attack button to make your warrior swing his sword. As a result, your warrior is rooted in space until he finishes his attack, leading him to getting hit by the special attack and dropping to 50% hp

- Not wanting to feel left out, the party's sole mage healer randomly runs forward and is almost 1-shotted by the boss' special attack

- Panicking, you open the character spell screen by mistake, and notice that the warrior, rogue and mage classes actually have active dodge abilities. You begin to wonder if the enemy damage is balanced around active dodging, but you are also confused about how active dodging is supposed to work when you are controlling a party of 4.

- Back in game, you spam the potion key, and notice that there is a hard limit to the number of potions you can carry. You also realize that there is almost zero healing spells but that's alright since the game has made an innovative change by replacing healing spells with spells that give you extra life bars.

- You want to prevent the repeat of your ranged characters running into melee change, and also want to create the powerful spell combos that you could in Origins and DA2. So you open up the tactics screen

- You realize that tactics, as they existed in Origins and DA2, are gone. In their place is a very basic screen with 5 hardcoded situations that you can can't change beyond percentages.

- Back in game, you remember that mages in Origins could turn the tide of a losing battle due to how overpowered (and fun) some of the spells were. In the name of balance, those spells have been toned down significantly, if not outright removed.

- While you were fumbling around on your mage, the rest of the party randomly beat on the enemies for quite a while and victory is yours. It does take quite a while though due to how much hp the enemies have

- You come away from the battle with the conclusion that you were far more in control of the combat in Origins, or even DA2

I'm probably missing other issues, but this should give an idea about what combat is like. Most of these issues are magnified even more, especially the positional problems, on fighting dragons at higher difficulty settings.

Thanks for the elaboration. However a couple of those points actually made it sound a bit like DA:O

I'm glad you provided context though. I had actually written off ever buying this game but a few users (like Mrowak) made me open up the thread again.

 

[Zeriel]

That about covers it.

I'd drive home the point that there are things about the combat that could be good in theory, in a different game. They just make no sense here. In a lot of ways, Dragon Age: Inquisition's combat is like a metaphor for the Codex's criticism of RTWP in general: it can't decide what it wants to focus on, tries to do everything at once, and falls apart at the seams as a result.

Unlike in Bioware's earlier RTWP games, warriors and rogues have just as many active abilities as spellcasters. To make matters worse, they're also expected to be constantly repositioning themselves not just to avoid damage, but to deploy their abilities correctly (Twin Fangs, the backstab replacement, is an absolute joke in this regard). In short, the game feels like it is trying to replicate a twitch-based, action-combat game where you control only one character... only you're also expected to control 3 more characters at the same level. Further amusement comes from the tactical system: a camera that can barely zoom out more than a few inches, and a bad ability queue. Well, by "bad ability queue" I mean that there is no ability queueing at all. For some reason they left out the one thing that could have made the party combat vaguely workable.

Bioware compensated for all of these problems by just making combat really, really easy on Easy and Normal. You can get by just playing one character on Normal. If you're doing that, though, the "RPG" part of the game sort of disappears. Why are you leveling up your companions and picking all these cool abilities? You won't be switching to them in combat. They won't use most of the abilities due to the wonderful "tactics" AI, and when they do they'll perform amazing feats like charging off a ledge and falling away from the combat. What about Nightmare? Well, it does basically expect the game to be played optimally: you must employ positioning, proper use of your abilities, focus fire, CC, all of that good stuff.

It can be done. The fights themselves are no great challenge. Getting the game to do what you want it to do very much is. I started the game on Nightmare. But as you struggle with a tactical camera that won't zoom out, a complete absence of an auto-pausing functionality, and zero ability to queue moves on your party, at some point that wave of ennui will wash over you, and you'll question why the hell you are doing this to yourself. Nightmare is tactical after a sort, but the game actively works against you. It doesn't want you to play this way. "Just double the numbers until it gets hard" can actually be a viable way of providing challenge for players if the core gameplay loop is fun (XCOM's Impossible + Iron-Man is a great example of this, it does nothing other than pumping numbers), but in a game that was built from the ground-up to be an action game with trivial combat, it's a goddamn travesty.

I wish Bioware would just focus their combat in one direction, and do it well.

 

[DalekFlay]

It would be decent, and tactical, but really the combat controls suck ass.

This comparison is going to make people who liked Origins think Inquisition is a good game, and it's not, controls be damned. I loved Origins and Inquisition is a SHIT GAME compared. The quest design is ten times worse, the combat scenarios are barely designed at all and total shit. It's nowhere near a comparable experience on any level, the action game controls are just a small part of it.

 

[set]

How is the spawning in DA3? I realize enemies respawn, but how many fights are spawned on top of you this time? This was a pretty big problem in DA2 and DAO.

 

[Grunker]

Thanks for some actual impressions on how this game plays, guys. It is much appreciated

 

[Stainless Veteran]

I kinda fail to see what was that horrible with Derp Roads. Yeah, too long, too many trash mobs and kinda boring untill the end. But ~worst encounter design~ award I wouldn't give them. I wonder if anyone who hates Derp Roads ever played NWN2 and remember fucking Orc Caves.

 

[vonAchdorf]

I kinda fail to see what was

that horrible with Derp Roads. Yeah, too long, too many trash mobs and kinda boring untill the end. But ~worst encounter design~ award I wouldn't give them. I wonder if anyone who hates Derp Roads ever played NWN2 and remember fucking Orc Caves.

Coincidentally Deep Roads made me quit DA:O and Orc Caves NWN2

Like Grunker said, the lore for Deep Roads was actually quite interesting, but boring fights in bland caverns kinda drove me out.

 

[Ulrox]

I kinda fail to see what was that horrible with Derp Roads. Yeah, too long, too many trash mobs and kinda boring untill the end. But ~worst encounter design~ award I wouldn't give them. I wonder if anyone who hates Derp Roads ever played NWN2 and remember fucking Orc Caves.

I've played through that about 6-7 times - no issue at all, but thats because I'm a huge fan of dungeons and dragons.

 

[Space Satan]

Lots of trash mobs is not that awful. I am mostly disappointed by lack of non-combat content - ironically, exactly what Bioware promised to avoid in DA:I and, being bioware, nevertheless made the same mistake on a wider scale.
FFS some areas in BG2 annoyed me more than Deep Roads, with sudden instakills and stuff, but I can't call them boring.

 

[set]

I kinda fail to see what was that horrible with Derp Roads. Yeah, too long, too many trash mobs and kinda boring untill the end. But ~worst encounter design~ award I wouldn't give them. I wonder if anyone who hates Derp Roads ever played NWN2 and remember fucking Orc Caves.

There are people that played through the NWN2 campaign that wasn't MOTB? I was so sure 90% of people quit either after finishing the tutorial or reaching the bland as fuck major city.

 

[Space Satan]

There are people that played through the NWN2 campaign that wasn't MOTB? I was so sure 90% of people quit either after finishing the tutorial or reaching the bland as fuck major city.

I stopped after I realized 90% of all companions are mandatory and you are forced to take them, plus majority of choices were:
1. Yes.
2. Sure.
3. Okay.

 

[Bleed the Man]

There are people that played through the NWN2 campaign that wasn't MOTB? I was so sure 90% of people quit either after finishing the tutorial or reaching the bland as fuck major city.

I stopped after I realized 90% of all companions are mandatory and you are forced to take them, plus majority of choices were:
1. Yes.
2. Sure.
3. Okay.

Stop the lies, please. There was plenty of choice in NWN2:

1- Yes
2- Yes, for a price
3- yes, for a price, and kind of angry.

Roleplaying masterpiece, that game (actually, I like it quite a bit, but it was flawed as hell)

I'm surprised in this conversation about the deep roads and the orc caves, no one mentioned the entirety of the first NWN, but I will asume that is so terrible that everyone has errased it from their memory.

 

[Athelas]

I kinda fail to see what was that horrible with Derp Roads. Yeah, too long, too many trash mobs and kinda boring untill the end. But ~worst encounter design~ award I wouldn't give them. I wonder if anyone who hates Derp Roads ever played NWN2 and remember fucking Orc Caves.

There are people that played through the NWN2 campaign that wasn't MOTB? I was so sure 90% of people quit either after finishing the tutorial or reaching the bland as fuck major city.

There wasn't exactly a wealth of RPG's to play. You must have been born after the Decline.

Which makes you about one and a half years old, I guess.

 

[Seaking4]

Also, weren't 100% of the companions mandatory?

 

[Ulrox]

I'm surprised in this conversation about the deep roads and the orc caves, no one mentioned the entirety of the first NWN, but I will asume that is so terrible that everyone has errased it from their memory.

Haha, the first neverwinter nights campaign is in the so bad its good territory for me. Full of spelling errors and retarded plots. I always have a blast playing through that for this reason.

 

[Malpercio]

I kinda fail to see what was that horrible with Derp Roads.

Everything.Gif

Seriously, what the fuck!? We should ask ourself what was good about the Derp Roads (answer: nothing).

DAO encounter design was already pretty shitty, even a quick pee between one dialogue and another required your chara to fight 20 darkspawns, but the Derp roads just blew it.

 

[Bleed the Man]

I'm surprised in this conversation about the deep roads and the orc caves, no one mentioned the entirety of the first NWN, but I will asume that is so terrible that everyone has errased it from their memory.

Haha, the first neverwinter nights campaign is in the so bad its good territory for me. Full of spelling errors and retarded plots. I always have a blast playing through that for this reason.

I have allways considered jade Empire as the "so bad is good" from Bioware. For me, it feels like an unnintentional parody of all Bioware tropes. NWN, although plot wise and character wise has a lot of laughs, it's too "banal, shit, boring", as they say here, for my taste.

But as this is the DAI thread, I will say my major grip with this game, the fucking HP bloat. It's absolutely desproportionate. All the enjoyment one might have had whit the combat, this kills it. Like the design for the secondary quests, the combat is designed to be busy work, a time sink.

 

[Stainless Veteran]

There are people that played through the NWN2 campaign that wasn't MOTB? I was so sure 90% of people quit either after finishing the tutorial or reaching the bland as fuck major city.

I stopped after I realized 90% of all companions are mandatory and you are forced to take them, plus majority of choices were:
1. Yes.
2. Sure.
3. Okay.

Stop the lies, please. There was plenty of choice in NWN2:

1- Yes
2- Yes, for a price
3- yes, for a price, and kind of angry.

Roleplaying masterpiece, that game (actually, I like it quite a bit, but it was flawed as hell)

I'm surprised in this conversation about the deep roads and the orc caves, no one mentioned the entirety of the first NWN, but I will asume that is so terrible that everyone has errased it from their memory.

Were there people ever people who completed NWN1 OC? I quit after the first act, wondrous plot twist where clerics are casting red-tinted harm spell doesn't make for compelling mystery, combat was atrocious, and the game looked butt-ugly in comparison to older 2D games. All and all, after Infinity Engine games NWN1 looked like an abomination, and played as such. I even could finally get into mods only after 8 or so years have passed since I tried the OC, it was that bad.

 

[Turjan]

Were there people ever people who completed NWN1 OC?

Sure, I did. It was kind of boring, but not boring enough to make me quit. It just felt like a big letdown after the games that went before. The expansions were better.

I quit DA:O though. At one point, I had simply seen enough darkspawn and could not bring myself to fight against more of them.

 

[RK47]

 

[Grunker]

Were there people ever people who completed NWN1 OC

Yep. I did. At the time I played all games I started to completion almost no matter what.

 

[Stainless Veteran]

Were there people ever people who completed NWN1 OC?

Sure, I did. It was kind of boring, but not boring enough to make me quit. It just felt like a big letdown after the games that went before. The expansions were better.

I quit DA:O though. At one point, I had simply seen enough darkspawn and could not bring myself to fight against more of them.

Were there people ever people who completed NWN1 OC

Yep. I did. At the time I played all games I started to completion almost no matter what.